Welcome everyone to our nine-month 2022 analyst and investor call. This is M artin Praum, Head of Investor Relations and Group Reporting, speaking. I'm happy to have our CFO, Christoph Glaser, with us today to present to you an overview of the business development and financial results for nine months 2022, as well as further details on the adjusted guidance for fiscal year 2022, followed by the Q&A session. During today's call, we will refer to the nine-month 2022 results presentation, which you can find on our website in the section Shareholders under Most Recent Publications. The presentation includes the nine-month figures, details about our adjusted guidance, and in case of question, you know, the IR team is always there to help.
As usual, this call will be recorded, and it will be made available on our website, and we'll also offer a call transcript for further reference. With that, I'd like to hand over to Christoph to start the presentation. Christoph?
Thank you very much, Martin. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to this call. I would like to start by taking you through and briefly talk about what we see in the markets and what that means for PATRIZIA and what we're doing in that context. If you would please turn to page four to start with. Needless to say that we're all still faced with geopolitical risks and unusually high inflation rates. Interest rates are rising, so there's a lot of volatility, and both stocks and bonds are negatively affected by the current news flow. There's a lot of questions swirling around over the future performance of other asset classes, like real assets included.
There's a bit of risk aversion on the investor side, and a lot of people are sitting on the sidelines right now, especially probably in some aspects of the European real estate market. Quite a bit of investment activity has been put on hold. Now we see all of that to be somewhat temporary in nature, although of course, opinions differ as to what temporary means. One thing that's for sure for the short and medium terms of the market has kind of changed from a seller to buyer market. For us, of course, the key question is what does it mean for PATRIZIA and what should we do about that? First of all, we do not expect any more stabilization of either the political environment or the market conditions in the short term.
Because of that, we had to adjust our guidance for fiscal year 2022, which we already briefly talked about last week. In addition to that and what's probably more important, management is actively taking action to address PATRIZIA's cost base, but also to reallocate resources, both human resources and capital, to support selected critical growth initiatives. Because one thing we do not wanna do as a company that has a strong balance sheet and a strong culture and strong skills, we do not want to sacrifice our midterm strategy, or at least the most important parts of that, to short-term purposes. There needs to be some balance. We talk a lot about rebalancing the company for growth.
With that, let's briefly go to page five, where we have summarized for you the adjustment of our guidance for 2022. This is really in essence not so much news as of today anymore because we communicated last Wednesday. Most of it you know, but what is important for me to focus you on once again is that you know, against this backdrop of a sustained market uncertainty, a bit of client inactivity, and the slowdown in transaction activity, I just wanna make it very clear where the drivers for the guidance adjustment are.
You can see here on the slide that roughly 60% of the guidance adjustment is driven by what I would call a reduced revenue expectation against the backdrop of a little bit lower AUM assumptions, but in particular, transaction fee income assumptions, and to a much lesser degree, slightly lower management fee assumptions. Forty percent of the guidance change is really driven by expected one-off expenses and reorganization. Roughly half of it within the EBITDA space and roughly half of that below the EBITDA line. It's reflective of measures were taken to future-proof PATRIZIA. We do that quite decisively. On the one hand, we're addressing the cost base, including personnel expense, but not only. We're right-sizing capacities which are not business critical. We're emphasizing critical growth capacities.
We support a strong and stable core business, so we're not gonna put our service levels at risk. Our investors are at the forefront of our interest, and those interests will be protected. We will stay a reliable partner. There will be a bit of increased focus on flagship investment strategies and a lot of discretionary capital deployment, and our global diversification will continue, beyond Germany, inside Europe, into Asia and beyond, and this infrastructure really across the globe. The chart on the right side summarizes that. Once again, we're tackling the issue from two directions. We do avoid too much future cost increases. We're getting rid of things that are not core and we're addressing our cost profile, as I mentioned before. Again, no sacrifice of core growth initiatives that underpin our midterm strategy.
With that, let's go to strategic and operational highlights, starting on page seven, if I'm not mistaken. Firstly, because it always attracts a lot of attention, I'd like to give you a short update on one of our larger portfolios, which is the Dawonia portfolio, which PATRIZIA Alternative Investments manages on behalf of a few dozen very strategic, very important, and very long-term oriented investors. It's a fantastic portfolio. It's roughly EUR 5.4 billion assets under management. Associated with that is a profit entitlement, which is seen on our balance sheet to the tune of EUR 355 after tax.
