People Property Place

Three weeks before this conversation, Rick de Blaby left Get Living after a decade running it. This is a look back over a 46-year career, and over the business he built from the Olympic Village into one of the UK's first institutional build-to-rent platforms.
When Delancey and Qatari Diar bought the Athletes' Village off the government, the word "BTR" wasn't even in the lexicon yet. Rick got the call, said "when can I start" in a heartbeat, and set about building a vertically integrated investor, developer and operator from scratch - even the repair crews had Get Living on their shirts. It grew from around 1,000 units to 6,500 during his tenure, writing the manual as it went, backed by APG, Delancey, Qatari, Aware Super and Oxford Properties.
He's clear-eyed about the hard parts. Running rental stock at scale is an ultramarathon, relentless in a way deal-led businesses aren't. Then came the Building Safety Act after Grenfell - right in principle, he says, but badly drafted, landing the bill on freeholders like Get Living for buildings the government had built. That fight has run all the way to the Supreme Court, and his position is blunt: Get Living never refused to remediate, but it didn't build, design or contract the buildings, and it's litigating to make the people who did pay for it.
There's the wider market too - why London built under 5,000 homes last year against a target of 88,000, why fixing planning alone won't open the taps, and why the government needs to understand how global capital actually chooses where to go. And there's the personal side: a son in Canada, a grandson, a wife telling him not to leave the other things too late, and a man three weeks into working out what comes next.
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Robert-Jan Foortse has been at APG for 23 years - he warned the man who hired him he'd probably get bored and leave within 3. He'd only been available because Arthur Andersen collapsed after Enron, and the job came out of sharing a cab back to the airport with the head of real estate at ABP. Today he runs the European property portfolio and sits on the investment committee at a pension investor with around €600bn under management, just over €50bn of it in property, run by 55 people.
That headcount only works because APG doesn't manage anything itself. Every position sits alongside a local operating partner handling the leasing, financing and day-to-day. His framing is horse racing - back a blind pool fund and you're picking the jockey, and APG would rather pick the horses. After the GFC they cut the number of positions, wrote much bigger cheques, insisted on governance rights, and moved away from traditional fund managers towards operators like citizenM, McArthurGlen and The Social Hub.
People building businesses, rather than collecting rent and charging a fee for it. What that's produced isn't the portfolio you'd guess. Offices are 1% of the European book, on the logic that a good office pitch is exactly where a council will happily consent the tower next door. Residential is close to 40%.
They spent a long time trying to buy into European data centres, got outbid on one and couldn't agree terms on the other, then worked out they already owned the exposure - roughly 30% of Digital Realty and Equinix by assets sits in Europe. His sense-check for that sort of thing is his mother, a retired teacher, 91 this summer and an ABP pensioner. She doesn't care which regional portfolio it's parked in.
What guests would you love to see next on PPP? Let us know in the comments.
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Andrew Jones describes himself as a capital allocator first and a property person second. He was buying shares and reading Buffett and Munger as a teenager, long before he'd heard of a chartered surveyor, and he still thinks of a building as a widget - a tool for putting capital somewhere it'll be treated well.
He was once asked by the man who developed the Trafford Centre what his ambitions for LondonMetric were. Andrew said he'd like it to be one of the better companies in the sector and a good place to work. The reply was: what about the biggest? Fifteen years on, LondonMetric is a FTSE 100 REIT with a £7.6bn portfolio, and Andrew's view is that size was the outcome of the strategy rather than the strategy itself.
The strategy is triple net, and it's deliberately low energy. Buy assets that are mission critical to the occupier, let them on a full repairing and insuring lease, then leave them alone - LondonMetric owns buildings it hasn't spent money on in fifteen years. It runs on 54 people with no HR department, and Andrew has never run an IRR to justify a purchase because anyone can juice the numbers by guessing an exit yield. He's blunt too about the incentives around him: the lawyers, the bankers, the agents and the recruiters all get paid when he's busy, and the rent turns up either way.
He talks through the trip to the Berkshire Hathaway AGM in Omaha that pushed him off the British Land board at 41 with three young kids and a mortgage, why the Christmas his wife did all her shopping online sent him into logistics, and why he thinks the listed sector today is really just a five-year swap business.
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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.
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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.
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