Tony Smedley runs the European business at Heitman, a $50bn real estate manager that's 60 years old and still owned by its partners. He's spent 30 years working across pan-European real estate - early cross-border deals out of Brussels and Paris, building businesses at Insight and Schroders, co-founding Fountain Capital - and he's seen enough cycles to have a clear view on this one.

His take is that the next three to five years will be consequential, and it's a good time to be courageous. The market's been through a rough capital markets cycle, but operating performance has stayed strong. The lesson he keeps coming back to is to stop relying on the capital markets to generate value and focus on what you can actually control: earnings, asset management, the operational performance of the business underneath the building.

That's why Heitman has spent two decades buying real estate operating companies rather than just buildings, with a deliberate tilt towards needs-based areas driven by demographics rather than GDP - living, healthcare, student housing, senior housing, self-storage. Tony's wider argument is that the lines between real estate and infrastructure are blurring, and the industry needs to start talking infrastructure's language: earnings, operations, and duration.

He's also candid about what that means for the people in the industry. The job is more operational than it's ever been, and the traditional real estate qualifications don't really prepare you for reading a P&L or running an operating business. The skill set has shifted.

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Rodney Bysh has spent 30 years operating between Germany and the UK. He set up what's now a €68bn real estate platform from a serviced office at Henderson, did M&A at Rothschild & Co, built and sold Cording Real Estate to Edmond de Rothschild, and then started again. Feldberg Capital launched at the end of 2022, merged with Brunswick Property Partners, and has grown from £500m to £2bn under management with a team of 30 across Berlin, Frankfurt and London.

The conversation covers a lot of ground, but the through line is Rodney's view that this is the best window he's seen in his career for London offices. Rents are low and growing fast, there's virtually no supply, and institutional sellers are letting go of their best assets to free up liquidity. Three years ago it was a contrarian position. Now the market's catching up, but he thinks the opportunity is still there.

He's also unusually well placed to explain the German market to a UK audience. Feldberg is one of the few platforms with genuine boots on the ground in both countries, and Rodney's bilingual background - he grew up between the UK and Germany after his family left Uganda - gives him access to a layer of local operators and developers that most London-based investors never reach.

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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.

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