I'm very pleased to tell you that, based on the strong relationships we have with our investor base, we have agreed to extend the investment phase beyond the ten-year mark into the midterm. Which means that, you know, in the context of ongoing future discussions, we will agree with our investor base as to how to proceed long-term with that vehicle. We're gonna do this in a context of a very constructive and strategic discussion, and not being distracted by short-term market volatility. All options are being kept open on the table, and of course, I cannot preempt those talks at this stage. The general entitlement to the variable profit share remains.
It has actually slightly increased at the sort of quarter mark, and we expect it to be kind of stable in the short term. With that, let's move to page eight for a quick update on other strategically quite relevant forward-looking activities. In a very simple way on the left side, I would like to talk a little bit about infrastructure because that's a huge topic for us now and going forward. On the right side, I'd like to talk a little bit more about our traditional real estate investment business. Maybe before diving here into the detail, what's perhaps important to realize once again that until the end of last year, PATRIZIA was really more of a European and partially Asian real estate investor, investment manager.
As of the beginning of this year, especially following the acquisition of Whitehelm, we're now really a well-diversified real asset investment manager with global transaction capabilities and global asset investment management capabilities. What's really here on the slide on the left side, you can see a couple of future-proof investments that we have done in line with our convictions and beliefs in certain mega trends. In Norway, a new platform that will support decarbonization efforts in Norway around CCS capabilities. In Italy, there's been a second investment in a smart street lighting company, which we literally just announced Friday last week, if I'm not mistaken.
We are very much able now to offer our investors a well-sought after product at the right time, where the cycle is going and to achieve decarbonization targets worldwide. On the right side you see a quite different portfolio of activities. We invested in a couple of purpose-built student accommodation properties across Europe. One in Italy, one in Spain. Great locations against the backdrop of a very significant demand. The message here really being PATRIZIA, as of 2022, is a globally acting real asset investment manager, and the focus is both on real estate and infrastructure. Perhaps where the cycle is going, there's an even stronger emphasis on infrastructure in the short and medium term, which will underpin the expected growth in the midterm.
With that, let's briefly talk about financials, and we'll start that by going into the assets under management development in 2022 on page 10. There's some good news here, which is summarized on the left side of the chart. Compared to the year end of 2021, our assets under management continue to increase against the bright backdrop of partially adverse market environment already in the first three quarters of the year. Of course, a lot of it can be attributed to the completion of the Whitehelm Capital acquisition. We've talked about that in the past. There's also been a bit of healthy net organic growth. A bit of positive valuation effects, of course.
As I said already before, last time we talked, some of those effects are kind of fading out a little bit in the short term. You know, we really see still some of that and those acquisitions have played quite a role here as well. Maybe one point to stress here is that when you think about it from an AUM point of view and EUR 57.1 billion under management now, our debt levels at the fund level, so across our roughly 145 vehicles, is actually quite low. It's at an average level of 31% right now, and in some of our larger higher quality funds, it's even below the 30% mark.
I'm making that point specifically to preempt maybe some questions regarding valuation developments or higher interest rates to be paid on certain medium or long-term debts and facilities inside those funds, could obviously hurt valuations. In our world, that is comparatively speaking, less of a problem than for some other market participants. We are way below market average here, which is quite advantageous from a portfolio resilience point of view. In fact, maybe one last comment on that topic. We've seen a lot of investors who are contemplating to go all in with equity, on certain topics. There's quite an interesting dynamic here, depending on where you are.
What is equally important when you talk about AUMs as well, we've tried to illustrate here briefly on page 11, because as you know, we're an asset light player who is very actively managing investments across a broad institutional investor base and some retail clients. Our portfolio is quite resilient for a second reason. Not only the low level of leverage or loan to value, but also because of its diversity across geographies, risk classes and asset classes. That provides a lot of safety and security from a company point of view and less exposure under adverse markets circumstances. The maturity that you can see is actually very largely centering around long-term versus medium-term or short-term.
In fact, you can say that roughly 94.5% are long-term in nature, which is also not the norm in the market. As I mentioned on our last call, our institutional investor base of roughly 500 key players is very strategic in nature, very long-term oriented, and the relationships have been forged over up to 30 or more years in some cases. That is very pleasant to observe. Maybe a couple of more points on the risk classification. 80% of the AUM seem to be core or core plus in terms of strategies that are being followed. Investments with the long-term feature in the portfolio will face a lower downward pressure, and so we will sail through the cycle.
