Meet the Co-Founders of Home.Earth, Emil Bender Lassen and Rasmus Nørgaard: “The challenges our cities are facing require us the think in entirely new ways”
Meet Emil Bender Lassen and Rasmus Nørgaard, two of the Co-Founders of Home.Earth
1. Describe your startup in two sentences?
Home.Earth is a real estate company founded to demonstrate a more sustainable and inclusive way of developing the cities we love. The ambition is to build a truly triple-bottom-line company that creates attractive risk-adjusted returns for our investors, strong social impact for our tenants and a much more sustainable way of building and operating homes. The journey has begun with 3 projects in Copenhagen – and a plan to enter other major European cities in the coming years.
2. What gave you the inspiration?
RN: I have worked with real estate for more than 20 years, and 17 years ago I was one of the co-founders of NREP, where I was the Chief Investment Officer of NREP until a couple of years ago. NREP today is the largest real estate investor and developer in the Nordics managing about €20 billion.
I’m extremely proud of the journey I’ve been on with NREP, but the journey so far has also shown me some of the things that the real estate sector has yet to solve. It is an highly fragmented industry, it too often optimises for short-term profits over long-term value creation and it is frankly not a very innovative sector.
If we zoom out and look at the climate crisis and the social inequality challenge our cities are facing, which is only being deepened by the rapid urban population growth we see these years, it is clear to me that we need to rethink the real estate sector.
So the inspiration for Home.Earth is in many ways a product of my many great learnings from my journey with NREP combined with an acknowledgement that the challenges our cities are facing require us to think in entirely new ways.
With Home.Earth, we aim to create a pathfinder to a new paradigm and have developed a business model that we think works for both investors, our tenants and the planet – and operates for long-term value creation for all stakeholders.
3. How did you meet?
EL: I was introduced to Rasmus by a previous colleague from McKinsey & Company where I interned during university. I had just stepped back from my role as CEO of Project Access International, a social mobility charity, and was about to rejoin McKinsey, but before I said yes to that, I was strongly encouraged to grab a coffee with Rasmus.
We met in the summer of 2020, where Rasmus sketched the first ideas on a new kind of real estate company and his motivation behind. I was super inspired by his analysis of the challenges and not least his commitment to reshape the sector for good, so we stayed in touch and continued talking until the winter, where we were ready to officially found Home.Earth.
It's important to note that the founding team behind Home.Earth is larger than Rasmus and I, we have a fantastic group of industry leaders with us and today our team counts 18 phenomenal people – representing 11 nationalities!
4. What has been your greatest success to date? And your greatest challenge?
EL: Two things stand out to me when looking at our largest successes. The first is our business model where we have developed a model where both investors, team members, tenants and society get a share of the financial value created by Home.Earth. It’s been super tricky to arrive at a model that worked both financially, legally, from a tax perspective, towards investors etc. and I think it’s a tremendous achievement to have it developed.
The other thing I will highlight is our first development project “Nærheden” situated in Greater Copenhagen, where we will build about 160 apartments + 2,100 sqm of community and commercial space. While the project is not done yet, it makes me proud to see how far our team has been able to get us when it comes to realising our impact across bottom lines.
Not only does the project have a strong business case, it also goes really far on the social agenda and has a carbon footprint 75% below the current “gold standard” – in fact, it looks to be the multi-story project in Denmark with the lowest carbon footprint ever!
RN: On challenges, I would also mention Emil’s point on arriving at the right business model. We feel like we have arrived on something sound now that works for all stakeholders. So I believe the biggest challenge we work on now is raising capital for a new venture in uncertain times. The macroeconomic turmoil combined with a commitment to do things in a new way has naturally made fundraising harder – which we knew when we started.
We are optimistic though and are fortunate to have really good momentum. It makes me particularly optimistic to see the diversity of the investors we are talking to who count both private high net-worth individuals, family offices, foundations and institutional investors. We closed our first round of funding in December 2022 and are able to close a second round already in April 2023, so it feels like there’s demand for a more sustainable and inclusive way of developing our cities.
5. What kind of impact is your business having and how do you measure it?
EL: We have developed a holistic and data-driven Impact Framework which we use to measure, manage and report our impact across people, planet and profit. The framework is the product of two years of research and development, as we wanted to build on top of best practice. We will actually publish the full Impact Framework on our website very soon and we hope that other ambitious actors in the real estate sector will use it as inspiration.
The framework enables us to pursue the positive impact we want to have – and as a real estate developer, we believe we can have a quite significant impact on both the planetary and social bottom-lines.
On the planetary side, we work to eliminate carbon in both the way we design, build and operate our buildings, we utilise new energy systems and supply our tenants with renewable energy (often on-site), we maximise the circularity of our buildings so they work as material banks for the future, and we add biodiversity on all the plots we enter.
On the social side, we work to create affordable and inclusive homes, we design our homes to be healthy to live in and measure the well-being of our tenants, and we work to create a more trust-based relation between tenants and landlords. We think the key is to treat our tenants as “co-owners” and we do that quite literally by awarding them 15% of our financial returns. We see this as an investment in our most important stakeholders – and we are certain that the investment will pay off: happy tenants live with us longer, we have less vacancy and we can focus our energy on creating community instead of managing costly conflicts.
But much more on that in the Impact Framework for those who are curious.
6. When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up?
EL: I wanted to be a chef – and I actually did cook for 20 of our tenants once, so almost completed ;)
RN: I wanted to be a professional golf player and I did manage to play at a high competitive level for 15 years, but only as an amateur.
7. If you weren’t doing this, what would be your plan B?
EL: I would probably go back to school and study the challenges further or work on them from a public policy perspective instead of social entrepreneurship.
RN: I would start another company that works to solve some of the key challenges facing us. I have learned that I thrive in the intersection between entrepreneurship and purpose.
8. What would you save in a fire?
EL: Photo albums and maybe the Didgeridoo my family and I brought home from Australia when I was a child.
9. Who is your role model/ greatest influence? And why?
We are both quite inspired by Kate Raworth, the author of Doughnut Economics, which we see as a powerful framework because it unites people, planet and profit in one beautiful model. And we are actually lucky enough to be working with Kate and her team in our first innovation project, where we will develop a Doughnut for Urban Development.
10. What is your happy track?
EL: This Life by Vampire Weekend
RN: Somewhere over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
11. What are your company values?
We are building Home.Earth on values of courage, trust & care and integrity
12. What are you most looking forward to in 2023?
RN: Starting the construction of our first project west of Copenhagen city centre in Q2 and see all the ambitions we have come to life