The UK student accommodation and build-to-rent markets have followed in the image of their American cousins over the past decade, and Greystar has been a leader in that movement, buying and building at a scale few others can match.

Mark Allnutt has been at the heart of Greystar’s European growth since joining in 2014, helping build its UK multifamily platform before taking leadership of the region. Today, South Carolina-based Greystar operates more than 93,000 homes and beds across eight markets in Europe, with more than 1,700 team members. 

Now Allnut is driving Greystar’s next phase. In 2026, the business raised €2.7B for its second European value-add fund, giving it significant capital to deploy. And in the UK, it is pivoting away from its previous strategy of high-rise BTR blocks in city centres. 

Greystar’s garden-style rental strategy targets up to 20,000 UK homes over four years, starting at Waterbeach near Cambridge, with ambitions to scale across Europe.

Away from work, Allnut enjoys spending time with family and friends, countryside walks, running, golf and live music. He reads spy novels, is learning padel and watches any sport.

If you’re an overseas investor looking to build something in the UK, the chances are you’re going to partner with David Camp.

The list of Stanhope’s partners and backers is a who’s who of global institutions, including Mitsui Fudosan, Mitsubishi Estate, OTTP and AIMCo of Canada, and, most recently, Norges Bank, which drafted the company to boost its London and Paris returns.

The list of developments Camp has led is equally impressive — White City Place and Television Centre, 8 Bishopsgate, Bloomberg’s London HQ and, most recently, the extension of the British Library. 

Camp joined Stanhope in 1987 and was appointed a director in 1990, managing director in 1995 and CEO in 2002. 

He spent nine years at Donaldsons, now part of Cushman & Wakefield, including five years as a partner, and was responsible for commercial property development, acquisition, investment and leasing in the south-east of England. 

Outside work, Camp enjoys spending time in nature on the Isle of Wight with his family.

As the office market took a tumble in the wake of the pandemic and elevated interest rates, Great Portland Estates CEO Toby Courtauld didn’t just let the inevitable happen. 

Plenty of office REITs had dipped a toe into the flex office market without ever truly embracing it, but Courtauld went the whole way, creating a 650K SF flex office business, where some rents are now topping £200 per SF. The plan is to increase that to 1M SF, alongside a traditional business refurbishing older offices to become larger corporate HQs.

Courtauld joined GPE in April 2002 as CEO after 11 years at developer MEPC. He leads GPE's Sustainability Committee and said he is proud of the industry-leading work the company is doing in embedding the principles of the circular economy through, for example, the reuse of building materials.

He has previously been president and a board member of the British Property Federation and its Policy Committee, as well as a member of the council of Imperial College London and chair of its Property Committee. He is director of The New West End Company and a nonexecutive director of Liv-ex Ltd, a fine wine exchange.

He is a sailor, runner, amateur pianist and ballet fan with a soft spot for Cornwall and Britain’s extraordinary coastline.

As the newly installed CEO of build-to-rent pioneer Get Living, Kate Freer takes over at a pivotal time for the company. It is no longer in rapid build-out mode, having developed a 6,200-home empire valued at £2.9B. The focus now is on operations, management and possibly adding scale. 

Prior to joining Get Living, Freer spent 12 years at Realstar, where she played a leading role in establishing and growing the company’s UK and Ireland platform. She was instrumental in building its UK multifamily business and the Uncle residential brand from the ground up, helping to create a significant portfolio of rental homes.

Before Realstar, she spent a decade at Blackstone, where she worked across a diverse range of major real estate investments and operating platforms, including NHP, Nido, Center Parcs, Logicor, MultiRetail and Chiswick Park.

Outside of work, she likes to keep fit by running and doing Pilates. She also enjoys playing tennis and padel with her children and friends.

Under the leadership of CEO Helen Gordon, Grainger has been transformed from a slightly odd assortment of residential assets into the only true listed BTR owner and developer in the UK.

One of the largest rented residential owners in the country, Grainger’s BTR portfolio is worth just shy of £3B, totalling more than 10,000 homes, with a £1.2B portfolio still to build out.

It is the latest chapter in a distinguished career, in which she previously held senior property positions at Legal & General Investment Management, Railtrack and John Laing Developments, building everything from City landmarks to new railway stations.

