People Property Place

This week, I sat down with Mark Russell, CIO and Head of Real Estate at Federated Hermes, for a conversation about what it really means to build a career on first principles, and why that philosophy is becoming more valuable in today's market than it has been in years.
Mark's route into real estate began with a week of work experience organised by his headmaster, driving around the southeast in a sports car looking at office buildings. He was 17. It is a story that says something important about how the industry finds its people, and more pointedly, about how many people it never finds at all.
What followed was a career built across some of the most formative environments in UK real estate. JLL in the nineties, Legal and General managing institutional mandates, and then Prestbury Holdings where working closely with Nick Leslau taught him a set of disciplines that have stayed with him ever since. It is better to be bored than bust. Know why you are doing what you are doing. And collect the rent.
We discuss his arrival at Federated Hermes, what he found when he got there, and the patient process of listening, questioning and recalibrating that any leader needs to go through before they can move an organisation forward. Mark is refreshingly honest about what that looks like in practice and why asking dumb questions is one of the most underrated tools a CIO has.
The conversation then turns to the Federated Hermes business itself. An integrated platform spanning development, asset management and operations, with MEPC, one of the UK's most storied development businesses, sitting at its centre. Mark makes a compelling case for why that combination is exactly what the market needs right now, and why 82% of the total return from real estate over the past 40 years has come from income rather than capital growth.
And of course, I asked Mark the big question:
Who are the People, what Property, and which Place would you invest in if you had £500 million to deploy?
Drop your thoughts in the comments. We would love to hear your take.
Key Topics
✅ Nick Leslau, Prestbury and the Discipline of Knowing When to Sell
✅ Why Property Management Is the Most Undervalued Part of the Industry
✅ How to Lead an Organisation Through Uncertainty Without Losing the Team
✅ The Case for Income Over Capital Growth in the Current Cycle
✅ Why Urban Regeneration and Brownfield Sites Are the Biggest Opportunity in UK Real Estate
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.
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This week, I sat down with Justin Hildebrandt, Senior Managing Director and Head of Europe at Affinius Capital, to explore a career that began on construction sites in Napa Valley and has taken him to the forefront of one of the most quietly formidable real estate platforms operating in Europe today.
Justin's path into real estate was shaped early. A father in construction, summers spent on job sites, and a year in Germany as a 16-year-old exchange student that he credits with permanently expanding his ambitions and ultimately pulling him back to Europe decades later. That move to London on the day of the Brexit vote, intended as a short term expat stint, is now approaching a decade.
We discuss the journey from USAA Real Estate, where Justin joined a 3 billion dollar business in 2011 and helped grow it to the 62 billion dollar platform it is today, and what that kind of growth actually requires in terms of creativity, discipline and the willingness to pivot into new strategies before the market catches up. Justin is candid about how the business got there and why AUM for its own sake was never the point.
The conversation unpacks each of Affinius Capital's European strategies in detail. The Mount Park logistics platform that started with a handful of transactions and became a wholly owned pan-European business. The data centre strategy in West London that took three years to get through planning and is now a 140 megawatt site. The living strategy built in partnership with Package Living. And a credit platform that has grown to around 20 billion dollars of AUM globally and is increasingly active in Europe at exactly the right point in the cycle.
Justin also shares a perspective on the European market that is genuinely unusual. Having sat on the global investment committee and seen both sides of the Atlantic in real time, he makes a striking observation about where Europe now sits relative to the US in the current recovery.
And of course, I asked Justin the big question:
Who are the People, what Property, and which Place would you invest in if you had £500 million to deploy?
Drop your thoughts in the comments. We would love to hear your take.
Key Topics
✅ From Napa Valley to a Decade in London. The Career That Followed Opportunity Wherever It Led
✅ Growing a Business From $3Bn to $62Bn. What It Actually Takes
✅ Mount Park, Data Centres, Living and Credit. Inside the Affinius Capital European Platform
✅ Why Europe May Be Leading the US for the First Time in Several Cycles
✅ AI, Heat Mapping and the Future of Smarter Real Estate Decision Making
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.
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This week, I sat down with Mark Bourgeois, Chief Executive of the Government Property Agency, for a conversation that bridges the worlds of private sector real estate and public sector purpose in a way that very few guests on this show ever could.
Mark's journey into real estate began not through a carefully planned career move but through a rugby sevens team at Donaldson's in Leeds. What followed was 25 years at the sharp end of the retail property industry, from running shopping centre teams at Capital Regional through to managing director roles at Hammerson, navigating two of the most turbulent periods the sector has ever seen. The Global Financial Crisis and the structural disruption of COVID taught him things about leadership under pressure that no business school could.
We discuss what it really feels like to lead a three billion pound business through a fight for survival, why staying close to your North Star matters more than ever when the ground is shifting beneath you, and how Mark's unusually broad grounding in finance shaped a career that consistently put him ahead of the curve in a sector famous for siloed thinking.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Mark explains what drew him from the private sector into public sector leadership, first at Liverpool City Council during one of the most challenging periods in its modern history, and then to the GPA. He is candid about what surprised him, what frustrated him, and what has genuinely inspired him about leading a 500 person organisation with a mandate to transform how government uses its estate across the UK.
Mark also shares his thinking on AI and why he believes every leader has a personal responsibility to get deep into the technology rather than delegating it to someone else in the organisation.
And of course, I asked Mark the big question:
Who are the People, what Property, and which Place would you invest in if you had £500 million to deploy?
Drop your thoughts in the comments. We would love to hear your take.
Key Topics
✅ From Rugby Sevens to Real Estate. The Unlikely Career Origin Story
✅ Leading Through the Global Financial Crisis and the Retail Collapse
✅ What the Public Sector Teaches You About Leadership That the Private Sector Cannot
✅ Inside the Government Property Agency. The Mission, the Portfolio and the Opportunity
✅ Why Every Leader Must Be a Digital Leader Right Now
 
