HORIZON AM: ADVICE FOR SAVERS WHO WANT TO CONCEIVE TOMORROW'S HOUSING

This company is the place to find savings with a mission. Horizon Asset Management offers savings solutions focused on useful housing for tomorrow. Social housing, co-living, schools, nurseries, low-carbon housing... The company aims to transform and create new mixed habitats. Mehdi Gaiji, Chairman of Horizon Asset Management, explains.

What does Horizon Asset Management do?
Our business is to offer savings solutions based on a socially responsible approach. As a portfolio management company, we offer our customers savings solutions (equities and bonds) that enable them to grow their capital or receive additional income. The savings collected are directed almost exclusively towards financing housing, particularly useful housing, the future's housing.
On one hand, we finance property development projects right from the design stage, integrating all the different stages of a project. Our involvement ranges from finding the land to obtaining planning permission and delivering the building. We also finance the renovation of outdated or obsolete buildings, in order to create value and living space in line with today's trends. This strategy enables our investors to play an active role in society. In this way, we finance the construction of social housing and participate in the development of mixed-use property projects, to support new ways of living together. We also finance intergenerational housing, nursing homes, nurseries, schools and so on.

How are building and renovating homes a socially responsible process?
The act of building or renovating a building is an opportunity to rethink housing and take into account new ways of living and the need to live together. Our investors have a vital role to play, as their funds enable us to finance the production of tomorrow's homes. We want our savers to know what economic, social and environmental objectives their savings are being directed towards: useful housing that has a positive impact on the community, within the framework of a short circuit.
Our prerogatives therefore encourage us to think about new ways of living and to offer housing accordingly. Mixed-use housing, mixing generations and socio-professional categories, is one of our spearheads. We also think of buildings as connected places, adapted to living together and integrating environmental issues. For example, we have developed a hybrid property project in Orry-la-Ville, in the north of the Paris region. This is a vacant building that we have brought up to new standards (in line with environmental criteria) and which now includes a Montessori school, a nursery, a health centre and a co-working space.

What are Horizon Asset Management's future objectives?
Our short-term ambition is to raise €30 million through a new fund that we set up in July. It has been approved by the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (Performance Pierre 5), the most important authorisation for public savings schemes. Savers can subscribe to this fund from €10,000 and acquire shares, thereby participating in our public-interest missions.
In the longer term, we want to use these savings and financial tools to create major urban projects. In particular, we are working on a project near the town of Versailles: a building complex that could be as large as 130,000 m², including a sports village, schools, nurseries, and new energy uses. Among other things, we are thinking about using bioenergy and geothermal energy sources, while preserving a significant amount of green space. Finally, we want to integrate modern, clean means of transport, for example, by deploying autonomous shuttles and emission-neutral mobility elements such as electric bicycles. It's a project that's close to our hearts, because it will enable our savers to direct their finances towards a complex that's ecological, socially responsible and profoundly human.