Change of baton at the SVSM
At the general assembly of the Swiss Association for Site Management SVSM, Beny Ruhstaller handed over the presidency after eight years. He not only shaped the association, but also made a name for himself over the past 20 years as "Mister Glattpark" and ensured that marketing also became a topic in the real estate industry.
For eight years, Beny Ruhstaller shaped the umbrella organisation of Swiss location and business development agencies as president, and he had already been a member of the board since 2013. But he had his first contact with the SVSM much earlier: “In 2007, I received the first SVSM award for my mandate as managing director of the Glattpark area marketing Ruhstaller is not a classic location promoter. Rather, he has represented the real estate industry’s point of view in the association by sitting on the SVSM board and, from 2015, as president. It has always been important to him to bring the real estate industry and location promotion closer together. Ruhstaller will be succeeded as president of the association by Remo Daguati, owner of LOC AG, and Stefan Otziger, managing director of the Thun economic region, will take over as vice-president.
As president of the SVSM, Beny Ruhstaller benefited from a large network that he built up during his decades of activity in the real estate industry. He became particularly well known as “Mister Glattpark”: as Managing Director of the Glattpark Area Marketing – now IGG Glattpark – 21 years ago, he built up an organisation that was unique in Switzerland at the time. The association of several property owners aimed at the overall marketing of the area, which was then still called Oberhauserriet. In the following 21 years, Ruhstaller not only acted as a mediator between landowners, representatives of the city of Opfikon, media representatives and the public, but also sat on juries for individual building projects, set up a showroom with a large model and visualisations of the new district or founded the IG Boulevard. Ruhstaller took a lot of time for lectures and guided tours of the new district: he gave about 1,000 of them. Ruhstaller also recently gave up his mandate as managing director of IGG Glattpark.
Furthermore, Beny Ruhstaller made a name for himself in the field of real estate marketing – at a time when this discipline did not actually exist in Switzerland: Together with Roman H. Bolliger, he wrote the non-fiction book “Immobilienmarketing: Mehrwert für Liegenschaften” (Real Estate Marketing: Added Value for Real Estate), which has become a standard work and textbook and has sold over 10,000 copies to date. Ruhstaller was active as a consultant and marketer in numerous real estate projects with his company acasa Immobilienmarketing and was involved as a lecturer and speaker on the subject.