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.
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This week, I sat down with James Jacobs, Managing Director and Global Head of Real Assets within the Private Capital Advisory team at Lazard, to explore the topic Real Asset Capital Formation: Who Wins?
In this conversation, James opens with a striking assessment of where the market actually stands. Fundraising volumes rose for the first time in four years in 2025, up 27% year on year. But the headline number masks a far more complex story. The market has never been more concentrated, more competitive or more unforgiving for managers who don't understand what investors are really looking for today.
James breaks down the three sectors attracting the lion's share of capital, why 1 in 3 dollars raised last year went into a single asset class, and why two sectors that dominated the industry when he started his career over 25 years ago are now considered niche. He also shares a clear and candid view on what distinguishes the managers who are winning capital from those who are not, and why the answer comes back to something surprisingly simple.
We then explore three structural trends that James believes will define the industry for years to come. The bifurcation of the market into mega funds and hyper-specialists, the rapid rise of secondaries and continuation vehicles as a portfolio management tool, and the blurring of the lines between real estate and infrastructure that is quietly redirecting billions of dollars across asset class boundaries.
🎯 Key Topics
✅ Global Fundraising in 2025. Recovery or Illusion?
✅ The Three Sectors Dominating Capital Formation Right Now
✅ Why the Squeezed Middle Is Getting Squeezed Even Further
✅ Secondaries and Continuation Vehicles. Powerful Tool or Manager Lifeline?
✅ The Convergence of Real Estate and Infrastructure and What It Means for Your Capital
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.
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This week on People Property Place, we do something different. Recorded live on the ground at Mipim in Cannes, this episode is the first of a new format: People Property Place Profiles. Where I walk and talk with some of the most outspoken and influential figures across the real assets industry.

This week's conversation features Shaun Simons, co-founder of Compton, whose previous episode held the number one download spot on the show for nearly two years. Recorded in the middle of one of the industry's biggest annual gatherings, Shaun is characteristically unfiltered, direct and full of conviction.

The conversation opens with Shaun making a bold call — he is more optimistic about the market right now than he has been since 2021. He breaks down the three specific forces he believes are converging to make 2026 a genuinely pivotal year for the London office market, and why the narrative of an industry circling the drain is finally starting to shift.

Shaun also takes aim at one of commercial property's biggest blind spots — the industry's chronic failure to communicate with the people it is actually trying to do business with — and explains why he believes the big surveying firms have been getting this fundamentally wrong for years.

The discussion turns to the role of personal brand and social media in building a real estate business, where Shaun shares a remarkable story about how four years of consistent LinkedIn activity resulted in a 40,000 sq ft instruction he never had to pitch for. He also reveals that he attributes somewhere between 25 and 30% of Compton's total revenue directly to social media.

Finally Shaun shares his outlook for the year ahead, why he believes the stars are aligning for a genuine market recovery and what keeps him up at night as he leads a growing team of over 30 people.

Drop your thoughts in the comments. We would 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/