This is combined with an extensive knowledge of the City. Gordon is the senior independent nonexecutive director of Derwent London, a nonexecutive director of BusinessLDN and chair of EPRA. She was also a member of the New Towns Taskforce and is past president of the British Property Federation, now merged into Real Estate:UK .

Gordon enjoys visiting Cornwall, messing about on boats, theatre and food.

Before Bill Hughes took over as head of real estate at L&G in January 2008, the property divisions of big UK institutional investors were sleepy places, hoping to passively track indexes when it came to performance, rarely straying beyond traditional asset classes.

Hughes changed all that, making L&G a major player in residential, pioneering in asset classes like BTR and affordable housing, taking it abroad for the first time, and leading take-private deals and forays into life sciences. 

Eventually rising to global head of private markets, he grew the business from £7B in assets under management in UK real estate to more than £70B across a range of international private markets, winning awards for investment performance, innovation and sustainability — he instilled a desire to have a positive social impact as well as make money.

Having decided to leave L&G, Hughes is building a portfolio of roles as chair, nonexecutive director, adviser and consultant, adding value to the sector from a different perspective. 

Hughes has also held several industry roles and is chair of the Property Industry Alliance. His interests include hiking, cycling, fishing, politics and history.

The volume and variety of deals Brad Hyler has led at Brookfield is startling: £32B in Europe and counting, including the 2016 purchase of Student Roost, which Brookfield doubled in size and then sold for £3.4B last year.

Hyler is co-president of Brookfield’s Real Estate Group and head of real estate in Europe, responsible for overseeing real estate activities globally and investments, strategy and portfolio management in Europe for the world’s second-biggest real estate manager.

Prior to joining Brookfield in 2011, Hyler held various positions at O’Connor Capital Partners and JLL. In his spare time, he enjoys snowboarding, live music and exercising.

Where to start with a man who built an entire new district of London out of hundreds of acres of abandoned docks?

Sir George Iacobescu came to the UK in 1987 to lead Canary Wharf, transforming it into Europe’s largest urban regeneration project and helping establish London as a global financial centre in the years after the big bang financial liberalisation of the city. 

During his 35-year tenure at Canary Wharf Group, he oversaw more than 30M SF of development across east London, the City and South Bank.

Iacobescu is now executive chairman of St John’s Wood Square, which will be one of the last large-scale prime residential developments in Westminster, and is still a key influence on London development: He advises the Qatar Investment Authority and Qatar National Bank and also advised JPMorgan Chase on its recently announced plan to build London’s largest-ever office — in Canary Wharf, of course. 

He has held numerous public, business, charitable and cultural appointments, including the British Museum, Royal College of Music and Teach First. He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and knighted in 2011 for services to charity, community and financial services.

Iacobescu is a Chelsea supporter and likes cigars, jazz, opera and going to Italy.

In a world where the UK’s listed property companies are being picked off slowly but surely by private equity firms and larger U.S. rivals, Andrew Jones decided to become a predator rather than prey. 

As CEO, he has turned LondonMetric Property into a FTSE 100 company and gradually pivoted its strategy to become the UK’s leading triple-net-lease REIT. Spend even a short time in his presence, and he will expound the virtues of compound interest over time, a mantra he picked up from investing heroes Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. 

Under his leadership, the company has grown considerably with the takeover of six listed real estate companies.

Today LondonMetric’s portfolio totals £8B, invested across the logistics, grocery and hospitality sectors. 

He has led the company since 2013 after the £800M merger between Metric Property and London & Stamford. In 2010, he floated Metric Property in a £190M initial public offering. He was previously a director at British Land, from 2005, following its £811M acquisition of Pillar Property.   

Outside of work, Jones loves his family, friends and travelling. He is a passionate Welshman and loves football: Fulham FC, Manchester United and Merthyr Town FC. He also plays golf, listens to business podcasts and enjoys reading anything on, of course, Buffett and Munger.

It is no mean feat keeping an 800-year-old company on the cutting edge of innovation. But that is what Dan Labbad has achieved since taking over as CEO of The Crown Estate in 2019. 

Labbad has presided over several significant milestones, including returning £3.6B to the Treasury over the last six years, supporting the passing of the Crown Estate Act 2025 to provide new investment and borrowing powers, and building a significant development pipeline across the science and housing sectors.

Last year, the crown struck a JV with Labbad’s former company, Lendlease, that could see it build out the Aussie firm’s £24B development pipeline. And the company has also led the way in terms of cutting carbon emissions from retrofits and development. 

