Earnings call transcript: Demire Deutsche Mittelstand’s Q3 2025 results

Demire Deutsche Mittelstand Real Estate AG reported a challenging third quarter for 2025, with a notable decrease in rental income and a slight increase in net loan-to-value ratios. Despite these hurdles, the company maintained its full-year financial guidance and highlighted strategic initiatives to optimize its financial position. The stock price saw a decline of 3.85% following the earnings announcement.

Key Takeaways

• Rental income fell by 18%, reflecting market challenges.
• The company maintained its full-year guidance despite the decline.
• New strategic appointments and lease agreements were finalized.
• The stock price dropped 3.85% during the earnings call.

Company Performance

Demire Deutsche Mittelstand Real Estate AG faced a difficult quarter, marked by an 18% decline in rental income to EUR 41.4 million. The company attributed this decrease to the ongoing challenges in the German real estate market, compounded by a weak economic backdrop. Despite these setbacks, Demire emphasized its commitment to maintaining a stable letting performance and optimizing its financial structure.

Financial Highlights

• Rental income: EUR 41.4 million, down 18% from the previous period.
• Funds from operations (FFO1): EUR 8.3 million.
• Net loan-to-value (LTV): Increased to 43% from 40.9%.
• Annualized contractual rent: EUR 53.9 million.

Outlook & Guidance

Demire reiterated its full-year guidance, projecting rental income between EUR 52-54 million and FFO1 between EUR 5-7 million. The company plans to continue focusing on debt reduction and financial optimization, while maintaining a selective approach to asset disposals. Additional maintenance costs are expected in the fourth quarter.

Executive Commentary

Frank Nickel, a management representative, emphasized the company’s strategic focus, stating, "We successfully completed several property disposals to streamline our portfolio and strengthen our balance sheet." He also highlighted the company’s financial priorities: "We are staying firmly focused on strengthening our financial position with debt reduction and financial optimization as key priorities."

Risks and Challenges

• Economic Uncertainty: The weak economic backdrop in Germany poses ongoing challenges.
• Market Conditions: The real estate market remains challenging, affecting rental income.
• Debt Levels: The slight increase in net LTV could pose financial risks if not managed.
• Vacancy Rates: The EPRA vacancy rate increased to 17.4%, indicating potential occupancy challenges.
• Bond Penalties: The company faces penalties for not redeeming a EUR 50 million bond early.

Demire Deutsche Mittelstand Real Estate AG’s Q3 2025 earnings call highlighted the company’s resilience in a challenging market environment. By focusing on strategic financial optimizations and maintaining its guidance, Demire aims to navigate the current economic landscape effectively.

Full transcript - Demire Deutsche Mittelstand RE (DMRE) Q3 2025:

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DEMIRE’s Q3 earnings call. My name is Maxi Gutmann, and I’ll be your moderator today. We’ll begin with the management presentation and then move into the Q&A. I’ll provide more details on the process once the presentation concludes. With that, let’s get started. Mr. Nickel, the floor is yours.

Frank Nickel, Management Representative, DEMIRE: Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, from DEMIRE’s side, and welcome to our 9 Months 2025 Results Presentation. Thanks for joining us today. With me here is DEMIRE’s CFO, Tim Brückner, CIO, Ralf Bongers, and Julius Steinauer, our Head of Investor Relations. I’m sure many of you have already reviewed our results, which I would describe as robust, particularly in light of our smaller portfolio size compared to 2024. In a still challenging environment and weak real estate markets, we successfully completed several property disposals to streamline our portfolio and strengthen our balance sheet. These sales have already generated around EUR 43 million this year. Given current market prices, we have decided to hold back some further disposals and will therefore not redeem the EUR 50 million of our bond early as originally planned. We believe.

Retaining these assets for now positions us for stronger value appreciation and gives us more financial flexibility in the future. This year, we secured new bank loans totaling around EUR 75 million for five properties, and we were able to partially revalue these loans. Since summer, we’ve already seen encouraging signs of recovery in the financing market and for real estate companies. Despite a weak economic backdrop, DEMIRE delivered solid operational performance, achieving nearly the same letting volume as last year while maintaining stable and, in some areas, higher rent levels. This positive trend reflects our excellent work of our asset management team and our close tenant relationships. On top of that, we expect added momentum from the new Immatec Center Manager starting in early 2026. Now that we’ve covered some of the highlights, let’s move to the next slide.

We’ll briefly walk you through the developments of our key metrics in the first nine months of this year. Let us make a more detailed look at our four strategic pillars. Among the key highlights, there are continued robust letting performance, the successful financing, and the progress we’ve made on our asset disposals. Our asset management activities generated an annualized contractual rent of EUR 53.9 million, slightly lower than at the end of 2024 due to property disposals. Letting performance remained almost stable, a solid achievement given the challenging economic environment in Germany. We are also adding momentum at our largest asset, Immatec in Neuss, with a new Center Manager starting early 2026. From that point on, leases will be concluded directly with DEMIRE, further enhancing our earnings potential.

