The Supervisory Board of Mainor Ülemiste AS, which is developing Ülemiste City, has decided to extend the tenure of Ursel Velve, who is the head of the largest business campus in the Baltics, as the Chairman of the Board for the upcoming three years.

“Ursel’s work so far as the CEO of Mainor Ülemiste have been fast and fruitful, and Ülemiste City has developed comprehensively and based on the vision as an innovation, work, living and learning environment,” said Guido Pärnits, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Mainor Ülemiste AS.

“The most modern and greenest office building in Ülemiste City, the Alma Tominga building, has been completed, with which we became one of the leaders in the office real estate sector. In 2023, we took first place in Äripäev’s Real Estate Companies TOP. We started the construction of two very important buildings for the campus – a new Health Center and an Educational Quarter, and signed an agreement with Ericsson Eesti AS to bring their new smart production and technology hub to Ülemiste City. The added value of Ülemiste City companies has increased by a total of 300 million euros between 2020 and 2022,” commented Ursel Velve, summarizing three years.

Velve is pleased to continue the current work, which is not only interesting and important from the developer’s point of view, but has also caught the eye of companies operating on the campus: “We are grateful that customers notice our efforts. 73% of Ülemiste City customers recommend us to a friend or acquaintance, which is on the same level as Amazon and even higher than Apple and Google. In addition, Ülemiste City’s popularity among the Estonian population is over 80%, which is a very strong result.”

“We entered a completely new field of services for real estate developers and, in cooperation with Mainor AS and Technopolis Ülemiste AS, created new data-based services such as Green City and we offer the companies the opportunity to use the campus as a testing environment through our Test City program,” noted Velve. “In my next working period, I would like to continue with the same ambitious real estate development activities, open a new Health Center and Educational Quarter in Ülemiste City to the community and service providers, and start the construction of two new office buildings to ensure expansion opportunities for good customers. It is important to ensure mutual business activities of the large Ülemiste community, which is why we continue to develop a special offers platform. In creating the environment, we emphasize the creation of a high-quality and human-friendly urban space,” commented Velve and added that she considers improving accessibility to be the biggest challenge of Ülemiste City. “We would like to develop an updated public transport plan together with the city of Tallinn to ensure convenient public transport and cycling options for existing and new customers of the campus, including employees of the future Ericsson development hub. For this, it is extremely important to create a safe bike path infrastructure together with the tunnels created under Rail Baltica.”

Velve certainly wants to continue leading innovation projects in the upcoming three years. “Innovation is already inscribed in our DNA, and in order to continue to offer added value to companies, we continue to develop the successfully launched Test City concept with three new business models a year,” she noted. “Of course, we must also continue to bring innovative solutions to real estate development – here the principles of the Green Tiger construction road map in the development process and BIM models in administration are our guiding principles.”

Guido Pärnits also confirms that the next three years will undoubtedly bring great efforts to implement new opportunities. “Ülemiste City is in a leading position in real estate development in Tallinn and an important indicator in the establishment of the European Park with the construction of a landmark high-rise building and the connection of the campus with both the RB terminal and the airport area. It is also important to further develop the Ülemiste City Radar in order to measure and evaluate the fulfillment sectoral goals of campus. The premise of the solution is continuous digitization, increasing the quality of data and adding new data sources, as well as creating a city-wide data strategy,” he added. In addition, Pärnits introduces the Ülemiste City community fund as a new initiative, which has already started this year and whose concept has spread to several business campuses around the world. “In the form of the community fund, the companies on campus can contribute financially to the development projects and actively participate in the development of the campus.”