The fact that we're being consistently following a fairly conservative valuation approach helps us as well. Some people have asked us recently whether some of our investors have a tendency to quit their investments or to walk away. We don't see that. We do not see that. We have a strong stable investor base, long-term oriented, cash rich. We don't see any significant liquidation issues at all. As I mentioned, the duration speaks for itself. To sum it up, are we immune to potential negative valuation impacts in the, you know, as we leave 2022 or go into 2023? No, we're not, of course, but it will be very small and very moderate and very measured in nature and relative to competitors, clearly, favorable. The portfolio mix supports that assumption.
With that, let's move to page 12, where I'm gonna not really spend a lot of extra time because we've captured some of these points already. The geographic diversification has progressed. We're now almost 50% outside of our historical core market. That trend's gonna continue. I expect us to be mostly 50% in those other markets in the foreseeable future. From an asset class point of view, the degree of diversification is also increasing and improving, and the risk style is, as I explained, largely core and core plus. We have a platform, and we have the product offer that we need at the right point in time.
We're kind of opening the first chapter of repositioning strategically here, to become really global and really multi-asset class and, covering both infrastructure and real estate, makes us robust and gives us also confidence that we're able to go through the cycle. Let's talk a little bit more about the financial details here, and I guess we start with the composition of EBITDA, nine months year to date on page 13. Look, it's obvious that our EBITDA came in a bit weaker than last year, which is regrettable, but the overall level was still relatively decent year to date. I emphasize that. We continue to invest and further internationalize.
Total service fee income at almost EUR 250 million, again, slightly below last year's level of EUR 255 million, but it's a relatively moderate decline of 2.6%. The recurring management fees, which is probably the most important thing here, has actually grown by almost 19%, to a level north of EUR 180 million. That is something that we like a lot because we are on a long-term trajectory to improve the quality of our earnings towards recurring, reliable, plannable income streams. That trend has continued this year to date, and it will continue going into next year. We will in the future be less dependent on transaction fee income, performance fee income although we will of course be happy to harvest it if and when it comes.
Net sales revenues and co-investment income has increased 16%. That was quite pleasant to see. As you see in the middle of the chart, and I've already alluded to this, transaction fee income has dropped from a level north of EUR 30 million to somewhere around EUR 15 million, and performance fees have dropped by about a quarter from a level north of EUR 60 million- EUR 50 million. That's really where we've seen some pressure. Net-net, the increase in recurring management fees has almost managed to compensate for this, which is something we feel good about, but it shouldn't distract us from the fact that the outlook for the fourth quarter is challenging. You know, more negative on the transaction performance fee outlook and our ability to compensate for that will eventually fade away in the short term.
That's also one of the reasons why we talked already about guidance change. Let's go to page 14, where you see a little bit more detail here, with regard to service fee income, transaction fee income, and performance fee income. I'll keep it short. As I mentioned, we've reached EUR 184, up 19% on the first category, and we're down on the second and third. Overall, we managed to almost compensate. This is just again to illustrate all the relevant numbers, year to date 2021, year to date 2022, and then also the outlook for 2022 as a total estimate. In total, we're expecting our management fees for total year something between EUR 235 and EUR 245.
Transaction fees at a more moderate level, EUR 20-EUR 25, and performance fees, EUR 55-EUR 60. That outlook is quite well substantiated for the remainder of the year, so we feel comfortable from a quality of estimation vis-à-vis the fourth quarter. Let's move to page 15, our net operating expenses. We've made an effort here to explain that in quite some detail. You can see on the left side of the chart, nine months 2021, at a level of EUR 166. You can see that cost has increased, but it requires some explanation to allow you to put it into perspective.
There's an increase in staff costs, which is related to headcount change, which is mainly driven by the acquisition and consolidation of Whitehelm Capital, which came with around about 17 employees, if I'm not mistaken. There's some other operating expenses that we had to incur, linked to organic cost growth, no surprise there. There's been a couple of one-off items linked to the preparation of the Whitehelm acquisition and the execution of it. There's been other costs that have been positively impacted at the level of EUR 7.4. Now, there's been one anomaly in here which is important to point out in the net operating expense section, which is very clearly shown in our financial statements.