The approved vacancy rate rose to 17.4%, mainly due to Deutsche Telekom partially vacating space in Bonn, as already announced before, offset by successful new lettings in Rostock and Langenfeld. Encouragingly, these lettings also improved our WALT to 4.7 years. Let’s look at our transactions. This year, we completed several disposals with expected proceeds of around EUR 40 million, though some are still closing and not fully reflected in the Q3 figures. The sale of a leasehold property will bring meaningful cost savings going forward. We are continuing to focus our disposals on smaller, non-strategic, and mature assets. Overall, these steps strengthen our flexibility and position us well for the future. Turning to the financials, rental income came in at EUR 41.4 million, down 18% compared to the previous period, mainly due to the removal of Lockpark and Leipzig and the Limes asset from our portfolio.

FFO1 stood at EUR 8.3 million, reflecting the smaller portfolio and the lower rental income. Our net LTV was 43%, only slightly higher than year-end 2024 at 40.9%, showing that our balance sheet remains solid. Regarding our processes, all our mortgage loans maturing in 2025 have been successfully extended by at least three years. In addition, we once again achieved gold awards for both our EPRA section of our annual report and our EPRA sustainability report, reflecting the high quality and the transparency of our reporting. Looking at our earnings so far this year, and what we expect for the rest of 2025, we are sticking to our guidance. For the full year, we anticipate rental income of around EUR 52-54 million and FFO1 of EUR 5-7 million. Ralf, I would now ask you to continue with some more portfolio highlights.

Ralf Bongers, CIO, DEMIRE: Yes. Good morning, everybody. As already mentioned by Frank, the annualized contractual rent has decreased slightly from EUR 56.4 million down to EUR 53.9 million. This reduction is mainly driven by the disposals of three smaller assets and then an increased vacancy in one of our larger assets. Nevertheless, as already mentioned by Frank also, we had a strong letting performance and close to matching last year’s strong performance with 56,000 sq m. Largest drivers here are prolongations of 9,400 sq m with Deutsche Telekom in our asset in Kempten and approximately 10,000 sq m with the DIY market. Frank already elaborated a bit on our asset in Neuss. In addition to this strong letting performance, we have appointed a new Center Manager for our largest asset in Neuss with 56,000 sq m. This new management will come into effect in June 2026.

From then on, leases will be handled directly by DEMIRE. This will give us better control over the property and help us to unlock more of its earning potential. The EPRA vacancy has increased from 15.1% up to 17.4%. The increase of vacancy is primarily a consequence of Deutsche Telekom leaving parts of their rental space in the asset in Bonn. Our letting achievements, especially in the asset in Rostock and Langenfeld, helped us to mitigate this effect. The WALT has increased slightly from 4.6 years up to 4.7 years. The WALT improvement reflects a prolongation with Deutsche Telekom in Bonn and further letting achievements, for example, in our asset in Rostock. We see this 4.7 years still as a solid level for a portfolio with an office overweight. Yes, I would.

Like to hand over to our CFO, Tim, who will explain the financial highlights. Tim, please take over.

Tim Brückner, CFO, DEMIRE: Hello, everybody. Our show, as said before, lower mainly driven by the previous disposal of Lockpark and the consolidation of the Limes portfolio. Due to the aforementioned disposals, we post more or less stable operating margin in the high 60% in line with loss from the rental of real estate. I think for the first time, this is a stabilization of our margins, and we are looking forward, obviously, to reduce vacancy and increase margins again above the 60% threshold. 7%. When you further go down, we see that there are some head-offs again, profits from fair value adjustments in properties. Those were connected to the disposal prices we can achieve in the current market conditions. If you have all read our talk release from last week, it has also an effect on our disposal strategy going forward.

The impairment of financial and other receivables mainly consists of the remaining Limes-connected shareholder loans into the structure. Given the assumed disposal prices of that portfolio, we have now completely written off all proceeds that we expected previously from the Limes sub-portfolio. We, given the difficult economic situation, obviously also try hard to push down G&A. I think there’s some success in our complex structure. It’s not that easy, but we have reduced the number quite a bit from EUR 9.1 million to EUR 7.8 million for the first nine months of this year. As you all know, interest expense is up, mainly driven because of the amended terms of the bond and also the shareholder loan. As your shareholder loan interest is not payable, but it is shown in our current financial statements. So we show a significant rise from EUR 12 million to EUR 41 million.

