Fortress Real Estate Investments is building a long-term logistics base across Central Europe. Anchored in Poland and Romania, the company is targeting Germany’s growing industrial and nearshoring demand.

Q: How has your strategic vision evolved since your appointment in 2021?

Maciej Tuszyński, Managing Director Europe: When I joined, we had the privilege of formulating the company’s strategy from the ground up. Our long-term ambition is to be present in roughly eight countries across Central Europe, but we made a deliberate decision to first consolidate our position in the two most populous and most promising markets in the region – Poland and Romania.

Poland is the more mature of the two: economically advanced, with a market that has grown rapidly over the past two decades and is now approaching a stage of maturity. Together, these two countries are large enough to sustain significant portfolio growth and will always represent the largest share of our overall exposure. Once we have a strong foothold there, we will expand into further markets – Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia and the Baltic states are all on our radar.

Q: What differentiates Fortress in the marketplace?

MT: We are, at our core, a real estate investment management company that also carries strong in-house development capabilities. The practical advantage for tenants is continuity. The same institution and the same team that negotiates the original lease agreement remains their counterpart throughout the asset’s life – for expansions, modifications and renewals. Because we hold assets long-term, we are also willing to invest in a higher technical specification from day one, even where the additional cost is not immediately reflected in the headline rent. A better-specified building costs less to operate, ages more slowly and does not require frequent upgrades. That means lower total occupancy costs for tenants, which matters to them far more than the split between rent and service charge.

Q: How do you generate value for the communities in which you operate?

MT: By investing in projects spread across both countries, we are bringing local tax revenues and employment opportunities directly to communities, rather than concentrating them in major urban centres. That matters particularly as nearshoring and reshoring accelerate. When a German manufacturer moves part of its production to Poland, it looks first at labour availability and the quality of the local managerial talent pool. By providing facilities in locations where that talent exists, we help anchor those jobs locally.

We also invest significantly in the immediate environment of our logistics parks – outdoor rest areas, bicycle parking, EV charging stations for both passenger cars and, increasingly, heavy trucks and lorries. We also pay careful attention to greenery and biodiversity. Post-construction, we plant trees, install beehives and insect habitats, and include rainwater capture and reuse systems to reduce our environmental footprint. These are not marketing exercises. Our tenants compete for employees, and employees who enjoy their working environment are more likely to stay – which in turn encourages tenants to renew leases and open additional facilities with us.

Q: Where do you see growth opportunities?

MT: The opportunities remain, in my view, very substantial. One clear trend is demand shifting away from older stock towards modern assets that allow tenants to run operations more efficiently and reduce costs. That migration alone represents a significant volume of activity.

The second major avenue is brownfield redevelopment. Poland has a large inventory of obsolete industrial sites, many of them close to or within major urban areas. Those locations are inherently attractive for real estate investment, but they can also be converted into facilities that serve both logistics and light manufacturing simultaneously. A building specified to a high logistics standard – greater natural light, thicker insulation, flexible internal configuration – can, over its life, serve a logistics operator, then a manufacturer, then as a distribution centre. That versatility broadens the potential tenant base considerably.

On energy efficiency: as of June 2025, we have installed over 35 megawatts of solar capacity across our portfolio and generated 42,329 MWh of energy during our last financial year. We know that more than 74% of tenants are willing to pay a premium for sustainable space. The question for us is always how much additional specification to incorporate at day one – and while that is sometimes a difficult internal conversation, our long-term ownership horizon consistently pushes us towards the higher standard, because either the current tenant will come to value it or the next one will.

Q: How are German nearshoring and relocation trends shaping Fortress’s pipeline?

MT: It is a significant tailwind for our business and one that plays directly to our model. A logistics operator acting on contract terms may sign a lease of three to five years. A manufacturer relocating part of its production process from Germany to Poland needs certainty of tenure for at least ten years – that is a fundamental precondition for the capital expenditure involved.

Longer leases change the economics of development for us. They allow us to spread our initial investment over a longer period, which means our required internal rate of return is lower and we can justify developing on land that might otherwise be too expensive for a standard logistics shed. For the tenant, locking in today’s rental rate with euro-denominated indexation – at what we expect to remain a relatively low level of European inflation – provides meaningful cost stability over a long horizon. Land availability in Poland will diminish as the market matures, and rents will rise accordingly. Thus, a company that commits now will emerge as a clear winner post market adjustment.

In five years’ time, I would like to see Fortress operating close to one million square metres of logistics space across our two core markets, with the foundations in place to begin expanding into additional countries in the region.