The
Firm
Sarego Group is a Viennese real estate trustee firm for hotel property, active in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the Alps and the Mediterranean. We work for owners, investors and operators, and we do so away from the open market.
Origin: 1994 to today
In 1994 a real estate trustee office started in Vienna with the usual programme of apartments, tenement buildings and retail space. After a few years one asset type stayed, the one most colleagues preferred to avoid, because hotels add up differently from the properties they were used to.
The result of a hotel arises in the business and not in the building. Value it like a property and the figures miss the point, and sell it like a property and halfway through you lose the operator, the staff or both. The specialisation grew out of that experience.
The 2000s brought the connections we live on today, that is owner families in the Alps, operators on the Adriatic and banks that accompany individual houses across decades. With one of these families we have been in conversation for more than fifteen years without a property changing hands in that time, and that too is part of this business, because trust here is not built in a quarter.
From the 2010s onwards, mandates from institutional and private investors abroad came in. They needed someone who knows the local market and speaks the language of the operation at the same time. Out of that grew the partner network that today reaches beyond Europe.
The firm is led by Thomas Uhlir, MBA. Under the Sarego brand, what grew over three decades now sits together, that is transaction, development, operations and the restraint this market demands. Over the years the seat has remained Vienna, while the mandates have long reached beyond it.
What a property can carry rarely shows in the brochure.
Principles: Three, in that order
Discretion
No property entrusted to us appears on a listing portal, and no name is mentioned before a confidentiality agreement is signed. What is protected is the business, that is staff, banks, guests and the price, because a hotel the market knows to be available loses value first.
Substance
We look at the figures before we hold an opinion, that is lease, occupancy, deferred maintenance and contract terms. What cannot be evidenced we do not say, even where it would move a conversation along faster. Buyers usually notice an unsupported figure at once and owners only later, which is why every paper states where a figure comes from.
Reliability
If we announce a meeting, an assessment or a call-back, it comes. If a mandate does not suit us, we say so in the first conversation and not in the third, which occasionally costs a piece of business and spares everyone involved the longer version of it.
Working method: Four steps
First conversation
You describe the matter, and we tell you whether we are the right people for it. The conversation is confidential and happens without a mandate and at no cost.
Confidentiality
Before documents move, the confidentiality agreement stands. An NDA, and where third parties are involved an NCND that rules out circumventing the intermediary.
Qualified approach
We approach only parties that suit the property and can evidence their means, and we work with neither mailshots nor lists nor anonymous enquiries.
Through to closing
Data room, due diligence, negotiation, notarial appointment. We stay in the process until it is signed and handed over.
Licence & association: Verifiable
Sarego Group is a brand of RED Real Estates Development Bauträger und Immobilien GmbH, seated in Vienna. The activity falls under the regulated trade of real estate trustees.
- Real estate trustee: estate agent, property manager, property developer
- Member of ÖVI, the Austrian Real Estate Association
- Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, Professional Group of Real Estate and Asset Trustees
The full particulars on the commercial register, the authority and professional law are given in the imprint.
