People Property Place

Hosted by Matthew Watts

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Episodes

190

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-GB

About the show

Interviewing the leaders shaping the real estate investment management industry. Hosted by Matthew Watts, Founder of Rockbourne. Join our growing community that sits at the intersection of real estate and media. www.peoplepropertyplace.com

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60 recent

August 10, 2026Episode 18957 min

Brian Welsh, CEO at OPRE Group - Mobilise, Stabilise, Optimise: 21 Years in Operational Real Estate

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 deal. It was a 695-bed student building, running late, contractor gone bust, universities up in arms, no reservations taken. He told the CEO that launching it was no different to opening a hotel at the start of a ski season. They shook hands more or less on the spot. What followed is the argument that runs through the whole conversation. He painted 60 of the bedrooms himself to get it finished, appointed his own cleaning contractors, wrote the lettings spreadsheet, and ran a system of about 50 in-trays to track every application through the process. When the sewage leak flooded the underground safe, security guards dried 50 pound notes with hairdryers on the common room floor. That grounding is why he thinks the operation is the part investors underestimate: if you miss the EBITDA plan, yield compression isn't there to bail you out. From there it's Liberty Living in the Gherkin, then a decision that had people asking if he'd lost it - leaving a 2bn business and 100 staff for a basement in Fitzrovia and a startup with no assets. That became Knightsbridge Student Housing and ThreeSixty, four founders and 17,000 beds in seven years, first movers into Ireland, Spain and France. It ended with the four of them standing in a circle making each other redundant one by one, everything returned to investors. Then Nido and Round Hill, agreed over a drink at a conference and explained to his wife the next morning with a hangover. He founded OPRE in 2023 to do the same job from the other side, as what he calls a strategic enabler - the layer that lets institutional capital access operational cash flows while being insulated from the noise. He's good on the sector arguments too. Why institutions once wanted a single 25-year covenant and thought 900 student tenancies were the risk, and why Debenhams and Virgin settled that. Why a residential team panicking at 95% occupancy should look at the Oxford Street unit sitting empty for five years with a £5m refurb bill. And why the thing he hires for isn't a CV but agency - people who see a problem and fix it. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

August 3, 2026Episode 18855 min

Rick de Blaby, Former CEO at Get Living - Looking Back on Building Britain's BTR Pioneer

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 call, said "when can I start" in a heartbeat, and set about building a vertically integrated investor, developer and operator from scratch - even the repair crews had Get Living on their shirts. It grew from around 1,000 units to 6,500 during his tenure, writing the manual as it went, backed by APG, Delancey, Qatari, Aware Super and Oxford Properties. He's clear-eyed about the hard parts. Running rental stock at scale is an ultramarathon, relentless in a way deal-led businesses aren't. Then came the Building Safety Act after Grenfell - right in principle, he says, but badly drafted, landing the bill on freeholders like Get Living for buildings the government had built. That fight has run all the way to the Supreme Court, and his position is blunt: Get Living never refused to remediate, but it didn't build, design or contract the buildings, and it's litigating to make the people who did pay for it. There's the wider market too - why London built under 5,000 homes last year against a target of 88,000, why fixing planning alone won't open the taps, and why the government needs to understand how global capital actually chooses where to go. And there's the personal side: a son in Canada, a grandson, a wife telling him not to leave the other things too late, and a man three weeks into working out what comes next. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

July 27, 2026Episode 1871 hr 15 min

Robert-Jan Foortse, Head of European Property at APG - Invest in the Trend Lines, Not the Headlines

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 with around €600bn under management, just over €50bn of it in property, run by 55 people. That headcount only works because APG doesn't manage anything itself. Every position sits alongside a local operating partner handling the leasing, financing and day-to-day. His framing is horse racing - back a blind pool fund and you're picking the jockey, and APG would rather pick the horses. After the GFC they cut the number of positions, wrote much bigger cheques, insisted on governance rights, and moved away from traditional fund managers towards operators like citizenM, McArthurGlen and The Social Hub. People building businesses, rather than collecting rent and charging a fee for it. What that's produced isn't the portfolio you'd guess. Offices are 1% of the European book, on the logic that a good office pitch is exactly where a council will happily consent the tower next door. Residential is close to 40%. They spent a long time trying to buy into European data centres, got outbid on one and couldn't agree terms on the other, then worked out they already owned the exposure - roughly 30% of Digital Realty and Equinix by assets sits in Europe. His sense-check for that sort of thing is his mother, a retired teacher, 91 this summer and an ABP pensioner. She doesn't care which regional portfolio it's parked in. What guests would you love to see next on PPP? Let us know in the comments. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

July 20, 2026Episode 1861 hr 10 min

Andrew Jones, CEO at LondonMetric - Size Is the Outcome. It Was Never the Strategy.