We were able to deconsolidate a very successful project development in Hamburg, which was only temporarily held by us on the balance sheet. It had a significant relieving effect on the operating expenses to the tune of almost EUR 18 million. On the other hand, there have been also one-off items with negative impact in the space of a mid- to large single-digit amount, linked to the organization expenses, among other things, to the tune of EUR 2.5 million, for instance, as of nine months year to date. That's the picture on net operating expenses, and we believe that we have provided here quite some detailed overview that helps you put it into perspective.
With that, let's go to page 16, which continues to be one of my favorite pages in all these update calls because it speaks about the solid balance sheet and liquidity available, which provides us with a good amount of capacity to seize opportunities if and when they arise. In the past, we may have discussed a lot whether it's good or bad to have such a strong position. Today I'm feeling and I'm thinking that it's good to be in that position because it allows us to be on the buy side when the market becomes a buyer's market. When other parties have to sell and we will directionally be more of a buyer on the buy side. Our equity ratio is at 66.1%. The net equity ratio is quite impressive, at 72.6%.
Available liquidity of EUR 361 million. We're following our, you know, active capital deployment policy, which is geared around boosting or turbocharging key flagship vehicle strategies around infrastructure, around real estate funds, TransEuropean portfolios, following our research convictions. An example there would be, for instance, deployment of EUR 30 million to boost our Low Carbon Infrastructure funds or deployment of a few million Euros to support our Sustainable Ventures Future fund. So on and so forth. That said, our share buyback program shows good progress, which has crossed the 5% threshold. We're sticking to what we have decided to do, and we're executing as planned. No change to that. We're holding now almost EUR 5 million treasury shares.
We feel good about going into a tough short-term period here, a transition between cycles. We do have reasons to believe we'll come out of it stronger. You know, and some of the regular transactions that we may not see and some of the acquisitions we may not do in that context and some of the AUM that we may be missing in that context could be, you know, maybe a tailwind coming from opportunities that may pop up when others sell, and we're gonna buy. Let's see how that's gonna unfold. The one thing that's important here is that we have the capacity to act, if it makes sense. If the right stuff comes along at a reasonable price, we will take it.
With that, let's go to page 17, where we once again summarize the updated guidance for the fiscal year 2022. Key message here is that, you know, as Martin talked about this to some degree already, the guidance increase in cost is driven by reorganization efforts and one-off items that we will expect to see in the fourth quarter because in case of doubt, we're just gonna take a more conservative stance given the circumstances. That in combination with the reorganization we're gonna execute with regard to personnel expenses in general, G&A expenses, which in totality will amount to something like EUR 20 million are equally split across these two categories. That's one important message.
You know, maybe it's also important to say that in our view it's quite unlikely that all three revenue lines which hit the lower end of the guidance range at the same time as a worst case scenario are not 100% correlated between the three items. So we feel good about what we have given into the market last week, and I just like to reiterate that today. The cost base is of course something that we can directly impact. That's what we do. Maybe compared to that, the revenue side is something we are depending a bit more on external factors, but again, management fee outlook is quite well grounded in our existing AUM base and what we expect there.
As I mentioned before, the transaction performance fee outlook is also quite well substantiated bottom up and there's not much room for unallocated expectations. With that, I would like to hand it back to the operator, I guess, Martin, to take questions. We have quite a bit of time left here, more than half an hour to address those. Go ahead.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. The first question is from the line of Andre Remke with Baader Bank. Your question please.
Yeah, good afternoon together. A couple of questions from my side. Starting with market question, could you elaborate a bit more on the demand or the situation across your different product categories? We all observe substantial inflation in the European real estate market, but what about potential demand for infrastructure and real assets? A category which you are more and more focusing on. Is the situation here completely the same?
Okay. Thanks very much for the question. Look, we're sitting on a quite a good pipeline still actually. It's more of a buy pipeline than a sell pipeline, I'm happy to say. If you ask me where the interest is, there's a lot of interest in infrastructure as an asset class. A lot of interest in anything that has to do with ESG and decarbonization. We see still, and we're happy about that because that's where we're good. We see a lot of flight to quality. Since our you know assets under management are usually high quality, we don't lose them, and we see more demands for them.
Now, not across every sector to the same degree, but the living sector keeps attracting a lot of attention, especially when you run resource-based strategies as we do, like Living Cities as an example. High-quality office is also in good demand, although it is very important here that the demand across the office as an asset class is very much differentiated depending on where you are, of course, and what type of asset you offer. High-quality office demand. Healthcare is an interesting other topic to talk about. If you ask me what's really in high demand, I would probably name infrastructure first as I mentioned. The nice thing is that we have equity investment opportunities there. We have debt investment opportunities there.
