In the offices of Aena, the national airport manager, there is a date marked in red due to its importance: 2027 Barajas, Barcelona-El Prat or Palma de Mallorca to attack the foreseeable saturation of its facilities. And while the airlines finance these improvements via rates, the listing continues to prepare its real estate ‘master plan’ to improve its profitability and free up land and assets “with high potential” to improve logistics in cities.
With an air market probably recovered, the doubts lie in knowing when some of these facilities will collapse due to the foreseeable increase in passengers, something that could condition the investment calendar. In places like El Prat, whose political unblocking has recently arrived, the facilities have been saturated for years. In Barajas, a key ‘hub’ for IAG that will grow even more with the acquisition of Air Europa, the problems are in the capacity available for cargo or operations at peak hours.
In 2027, the third Airport Regulation Document (Dora III) will enter into force, detailing the investments planned for the next five years. These investments will be financed with the increase in rates that Aena charges the airlines, which have been paralyzed for years. This four-year period allows Aena to have a sufficient window of time to prepare and start making its land profitable, with a view to improving the performance of its action.
The president of the listed Maurici Lucena The airlines are reluctant to any increase to avoid losing competitiveness with other ‘hubs’, and within this negotiation the extra resources that Aena obtains from the use of its land will come into play.
Expand Barajas and El Prat, key projects
Between 2022 and 2026, Aena plans to invest 2,250 million euros in various airports in its network, but some of its works have much later completion dates, which allows revealing some of the projects that will go into the next five years. This is the case of the expansion of terminals 4 and 4S in Madrid, scheduled for 2029; and a new processing building for the joint terminal 1-2-3 of the same aerodrome. The renovation of the Palma terminal (2027), actions in Lanzarote (2028), or the third terminal and runway at El Prat are also planned.
The fundamental piece of this real estate plan has also been the first to come across reality. The Madrid-Barajas logistics park, destined to become “the most advanced and innovative developed to date”, has seen its future clouded by the turbulent economic outlook. These have led to successively delaying the award of the surface right to the so-called “Area 1”, which with 28 hectares of land and 153,000 m2 buildable and exploitable for the next 75 years, welcomed the interest of Segro y lu Logicgo in the bid.
From Madrid to Malaga, Valencia and Palma
Doubts about the profitability of the project have also led the third successful bidder, P3 Group Sarl, to renege on the project without actually constituting the joint venture of which Aena will retain 35% ownership. After reopening the award, the ball is now in the hands of the fourth candidate, Merlin Properties, the listed socimi that also has its eyes on Madrid Nuevo Norte, the other large land exchange in the capital.
In the initial plans, the investment partner would be chosen to be in charge of investing 116 million euros for the urbanization of the area, and injecting another 52.6 million to Aena as excess value. The land available to him would be only one tenth of the 323 hectares available around Barajas, which will allow the construction of 2.1 million m2 of logistics activities, hotels, services or offices.
But not everything is Madrid. Aena’s real estate plans extend to growing territories such as Malaga, where work has already been done on a first proposal. Subsequently, it was planned to start the definition of the surroundings of Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and Seville, without forgetting Barcelona, where in October the company claimed to have started the work in order to put out a bag of soil in a tender “imminent”.
