People Property Place

Mark Bladon is Head of Real Estate at Investec, where he oversees a UK real estate loan book of around £3bn. Mark didn't go to university. He started work at 19 in the post room at Singer & Friedlander, moved into loans admin and spent five years in the credit team before becoming a loan originator. He joined Investec in 2006, moved into a liquidity role during the financial crisis and ran the spo...

Harry Iles is the co-founder of Peppermint, a self storage operator that puts small, automated storage units into unused space in residential and office buildings. Harry studied French and German at Durham and planned to join the army, until a rugby injury and three knee operations changed course. He joined King Sturge, working in London, France and Germany, and then spent 14 years working for a f...

People Property Place hits 200 episodes! Joining him for the milestone is Bradley Baker, CEO of CO-RE, the central London developer and development manager. Bradley tells Matthew Watts about dislocating his knee at 6,000m on Ama Dablam in Nepal in 2024 and being helicoptered off the mountain, and how he thinks about risk. He started his career on the Weatherall Green & Smith graduate scheme and mo...

This week, Matthew Watts revisits one of his favourite conversations from the archive. Episode 47, recorded on 17 October 2023, features Hugo Llewelyn, CEO and Co-Founder of Newcore Capital, a specialist real estate investment manager focused on social infrastructure. Hugo explains his investment philosophy and his thesis around asymmetric returns. He argues that investing in assets society needs...

This episode was recorded on 29th September 2026. Joe Lister is CEO of Unite Group, the UK's largest owner and operator of purpose-built student accommodation. Joe joined Unite in 2002 from PwC's corporate finance team, when the business had 3,000 beds. He spent 15 years as CFO before taking over as CEO. He tells Matthew Watts how Unite helped turn student accommodation into an institutional asset...

Gabriela Hersham didn't set out to work in property. She studied international business with French and Spanish, then moved to New York to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute before moving into producing. Working out of an early WeWork gave her the idea, and when she moved back to London she set out to build the same kind of space. She grew up in a real estate family - her f...

Jack Palmer left school at 17 with his A-levels unfinished, supported by his dad and rather less so by his mum. He started out as an art handler at Christie's, working in the house sales department, photographing and cataloguing the contents of stately homes for a week or two at a time. At 19 he went back to Hong Kong, where he'd lived until he was eight, with the intention of getting into real es...

Alex Price started his career as an officer in the British Army, moved into investment banking, did an MBA at London Business School, and joined Palmer Capital in 2003. At that point the business had three or four people, a balance sheet under £1m, no funds under management and three operating partners. Over 16 years he built it alongside founder Ray Palmer into a business with more than £1bn of a...

Guy Butler grew up in a poor village in the Welsh valleys, the son of a butcher who understood the local property market better than he understood meat. He studied surveying at Reading, left an early consultancy role to co-found the planning and development boutique Turnberry Consulting in 1998, on the single condition that his name wasn't in the company name, and joined Grosvenor before he'd even...

Tim Robinson joined Knight Frank as a graduate and has spent the whole of his 32-year career there, becoming an equity partner in 2008 and Head of Commercial in 2025. In April, he takes over as UK Managing Partner from Stephen Clifton, a role that will bring the firm's residential and commercial businesses together under one leader for the first time. His path started a long way from property. His...

Allan Lockhart never went to university. He left school for a graduate broking scheme in the City, spent a few years as an oil and gas liability broker in the Lloyd's of London building, and decided it wasn't for him because it felt intangible. A knee injury three weeks before a round-the-world trip changed his plans, and he took a job at the bottom of Strutt & Parker's retail team instead, openin...

Roun Barry moved to the UK from South Africa in 1986, aged 26, using the trip as both a career test and an act of defiance against the politics of the time. He trained as a lawyer but went into real estate instead, working as a partner at Jones Lang Wootton and then running the UK portfolio at ING Real Estate. In 1996, he led a management buyout of the Dunedin business from ING, backed by the Roya...

John Munday took over as chief executive of Colliers UK in March 2025, and he's set the business a target: £165m of revenue last year, £250m and beyond by 2030, with profitability rising alongside it. He's asked every team in the business the same question - how do you double in the next four years? John came into the industry through building surveying rather than agency. Early on he turned down...

