It is a magnificent residential building in the middle of Schwabing, but it is in need of renovation and it has been empty for years. The city actually wanted to take over the building at Agnesstrasse 48. Last year, the city council decided to assert its right of first refusal and to limit costs with the help of a new legal regulation – but it came up empty. Because according to SZ information, the previous owner, a subsidiary of the luxury apartment builder M-Concept, made use of its right to reverse the purchase contract. She’s keeping the property she originally planned to sell to another company for a staggeringly high price, so yes.
What M-Concept Managing Director Stefan Mayr intends to do with it remains open. Upon request, he had an employee say that they would not comment on the subject. A spokeswoman for the municipal department responsible for pre-emption rights also made no comment, as it was a non-public city council process.
Agnesstraße 48 has become a symbol for the excesses of real estate speculation in Munich. At the end of 2016, a company called Agnes48 UG, backed by a few business people, bought the house from a private individual for eleven million euros.
Evictions began in 2017: the apartment building, built in 1912, was divided into residential property. The new owners announced modernization and, as a result, rent increases of up to 245 percent. All tenants left the house one by one.
In 2019, M-Concept took over the company Agnes48 UG and became the owner of the property. The new investor initially planned the demolition and a new building with 20 to 24 apartments plus an underground car park. But then the preservation of historical monuments intervened and placed the house under protection: It was “the earliest and up to now preserved building of the block Agnes-/Hiltensperger-/Elisabeth- und Zentnerstrasse”, designed by the architects Otho Orlando Kurz and Eduard Herbert. Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) called it “a piece of Schwabing history”.
The city is left with the notary fees
A lot happened in 2021: In March, M-Concept submitted a new planning application for the renovation and addition of a storey to the building. In July, the company sold the building to a company called Eisbach Immobilienverwaltung GmbH & Co. KG from Starnberg. M-Concept spoke of “a quite normal market price”. This was 35 million euros, more than three times as much as when it was sold five years earlier – and an incredible 54 percent above the market value of the building of 22.7 million euros determined by the city.
Because the property is in an area with a conservation statute, the city had a right of first refusal. She made use of this in September. Normally she would have had to pay the price from the purchase contract. But because it was so high in this case, the suspicion was voiced in the city council that it was a bogus sale. So the city made use of its right to “limit the purchase price” and set the price at 22.7 million euros. Apparently that wasn’t enough for M-Concept. The reverse transaction has the disadvantage for the city that it now has to bear the notary costs – that is the legal situation. The city council has not yet been informed of how high the sum will be.
In September 2021, around the same time as the city council decided on the right of first refusal, the local building commission (LBK) rejected the building application that was still pending. On the other hand, M-Concept and its subsidiary have filed a lawsuit with the administrative court, but a hearing date is not yet in sight. It is therefore to be feared that nothing will happen on Agnesstraße for a long time.
An excavation, three stories deep
M-Concept has other projects that are stagnating or at least making slow progress: At the corner of Alramstrasse and Aberlestrasse in Untersendling, there is still nothing to be seen of the announced “elegant apartment building with 130 wonderful condominiums”, but a three-storey one has been for a good two years deep excavation. And for an apartment building at Possartstraße 11 in Bogenhausen, the M-Concept website stated summer 2021 as the date for the start of sales, but on the website of the agent commissioned it was already spring 2022.
A spokeswoman for M-Concept explains that there can be no question of delays or problems. In fact, the building permit has only recently been granted and it is only now that “a final schedule can be drawn up”. Construction will begin “at the turn of the year 2022/2023”, and the apartments may only be sold “after the completion of the construction work”.
After the SZ request, the previous information on the start of sales on the Internet was deleted. At M-Concept, however, it is still said that the project is “under construction”.