People Property Place

Matthew Watts
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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

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

    2h ago

    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/

    1h 11m
  2. Gary Hersham, Founder at Beauchamp Estates - 45 Years Brokering London's Most Expensive Homes

    Jul 6

    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/

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

    Jun 29

    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/

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

    Jun 22

    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/

    1h 7m
  5. Stafford Lancaster, CEO at Delancey - Never Get Caught Out: Inside Delancey's 25-Year Property Run

    Jun 15

    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/

    1h 11m

  6. Jun 8

    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/

    57 min
  7. Kirsty Wilman, COO & CFO at Rebalance Earth - Why Should Real Estate Investors Care About Nature?

    May 31

    Kirsty Wilman, COO & CFO at Rebalance Earth - Why Should Real Estate Investors Care About Nature?

    This week I sat down with Kirsty Willman, CFO & COO of Rebalance Earth to ask Why Should Real Estate Investors Care About Nature? Kirsty spent 22 years in private markets finance, most recently as COO of Real Estate at Federated Hermes. She walked away from that to back a £100 billion market that nobody has properly built yet. Her view is straightforward. Flood risk is becoming impossible to insure away. Coastal erosion is outpacing the defences built to stop it. Urban temperatures are rising fast enough to change where people actually want to be. Most real estate portfolios have not started pricing any of this. We got into how Rebalance Earth finances nature restoration projects, how the returns work through service contracts, carbon credits and biodiversity net gain, and what 4 million oysters off the coast of Norfolk have to do with coastal property and offshore wind. This is not a vanilla ESG conversation; it is a conversation about portfolio risk and why you really should care about nature before it is to late. Drop your thoughts in the comments. The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers. Key Topics ✅ Why Nature Loss Is Now a Real Estate Balance Sheet Risk Not an ESG Talking Point ✅ How Rebalance Earth Underwrites Nature Restoration Like Any Other Private Markets Asset ✅ Flood Risk, Coastal Erosion and Urban Heat. The Risks Most Portfolios Have Not Priced ✅ Why Kirsty Left a Senior COO Role to Back a £100 Billion Market Nobody Has Built Yet ✅ The Revenue Model Behind Nature Based Investing and Why It Works for Institutional Capital 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/

    28 min
  8. Lord Walker, Bywater & Iceland - Building A Billion Pound Timber-Led Property Business

    May 24

    Lord Walker, Bywater & Iceland - Building A Billion Pound Timber-Led Property Business

    This week, I sat down with Lord Walker, Executive Chair of Iceland Food Group, Founder and Chairman of Bywater, and the Prime Minister's Cost of Living Champion. Richard started his property career on the JLL graduate scheme in the West End before moving to Warsaw to build a value-add business across Eastern Europe. After returning to the UK, Bywater spent several years searching for its niche before the former Costa Roastery site in Lambeth became Paradise - one of the UK's largest CLT mass timber office buildings. That project helped bring in Sumitomo Forestry, a 400-year-old Japanese partner, and gave Bywater the platform to scale into timber-led workspaces and living assets. In this conversation, Richard talks about patient capital, building through the GFC, why "long term greedy" shapes both Bywater and Iceland, how purpose and profit can sit together, and what his new role in the House of Lords means for his work around the cost of living. We also discuss Iceland's growth into a £4.5bn family-owned retailer, his year working on the shop floor, climbing Everest in 2023, and why resilience has been central to every stage of his career. ⸻ Key Topics Covered in This Episode ✅ From The West End To Warsaw Lessons from the JLL grad scheme and building in Eastern Europe through the GFC. ✅ Paradise, Vauxhall & The Mass Timber Thesis How the CLT office in Vauxhall became the deal that defined Bywater. ✅ Sumitomo And The Power Of Patient Capital Why a 400-year-old Japanese partner is rewriting how Bywater thinks about cycles and product. ✅ Scaling Beyond Offices £1 billion GDV by year end, a new pension-fund vehicle, and the move into living. ✅ Long Term Greedy Why purpose-led businesses last longer and why Gen Z is voting with their feet. [This episode was recorded on 16th April 2026] If you have thoughts or questions about this episode, drop them in the comments. I'd love to hear your take. 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/

    50 min
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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

Information

  • Creator
    Matthew Watts
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    186
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2022
  • Show Website
    People Property Place

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