Xavier Jongen

Biography: Xavier Jongen (1970, Las Palmas), MD Catella European Residential, graduated from Sciences-Po Paris, holds a post-graduate Master of the College of Europe in Bruges (with Honours) and the Cambridge IPF Diploma. Further trainings at Fannie Mae, Stanford Business School and the Ayn Rand Institute. Xavier is MD European Residential at Catella. Xavier was the first to introduce a pan-European residential investment fund in 2007. The portfolio grew to over 5 bn EUR in AuM with assets in 9 countries and 9 sub-sectors. He also set up a Residential Alliance to manage the portfolio across the continent, innovate and improve quality standards. Xavier started analysing housing and capital market fundamentals whilst working for World Bank/IMF/EU structural adjustment programmes to liberalise socialist housing markets in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, after the fall of the Berlin wall. From 1996 to May 2005, Xavier worked in parallel as a public speaker for the European Commission in Brussels on EU integration for target priority groups (politicians, journalists, CEO’s). Xavier was a tutor and module leader at Cambridge University as well as a Governor of the Cambridge International Land Institute where he founded the SOLUM foundation which convened annually the 12 most powerful real estate CEO’s to discuss matters of globalization in the real estate industry, until its implosion during the GFC. He chaired the first INREV EU Public Affairs committee and the first ULI European Residential committee and is currently a Global ULI Trustee.