People Property Place

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/

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/

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/

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/

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.
🔊 LIKE ➡ SHARE ➡ SUBSCRIBE 👉 http://peoplepropertyplace.com/