After around three decades with Greif & Contzen Immobilienmakler GmbH, Frank Klähn will withdraw from his position as Head of Industrial and Logistics Properties at the end of May. His role will be taken over by Senior Consultant Daniel Noeckel.

Approaching retirement age, Frank Klähn can look back on more than 45 years in the real estate industry. Following his apprenticeship as a real estate agent with a Cologne-based housing association, Frank Klähn started working for Greif & Contzen as a broker for industrial properties. After five and a half years with Greif & Contzen, Klähn moved on to the construction corporation Herlitz Falkenhöh AG in Berlin, before being recruited by the shopping centre operator mfi from Essen. Here he spent a number of years letting and operating shopping centres, before returning to Greif & Contzen in Cologne in July 2000, where Frank Klähn was made Head of the Industrial and Logistics Properties Department.

Living in Erftstadt, Klähn has since remained loyal to the region. Over the past several years, his team has worked with hundreds of national and international industrial and logistics companies who took up many thousands of square metres of space, as well as supporting investors, and advising landlords and property developers. Frank Klähn knows the regional industrial and logistics property market inside out. “I have never experienced a situation that was as challenging for businesses as is currently the case, though,” Klähn says. “Many industrial companies are going through a rough time and have received little or no effective support from policy-makers to date,” he says in view of the current situation in the sector that had been solid in the Cologne region for decades.

Klähn points out that he would, of course, have preferred to say goodbye in a more prosperous time for the industrial and logistics industry, as had been the case in the Cologne/Bonn region for many years. Nevertheless, he is handing over his job into reliable hands: to his colleague and Cologne native Daniel Noeckel.

Noeckel and Klähn first met several years ago, as Frank Klähn has not only been a department leader and authorised signatory at Greif & Contzen, but a training supervisor, too. In this role he supported Noeckel during his apprenticeship which he completed in 2020 as one of the best graduates of his year. Upon completing his training, Daniel Noeckel stayed with Greif & Contzen as a consultant in the Industrial and Logistics Properties Department. He quickly gained a sound understanding of the business, and can look back on a large number of transactions, not only in the Cologne-Bonn region, but across North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland Palatinate, too. Noeckel is now a Senior Consultant as well as being enrolled in a master of science programme in real estate management.

In December, Noah Dellenbusch joined Greif & Contzen’s industrial and logistics team. Following his apprenticeship as a real estate agent, Dellenbusch obtained a bachelor of science degree, and is now returning to the real estate industry as a Senior Consultant with Greif & Contzen.

Picture: v.l. Noah Dellenbusch | Frank Klähn | Daniel Noeckel