Remon Vos moved to the Czech Republic after the fall of the Iron Curtain and started building logistics parks. Three decades of post-Cold War growth have made his firm CTP an industrial real estate giant—and Vos a billionaire. Higher tariffs could make him even richer.
Weeks before President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on more than 80 countries around the world—including 20% on the European Union—Dutch real estate billionaire Remon Vos was sanguine about the impact a coming trade war would have on CTP, his publicly traded industrial real estate firm that’s the largest player in central and eastern Europe.
“Asian companies like to be located in Europe to avoid import tariffs. I think that’s good,” he said in an earnings call on February 27, pointing to the growing roster of east Asian clients flocking to CTP’s industrial parks to make goods for the European market. “For us, there’s a benefit.”
Andrejs Zavadskis for Forbes
CTP took a hit from the stock market rout unleashed by Trump’s tariffs, with its stock falling 12% between the announcement on April 2 and the day tariffs came into effect a week later. Still, CTP fared better than many of its competitors. (Trump delayed the higher tariffs for 90 days on April 9, except for a 10% global tariff on all countries, sending it back up 4%.) Vos, who owns 73% of the shares, is worth an estimated $6 billion, making him a newcomer to Forbes’ 2025 World’s Billionaires list.
CTP has a dominant position across 10 countries in central and eastern Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic and Romania, where land and labor costs are lower than countries further west and where markets are less exposed to the U.S. economy. That means it’s likely to benefit from tariffs in the long term. If countries around the world start imposing higher duties, companies who want to sell to Europe will have to build their factories there to avoid them—and CTP is in the driver’s seat to win their business. More than 10% of its properties are already leased to Asian companies manufacturing for the European market—including Japanese conglomerate Hitachi and South Korean automaker Hyundai—and 20% of new leases signed in 2024 were from Asian clients.
Vos, 54, is constantly on the move seeking new deals. On a Monday afternoon, he found an hour to sit down with Forbes. Every other day of the workweek, he’s traveling on a private jet to different corners of eastern Europe, but on Mondays he works from CTP’s headquarters in Prague, housed in a futuristic, glass-covered building that stands out from the Habsburg-era architecture surrounding it.
“I don’t have an office here, this is a meeting room. Tonight I’ll fly to Romania. I’m going to Asia next week. That’s how it works,” he says, dressed in his usual outfit of a white shirt, dark tie and round rimmed black glasses, with his blond hair combed to the side. “I go to the countries and go with my colleagues to look at projects and land. Don’t talk to me about IT or HR. Talk to me about deals.”
Vos has been criss-crossing the former Eastern bloc and cutting real estate deals for nearly three decades. Since cofounding CTP in Prague in 1998, he’s grown it into the second-largest industrial and logistics real estate developer in Europe. It now owns more than 143 million square feet of industrial parks and warehouses leased to blue-chip tenants including delivery firm DHL, clothing retailer H&M, automaker Renault and healthcare diagnostics firm Thermo Fisher Scientific. Plus it owns more than 284 million square feet of land—more than any of its competitors—most of it already zoned and permitted, located adjacent to existing properties so CTP can quickly expand when its clients need more space. The firm, which listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange in 2021, recorded $614 million EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) on $900 million revenues in 2024. That was up 29% and 17%, respectively, over the previous year, thanks to growing rental income at its properties.
Vos built CTP through a relentless focus on expansion, taking advantage of cheaper labor and land costs first in the Czech Republic and then throughout the region as those countries joined the European Union—a key advantage for multinationals seeking to ship products to western Europe. As the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a wave of near-shoring—where companies move production closer to the final destination of their products—CTP has been one of the biggest winners, gaining customers as far afield as China and the U.S. Since the beginning, Vos, who owned 100% of the firm before it went public after buying out his late cofounder’s shares in 2019, has long run the company as a hard-charging startup in the sedate world of commercial real estate.
“Remon is the battery of the company, he’s the drumbeat. He recruits people who are dealmakers, who have the same work ethic,” says Wim Lewi, an analyst at Belgian financial services firm KBC Securities. “I compare it to Navy SEALs. It’s almost like an army.”