They're global in nature, Asia, Europe, and then decarb and we look forward also to our Sustainable Communities vehicle, which will be quite interesting and some more stuff we're gonna do on the infrastructure side. That's in a nutshell where we see most of the demand. As I said, I think in times like these it's equally important to be focused on losing less and acquiring more. On the losing less side, I think we're in quite good shape because we already are in high quality space.
But maybe-
Sorry, one more comment before I forget, because I actually had an interesting discussion about that topic yesterday. There is a trend towards preparing for value add plays. As the outlook of value add plays improving in the short term, clients are positioning to consider benefit from that. We are preparing for that as well, either with existing vehicles or through the setup of specific vehicles, or if we need to, we would even think about temporarily warehousing certain core assets we get as value add plays and then spin them out to existing vehicles. Sorry, that was just an add-on comment which just popped into my mind.
Yeah, sure. But for all you mentioned, so there is still demand, but the execution is on hold. This is the same, not only in real estate and in different topics, but also in infrastructure and if you relate it with investment, et cetera.
I would say at the moment, a lot of transactions are on hold on the real estate side. On the infrastructure side, I would not necessarily say that, there's an ongoing flow of transaction happening. I just gave you two examples earlier today. I would differentiate between the two.
Okay. That's what I expected. A second question on, or on, you mentioned selected growth initiatives. What does it mean? Do you mean the, for example, the flagship investment strategy with that? What is the main focus here?
Yeah. The pillars of our midterm growth strategy, which is aimed at, let's say, doubling the size of our business in the medium term and to globalize it. They center around asset class diversification. You know, today we're sitting on 11% of infrastructure in the AUM portfolio. You know, in the midterm future, this should be somewhere around 25%-30% perhaps. That is a key pillar of our growth initiatives. There are flagship funds associated with that. We do intend to continue to allocate capital there, human resources. That is something we need to protect even in a down cycle because it makes a lot of sense, and especially in a down cycle, that part of the strategy makes a lot of sense.
There's of course, you know, the geographic expansion into Asia, which is organic in nature, and we're making decent progress there. I'm very happy to report. We'll be a bit more specific in that respect, very soon. Focusing on some of the more established markets in East Asia and Southeast Asia, where we now have a license, we are on a good track. That's also an early-stage fledgling initiative getting good traction, and then that one we're protecting as well. Of course, there are the cornerstones of our existing strategy which are not changing, which revolve around our German and European or national TransEuropean flagship funds. You know, the TransEuropean series, for instance, and so on. Dawonia I mentioned already before.
The further nurturing of our German core business and the efforts to make it bigger and to be able to continue to rely on that. To maybe spin it a bit more into value add direction on one or the other location play a key role, and the same applies to our London-managed TransEuropean funds, which are hugely important for us to grow. That's also two more key growth initiatives where capital's going, where human resources will be maintained or even increased. That's just four examples. Infrastructure, real estate, Asia, TransEuropean flagships on the real estate side, and the German flagships that we focus on.
If you look at this at the fund or vehicle level, it's probably 20-25 vehicles that in aggregate would fall under these four plus initiatives. I've only given you four out of probably eight or nine that we are mentally focused on.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Perfect. On your cost-cutting measures, your implied EUR 10 million cost for that, what is the target cost reduction amount here? And are you able to say it in this equation? And what could be a potential timeframe to reach a full effect out of that?
Let me put it this way. The amount of restructuring expense we're seeing right now that we will have to incur is around EUR 10 million. Yeah. Which is part of the negative guidance adjustment below the EBITDA line. Expect the payback of this to be less than a year for sure. It's gonna be significant in size, but it's measured in a way because we're not only removing cost personnel expenses of G&A where it's not critical to core or where it's maybe questionable from a performance point of view. We also at the same time closing gaps where we have resource gaps executing growth strategy.
Of course, as you would appreciate in a high inflation environment, we need to bear in mind that there will be headwinds stemming from inflation that we will have at least to partially address. Some of it we will sell funds, but there has to be some moves. You know, when you look about what's happening in some of the Anglo-Saxon markets or elsewhere in Europe in terms of cost of living inflation, we have to address part of that as well across the employee base. It's really the combination, but the payback will be quite swift. And as I also said, equally important also coming out of ten great years is to make sure that we don't add to our cost base as we have in the past, maybe occasionally done too easily.
