Huge Success: "Guter Freund" Wins the "immobilienmanager" Award
Cologne/Aachen. The Quartier Guter Freund in Aachen is Germany’s best new-construction development—at least according to the 15-member jury of the immobilienmanager Awards.
On Thursday evening, Landmarken AG’s publicly subsidized housing development was awarded the coveted prize.
With 248 apartments on a plot of approximately 15,500 square meters—more than 70 percent of which are publicly subsidized—“Guter Freund” is one of the largest projects of its kind in North Rhine-Westphalia. “The integration of a daycare center and a senior day care facility, local amenities in the immediate vicinity, and good public transportation connections make the complex attractive to people of all ages,” stated the jury in its rationale, praising the valuable contribution made toward providing urgently needed housing during the award ceremony in Cologne. Landmarken had “exemplarily assumed responsibility for the city and the people living there.”
“It was important to us to prove that subsidized housing of this high quality is possible. The jury’s recognition of this achievement means a great deal to us,” said Landmarken CEO Norbert Hermanns. “Our neighborhood is, in the best sense of the word, a ‘Good Friend’ to its residents and the city because it offers affordable, beautiful apartments of outstanding quality in an attractive location.” The architecture was designed by pbs architekten of Aachen.
Landmarken AG is active in many cities in North Rhine-Westphalia, including Bonn, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, and Cologne. It maintains its own office locations in Bochum and Münster. “We can envision a commitment to publicly subsidized housing of the same quality in many of these cities,” says Sylvia Friederich, Head of the Housing Unit at Landmarken AG. For the jury of the immobilienmanager Award, “Guter Freund” is already “an exemplary concept that can serve as a prototype for many other locations throughout Germany.”
As a pioneering project for publicly subsidized housing in North Rhine-Westphalia, “Guter Freund” stands out with its family-friendly and intergenerational design, which brings together different income groups and age brackets and has a particularly sustainable impact thanks to attractive green spaces, modern mobility options, and numerous services designed to foster community.
The German Real Estate Association (ZIA) and the Institute for Corporate Governance in the German Real Estate Industry (ICG) had previously highlighted the Quartier Guter Freund as a recognized best-practice example of corporate social responsibility in the housing sector. Built on the site of a former Belgian military depot, “Guter Freund” had also previously been honored with the polis Award for urban land reuse.
Read more: immobilienmanager.de