One of CTP’s newest customers is Regensburg, Germany-based auto parts supplier Vitesco Technologies, which spent $200 million to build an electric vehicle components factory at a CTP industrial park in the Czech city of Ostrava last year.
CTP
“He’s like a nuclear plant when it comes to his energy,” adds Peter Ceresnik, CTP’s chief operating officer. “It brings a lot of value but it also brings a lot of stress to work with him, because you need to be at your best to keep up the pace.”
Vos doesn’t plan on slowing down. Last year, CTP borrowed $2.6 billion between taking out loans and issuing bonds, and raised $330 million in a new share offering, helping it finance the purchase of industrial parks and land in Romania and Germany. The firm’s ambitious target is to hit $1.1 billion in rental income by 2027, up from $770 million last year. And it’s still building, with more than 19 million square feet of projects under construction across nine countries.
“We still think there are good opportunities in the region,” says Vos. “If you have cash in hand, you can attack and do a deal quickly.”
Not bad for a high school graduate who left the Netherlands to sell dairy products in the Czech Republic in his early 20s, just after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Born in the small town of Stadskanaal in the northeastern Netherlands to a student mother and a father who traded cars, Vos moved between nearby towns as a child after his parents divorced when he was six years old. By age 12 he started working, washing cars and cleaning at a hair salon on weekends. “So I could afford to buy a beer and cigarettes,” he says, deadpan.
When he was in his last year of high school in 1988, his school planned a trip to what was then called Czechoslovakia. Vos signed up and paid for the bus ticket, but he missed a presentation on the trip a week before. “I didn’t go to school a lot,” he says. “I did ask a friend to tell me what it was about, so he gave me the departure time. I arrived at the bus station that day, a Sunday evening in October 1988, but I found out my bus had already left.”
That missed trip sparked an enduring fascination with Czechoslovakia. After graduating, Vos worked with his father selling car phones. In 1990, he met a friend of his father’s, Johan Brakema, who had been married to a Czechoslovakian woman and traveled there to visit her family after she died and brought them food, clothes and appliances. Vos asked to go along with him on his next trip, and he made his first journey in 1991.
“We saw the whole country and it was very impressive because there were [few paved] roads,” he recalls. “It was autumn and it was all misty and dark and gray. But I also thought, ‘wow, there are great opportunities here because there is nothing.’”
Vos and Brakema started a small company exporting Dutch products to the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia split into two countries in 1992), until one of their Dutch clients approached them about setting up a steel parts factory in the Czech Republic. They took that on and Vos moved from the Netherlands with his wife in 1995. But they couldn’t find a building for the factory—or a developer to build one for them.
“We thought, ‘Is it just us looking for property? Or are there other companies who have the same demand and there’s no supply?’” Vos recalls. “So we looked at [building] a business park, and then that company from Holland could be the first tenant and we could find other tenants. And that’s what happened.”
They found a plot of land in Humpolec, a small town in the central Czech Republic and brought in a third partner, a Dutch lawyer and businessman named Eddy Maas, to build their first industrial park there in 1998. They named their new company CTP, for Central Trade Park, with each partner owning a third of the shares. “Johan had the money, Eddy the brains, and I had the energy,” says Vos.
CTP’s 6.9 million square foot industrial park in Bor, near the Czech-German border, is the second-largest in its portfolio and hosts firms including tiremaker Bridgestone and fashion retailer Primark—and there’s still room to grow. “We have so much land we can build for many, many years to come,” says Vos.
CTP
After a couple of rough years where they lost money selling a building and a client went bust, things started to turn around in 2002. Brakema sold his shares for an undisclosed amount and Vos and Maas kept going. By 2007 CTP had become the largest industrial developer in the Czech Republic, with 22 logistics parks around the country. Vos also learned a lesson from those early years that he’s always tried to heed: “Never sell,” he says. “If you build a park, the idea is to continuously build so it doesn’t make sense to sell it.”
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Vos looked to convince customers to come to CTP’s properties because they were cheaper and newer than their existing sites in western European countries. “They had production facilities in Holland, Germany or France, with expensive labor and outdated facilities,” he says. “This was the moment to bring business to central Europe.”
