People Property Place

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.
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Brian Welsh came into real estate through a side door. He'd been a Butlins Redcoat warming up crowds for Little and Large, a ski rep in Italy moving 5,000 people a week between hotels, then a health club manager launching gyms for Fitness First and David Lloyd. In 2005, while drumming up membership for a new club in Newcastle, he walked into what looked like a block of flats to pitch a corporate deal. It was a 695-bed student building, running late, contractor gone bust, universities up in arms, no reservations taken. He told the CEO that launching it was no different to opening a hotel at the start of a ski season. They shook hands more or less on the spot.
What followed is the argument that runs through the whole conversation. He painted 60 of the bedrooms himself to get it finished, appointed his own cleaning contractors, wrote the lettings spreadsheet, and ran a system of about 50 in-trays to track every application through the process. When the sewage leak flooded the underground safe, security guards dried 50 pound notes with hairdryers on the common room floor. That grounding is why he thinks the operation is the part investors underestimate: if you miss the EBITDA plan, yield compression isn't there to bail you out.
From there it's Liberty Living in the Gherkin, then a decision that had people asking if he'd lost it - leaving a 2bn business and 100 staff for a basement in Fitzrovia and a startup with no assets. That became Knightsbridge Student Housing and ThreeSixty, four founders and 17,000 beds in seven years, first movers into Ireland, Spain and France. It ended with the four of them standing in a circle making each other redundant one by one, everything returned to investors. Then Nido and Round Hill, agreed over a drink at a conference and explained to his wife the next morning with a hangover. He founded OPRE in 2023 to do the same job from the other side, as what he calls a strategic enabler - the layer that lets institutional capital access operational cash flows while being insulated from the noise.
He's good on the sector arguments too. Why institutions once wanted a single 25-year covenant and thought 900 student tenancies were the risk, and why Debenhams and Virgin settled that. Why a residential team panicking at 95% occupancy should look at the Oxford Street unit sitting empty for five years with a £5m refurb bill. And why the thing he hires for isn't a CV but agency - people who see a problem and fix it.
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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.
The People Property Place Podcast is powered by Rockbourne, recruiting leadership talent for real estate funds, owners, investors, and developers.
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