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 LondonMetric were. Andrew said he'd like it to be one of the better companies in the sector and a good place to work. The reply was: what about the biggest? Fifteen years on, LondonMetric is a FTSE 100 REIT with a £7.6bn portfolio, and Andrew's view is that size was the outcome of the strategy rather than the strategy itself. The strategy is triple net, and it's deliberately low energy. Buy assets that are mission critical to the occupier, let them on a full repairing and insuring lease, then leave them alone - LondonMetric owns buildings it hasn't spent money on in fifteen years. It runs on 54 people with no HR department, and Andrew has never run an IRR to justify a purchase because anyone can juice the numbers by guessing an exit yield. He's blunt too about the incentives around him: the lawyers, the bankers, the agents and the recruiters all get paid when he's busy, and the rent turns up either way. He talks through the trip to the Berkshire Hathaway AGM in Omaha that pushed him off the British Land board at 41 with three young kids and a mortgage, why the Christmas his wife did all her shopping online sent him into logistics, and why he thinks the listed sector today is really just a five-year swap business. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

July 13, 2026Episode 1851 hr 11 min

Thomas Collins, COO at L1 Property - Can 80% of Property Management Be Automated?

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 built since. Thomas taught himself to code, watched ChatGPT outperform a proprietary model his team had spent twelve months training, and set about applying that to the part of the business everyone finds painful: property management. The result is an AI system that now handles a large share of resident communication and reactive maintenance across L1's 3,000 units, letting the same team manage far more. He's honest about how it actually came together. The early version he vibe-coded himself, but it wasn't production grade, so he brought in an engineer and rebuilt it properly. He's equally honest about where it's heading - his view is that 80% of day-to-day property management is possible to automate today, and the hard part isn't the intelligence, it's the interface, the tools and the nerve to hand over the risk. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

July 6, 2026Episode 18451 min

Gary Hersham, Founder at Beauchamp Estates - 45 Years Brokering London's Most Expensive Homes

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 they'd squeeze him out. They didn't. Gary built a business at the super prime end because he worked out early that it suited him: fewer deals falling over, faster transactions, and a chance to meet some of the most interesting people in the world. He's candid that the thing driving him was never proving a point to his successful father. It was the thrill of the deal, and hating to lose one. He talks through the deals that made his name, the way he gets into rooms he's not supposed to be in, and why he's still a major player today. What comes across is someone who genuinely loves the game - the people more than the property, and the relationships more than the transactions. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

June 29, 2026Episode 18359 min

Tony Smedley, MD & Head of Europe at Heitman - The Next Real Estate Cycle Belongs to the Brave

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 that the next three to five years will be consequential, and it's a good time to be courageous. The market's been through a rough capital markets cycle, but operating performance has stayed strong. The lesson he keeps coming back to is to stop relying on the capital markets to generate value and focus on what you can actually control: earnings, asset management, the operational performance of the business underneath the building. That's why Heitman has spent two decades buying real estate operating companies rather than just buildings, with a deliberate tilt towards needs-based areas driven by demographics rather than GDP - living, healthcare, student housing, senior housing, self-storage. Tony's wider argument is that the lines between real estate and infrastructure are blurring, and the industry needs to start talking infrastructure's language: earnings, operations, and duration. He's also candid about what that means for the people in the industry. The job is more operational than it's ever been, and the traditional real estate qualifications don't really prepare you for reading a P&L or running an operating business. The skill set has shifted. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

June 22, 2026Episode 1821 hr 7 min

Rodney Bysh, CEO at Feldberg Capital - It's the Best Time to Buy London Offices in 30 Years

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 management with a team of 30 across Berlin, Frankfurt and London. The conversation covers a lot of ground, but the through line is Rodney's view that this is the best window he's seen in his career for London offices. Rents are low and growing fast, there's virtually no supply, and institutional sellers are letting go of their best assets to free up liquidity. Three years ago it was a contrarian position. Now the market's catching up, but he thinks the opportunity is still there. He's also unusually well placed to explain the German market to a UK audience. Feldberg is one of the few platforms with genuine boots on the ground in both countries, and Rodney's bilingual background - he grew up between the UK and Germany after his family left Uganda - gives him access to a layer of local operators and developers that most London-based investors never reach. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

June 15, 2026Episode 1811 hr 10 min

Stafford Lancaster, CEO at Delancey - Never Get Caught Out: Inside Delancey's 25-Year Property Run

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 has stuck to from day one: never get caught out. Before the GFC, they had no loan-to-value covenants in any of their debt. When values crashed and banks started calling in loans across the industry, Delancey had nothing to trigger. They rode the whole thing out and came through with a 15% gross IRR. That same discipline shows up in how they won the Olympic Village - a David and Goliath bid against Hutchison Whampoa and the Wellcome Trust - and how they pioneered build-to-rent in the UK, interviewing 3,000 renters and flooding the market with 1,400 homes when the rest of the industry was still drip-feeding stock. It's a flat structure, everyone's self-starting, and Sir John is still in the office at 90. Stafford talks openly about how that culture is what lets 65 people compete with firms ten times the size, and why he'd rather keep it that way than scale up. What's the one principle you'd never break in your own business? Let us know in the comments. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

June 8, 2026Episode 18056 min

Rob Abraham, CEO at Supermarket Income REIT - From a 65p Share Price to FTSE 250 CEO in Under a Year

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 Atrato in six weeks. Rob is clear on what drives value in grocery real estate. The best sites were taken during the space race of the 1990s and 2000s. You can't get 10 acres in a residential urban location anymore. And Tesco spending £50 million to buy a single store back onto its balance sheet tells you everything about how critical these properties are to the operators. He's also pretty candid about the moments where it could have gone wrong. The internalisation was make or break. The Blue Owl JV, now at £840 million, came with real pressure. And none of it was planned. What would your strategy be for building a specialist REIT from scratch? Let us know in the comments. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/