In this interview, Patrick Schmid explains why a quarter of Avobis’ employees work in the innovation department, how renters can become owners and what the next phase of Constructive Venture Fund will look like.

Co-CEO, Avobis Group
Patrick Schmid is co-CEO of Avobis Group, an independent Swiss real estate service provider. Avobis Group is one of the founding shareholders of Constructive Venture Fund, a fund managed by Verve Ventures that invests in fintech, construction and proptech startups
Before you joined the real estate world, you started your career in sports. How did one lead to the other?
I’ve originally studied sports science and did a second degree in economics. After a stop in the sports industry, I got the opportunity to lead a specialist publishing company in the field of real estate and construction, which brought me into the world of real estate. This eventually led me to a startup, a search engine for building products, where I was CEO for several years before joining Avobis.
Avobis is a real estate service provider. What exactly does Avobis offer?
The Avobis Group has become the leading provider of independent, integrated and technology-based real estate and financing solutions in Switzerland. We stand by institutional and private investors as a partner for customized, forward-looking solutions along the entire real estate value chain. We provide underwritten mortgages by pension funds, insurances, and banks, and we also offer real estate funds. We help family offices and wealthy individuals to invest in real estate and provide financing for specialist properties such as hospitals or gas stations. The clients here range from private clients with a few apartment buildings to owners of multi-billion real estate portfolios. Through our subsidiaries VERIT Immobilien, Centerio, and Rimaplan, we advise our clients developing of real estate properties and take care of the marketing and management of commercial and private properties. Finally, yet importantly, our innovation department, which I led until I became co-CEO, is constantly working on new tools and platforms. One startup founded by our innovation department is Property Captain, an independent real estate platform open to third-party providers. We offer customers access to innovative, needs-oriented products and services related to housing and home financing through this platform.
Can you elaborate on innovation? What does that mean?
A quarter of all employees in the Avobis group work in this field. We become more and more a data-driven tech company. There is a great need for digitalization in the real estate industry. Just think of the reporting needs that the owners of real estate portfolios have. Based on more granular data from buildings we can improve the reporting quality. To put it more generally, we want to build new businesses, services and products based on data gathering, data transformation and enrichment.
How do you see the Swiss real estate market?
In residential real estate, supply is still scarce and demand very high, driven by negative interest rates. On the other end of the spectrum, the prices of business properties in peripheral locations have come under pressure. What we are working on is a tool that helps investors identify objects with development potential, again based on data. These kinds of objects are still attractive for investors. And we have another exciting project in the field of alternative financing.
What is this project about?
The underlying problem we want to solve is that many people in Switzerland cannot afford to buy a property and hence are unable to profit from the appreciation of real estate. Our model will allow them to rent an apartment in view of buying it in, say, a decade. The seller of the apartment will receive cash now, and long-term investors will underwrite the financing. We will launch this offering on our B2C platform Property Captain, the first smart real estate matching platform in Switzerland.
Avobis was one of the driving forces behind Constructive Venture Fund, a partnership between several companies. What is the idea behind this investment vehicle?
For startups, Constructive Venture Fund is not just an investor but also a real opportunity to work directly with potential clients. The setup together with Verve Ventures assures that Constructive Venture Fund has access to a very strong deal pipeline. In the first phase that started in 2019 we were building a track record of investing in great companies, and it shows that we’re able to leverage our combined network for the benefit of all involved parties. This has built the necessary trust for the second phase of Constructive Venture Fund, when we will open it to purely financial investors as well. The second phase should make CVF a much larger investor, with 5 to 10 times more firepower than in the first phase, and with a much more international portfolio. The investment scope of CVF is broad; it includes financing and property management, housing technology, even construction. This gives us the possibility to diversify broadly and is a quite unique approach.
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