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.

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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.

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Roun Barry moved to the UK from South Africa in 1986, aged 26, using the trip as both a career test and an act of defiance against the politics of the time. He trained as a lawyer but went into real estate instead, working as a partner at Jones Lang Wootton and then running the UK portfolio at ING Real Estate.

In 1996, he led a management buyout of the Dunedin business from ING, backed by the Royal Bank of Scotland. The business grew, and by 2006 he had built roughly £700m of industrial property, all backed by RBS money, and completed what was at the time the largest private CMBS in the market, a £640m deal.

Then the GFC hit. As interest rates rose and values fell, Roun made the call to warn the 200 bondholders holding the CMBS that there was a problem, hoping to work through it together. Almost none of them understood the underlying industrial estates the debt was secured against, no one could agree on a solution, and the structure went into administration. He calls it the biggest mistake of his career. In hindsight, he says he has no regret, because it cleared the decks while many of his contemporaries spent years tied up in negotiations with banks.

He rebuilt from a blank sheet of paper between 2010 and 2016, got back to roughly £1bn of assets under management, and sold the industrial portfolio to Blackstone. From there he joined ARA Europe in 2018 in a joint venture that combined his local expertise with ARA's access to international capital. ARA later merged with ESR, and Roun now runs ESR Europe as part of one of the largest real estate investment managers in the world.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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