The bar for that is substantially higher now. The bottom-line impact of what we do depends also a little bit on our growth profile in 2023, and as I mentioned already before inflation. The strategy we're really driving here because we have the balance sheet strength is that again, it's balanced between short and long term and more focused growth strategy and a unrelenting review of what's not critical to daily business and what's not critical to investor service, transactions and so on. The company's become a lot more self-aware and self-critical in that context.
Your target is to increase the profitability of the platform overall. In the past year, you achieved 40% roughly EBITDA margin, down to 35% this year below 20%, etc. Do you have a mid-term goal or a long-term EBITDA margin in your mind as a kind of, let's say, sustainable margin? What an asset manager in real estate should earn.
That's a bit tough to comment on at the moment. You know, the level that we had at the 40% mark or so was to some degree driven by performance fee income and transaction fee income in an up cycle. I would not necessarily consider that long-term sustainable. The quality of what we have today at the level below that is much better, but the absolute level is lower. If you ask me about a range where we could be in the medium term, I don't know, 30%-40%.
It's grounded in the assumption that short-term management fee income will be, I think, in good shape, as I mentioned, because we will do some deals, there will be some growth. Valuation pressure should be moderate. We may do some opportunistic moves, and I think the income flow stemming from that it will be quite reliable. Short-term transaction fees will be still suppressed. Performance fees as well. They will only come back in the midterm. If you then are in the midterm horizon with resurrected transaction fees and perhaps also slowly improving performance fees, let's see. That in combination with the bigger AUM base, I think we can get back to that 40% level at some stage. Look, really Q1 2023 is still gonna be suppressed somehow.
To ask the key question is how quickly are we gonna improve over the course of 2023? We're gonna leave 2022 with a, is it, well, under the circumstances, okay pipeline, but it's not comparable to how we left 2021. The early months of 2023 will still be tough, I would say. After that, you know, comes the summer and some opportunities, and then the second half where things may start again, but things will only start to normalize, then later on towards the end of 2023, really end in early 2024.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know the Dawonia portfolio. What is meant by midterm in respect to all? You mentioned midterm in respect to investment phase of the clients, your own stake and the profit contribution on your side. Are there concrete time frames you agreed on? Or how should I read it? Or did you simply agree not to decide in such a market environment right now?
Yeah, look, it's well known that the vehicle was conceived almost 10 years ago, and the intended investment phase would have ended in late spring next year. As we are here together with very established and reliable and long-term investors, we have, of course, as part of our ongoing dialogues, decided collectively and quite unanimously that the last thing we wanna do is to make important decisions under circumstances as they are. We have simply bought us collectively enough time to sail through this short-term uncertainties and to think through options for the long term and to make those decisions when there is more stability.
I'm not gonna talk about a specific date, or I'm not gonna talk about specific considerations because that would preempt internal discussions that I think the investors and PATRIZIA's extended investments are really privy to. Maybe importantly, there is no significant change to the, or shall I say, like conditions as they stand now. Think about it like a midterm freeze. Freeze in a positive sense. Yeah.
Yeah. That is what I expected.
Which is the right thing to do.
Yeah.
And really we are super pleased by the collaboration that we have with those strategic investors, and it's also a sign of trust. It's a premium portfolio. I mean, it is a premium portfolio. We're not concerned about valuation pressure there. You know, rents are improving, market rents, comparables are improving. You know, when we occasionally sell units or blocks, we get good price at book or above, even very recently. It's you know, it's the right thing to wait a little bit till things have calmed down.
Okay. Perfect. That's all my side. Thank you very much. Good talk.
Welcome.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one at this time. The next question is from the line of Manuel Martin with ODDO BHF. Your question please.
Yes. Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. Two questions from my side. Actually one follow-up question on the progress of PATRIZIA in acquiring new clients. So, we heard from you that you're quite optimistic on Asia, that there might be some positive news flow in the pipeline. What about other regions, Europe or in particular U.S.? Is there anything new in this difficult times?
