53BloombergBusinessweek February 10, 2020
O
n thegroundfloorofa tanstuccobuildinginthe
SchillerkiezneighborhoodofBerlinsitsananarchist
barcalledSyndikat.Itswindowsareplasteredwithanti-
Naziandanti-gentrificationstickers.Motörheadand
Germanpunkbandsplayonrotation,anda smalldraftbeer
costslessthan€2.
Since1985,Syndikathasservedasa kindofcigarette-
smoke-saturatedlivingroomformisfits,students,immi-
grants,andhard-upneighbors.InSeptember2018,however,
anevictionnoticefromthebar’slandlord,FirmanProperties
S.a.r.l.,appeared in themail. That’s whenSyndikat’s
co-managers took on a surprisingly difficult challenge: find-
ing out who owned their building.
“We’ve had a few owners, but the most recent had an
address in Luxembourg,” says Christian Schulte, a 42-year-old
sociologist with a septum piercing who’s helped run Syndikat
for 13 years. “When we finally found the company’s number,
no one ever picked up.”
Wondering exactly who he was dealing with, Schulte
enlisted friends near the Luxembourg border to drive to the
company’s headquarters. At the address listed on the bar’s
lease they found an unremarkable commercial building hous-
ing a shoe store and a tanning salon—and an intriguing mailbox.
On a sheet of paper posted nearby was a list of 76 companies
associated with that mailbox, most of them apparently prop-
erty management firms. Among them was Syndikat’s landlord.
Schulte and his colleagues scoured the internet and
Berlin housing logs and discovered that the companies all
shared the same three or four managers. They also found
that roughly two dozen of the companies had been used to
purchase more than 3,000 apartments throughout Berlin.
Luckily for Syndikat, some of the companies were also active
in Denmark, where, unlike in Germany and Luxembourg,
owners must reveal their true identities. (In 2020, this became
true for all European Union countries.)
That’s how, after about two weeks of fact-finding, Schulte’s
team identified the actual owners of Firman Properties:
Mark, David, and Trevor Pears, three reclusive brothers from
London who own a majority of the privately held William
Pears Group property company and, according to the Sunday
Times Rich List, are worth about $4 billion. “They’re very
secretive,” Schulte says. “One of them, you can’t even find
photographs.” (Schulte isn’t his real name; he uses a pseud-
onym when talking to the press about real estate because he’s
looking for a new apartment.)
Soon, journalists caught wind of the story. In May the Berlin
newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, together with the German investi-
gative group Correctiv, confirmed Syndikat’s reporting. Using
information from the Panama Papers, they also revealed that
the Pears brothers collected at least $53 million in Berlin rents
and sales in 2017, while using standard real estate loopholes
and shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and
Luxembourgandreportedpaying$197,000intaxesonthat
income.SyndikatalsofoundthatthePearses’variousBerlin
companieshadforcedouta kindergarten and a pottery studio
and had tried to remove a flower shop and a decades-old hard-
ware store, presumably to charge higher rents. The Pearses
didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.
In Berlin, revelations about the Pearses’ real estate ven-
tures stoked a growing rage against big landlords and property
speculators. Since 2009 rents in the city have more than dou-
bled. For people looking to buy rather than rent, it’s at least as
bad—in 2017 alone, property values jumped 20.5%, the high-
est increase for any major city in the world, according to the
real estate consulting firm Knight Frank. And while many fac-
tors are at play—most notably, a giant influx of new residents
anda shortageofhousing—Berlinerstendtoseegreedyland-
lordsastheproblem.
Accordingly,Germany’scapitalis takingextrememeasures
to stay (relatively) affordable and not go the way of SanNO CITY HATES ITS
LANDLORDS QUITE LIKE
BERLIN
ACTIVISTS SAY THE NEW FIVE-YEAR RENT FREEZE IS MERELY A GOOD START. WHO’S UP FOR
EXPROPRIATING SOME PRIVATE PROPERTY? BY CAROLINE WINTER AND ANDREW BLACKMAN