This all sums up into FFO after taxes before minorities and shareholder loan interest of EUR 8.3 million for the first three quarters of this year. As you know. Our guidance is slightly above our guidance for the first nine months, but we expect some factors in the last three months that will hinder us from increasing the guidance, at least at this point. On our balance sheet, you see the effect, obviously, of a shift from investment properties to assets held for sale and also the negative result of the period. That at the end of the day shortened our balance sheet. And led to some. Slightly weaker ratios than in the previous reporting period. At the same time, the net LTV is increasing slightly from 40.9% to 40.3%.

Excluding the shareholder loan, obviously, we expect that to go down for year-end, driven by some closings of the disposals that have been mentioned by Ralf and Frank before. The average cost of debt is more or less stable against the end of the previous year. As said before, we have refinanced quite a number of mortgage loans. You can imagine that those refinancings came in at a higher cost than the original loans. We see a bit, or we will see a slightly further increase in the nominal cost of debt going forward. Back to you, Frank.

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Thanks, Tim. All in all, we delivered robust results for the first nine months of 2025 and feel well prepared for the developments ahead of the remainder of the year. Looking at our performance in the first nine months and the outlook for the rest of the year, we are keeping our full year 2025 guidance, as Tim just mentioned. FFO is currently at EUR 8.3 million, above guidance, though we do expect some additional maintenance costs in the last quarter. Hence, we are confident to achieve a rental income guidance of EUR 52-54 million and to generate an FFO1 of EUR 5-7 million. Before we move into the Q&A session, I’d like to reiterate our key priorities going forward. We are staying firmly focused on strengthening our financial position with debt reduction and financial optimization as key priorities.

At the same time, we continue selling assets where it makes sense, while putting a strong focus on operational excellence to unlock the full value of our portfolio. Thanks for listening, and we are now happy to answer your questions.

Thank you all for the presentation. We will now open the line for the Q&A session. As a quick reminder, you can ask your questions by clicking the raise hand icon. Once I grant your permission to speak, you’ll be able to ask your question directly. Hopefully, that’s clear. Let’s proceed with the first question. I see Philip Zenebelt has a question.

Philip Zenebelt, Analyst/Questioner: Yeah, thank you very much. I hope you can hear me well.

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Tim, I want to get back to the X-ray effects you mentioned in the fourth quarter affecting FFO. Can you elaborate a bit further? I mean, you consistently improved FFO over the first quarters sequentially, and now you expect at least EUR 1.5 million negative or EUR 1.3 million negative, to be precise, in Q4. Yeah, I want to know, yeah, maybe a bit more detail on that.

Tim Brückner, CFO, DEMIRE: I think Frank helped me with that by saying that we expect to spend more maintenance than in the previous quarters. If those maintenance effects really materialize, we think that that should have a negative FFO impact.

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Maintenance piles up at the end of the year, Philip. We have to be prepared. This is why we think that going down with the FFO1 prognosis makes a lot of sense to us.

Philip Zenebelt, Analyst/Questioner: All right, understood. Also regarding the news you put out last week, you also mentioned at the end. I want to know, I mean, you have to pay the penalty fee now, as you do not pay back the EUR 50 million. First of all, when is this cash relevant? Is this cash relevant this year, or is it stretched over the course of the, until the bond is due? Second one, what makes you so confident that you can compensate by higher selling prices for this penalty payment? Does this apply that you see easing pricing pressure?

Tim Brückner, CFO, DEMIRE: Let me answer the first part of the question. It’s payable at maturity.

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Okay. On the second part of the question, Philip, we always said that we are opportunistic in our sales. We plan to sell the assets that we want to sell and that at a fair price. We have not seen that for the last month. The decision was to go on with the assets that are usually our best assets because otherwise you cannot sell anything these days anyhow. We keep them to keep us flexible for the future.

Philip Zenebelt, Analyst/Questioner: Okay, that makes sense. I mean, in the case of, yeah, easing pricing pressure next year, should that happen, would you also be willing to sell, let’s say, a portfolio of assets once the market improves?

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: If it makes sense, of course, Philip, but I think the glass bowl is not big enough to give you a real answer on that.

Philip Zenebelt, Analyst/Questioner: Yeah, and so far we do not see any significant portfolio deals in the market. Right, yeah, that was also helpful. Yeah, that is it from my side. Thank you very much for answering my questions.

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Okay, I do not see any further questions now. Maybe we will wait a little bit.

Okay.

All right. Thank you very much. Since it seems there are no additional questions at this time, we can wrap things up here. Mr. Nicol, would you like to share any closing remarks?

Yeah, thanks again, everybody, for dialing in. We’ll be back at our full year results presentation on March 19, 2026. We are looking forward to speaking with you then again. Thanks very much.

Philip Zenebelt, Analyst/Questioner: Thank you.

Maxi Gutmann, Moderator, DEMIRE: Thank you.

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