Jean-Maxime Jouis, the very recently appointed chief executive of BNP Paribas Real Estate, spoke to Luc-Étienne Rouillard Lafond, of sister publication Business Immo, and Luke Haynes, regional editor of CoStar News, at Mipim 2026 in Cannes.
He described a market that is back on the up but by no means uniform: "First, if we look at the figures, transaction volumes have shown a slight increase compared to last year with a corporate real estate transacted volume in Europe, which is about 180 billion [euros]. That's a plus 8 or 9% compared to the previous year. So what we see is a sort of normalisation beginning on the market. We've also values that have been stabilising throughout the, I would say, the last two years or so.
"However, we see still very different dynamics from one asset class to another with intense polarisation on some asset classes like offices, depending on the quality level. Also very different dynamics in terms of geographies with, in particular, Southern Europe showing incredible strengths and dynamism compared to other areas. So now is the time to be agile, to be selective and also to be able to revisit what has made our success in the last decade.
Jouis also spoke about the company's recently announced 2030 roadmap across its three business lines: services, advisory and property development. Starting with advisory, he said: "The idea is for us to increase our European footprint. You know that we have very strong market positions in France and in Germany in particular pretty much throughout the asset classes. We want to expand that further to other geographies, in particular Southern Europe, but also the Netherlands are of specific interest to us. And we also want to shift a bit the positioning of our UK platform to be able to be more synergetic with what we do here in Continental Europe."
For property management it wants to take a more data-driven approach and add more value-added services, while in property development the company would like to become two-thirds residential and more active in the French regions.
On the back of his company advising Equinix on a £3.9 billion data centre site deal in Hertfordshire in the UK, he spoke about the opportunities across data centres across Europe.
"You don't need me to tell you that this is one of the hot asset classes of the day. The approach on our end is very much a European one.
"So the way we are acting is that we have a limited number of really specialist people who, however, have the strong connections with two categories of players.
"The first one being the operators of those facilities and the second one being our teams on the ground in the brokerage departments of each and every geography. The combination of that and the connection of those two populations create those deal opportunities.
"And the way we approach this, increasingly, and we will accelerate on that in 2026 is to treat this as a European unified team, notwithstanding where they sit on each market. So this is really one of the asset classes that we see [becoming] stronger and stronger in our business mix in the coming years."
For more detail on the strategic plan across the three business lines and the importance of ESG, click on the play button above.