Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust (CAPREIT) and European Residential Real Estate Investment Trust (ERES) have announced ERES CEO Phillip Burns has stepped down.

Mark Kenney, CAPREIT’s president and CEO, will become ERES’ CEO effective immediately.

“Over the past four years at ERES, we created a platform, delivered remarkable external and organic growth, including tripling the number of residential units within our portfolio, drove absolute and per unit peer-leading revenue and earnings growth and established a best-in-class local operating team,” Burns said in a statement.

“This has been a successful collaboration between CAPREIT and ERES, and one that I am proud to have led. ERES is well-positioned to deliver robust operating results. Having been chief executive officer since its inception, now is the time for me to step down.”

ERES (ERE-UN-T) is an unincorporated, open-ended real estate investment trust headquartered in Toronto. ERES owns a portfolio of 158 multiresidential properties, comprised of 6,900 suites and ancillary retail space located in the Netherlands, in addition to one office property in Germany and another in Belgium.

CAPREIT (CAR-UN-T) is Canada’s largest publicly traded provider of quality rental housing.

As of Dec. 31, 2022, CAPREIT owns or has interests in approximately 67,000 residential apartment suites, townhomes and manufactured home community sites across Canada and the Netherlands, with approximately $17 billion of investment properties in Canada and Europe.

CAPREIT’s transition

Burns also stepped down as a member of the board of trustees of ERES and as an employee of CAPREIT. Burns had been CEO since March 2019.

Kenney has also joined ERES’s board of trustees, effective immediately.

“CAPREIT has acted as ERES’s asset and property manager since 2019,” Kenney said in the statement.

“As one of the largest owners and managers of multiresidential real estate in Canada, CAPREIT’s strong team, including its European operating team of over 60 employees, is well-positioned to continue to deliver strong operating results for ERES.”

In March 2021, CAPREIT and ERES renewed their pipeline agreement for another two years, which ended on March 29.

The agreement made approximately $248 million available to ERES to acquire properties that comply with ERES’s investment policy, do not interfere in the investment policy of CAPREIT and which ERES wishes to purchase but is unable to do so with its own resources.

ERES was originally the European Commercial REIT.

It changed its name in December 2018 when CAPREIT sold it 41 multiresidential properties in the Netherlands for $634 million, becoming its majority shareholder in the process.