In addition to his role at The Crown Estate, Labbad is a nonexecutive director of Raspberry Pi Holdings. He enjoys spending time with his daughter and coding, and he has completed a master’s in computer science from the University of Bath. 

When no one else wanted anything to do with London offices, Orion, led by Aref Lahham, took a bold swing.

It developed a 500K SF spec office in the City next to St Paul’s Cathedral and struck a JV with Helical to kick-start development of a 195K SF scheme nearby. The reward? A lease to HSBC at the former, one of the largest and most valuable in City history, and the £333M sale of the latter building to occupier State Street.

It is just the latest in a series of spectacularly timed calls for Lahham, who began work life as an engineer, in a career spanning 39 years, such as selling Orion’s entire portfolio just before the onset of the 2008 crash and going big into southern European residential and hospitality before its private equity peers.  

Orion, a pan-European real estate private equity firm, was established in 1999 and has been responsible for more than €12B of property investments throughout Europe. 

Outside of work, Lahham enjoys playing golf and tennis and is an avid sailor.

People often bemoan the lack of ambition and originality in the real estate industry today. That’s not a criticism you can level at Lloyd Lee and Yoo Capital, the firm he co-founded with John Hitchcox and serves as managing partner.

Not for Yoo a bland, monocultural scheme comprising just offices or cookie-cutter BTR apartments.

The company is reimagining 40 acres of London, including Olympia, Camden Film Quarter, Saville Theatre & Hotel and Shepherd's Bush Market/Goldhawk Labs.

Olympia alone comprises offices, exhibition space, a hotel, theatre, music venues, bars and restaurants, and an arts school. Camden Film Quarter and the Saville Theatre also put the arts at the centre of major development projects. While arts venues are on the decline in London, the company is using them as drivers of commercial schemes. 

Lloyd serves on Harvard Learn to Fish Christian Research Endowment Fund and two London civic boards to promote accessible economic opportunity.  

Ric Lewis is one of Europe’s most prolific opportunistic investors and business builders. As executive chairman and chief investment officer, he built Tristan Capital Partners into an investment management firm with €16B of assets under management across the UK and continental Europe. 

He founded the firm in 2009, following the blueprint he established at Curzon Capital, the €20B real estate private equity company he built up before selling in 2008.

Tristan Capital is jointly owned with New York Life Company but autonomously managed by its principals, with 180-plus members of staff in seven locations across Europe.

In 2009, Lewis founded The Black Heart Foundation, dedicated to improving educational access, quality and outcomes for underprivileged young people. The foundation has provided educational scholarships to more than 850 students at 160 institutions, completing 155 degrees, courses, training and education programmes throughout the UK and U.S.

Lewis was appointed chair of The Crown Estate in July 2025 and has helped the 800-year-old company stay at the cutting edge of real estate. 

A project the size of the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station never has a single key individual. But if you had to pin down one driving force behind what has been one of London’s biggest regeneration projects of the last decade, it would be Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin.

As you wander past the buzzing offices of Apple, the shopping centre full of trendy stores and through busy bars and restaurants, it can be hard to remember that before it was bought by a consortium of Malaysian investors in 2012, Battersea was a wreck: beautiful, iconic, but full of rubble and falling masonry. 

Liew, who founded developer SP Setia and became the first chairman of the Battersea Power Station Development Company, saw past that and committed up to £9B to restore the power station and build residential and offices around it. 

It may not have made the profit that was originally hoped, but the market has moved significantly since the luxury residential boom of 2012-2016. The architecture of the new residential space isn’t to everyone’s taste. But it is a project no UK developer would touch, and Liew and his Malaysian partners have backed it to the hilt.

As the UK’s sole pure-play listed student accommodation company, Unite is a bellwether for the health of the industry. Recent drops in its occupancy levels have shone a light on the issues facing developers across the sector, and its pivot toward stronger universities, selling off noncore assets, is indicative of the general direction of the industry. 

In that sense, CEO Joe Lister is one of the key figures in a sector that has been one of property’s success stories despite those recent challenges.

Lister joined Unite in 2002 and has helped shape the company's growth across a variety of roles, including 16 years as chief financial officer. He is also chair of the RE:UK Student Living Board and a member of EPRA's advisory board. 

