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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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.

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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

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