Allan Lockhart, CEO at NewRiver REIT - Retail Was a Dirty Word but Now It's the Top Performer.

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, opening the post and making the coffee.

He stayed 14 years, working leasing, development and capital advisory, before joining his father's business, Halladale, to set up its London office in 2000. Halladale listed on AIM in 2001 and sold to a large Australian REIT in early 2007 for around £170m, just months before the financial crisis hit. Allan and his father then founded NewRiver later that year, betting that the UK REIT market would follow the US model into sector specialisation.

The years since have tested that bet. Retail spent the best part of a decade written off as a dying sector, hit hard by the rise of online shopping and then by Covid. Allan's argument is that the winners in online retail turned out to be the omnichannel operators - retailers like Next and Marks & Spencer who use their stores to fulfil online orders - rather than the pure online players, and that's driven demand for physical space back up while supply has kept tightening. NewRiver leaned into that rather than chasing the shift into logistics that much of the market made, built out its research and data capability, and is now one of the best-performing listed real estate stocks in the UK.

He's also candid about lessons learned. Ten years ago he was too focused on the detail of individual assets and not focused enough on the macro, and today he watches gilt yields move on the back of geopolitical headlines as closely as anything happening inside his own portfolio.

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