Brian Welsh came into real estate through a side door. He'd been a Butlins Redcoat warming up crowds for Little and Large, a ski rep in Italy moving 5,000 people a week between hotels, then a health club manager launching gyms for Fitness First and David Lloyd. In 2005, while drumming up membership for a new club in Newcastle, he walked into what looked like a block of flats to pitch a corporate d...

Three weeks before this conversation, Rick de Blaby left Get Living after a decade running it. This is a look back over a 46-year career, and over the business he built from the Olympic Village into one of the UK's first institutional build-to-rent platforms. When Delancey and Qatari Diar bought the Athletes' Village off the government, the word "BTR" wasn't even in the lexicon yet. Rick got the c...

Robert-Jan Foortse has been at APG for 23 years - he warned the man who hired him he'd probably get bored and leave within 3. He'd only been available because Arthur Andersen collapsed after Enron, and the job came out of sharing a cab back to the airport with the head of real estate at ABP. Today he runs the European property portfolio and sits on the investment committee at a pension investor wi...

Andrew Jones describes himself as a capital allocator first and a property person second. He was buying shares and reading Buffett and Munger as a teenager, long before he'd heard of a chartered surveyor, and he still thinks of a building as a widget - a tool for putting capital somewhere it'll be treated well. He was once asked by the man who developed the Trafford Centre what his ambitions for L...

Thomas Collins is the COO of L1 Property, the UK residential arm of Australian investment group L1. He came into real estate the long way round - economics at Oxford, McKinsey, a stint at Uber in its Travis Kalanick era, then British Airways - before an auctioned house on the south coast that cost six times its budget got him hooked on property. What makes this conversation different is what he's...

Gary Hersham has spent 45 years at the very top end of London property, brokering some of the most expensive private homes ever sold in the capital. He founded Beauchamp Estates, speaks seven languages, and has built a career on relationships with royalty, sovereigns and family offices who almost never deal in public. When he started in the early 80s, one of the established Chelsea agents told him...

Tony Smedley runs the European business at Heitman, a $50bn real estate manager that's 60 years old and still owned by its partners. He's spent 30 years working across pan-European real estate - early cross-border deals out of Brussels and Paris, building businesses at Insight and Schroders, co-founding Fountain Capital - and he's seen enough cycles to have a clear view on this one. His take is th...

Rodney Bysh has spent 30 years operating between Germany and the UK. He set up what's now a €68bn real estate platform from a serviced office at Henderson, did M&A at Rothschild & Co, built and sold Cording Real Estate to Edmond de Rothschild, and then started again. Feldberg Capital launched at the end of 2022, merged with Brunswick Property Partners, and has grown from £500m to £2bn under manage...

Stafford Lancaster has been at Delancey for over 25 years, working alongside Sir John and Jamie Ritblat. Today he runs the firm behind some of the UK's most recognisable real estate projects - Earls Court, East Village, Elephant and Castle - and he's just launched a new lending platform in Albion Arc. The thread that runs through the whole conversation is a single financing principle that Delancey...

Rob Abraham joined Supermarket Income REIT when it owned seven stores. Today it owns 128 and he's the CEO of a FTSE 250 company at 35. Getting there involved a farming deal that collapsed weeks after he started, a pandemic that supercharged the business, a mini budget that stopped it dead, and a share price that hit 65p before the board decided to internalise the management and break away from Atr...

This week I sat down with Kirsty Willman, CFO & COO of Rebalance Earth to ask Why Should Real Estate Investors Care About Nature? Kirsty spent 22 years in private markets finance, most recently as COO of Real Estate at Federated Hermes. She walked away from that to back a £100 billion market that nobody has properly built yet. Her view is straightforward. Flood risk is becoming impossible to insur...

This week, I sat down with Lord Walker, Executive Chair of Iceland Food Group, Founder and Chairman of Bywater, and the Prime Minister's Cost of Living Champion. Richard started his property career on the JLL graduate scheme in the West End before moving to Warsaw to build a value-add business across Eastern Europe. After returning to the UK, Bywater spent several years searching for its niche bef...