The city’s housing associations are not getting any peace: after just a month in office, Gewofag managing director Andreas Lehner is quitting again. The 68-year-old’s termination this Monday came as a complete surprise to Gewofag. Nothing is known about the reasons. The chairwoman of the Gewofag supervisory board, Third Mayor Verena Dietl, could not be reached for comment until Monday evening.
Andreas Lehner should have brought urban housing construction into the future and brought Gewofag to rest after turbulent months: After the planned merger of Gewofag with its sister company GWG at the beginning of 2024, he would have been appointed head of the new “Münchner Wohnen” and thus the largest landlord in the city Almost 70,000 apartments are to be built. It was only in March that his predecessor Klaus-Michael Dengler was deprived of an expert opinion following the affair. Now the search for a managing director will have to start again.
As Lehner told the SZ last week, the merger of the two equal municipal housing companies would be very difficult. Legally speaking, Gewofag takes over the GWG, but there are special cases. When it comes to salaries for its approximately 1,200 employees, for example, the city chose the public service tariff according to which GWG pays, and not the housing industry tariff with which Gewofag previously worked. You can also hear about forces of inertia who are resisting the merger.
Until his ultra-short stint in Munich, Andreas Lehner had always worked for profit-driven companies in the real estate industry, not for those focused on the common good. He was CEO of Deutsche Wohnen AG for four years from 2004, during which time he turned a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank into Germany’s first listed apartment landlord. When he left the board in October 2007, Deutsche Wohnen had 50,000 apartments in its portfolio. Today it belongs to Vonovia and is known as the namesake of the Berlin expropriation referendum.
Lehner comes from Lemgo in North Rhine-Westphalia and studied industrial engineering and business administration in Munich. After his years at Deutsche Wohnen, he worked in managerial and advisory positions in the real estate industry.