People Property Place

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This week, I sat down with James Halstead, Managing Director and BlackRock's Chief Investment Officer for European Value Add Real Estate, for a conversation that opens with one of the most direct and challenging questions the show has ever asked. Is real estate facing an existential crisis?
James does not flinch. He gives a forensically honest answer about where real estate equity sits today relative to private credit and infrastructure, why the sector has underperformed on a risk adjusted basis over the last decade, and what that means for how smart managers need to construct portfolios going forward. It is the kind of candour that is rare from someone at his level.
His own career is a fascinating study in patience, reinvention and strategic opportunism. Starting as a lawyer at BLP, a chance six month secondment to MGP during the financial crisis became the fork in the road that changed everything. What followed was a decade of deliberate stepping stones, going sideways and sometimes backwards, learning debt, development, asset management and acquisitions from the coalface up, until the breadth of that foundation became the very thing that set him apart.
We explore how Brexit, far from derailing his career, became the catalyst for building businesses in Ireland and Spain and ultimately broadening the BlackRock European platform in ways that would not have happened otherwise. James is candid about the role of serendipity versus strategy in how careers actually develop, and why the difference matters less than people think.
The conversation also tackles the talent gap that keeps him up at night. What happens to ambitious professionals in their early thirties when their managers stop investing in their development, and why the industry is quietly producing a generation of people who have plateaued without knowing it.
And of course, I asked James 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
✅ Is Real Estate Facing an Existential Crisis in Private Markets?
✅ Why Real Estate Equity Has Underperformed and What Needs to Change
✅ From Lawyer to BlackRock CIO. The Stepping Stone Career Nobody Planned
✅ How Brexit Became the Catalyst for Building Across Europe
✅ The Talent Development Gap That Is Quietly Damaging the Industry
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 Rishi Bhuchar, CEO of CBRE UK and Ireland, for a conversation that is as much about who he is as a person as it is about what he has built across one of the most decorated careers in real estate investment banking.
Rishi's story starts in a way that most people in this industry would not expect. Parents who arrived from India in the 1960s with nothing, a childhood where money was scarce and fitting in was hard, and a career that began not with a burning ambition for real estate but with a scramble for a summer placement and a salary that felt like life changing money.
What followed was three decades of building, leaving, returning and building again across Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Ernst & Young, MGPA and Jefferies. Along the way he led the $65 billion Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield deal, the largest real estate transaction ever done in Europe, took Jefferies from unranked to number one in UK real estate M&A in five years, and quietly funded schools in India, yoga classes for pensioners and homeless people in London, all without telling anyone.
We discuss what it actually felt like to walk into CBRE not knowing a single one of the 3,500 people in the business, why his wife predicted he would run a business long before he ever thought about it himself, and the leadership principles he has carried since his earliest days in banking when he learned how not to do things just as much as how to do them.
And of course, I asked Rishi the big question: Who are the People, what Property, and which Place would he invest in if he had £500 million to deploy? 
Drop your thoughts in the comments.

We would love to hear your take.

Key Topics
✅ His Early Career, the Moves, the Lessons and Reflections
✅ The Mammoth $65 Billion Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield Deal
✅ How Rishi Took Jefferies From Unranked to Number One in Five Years
✅ Why He Walked into CBRE Not Knowing a Single Person in the Business
✅ A Five-Point Leadership Philosophy: Clients, Margin, Data, Accountability, and Fun
✅ The 90% Stat About Fatherhood That Made Him Reassess Everything
✅ Receiving an MBE for Private Long-Term Support of Charities like Magic Breakfast
✅ Analysing the Current Market and Opportunities in Public Real Estate Securities
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.
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