The story of Mediterráneo, especially its origin, makes it a pioneering entity in the estate management sector. Since its establishment in 1964 as a service created by the then Caja de Ahorros del Sureste at its office in Benidorm, a town that was starring in one of the most striking tourist and urban developments of the sixties, and with its subsequent transformation into a company with a new name, Mediterráneo has followed a growing trajectory as a benchmark for professional consolidation, activity sustainability, and adaptation to the country’s social changes.
The service began with the management of four estates, but soon increased its client base and expanded across coastal areas of the provinces of Alicante and Murcia. Today, the firm manages more than 6,000 estates distributed in the Valencian Community, Region of Murcia, Community of Madrid, Andalusia, Basque Country, and Cantabria, while continuing to consolidate its expansion with its imminent presence in Castilla-La Mancha.
A significant date marks the start of its historical journey. On March 26, 1964, the community of property owners of the Edificio Ramsa in Benidorm held a General Assembly, in which it was recorded that “the Administrative Services of the Caja de Ahorros del Sureste de España, represented by Mr. Matías Mengual Grimalt and Mr. Manuel Sánchez Monllor, Head and Deputy Head, respectively, of these Services” were chosen as administrators. Even today, sixty years later, the community entrusts its administration to Mediterráneo, which has been re-elected each year.
The reason this was the first estate managed by the entity, and not another, has a curious explanation. Established the previous year, its founder and director of the Caja de Ahorros del Sureste, Antonio Ramos Carratalá, had acquired an apartment there and initially asked the director of the Benidorm office, Matías Mengual, to take charge of its management in its early stages personally, a proposal that the community approved in April 1963 as a decision prior to the one adopted a year later with the election of the Caja de Ahorros.
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Key precedent: the meeting on Alameda street
Manuel Sánchez Monllor, the young deputy head of the office at the time, is today a living memory of those initial moments after Mengual’s death, who as director oversaw the service’s advancement in Benidorm for years.
“I managed three estates on my own – recalls Sánchez Monllor – and for this, I had been issued a professional card by the National Autonomous Syndical Group of Rustic and Urban Estate Administrators; those were the first steps taken to organize the profession after the Horizontal Property Law was enacted in 1960, and in fact, I was one of the first ten in Alicante, who were entrusted to establish the provincial section”.
“That’s why I mentioned to Matías Mengual – he adds – that estate management could be a new service for the Caja, especially thinking of expanding ties with clients; so the two of us had a meeting with Antonio Ramos Carratalá in the Benidorm office, in the Alameda street facilities that had recently been inaugurated, and he accepted the initiative; the Service was born by transferring the estate that Mengual managed and the three that I managed to the Caja”.
Novelty, success, and expansion
The emerging service was a success and grew quickly. Sánchez Monllor keeps a graph that he included in an internal report from 1965 to demonstrate the Caja de Ahorros’s correct decision before moving to the Albufereta office in Alicante. There, among other missions, he also implemented the same service in that area that was beginning to grow with new apartment buildings and on San Juan Beach. “In that graph, you can see the increase in the number of managed properties in a short time”. The service’s expansion in the sixties solidified the innovation that the entity brought to the sector, even before the profession was officially organized in 1968 with the legal constitution of the then-called National Syndical College of Estate Administrators.
The model of administration as a legal entity from the savings bank was novel and unique at the beginning, in contrast to the development of the profession in small offices.
All the names
The Caja de Ahorros del Sureste changed its name in the seventies of the 20th century to Caja de Ahorros de Alicante y Murcia and, later in the eighties, to Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo.
In 1989, it transformed the Service for the Administration of Third-Party Estates into a company called Mediterráneo Servicios de Gestión Inmobiliaria SA – also known by its initials MSGI -, integrated into the CAM Group until 2010.
From that date, the company became a private investment firm, shortly afterwards registering its current name of Mediterráneo Servicios de Gestión Integral SAU.
Group of companies
Sixty years after its emergence in a single location, Mediterráneo attends to its administered communities of property owners in about thirty offices and also gives its name to a Group of companies: Mediterráneo Global.
The activities of this Group extend, as a complement to the estate administration represented by MSGI, to the insurance sector with SecurMe, a brokerage that supports the communities of property owners and their members, to technical and maintenance services through MiServ, a company that provides a wide range of suppliers, and to real estate advice with Mediterráneo Homes.
Currently, both the Group and MSGI are developing an ambitious territorial expansion plan with the incorporation of new professionals with experience.