Yeah. Thank you for the question, Manuel. Look, we're making progress with regard to new client acquisition, although it's a little bit slower right now, unexpectedly than it used to be until spring. In Europe, it's quite gradual, I would say. You know, we raised something around EUR 1.8 billion or EUR 1.9 billion. Year-to-date it's gonna be north of EUR 2 billion for sure towards the end of the year. Not as great as we were hoping, but decent. A lot of that comes from new clients. In Europe, it's gradual. In Asia, of course, we're starting from a very low level. Sorry, I take that back. I was referring to the asset side.
On the investor side, we're starting at a lower level compared to Europe, but still quite decent. Of course, it could be the acquisitions there are probably happening at a higher speed. The Middle East is gonna be quite interesting for us. Let's see. There's a lot of money there which needs to be invested, and we're quite actively improving our sales and distribution and marketing activities there, starting at the very top of the company, but we're also strengthening our capital market teams for that space. Same applies to Asia. In Asia, we do expect further growth.
Now, that further growth is not only gonna come out of PATRIZIA proper, but also out of Whitehelm, because Whitehelm has physical presence in Asia quite a lot, not only on the infrastructure side, but also some pockets of real estate. For us, that enables us to expand our sort of Japan and Korea and Singapore-focused activities also into Australia, New Zealand. We do expect more clients to show up from the Aussie side and a couple of assets to be picked up down under. It should be quite interesting to see a bit of Asia growth both on the investor and the asset side across those four or five jurisdictions.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
We got licensed now. We got a team. We got teams on the ground and with Whitehelm Capital and established shops.
Okay. I see. Second question also in relation to clients. I mean, the interest rate environment has dramatically changed compared to, let's say, couple of years ago. Have you noticed any preference or shift in preference amongst your clients, rather towards fixed income bonds? I mean, treasury bonds are yielding higher, coming back to actually attractive levels in terms of yield. Is there a shift preferring more bonds or do you see clients still striving to improve or to increase their real estate ratio in their asset allocation?
That's a question we have been pondering a lot for quite a few months already now. Interestingly, the short answer is we don't see a lot of change of behavior. Maybe it's important to ask ourselves what the key considerations here are. First of all, you know, across our roughly 500 or so meaningfully sized institutional investors, the question is how equity-rich are they versus not? The majority is extremely equity-rich. You know, pension funds, savings banks, you know, sovereign wealth funds, whatever. Some of them feature very low cost of capital. That's also considerations. A lot of them are thinking about bonds as being too risky given the volatility from a valuation point of view. Some of them, especially in the case of PATRIZIA, given our history are.
You know, let's give an example. Say we have more than 200 savings banks we're cooperating with on the debt funding side. A lot of them are also institutional investors, and a lot of them have, you know, partly commercially and partly politically motivated investment strategies, you know, as real estate focus, regional focus, certain core asset class focus. They have a long way to go before they feel real pain from a return point of view. That in combination of what I said before on the other features puts quite a bit of inherent stability into our AUM base.
You know, some of those who have these specific strategies I just alluded to, they're then of course looking also into alternatives, but they kinda tend to stay with our portfolio of offers. So we'll be discussing infrastructure, maybe not all of infrastructure, but say telco networks or decarbonization related efforts. Maybe not in the first closing, but in the second closing. So there's a lot of stability. When there is a consideration of diversification, then very often it stays within our product portfolio and I see very rare occasions only of capital leaving and very few.
They're usually not strategic in nature and small or inside certain vehicles, maybe certain minorities that have, I don't know, discretionary global considerations, and they operate differently than the majority of our core investors so.
Mm-hmm.
We feel maybe it's we need to be grateful for the history of the company here in terms of 34-35 years of organic build up on that client base. It's a lot of trust as well.
Okay. Okay, I see. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions, and I hand back to Christoph Glaser for closing comments.
Look, you know, we'll be quite active, again later in the fourth quarter going on the road, across Europe, and elsewhere. We'll see some of you there. I look forward to meeting you again. We will talk a lot about the resilience of our business model and our midterm strategy when we meet. Maybe also the one or other operating highlights that will pop in by then. Look, maybe as a last point, I would say, our share had a tough time year to date. We are acutely aware of that. Don't like it. A lot of it is the market. Some of it is also ourselves. We're working on that, as we just explained. You get our operating business.
Well, if I would make a smart ass comment at the end, I would say given the current valuations, you're getting our operating business kinda almost for free at the moment. Maybe that's an opportunity in some ways. We feel good, and we're looking forward to sail through the cycle inflection point as an active player. We appreciate your attention. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.