The real estate developer Avanza Urbana has just received the award from Economía 3 magazine for the best business strategy. Its president, Teresa Puchades,is delighted with this recognition of her company’s strategic plan: “Avanza Urbana is a family-owned company that has always worked to adapt to new realities. In 2022, we charted a new course and decided to involve an external financial consultancy like Kaizen Consulting in the process. We wanted someone from outside the sector to audit and analyze our future strategy, to ensure that our approach was correct.”
– What are the key points of this award-winning strategy?
– It has been a pleasant surprise for a real estate developer to be recognized for its business strategy. It is the acknowledgment of a strategic plan that we worked on in the second half of 2022, after deep reflection. The pandemic and rising costs greatly affected the real estate sector, which contracted. With our professional experience, we analyzed the situation and set the course for the future. But we also wanted an external perspective and trusted Kaizen Consulting to be part of this process and certify that the chosen path was a good one. We wanted an external financial view to avoid tunnel vision and make the right decisions. Now we are a developer with our own model, project manager, focused on adding value and meeting the new market demands.
– Investment is key in your business. How has the transformation of the financial market affected you?
– This sector needs investment alternatives. We came from a crisis, and funds were coming in to buy. We realized it was an opportunity for Avanza Urbana to manage projects with the support of funds: we had to channel investment, know what we were going to have available, and adjust the bank’s participation in the projects. We realized that we are more effective at scale, and to obtain the necessary resources, we turned to different Family Offices. This way, we have been able to aggregate projects on a larger scale, involving multiple investors in some cases. For large projects, we have approached major funds, and for smaller ones, we have pooled capital from different sources.
– How has the collaboration with Kaizen Consulting been?
– Their role has been to provide us with an external perspective and inform us about the diversity of alternative financing available at the moment. They have brought us knowledge and a perspective from outside the traditional real estate sector. It is the first time we have relied on an external consultancy to find new financial formulas, and they have helped us open up to new approaches. It has been an intense and fruitful collaboration, but also challenging… because it required mutual learning to coordinate well and adapt. We have worked to explain our sector to Kaizen Consulting and vice versa. This way, we have been able to find what we were looking for together and speak the same language.
– Have the results proven you right?
– Yes, the result is so positive that it has even surprised us. Our strategic plan is materializing, we are getting new projects, and we have now closed an important one with investors. Now we have two clients: the investor and the homebuyer. Success is that investors repeat with us, and we achieve customer satisfaction. We are developers, and from a piece of land, we create a viable and attractive project that must appeal to homebuyers and also attract investors to make it possible. Now, when we present our plans to potential partners, investors, and financial institutions, they congratulate us because it is not common to present well-founded five-year strategies.
– How do you see the future of real estate financing?
– Credit has tightened, that’s evident, but options have opened up. Alternative banking is needed now, and we have analyzed this with Kaizen Consulting. Traditional banks used to cover everything, but that is not possible anymore. But this sector now has little risk for investors: there is demand, and real estate development has transformed to adapt to market realities. I see the future in the Valencian Community as continuing to grow: there is a very high demand for access to first homes and also a shortage of supply in Valencia, Alicante, metropolitan areas, and tourist areas. There is demand for replacement and also from foreigners moving in.
– What is Avanza Urbana’s key to adapting to changes?
– In 2008 Mar Puchades and I took over the company, with female leadership in a sector in free fall. We survived because we were a family business, we had knowledge and experience in housing, and we knew the crisis would pass. But we went 7 years without doing any development. In 2016, we started again when we saw that the sector was about investors and project profitability. We have finally defined our role in the market and now we do other types of housing: one-bedroom apartments for professionals needing quality temporary housing, different forms of coliving, senior living, quality beach housing for primary residences… our thing is to adapt to the new reality, leveraging our experience in the sector.
