The Belgian real estate developer VGP has bought more than half of the 100-year-old production site of Adam Opel AG in Rüsselsheim. VGP wants to transform the site near the Frankfurt Airport into a huge business park.

VGP buys three parcels of terrain totaling 700 000 square meters or 70 hectares from Stellantis, the mother company of Opel. The car manufacturer will still rent the current site for two or three years from VGP. After that, the parcels will gradually be available for redevelopment.

As a first move, VGP plans a new business park of 350 000 m2 for larger and smaller companies. The financial data of the arrangement were not disclosed. This deal is the biggest transaction VGP has ever made. Earlier this month, the developer already bought a 19 hectares brownfield in Vélizy, near Paris, also from Stellantis.

VGP manages 112 business parks in 17 European countries. The company, led by Jan Van Geet, is very active in Germany, where it has no less than 40 locations. In total, the net active value of VGP  last June was € 2,2 billion.

Rüsselsheim

The Rüsselsheim site is well located for business development, being a 15-minute drive from Frankfurt International Airport, Germany’s largest airport, with a train station on-site and direct access to the port on the river Main.

Adam Opel started his company in 1862 in Rüsselsheim. After a fire in 1912, the building of the current factory site was started. In its heyday, 40 000 people were working at the plant in Rüsselsheim, where also the company headquarters and the entire engineering and development department are housed.

Opel also has a large proving ground facility in Dudenhofen (on the East side of Frankfurt) and had also plants in Bochum (Germany) and Antwerp (Belgium). The first was closed at the end of 2014, and the latter stopped activities in December 2010.

In 2017, Opel became part of the PSA Group (later Stellantis) as a result of the sales transaction between PSA and General Motors, which sold almost its entire European activities at that time.

Recently, there were already rumors that Stellantis wanted to sell the entire Rüsselsheim site (130 hectares in total). Half of it has now already been realized.