The huge growth potential of real estate F&B in Spain
Colliers, a global leader in real estate investment management and advisory services, brought together the main players in the restaurant sector to analyse the alternatives for creating value in real estate and hotel assets.
The forum entitled “Food & Beverage: The restaurant revolution in unique assets” was attended by a panel of experts representing all the players in this emerging market in the real estate sector: investors, operators, architects and managers of unique assets and large infrastructures.
Participants included Carlos Carrión, head of the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium remodelling project; Francisco Arocha, Managing Director of Pont Ventures; Ignacio Blanco, CEO of Grupo Larrumba; Néstor Marcos, architect and Colliers partner for restoration projects; Juan Manuel Ortega, Chief Investment Officer of Inmobiliaria Colonial and Dimas Gimeno, Founding Partner and President of WOW Concept and Kapita. Speaking for Colliers were Esperanza de Justo, Head of Retail F&B, Gonzalo Martín, Director of Capital Markets, Paula Paternina Retail F&B Senior Analyst and the CEO and President of Colliers, Mikel Echavarren.
The two round tables of the event analysed the most representative trends and challenges of this business, “which represents a clear opportunity to increase the value and profitability of real estate assets through the creation of F&B destinations”, in the words of Esperanza de Justo, Head of Retail F&B at Colliers.
Carlos Carrión highlighted in his speech the great potential of sports infrastructures in Spain, as the current F&B experience generates an average income of between 1 and 1.7 euros per seat, compared to similar assets in the USA, where the average income per event and attendee is between 40 and 45 dollars.
The Colliers conference analysed the alternatives for creating value in real estate and hotel assets through the restoration process.
For Carrión, the great challenge lies in “solving the demand of all”, referring to the mix of clients that can use an infrastructure of this type. “In a stadium like Real Madrid’s, 57% of users are foreigners. A public that can be very demanding and knows similar assets, but with a very different profile of catering offer, depending on the city in the world where they are”.
Carlos Carrión also highlighted the importance of these assets to generate real destinations, with the clear example of the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in the north of Madrid, which will give rise to what he calls the “Bernabéu District”: an area conditioned by the activities around the stadium for all those people who work, live or socialise in its area of influence. “For example, we account for 30% of the turnover of the restaurants in the area on the day of an event”, Carrión pointed out.
For Ignacio Blanco, CEO of Grupo Larrumba, the current trend is the complete leisure experience, but in his opinion the most important differential is to have a well-balanced proposal “In this world, eating well and receiving good service in the dining room must be absolutely essential and always hygienic. From there, as in any other sector, it is a matter of looking for differentials that distinguish you, make you different and turn your business into a destination. The interesting thing is that many times, the differential is precisely in the balance of all the elements”.
Francisco Arocha, Founder and CEO of Pont Ventures Group is an investor in the hotel and restaurant sector. He focuses on top international gastronomic concepts, which together have more than 200 restaurants in the world’s most vibrant capitals. Arocha pointed out that Spanish gastronomy is “one of the best and most recognised throughout the world” and that the offer in our country is extremely wide and varied, although he noted that Pont has detected room for new brands and successful formats that are already successful in other countries in Latin America and the United States.
Arocha also pointed out the importance of restaurants knowing and adapting to the local idiosyncrasies of the place where they land, as well as the need to adapt to global trends such as sustainability: “Sustainability is clearly having an impact on the sector, it is something that is going to become more and more important because it is a social demand”. In addition, Arocha commented that a window of opportunity is opening up for other trends such as vegan food or rooftops, especially in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona.
Néstor Marcos, architect and Colliers partner for restoration projects, pointed out the enormous importance of architecture in unique spaces, which also conditions the investment. According to this expert, “Aesthetics seeks to conquer the user in a very short period of time and generate an experience that encourages them to return, therefore, it contributes to creating a destination for consumption. Before a new project, it is critical to analyse the space we are dealing with, architecture and interior design allow us to manage it and reinterpret it for our purposes”.
Néstor Marcos, provided data related to the estimation of the investment indicating that it will always depend on two factors: the technical and the decorative, the latter being the one that has the most critical impact on the experience. “If we talk about the average cost, a good restaurant with a powerful aesthetic can be around 3,500 euros per square metre,” said the architect.
Gonzalo Martín, Director of Capital Markets at Colliers, began his moderation of the debate by indicating the importance of the incorporation of expert advisors in the selection of operators and the creation of unique destinations, grounding cutting-edge concepts in balanced contracts that align the interests of owners and operators, being able to create concepts that can triple the average rents of traditional uses.
Dimas Gimeno, partner and founder of WOW Concept, highlighted the importance of creating a spectacular F&B offer that is capable of creating a destination, indicating that it plays a fundamental role in feeding back the offer between retail and F&B and vice versa: “it is a critical element to captivate the public you have in the street and to differentiate yourself”.
In the case of office buildings, according to Juan Manuel Ortega, CIO of Inmobiliaria Colonial, the transformation of cities and the pandemic has made it necessary to readapt these assets and introduce F&B concepts that were unthinkable in our country years ago. “The next phase of F&B will be to be able to create concepts in rooftops, floors, etc., i.e., spaces that were unusual until the last few years,” Ortega commented. “We believe that the relationship with F&B is necessary and has a positive impact on value, it is also a key element to attract workers to the office and minimise teleworking times.