Transforming Airports into
Competitive Business Locations

Strategic Focus for Long-Term Airport City Growth

Airport City development is a highly complex, multidimensional task. While many airports tend to react to short-term market demands, sustainable success requires a disciplined, long-term strategic approach.

Instant gains are often the enemy of big solutions. At Airport City Consultants, we help you move beyond reactive planning. Together, we identify your primary focus, define the interconnected working fields, and align the diverse interests of all stakeholders. Let’s roll up our sleeves and transform your airport's potential into a viable, market-leading reality.

  1. Organisation
  2. Real Estate
  3. Investment
  4. Eco-Systems
  5. Aviation System

Airport Cities and landside Real Estate need a proper backup

Based on your strategic goals, the landside real estate assets as well as the tenant management and the technical operation need to be coordinated in an efficient, trustful and lean way.

Some of the important questions to decide on are

  • do we want to divide arside and landside real estate management?
  • How do we approach the markets properly?
  • How do we manage our clients, our tenants, our communication?
  • How can we create the best possible synergy and highest value across interests groups?

Real Estate Assets to meet internal and external requirements.

Regardless of the strategic goals set for the real estate portfolio, market rules and user requirements must be considered.

Real estate has a long lifetime. Therefore, meeting the requirements of tomorrow is always a target to work towards. What will the reasons be for stakeholders deciding on real estate assets in 10 years' time?

  • Is there a masterplan in place? Does it reflect the Real estate market and our impact on that market?
  • How can we create a location rather than a bunch of buildings?
  • What do we want our real estate portfolio to look like? What should it represent? 
  • Is the infrastructure strong enough to meet the demand for space?

Are Real Estate Assets an investment opportunity for you? Are high revenue streams important?

Again, based on the strategy, decisions regarding investment policies are to be made.

In case the Real Estate strategy targets a business campus development, which also shall bring revenue on investment, some questions may be answered diffently as if the strategy is mainly to create high revenue on investment.

  • Are we talking long term or short term?
  • Are we developing for the capital market, or do we want to keep the assets?
  • Do we want to reach a critical mass to produce our own market, and our own location?
  • Do we want to establish a monopole or to invite cooperation partners / competitors?

Increasing value by attracting the right people and the right industries. 

Yes, you can create a narrative and develop marketing campaigns. But are you embracing and fulfilling your own story? Is your airport city recognised by the real estate market as a place to be and invest in?

We believe that individuality and identity create power. We can help you create your story based on who you are. We use success stories, of course, but not as a blueprint; rather, to understand the structure of success.

  • Conducting workshops to define and outline the story for your Airport City
  • Including stakeholders who already "sit in the bus", and manage the different interests acoordingly
  • Developing the outcome into a resiliant economic model

Aviation systems hold great potential for synergy!

When it comes to developing airport cities, there is one asset that no other business district can match: the adjacent Aviation Systems!

One obvious example is the airside boundary: Airports tend to protect this boundary in such a way that it appears not as a strength but as a challenge.
However, the airside boundary is extremely valuable—especially for logistics and cargo handling, for airlines and their crews, for internal logistics processes within the terminal, and for the uniqueness of the location. It is crucial to manage this effectively and across all departments.

Other areas of synergy are:

  • The IT department and its facilities
  • The energy systems
  • Facility management, cleaning, waste management
  • etc