Unite has a portfolio totalling about 72,000 beds in more than 200 properties across the UK. 

Under Lister's leadership, Unite has established joint ventures with Newcastle University and Manchester Metropolitan University, which will develop more than 4,300 student beds on campus. He also led the acquisition of Empiric Student Property, extending the offer to a wider group of students. 

When Eastdil Secured set up its London office in 2010, few thought it would be able to break the European stranglehold of global names like CBRE and JLL or blue-blooded domestic grandees like Savills and Knight Frank. 

But under the indefatigable leadership of Jim McCaffrey, the firm did just that, becoming the go-to broker when it comes to big capital markets sales and debt financings in the old world. 

It leveraged relationships with U.S. clients like Blackstone and Brookfield but won a place in the hearts of European clients, too, bringing the New York hustle and financial acumen to the UK and Europe, with McCaffrey leading the charge at every turn. Standout deals include leading the €12.25B sale of Blackstone’s Logicor European logistics platform to CIC in 2017 and, more recently, the £3.4B sale of Student Roost to Greystar and GIC on behalf of Brookfield. 

McCaffrey is now on the executive board of Savills following the UK firm’s £827M purchase of Eastdil earlier this year and serves as the joint company's president and head of UK-Europe.

McCaffrey joined Eastdil in February 2007, opening the Boston office for the firm. This followed a six-year career at Trammell Crow as principal and a 15-year career with Meredith & Grew, where he was a partner. He is a graduate of Holy Cross College and was an NBA draft pick of the Phoenix Suns. He sits on several charitable boards in the U.S. and the UK.

Jo McNamara is fresh into one of the biggest jobs in UK real estate, having started as CEO of British Land in September. She joined from Oxford Properties, where she was executive vice president of Europe and Asia, rising to run the two regions after being one of Oxford’s first team members in London when she joined in 2010.

The move to BL is something of a full-circle moment for McNamara — her first deal at Oxford in 2010 was a joint venture with British Land on the Leadenhall Building, which was bought, developed, leased and ultimately sold for £1.15B in 2017, delivering record profits. She led more than £10B of deals for the Canadian pension fund, helping it to become one of the most important investors in UK real estate. Another standout trade was the acquisition of M7 in 2020, Oxford’s first platform deal and an innovative transaction for a pension plan. 

Outside work, McNamara enjoys spending time with her children, family and friends in Wales, generally keeping fit — playing netball, walking, yoga — and reading, preferably on the beach.

When AXA Investment Management, as it was then, pushed the button on the 1.3M SF 22 Bishopsgate office development just a month after the UK voted to leave the EU, it may have been the gutsiest decision in UK real estate in the last 10 years. 

But the call has been spectacularly vindicated — the building is now one of the most valuable in the UK.

And since then, under the leadership of Global Real Estate co-Head John O’Driscoll, the company, now renamed BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts, has become one of the preeminent forces in UK and European real estate. 

Since joining the firm in 2018, O’Driscoll has played a leading role in bringing forward landmark projects, including its latest big office bet, 50 Fenchurch Street, a net-zero office development scheduled for completion in 2028. 

His track record also includes the acquisition of Kadans Science Partner, establishing a major European life sciences platform, and its subsequent joint venture with Canary Wharf Group to develop One North Quay, an 823K SF life sciences research and development building. 

More recently, he oversaw the acquisitions of Elstree Studios and Bry-sur-Marne Studios in Paris, expanding the platform into new growth sectors, as well as Dolphin Square, one of the UK’s largest private residential schemes, ahead of a major refurbishment and brown-to-green modernisation.

Outside work, O’Driscoll is married with three children and supports several charitable causes, with a particular focus on elderly care, children living in poverty and conservation. He has a broad interest in the arts, particularly theatre and live music, and enjoys a variety of sports, fitness, travel, good food and wine.

The real (estate) king of the north? Chris Oglesby proves you don’t have to be in London to make a profit and a difference in UK property. 

Oglesby has been CEO of Manchester-based Bruntwood since 1999. Today, he leads Bruntwood, Bruntwood SciTech and Bruntwood Places, with the majority of its assets in the north-west and Midlands.

Bruntwood SciTech is the UK’s leading developer of innovation districts and specialist science and technology environments, with a £1.5B, 5.6M SF portfolio in a joint venture with L&G. Bruntwood Places manages a £240M workspace portfolio alongside an £84M regeneration portfolio with Trafford Council and Bury Council.

