People Property Place

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...

This week, I sat down with James Halstead, Managing Director and BlackRock's Chief Investment Officer for European Value Add Real Estate, for a conversation that opens with one of the most direct and challenging questions the show has ever asked. Is real estate facing an existential crisis? James does not flinch. He gives a forensically honest answer about where real estate equity sits today relat...

This week, I sat down with Rishi Bhuchar, CEO of CBRE UK and Ireland, for a conversation that is as much about who he is as a person as it is about what he has built across one of the most decorated careers in real estate investment banking. Rishi's story starts in a way that most people in this industry would not expect. Parents who arrived from India in the 1960s with nothing, a childhood where...

This week is different. I'm joined by my friend Harry Wentworth Stanley, Investment Director at BauMont Real Estate Capital, for what I believe is the most important conversation I've ever had on this podcast. 20 years ago, Harry lost his older brother James to suicide. James was 21, in his final year at Newcastle, sporty, academic, popular, with no history of mental illness. Following a routine o...

This week, I sat down with Mark Russell, CIO and Head of Real Estate at Federated Hermes, for a conversation about what it really means to build a career on first principles, and why that philosophy is becoming more valuable in today's market than it has been in years. Mark's route into real estate began with a week of work experience organised by his headmaster, driving around the southeast in a...

This week, I sat down with Justin Hildebrandt, Senior Managing Director and Head of Europe at Affinius Capital, to explore a career that began on construction sites in Napa Valley and has taken him to the forefront of one of the most quietly formidable real estate platforms operating in Europe today. Justin's path into real estate was shaped early. A father in construction, summers spent on job si...

This week, I sat down with Mark Bourgeois, Chief Executive of the Government Property Agency, for a conversation that bridges the worlds of private sector real estate and public sector purpose in a way that very few guests on this show ever could. Mark's journey into real estate began not through a carefully planned career move but through a rugby sevens team at Donaldson's in Leeds. What followed...

This week, I sat down with James Jacobs, Managing Director and Global Head of Real Assets within the Private Capital Advisory team at Lazard, to explore the topic Real Asset Capital Formation: Who Wins? In this conversation, James opens with a striking assessment of where the market actually stands. Fundraising volumes rose for the first time in four years in 2025, up 27% year on year. But the hea...

This week on People Property Place, we do something different. Recorded live on the ground at Mipim in Cannes, this episode is the first of a new format: People Property Place Profiles. Where I walk and talk with some of the most outspoken and influential figures across the real assets industry. This week's conversation features Shaun Simons, co-founder of Compton, whose previous episode held the...

This week, I sat down with Toby Phelps, Co-President of BGO, who has spent 30 years at the top of European real estate investing and been involved in over $20 billion of transactions across logistics, office, retail, residential and healthcare assets. In this conversation, Toby traces a career that took him from JLL in the mid-nineties through Morgan Stanley's private equity real estate team, wher...

This week, I sat down with Mathieu Elshout to explore the journey that took him from environmental sciences into institutional real estate investing, and how he is now helping build the European property platform for one of Australia's fastest growing pension funds. Mathieu is Head of European Property at Aware Super UK. Before joining Aware Super, he spent more than a decade at PGGM managing Euro...

This week, I sat down with Michael Zerda to unpack a career that spans private equity real estate, distressed credit, structured capital and some of the most complex investment situations across Europe and the United States. Michael is Global Head of Real Estate at Santander Alternative Investments and CEO of Deva Capital, the real estate and corporate capital solutions investment arm of the busin...

This week, I sat down with Emma Cariaga, Chief Operating Officer at British Land, to unpack what it really takes to run one of the UK's largest listed real estate businesses during a period of structural change, capital market pressure, and sector consolidation. Emma is COO of British Land, a FTSE 100 property company with over 170 years of history and a portfolio concentrated in retail parks and...

This week, I sat down with Michela Hancock to unpack the journey from psychology graduate to property entrepreneur, and how she helped pioneer institutional build to rent in the UK long before it was widely accepted. Michela is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hilltop Property Partners. Before launching Hilltop, she worked across US and UK real estate, including early exposure to multifamily housing in t...

This week, I sat down with Andrew Hynard to unpack a corporate career that spans more than three decades at JLL, the chief executive leadership of one of London's most prestigious estates, and a post-executive chapter advising some of the most interesting property businesses in the UK. Andrew spent the majority of his career at JLL focused on Capital Markets, ultimately becoming Deputy Chairman of...

This week, I sat down with Pavel Streblov to unpack how one of Central Europe's most established private real estate groups is entering the UK market, why London still matters, and what it really takes to build and deliver at scale as a developer in today's environment. Pavel is Business Director at Penta Real Estate, a privately owned investment group founded by five university classmates, with m...

This week, I sat down with Dr. Kate Jarvis to unpack a journey that spans childhood instability, academic rigour, early machine learning, and the building of an AI native platform designed to fundamentally change how real asset decisions are made. Kate is CEO and co founder of Fifth Dimension, a technology company powering decision making across real assets, underwriting, asset management and port...

This week, I sat down with Ian Rickwood to unpack a career that spans entrepreneurship, private equity, consumer businesses, failed exits, market downturns, and ultimately the building of a long term real estate investment and capital platform. Ian is Founder and Chairman of Henley, a fast growing private equity real estate investment and venture capital business operating across the UK, Europe an...

This week, I sat down with Niall Farmer to unpack an unconventional real estate career that spans retail property, residential development, masterplanning, construction, and now leading the UK platform for one of Asia's most powerful real estate and infrastructure groups. Niall is Head of UK at Gamuda Land, part of the Gamuda Group, a global infrastructure and property developer with operations ac...