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 sports finance team, funding football transfer payments, before returning to real estate.

He tells Matthew Watts why real estate isn't the old boys' club people think. He explains the difference between clearing banks, specialist banks and debt funds, how syndication and back leverage work, and how Investec's equity business, Realis, has raised and invested £100m across 10 deals using capital from its wealth and private clients.

For the £500M question, Mark would buy central London flats, having found some in Hampstead at £700 a square foot.

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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 family office on development and investment in Germany.

He tells Matthew Watts how he set up Peppermint with Henry Madden, who spent 15 years running self storage in Brazil. Harry explains that the US has more self storage sites than McDonald's and Starbucks combined, and that the UK has around 1 sq ft of self storage per person compared with 8-10 sq ft in the US. He sets out how Peppermint shares profit with landlords, uses automation so nobody needs to be on site, and breaks even at 14% occupancy. He also explains why planning is the biggest obstacle to growth.

What guests would you love to see next on PPP? Let us know in the comments.

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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 moved to Jones Lang Wootton after three months. He joined Knight Frank in 1989 and spent nearly 30 years there, moving into tenant representation and advising Swiss Re on the Gherkin. He joined CO-RE as a director in 2018 and became CEO in 2021.

Bradley explains how CO-RE is delivering Lansdowne House on Berkeley Square, a speculative development that Blackstone will occupy as its new London headquarters. He talks about what occupiers now want from their offices, how prime Mayfair rents reached £240-250 a square foot, why London remains attractive to global investors, and why CO-RE has launched an asset management business.

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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 can deliver financial returns and positive social outcomes.

He talks about the values behind Newcore, its B Corp status, its commitment to giving at least 10% of profits to charity, and his views on wealth and the responsibilities of the real estate industry. He also explains why he brought employees into the ownership of the business, and criticises how parts of the investment industry have operated since the financial crisis.

At the time of recording, Newcore was preparing to raise a £375m social infrastructure fund. That fund has since reached a £100m first close, backed by the MPs' pension scheme, a local government pension scheme and other institutional investors.

For the £500M question, Hugo imagines going back to 1792 to buy Sutherland and stop the Highland Clearances.

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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 class, and about the decision to waive £100m of rent when students were sent home during Covid.

Joe explains the demand shock of the last 18 months. Visa changes cut the number of international postgraduate students, and more students at low-tariff universities chose to live at home. Occupancy fell from 97-98% to 95%, and investors asked why Unite hadn't seen it coming.

He sets out the plan to sell around 15,000 beds, reduce from 29 cities to around 20, and move into second and third year housing through Hello Student.

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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 father, Gary Hersham of Beauchamp Estates, has been a guest on the show - and she credits her parents with her work ethic more than any knowledge of property.

Getting Huckletree from idea to its first building took three years. She raised a seed round of around £300,000 before she had a site, then spent close to a year unable to secure a lease, because she had no covenant and many landlords didn't want flexible workspace in their buildings. The first space was 2,400 sq ft in Clerkenwell, with 40 desks and one meeting room. Early on she also gave equity to a friend who helped her raise money but was never going to be operational in the business. She wouldn't do it again, because you never get that equity back.

Today Huckletree is a 50-person business with a quarter of a million square feet and more than 5,000 members, including spaces at 8 Bishopsgate and 40 Leadenhall. Gabriela's argument is that the market has moved heavily in the operators' favour. Landlords now fund the fit-out and offer management agreements, enterprise businesses treat flex as central to their workspace strategy, and occupiers sign up for 24 or 36 months, paying more than £1,000 a desk in some locations. What they're paying for is the building itself. In her words, people don't want to go to an office building anymore, they want to go to a lifestyle building.

She also talks about building a team, firing quickly when someone isn't working out, and running a business as the primary caregiver for her children. The conversation was recorded while she was on maternity leave.

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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 estate.

He spent years there building a network of family offices, first in an international role selling London property into Asian buyers, then moving into domestic commercial office leasing and transactions. At 25 or 26 he left the security of a larger firm and spent eight months from early 2019 writing a strategy for what became his own business, built on a simple observation: plenty of capital still wanted London commercial, plenty of managers operated there, but very few had a genuine Asia-centric focus. He partnered with Christopher, who had 35 years in the central London market, so the business had someone in Asia dedicated to private capital and someone in London executing the business plan.

Seven years on, Palmer Tabor Properties runs assets in London and Australia with teams across London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Zac Goodman's TSP has now taken a 50% stake in the business, which trades as PTSP. Jack's argument about Asian capital is that the British misread it. The decision makers in the Far East are dealmakers in their own right, many of whom built their wealth being inquisitive and curious, and his theory is that you're only ever two phone calls from the person who actually decides. Getting in front of them isn't easy, but it's easier than most people assume. What they're judging you on once you're there is track record: they're looking for problem solvers who bring results.

He's also open about what that costs. Around 63 flights last year, and the strain an international business puts on relationships and friendships.

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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 assets under management, having raised over £1.5bn from the UK, US, Middle East and Asia, employing nearly 100 people across ten operating partners. They sold to Fiera Capital in 2019, and Alex went on to run the combined European business before leaving in 2023 to study a masters at King's College London.

He set up Ashen Capital in 2024 with Steven Wright, a colleague of 15 years, to invest in the people investing in property. They take minority stakes in UK operating businesses, providing up to £5m of working capital alongside advice, connections and experience. Two investments so far: a land promotion business and an investment management business doing senior secured construction loans.

His argument in this conversation is about what separates a real estate entrepreneur from any other kind. In most startups you risk a laptop, an office and your reputation. In real estate the numbers are staggering, so the downside is far larger relative to the upside, and that changes what investors look for. Alex backs character before skill set, because trust is what he's actually underwriting. He also never backs a solo founder, wanting two complementary people so one drives and one reduces risk.

He walks through the mindset, skill set and character he looks for, the six steps to launching a business from concept through to launch day, and why he'd put £500m into UK residential rather than commercial.

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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 qualified as a chartered surveyor.

At Grosvenor he worked on major shopping centre developments, including a £330m scheme in Basingstoke, and built the relationships and reputation that gave him the confidence to go out on his own. He co-founded Glenbrook with former colleague Ian, setting the business up on £12,500 each while everyone else worked for favours and goodwill. Their first project took 14 months from start to finish, but by the time it was funded, Manchester had woken up to build-to-rent and sites became far harder to find. The Brexit vote in 2016 then cost the business roughly £2m in changed terms on a deal already in motion, right as they were trying to fund their first new-build scheme.

Guy's central argument in this conversation is about risk. Developers tend to focus on the risks they understand best, things like rights of light or site access, and assume institutional funders share that focus. In reality, the risks that actually move capital are the ones outside the site altogether: where the bond market sits, the cost of debt, and what the entry and exit terms look like. Understanding an investor's risk tolerance, not just your own, is what actually gets a scheme funded.

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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/

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