Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH

Stefan Ciapanna has been Managing Director of Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH and WestInvest Gesellschaft für Investmentfonds mbH since April 2025. As Chief Risk Officer (CRO), he is responsible for managing the Real Estate business division. His responsibilities in this role include the areas of finance, risk and taxes.

A qualified banker and business graduate, Ciapanna has more than 20 years of experience in asset financing. He joined DekaBank in 2012, holding various management positions in acquisition and portfolio management and, starting in 2019, in credit risk management and workout units. Most recently, he was responsible for the market-independent approval of loan applications and for risk monitoring, including a workout loan portfolio of around 20 billion euros in the real estate, transport and infrastructure loans segments. 
Before joining Deka, he worked in the financing divisions of HSH Nordbank, Berenberg Bank and NORD/LB.

Esteban de Lope Fend has been a Managing Director of Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH and WestInvest Gesellschaft für Investmentfonds mbH since 2020 and is responsible for fund management, product development and sales support.

He has held a variety of positions at Deka since 2002, most recently as Head of Real Estate Fund Management for open-ended retail real estate funds and before that Fund Manager for the Deka-ImmobilienGlobal and Deka-ImmobilienEuropa real estate mutual funds for almost ten years. Before joining Deka, he worked as a construction and project manager at a variety of real estate and construction companies.

Esteban de Lope Fend is a Certified International Investment Analyst (DFVA) and holds degrees in civil engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, industrial engineering from the University of Freiberg and real estate economics (ebs). He has been a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (MRICS) since 2005.

Johannes Hermanns has been Managing Director of Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH since 2024 and is responsible for real estate management. In this position, he is in charge of integrated portfolio management, leasing management and real estate project management for some 580 properties on five continents, as well as the sustainable transformation of the global real estate portfolio. Prior to being appointed as Managing Director, he headed up the Real Estate Management Germany department for ten years. Together with his four regional teams, he oversaw asset management activities for more than 250 German properties.

Hermanns has some 25 years of experience in various areas of the real estate sector. Before becoming Head of Deka’s Northern Region in 2008, he worked as a planning architect, as a sales manager in the construction supply industry and in various senior management positions at Allianz Real Estate. Hermanns has a degree in engineering from RWTH Aachen University and an MBA from ESB Reutlingen.

Victor Stoltenburg has been a Managing Director of Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH since 2019 and Managing Director of WestInvest Gesellschaft für Investmentfonds mbH since 2024. In his role as Head of Real Estate Acquisitions and Sales he is responsible for investment management across 27 national markets, including transaction structuring and treasury.

He was Head of Acquisitions and Sales Germany for Deka Immobilien for close to 11 years before his appointment to Managing Director.

After studying law, he held a variety of legal positions at Pünder Volhard Weber & Axster (now Clifford Chance) in Berlin and Philipp Holzmann AG in Frankfurt, among others. Starting in 2005, he worked as Real Estate Investment Manager for SEB Immobilien-Investment GmbH (Frankfurt) and Union Investment Real Estate (Hamburg), where he was responsible for real estate investments in other European countries.

Gesa Wilms has been a Managing Director of Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH and WestInvest Gesellschaft für Investmentfonds mbH since April 2024. As Chief Operating Officer (COO), her responsibilities include digital transformation, process and data management, procurement management and marketing.

Wilms has a background in real estate economics (IREBS) and roughly 20 years of experience in the property sector. She has held various positions at Deka since 2008, having spent the past six years heading up the Real Estate Services department. In this role, she was responsible for the central management of all real estate services and property management processes. During this time, she also spent two years as a member of the Supervisory Board of the two management companies. After graduating with a master’s degree in philology and political science, she began her professional career at Deutsche Telekom Immobilien.