CTP’s rental income grew nearly 8% each year between 2008 and 2011, outpacing its peers. That growth allowed Vos to expand into Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. Then in 2016, Maas died, leaving Vos alone at the helm. When Maas’ children agreed to sell their 50% stake in the company to Vos in 2019, he had to take out an estimated $760 million loan and break one of his cardinal rules, selling a portfolio of three industrial parks for $466 million in 2018 to help finance the purchase.
“I believe very much that change is opportunity. You need to be very reactive, keep your eye on the ball and focus.”
Remon Vos
When Vos decided to take CTP public in 2021, it was the largest real estate IPO in Europe in seven years. The listing raised $1 billion and Vos sold an additional $112 million worth of shares, using the proceeds to pay back part of the loan. (The loan was fully paid off in 2023). Flush with cash, CTP bought a German industrial portfolio for $786 million and picked up nearly 26 million square feet of land in Poland in 2022, as well as expanding in Austria, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Serbia.
Over his nearly three decades in the industry, Vos has learned how to turn crises into opportunities: the 2008 financial crash, Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, to name a few, all of which CTP survived and took advantage of to buy land for cheap and win new tenants. “I believe very much that change is opportunity,” he says. “You need to be very reactive, keep your eye on the ball and focus.”
CTP isn’t the only firm cashing in on the boom in eastern European industrial real estate: American giants Prologis and privately-held Panattoni Development both have large portfolios in the area, as does former Belgian billionaire Jan Van Geet’s publicly traded VGP. “Their private jets race against each other in Europe to pitch deals,” says Lewi of the competition between Vos and Van Geet.
But CTP is the largest in the region, and what sets it apart from its competitors is its speed—developing new projects when they’re only 30% to 40% pre-leased compared to rivals who typically wait until they are nearly 100% leased before starting construction. Because CTP develops its own properties, it can also build faster to meet its clients’ needs. “They have land adjacent to where they already have tenants next door, so it’s not as risky as just doing it in the middle of nowhere,” says Steven Boumans, an analyst at Paris-based financial services firm ODDO BHF.
So far, that strategy has worked. In 2024, CTP planned to build 14 million square feet of new developments and had only leased 38% of that space at the beginning of the year; once construction was complete, they were 92% leased. And even as the firm grows, it makes sure that its customer base is diversified: no tenant makes up more than 2.2% of total leases, and CTP isn’t overly reliant on any one industry, with logistics and manufacturing companies accounting for 28% and 26%, respectively, of its total space.
Still, CTP could be vulnerable if one of its most important industries is hard-hit. Automakers, which make up 21% of the company’s total leases, have been facing a slowdown in sales in Europe—and may be further hit by President Donald Trump’s 25% tariff on imports of cars and car parts into the U.S. “It’s a large part of their business and if the automotive industry doesn’t rebound, they could be impacted,” says Pierre-Emmanuel Clouard, an analyst at Jefferies. And because of Vos’ record of breakneck growth—CTP’s rental income has grown an average 16% per year since 2019—he needs to keep up the pace to keep investors on his side. “It’s a growth story, they have to launch new projects and get new tenants,” he adds.
Vos has a solution for that, too: landing more clients in Asia and taking advantage of the boom in defense spending in Europe. “In Germany, we see defense businesses asking for space,” he says, also pointing to more investment in semiconductor manufacturing and clean tech. “For Asian companies in the automotive industry, if they want to supply Volkswagen or BMW, they need to be within a one-day drive of their facilities,” he says. “They will have to set up shop here.”
Trump paused his additional tariffs on the European Union on April 9 for 90 days, but even a tariff war won’t deter Vos. “Recent events will lead to more production in central and eastern Europe, which is good for CTP,” says ODDO BHF’s Boumans.
Vos also knows how to keep clients, with 87% of CTP’s customers re-signing after the end of their leases—higher than its publicly traded peers. At some of its industrial parks, CTP has built housing for workers as well as clubhouses with restaurants, convenience stores, sports facilities and medical clinics. “Over two-thirds of our new leases are signed with existing tenants,” says Richard Wilkinson, CTP’s chief financial officer.
One thing that won’t change: Vos remains a micro-manager, overseeing hiring decisions and personally checking out new markets. “I’m not a guy who sits in a big office to rule an empire,” he says, laughing. “I would rather be on the ground.”
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