Team size: Heimstaden AB’s Group Legal & GRC comprises eight (8) colleagues, including the CLO, supported by twelve (12) additional legal professionals across our markets (Heimstaden Bostad AB)

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Two matters have defined the past year for the Legal team: the continued development of our privatisation programme and a significant arbitration case.

Since launching the privatisation programme in mid-2023, the Heimstaden group has established structured residential sales to homeowners as a recurring part of the business. The programme supports deleveraging and strengthens credit metrics, with a target of SEK 20 billion in cumulative sales by the end of 2025. Key markets include Norway, the Netherlands, Poland and Denmark.

For the Legal team, this has required a significant shift. We have supported the transition from a business primarily focused on letting and traditional large-scale transactions to one with a more consumer-oriented dimension. This has involved designing new legal structures, transaction documentation, governance processes and compliance frameworks suited to a higher volume of individual sales.

The work has been both technically demanding and commercially impactful. Legal has worked closely with the business to enable opportunities while ensuring robust consumer protection and governance standards. It has been particularly rewarding to see the team contribute directly to value creation through disciplined, well-structured execution.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

Our default approach is to manage legal matters in-house, reflecting our deep understanding of the business, our operating environment and risk profile, as well as the specialist expertise we have developed internally.

We engage external counsel where this is the most effective or necessary way to manage risk and deliver outcomes, typically in the following situations:

Capacity constraints or the need for highly specialised expertise;

Counterparty, lender or regulatory requirements;

The need for an independent third-party assessment, for example in shareholder matters or disputes where external credibility is important.

When instructing external advisers, we follow our Legal Procurement Principles. The Legal team defines the scope, selects appropriate counsel, obtains fee proposals where relevant, and monitors delivery against agreed timelines and budgets. We remain closely involved throughout assignments and often prepare initial drafts to ensure efficiency, alignment and consistency with our business objectives.

We evaluate external counsel against two primary criteria:

Quality and timeliness of delivery, including clear, pragmatic and actionable advice, and adherence to agreed budgets; and

Business understanding and strategic alignment, meaning their ability to understand our model, risk appetite and priorities, and tailor their advice accordingly.

How do you approach talent development and knowledge sharing within your legal team?

We are strongly process-driven, aiming to ensure high compliance standards while making Legal and GRC accessible and practical for the wider organisation. Our focus is not only on control, but also on usability.

We have invested in tailoring policies, guidance and tools to specific functions and user groups across the business. Key initiatives include:

A structured Legal & GRC onboarding programme for management, existing employees and new hires, covering group structure, stock exchange regulations and key governance policies.

Regular mandatory training on our Code of Conduct and relevant policies, delivered in collaboration with functional leaders and our People & Culture teams via intranet-based e-learning.

Within the Legal team, we hold monthly meetings to share developments, methodologies and challenges across markets. In addition, dedicated GRC and GDPR forums take place every six weeks.

Our model combines strong local expertise with a group-level centre of excellence. The Group function (Heimstaden AB) sets standards and shares knowledge, while local teams (Heimstaden Bostad AB) implement effectively within their respective markets. This ensures consistency across jurisdictions while maintaining close alignment with the business.