Hérault property company Socri Reim gains a foothold in Miami

It’s a place with a promising name. Treasure Island, located in the Miami metropolitan area, has attracted the Montpellier property company Socri Reim, led by Nicolas Chambon, which has decided to find new sources of growth abroad. Over the last three years, his company has bought three plots of land, including two on Treasure Island, in Florida’s most Cuban of cities. His ambition: to achieve cumulative sales of 150 million in ten years by selling turnkey villas.

“The housing market in the United States is different from France. You don’t buy a house off-plan, but once it’s built, and even decorated,” explains the entrepreneur, son of Henri Chambon (France’s 219^th richest man, according to Challenges) and head of the holding company Socri Promotion. For the developer, it’s a risk that requires capital, more than in France. However, the prospects of profitability are also without comparison.”

To date, Socri Reim, which is completely independent of the family holding company in which Nicolas Chambon has a 20% stake, is developing three shopping centres in Béziers, Nîmes and Montpellier. It also rents its premises to a Galeries Lafayette franchise, co-managed by Nicolas Chambon, in Béziers. “Commercial property suffered because of the pandemic last year. Our French business lost money, between 1.5 and 2 million euros. However, our accounts are positive thanks to the office space offering we’ve developed in Luxembourg’s Grand’Rue,” the business leader from Hérault assures us. He sees his project in Florida as an additional way of diversifying and securing his business. Although Nicolas Chambon’s property company is still modest in terms of sales (23 million euros in 2019), it has been able to expand rapidly thanks to the sale to Unibail-Rodamco of its stake in the Polygone shopping centre in Cagnes-sur-Mer (Alpes-Maritimes), which brought in some 30 million euros.

“This really helped launch Socri Reim, which until then had only been a service provider for the family group,” explains Nicolas Chambon, who initially thought about starting a commercial property business in Florida before finally deciding to focus on residential property. “With the pandemic, history has finally proved us right, because many shopping centres have closed in the United States and many Americans want to come and live in Florida,” he says. “Every week, I receive at least one request to buy our land. The last two offers were already 4 million euros more than we paid for it a short time ago.”

By the time these programmes are completed in ten years’ time, Socri Reim aims to have doubled its sales and reinjected most of the profits generated there into the US market. “We’re in a long-term economy where solid cash flow and bank confidence are vital,” says Nicolas Chambon, whose future projects include acting as developer on the overhaul of the Fontvielle shopping centre in Monaco. This prestigious project, covering almost 100,000 m², was won right under the nose of major players such as Klépierre and Carrefour Property.