People Property Place

Jack Palmer, Managing Director of PTSP and co-founder of Palmer Tabor Properties, connects Asia-Pacific capital with UK and Australian real estate. He recounts his unconventional path from Christie’s to building a cross-border investment platform. They explore reaching Asian family offices, translating investor preferences, scaling through Covid, integrated asset management, Brisbane offices, and the personal cost of 63 flights a year.

Alex Price, former British Army officer, investment banker and co-founder of Ashen Capital, shares a candid look at backing real estate entrepreneurs. They explore why character and trust matter more than technical skill, why solo founders are a red flag, and the six steps to launching a property business. Alex also reveals his investment filters, partnership lessons and where he would place £500m in UK property.

Guy Butler, co-founder of Glenbrook and former Grosvenor development executive, shares his journey from the Welsh valleys to major regeneration projects and regional property investment. He explores why developers often misread the risks investors care about, the lessons of Liverpool One, launching Glenbrook with limited capital, Brexit’s financial fallout, and finding value in overlooked retail and industrial assets.

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 father was an army colonel who wanted him to follow the same route, and Tim grew up moving between postings before boarding at Harrow from the age of six. He went into real estate instead, working his way up through agency roles at Knight Frank before taking on the property management, valuation, planning, business rates and building consultancy divisions in turn. He's candid about the timing of the new role. He'd assumed Head of Commercial would be his job until 60, and had committed to it fully, before Stephen Clifton told him a year in that he planned to leave and asked if Tim wanted to put himself forward. Taking over means running a residential business for the first time in his career, and merging two divisions that have operated largely independently to avoid duplicated costs and missed opportunities for clients. He also talks through how the partnership actually works, from the profit-sharing model to how someone becomes an equity partner, and where he'd allocate £500m of capital if he had it today, split across new talent, rural real estate and infrastructure. What guests would you love to see next on PPP? Let us know in the comments. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Art Capital & Yardi. For more on Yardi, head to: https://hubs.li/Q04wHxlH0 For more on Art Capital, head to: www.art-capital.co.uk/ LIKE - SHARE - SUBSCRIBE http://peoplepropertyplace.com/

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. 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/

Roun Barry, CEO of ESR Europe and long-time real estate investor-operator who led the 1996 MBO of Dunedin, rebuilt post-GFC and scaled into a global platform. He discusses moving into industrial assets, the £640m CMBS and the tough call that followed, rebuilding to £1bn and selling to Blackstone, then partnering with ARA and joining ESR. He closes with where he sees opportunity in European data centres.

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 offers from Hillier Parker and Jones Lang Wootton to join a four-person firm instead, because he wanted a voice with clients rather than to wait his turn at the bottom of a large organisation. He made partner within a year, helped grow that business past 100 people, and sold it in 2007. The buyer, a $5bn US title insurance business, went to nothing in 15 months. Three of them started Paragon in 2009 with 13 people in an office in Hanover Square, grew it, and sold into Colliers four years ago on a partnership model that let the owners keep skin in the game. Turnover has gone from £25m at the point of sale to £36m last year. His argument about where advisory is heading is the sharpest part of the conversation. Clients don't want brokers, and they don't want a PDF punted round the market. They want advisors who understand the business plan and what a particular building means within it. That's why he's restructured the UK business around sectors rather than service lines, and why he's clear he'll bin something he implemented last year if clients need it done differently. He's also open about the cost of a career like this. A marriage that broke down, a difficult relationship with his two eldest daughters, major surgery on his aorta last year, and losing his sister on the day of his first interview for the job he now holds. 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/

Brian Welsh, founder and CEO of OPRE Group with 21 years in operational real estate, built platforms like Knightsbridge and ThreeSixty from hands-on beginnings. He recounts mobilising delayed student housing launches, why investors underrate operations, and strategies for scaling, hiring for agency, and bridging institutional capital to operational value.

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/

Robert-Jan Foortse, Head of European Property at APG who runs a multi‑billion euro real estate portfolio, discusses APG’s strategy of backing operators not funds. He explains preferring long-term trend lines over headline noise. Topics include partnering with local operators, sector allocations like residential and data centres, and opportunities in senior living and PBSA.