People Property Place

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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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.
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.

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