Oglesby has long championed the role businesses can play in creating thriving cities and communities and is involved in partnerships focused on driving regional growth and innovation. He is chair of the Manchester Business Sounding Board, interim chair of Innovation Greater Manchester and a board member of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. 

Many people made Argent’s King’s Cross Central the huge success it is today, but David Partridge was there for the whole journey and played a fundamental part in making it perhaps the most admired and cited development in Europe in the past 20 years. 

Partridge saw the possibility in a postindustrial area that was a byword for crime, boldly made the first thing built there a university, and persuaded Google to build its UK home there.

Post-Argent, Partridge has also been at the forefront of the crusade to make UK real estate more sustainable, helping to establish the inaugural Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, which provides one standard to which the industry can adhere and makes it more difficult for developers to make unsubstantiated claims about how green a building is. He is now chairman at Senze, which measures energy and thermal performance of retrofitted residential buildings.

When interest rates spiked in 2022, big institutional investors largely pulled in their horns and shied away from big deals.

Not so Norges Bank Investment Management, under the leadership of co-head of real estate for Europe Jayesh Patel.

The giant sovereign wealth fund has struck two huge West End deals in recent years, buying a 25% stake in a £1.2B portfolio from Grosvenor in 2025 and a 25% stake in Shaftesbury Capital’s £2.7B Covent Garden portfolio the same year.

The deals weren’t exactly done on the cheap, but they did allow Norges to buy into portfolios of blue-chip assets that might not become available again for a long time.

More recently, Patel led Norges’ €1.5B push into Spanish retail, its biggest foray into European retail for several years.  

Patel joined Norges in 2015 from Sabal Financial, part of Oaktree Capital Management, having begun his career at Deloitte. Outside work, he spends time with his wife and two children and maintains that Lego is a respectable adult hobby.

Has anyone led the charge on quite as many blockbuster transactions as James Seppala, the chairman of Blackstone Europe and the head of real estate Europe? Mileway, Indurent, Bourne Leisure, Fora, Sage Homes, Village Hotels and HIP — that is about £35B in acquisitions and sales for those transactions alone, with many more on the list, too. 

While several large U.S. real estate private equity firms have struggled to build European businesses to match their strength on home turf, on Seppala’s watch, Blackstone has become the biggest investor in the UK and Europe, picking the asset classes and businesses it backs wisely.  

He joined Blackstone in 2010, prior to which he spent 10 years at Goldman Sachs, focused on real estate equity and debt investment opportunities in Europe and the United States.

Seppala serves as chairman of BEPIF, the firm’s European fund for individual investors. He also serves on the Imperial College Council, the Imperial College Endowment Board, the advisory board of the Academy of Real Assets, the European Advisory Board of the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at the Wharton School, and as a governor of John Lyon's Foundation. 

Outside of work, Seppala enjoys swimming, skiing, reading and spending time with his family.

David Sleath has led Segro to become the UK’s largest REIT and is at the helm as it prepares to undertake the UK’s biggest-ever property deal. 

An early career highlight was becoming a global equity partner at accountancy giant Arthur Andersen at the age of 31. When he arrived in 2006 in the property industry as finance director at Slough Estates, which became Segro in 2007, he knew nothing about yields, estimated rental values or drivers of real estate, but he learned quickly under the then-CEO, the late, great Ian Coull.

An early high in property was working with Coull when Segro bought its biggest UK rival, Brixton, at the depths of the Global Financial Crisis in 2009.

The pair spent a decade building the Segro platform across Europe, through both development and acquisitions, growing assets under management from £5B to more than £20B.

For the last three months, he has been focused on the proposed £14B takeover by Prologis, which he said has been all-consuming at times. It will be the biggest UK listed real estate deal by a country mile, but with regulatory clearances needed, it still has a way to go.

Outside work, Sleath’s life is spent with family. He has six grandchildren and loves sport, including triathlons, golf and white water rafting in Costa Rica.

Sometimes it seems like Ravi Stickney is trying to get the London and UK development market going on his own. 

Just last week, Cheyne Capital Real Estate, where Stickney is managing partner and chief investment officer, provided a £121M development loan to fund the refurbishment of the famous One Poultry office building in the City. 

While other firms have shied away from development, over the past three years, Cheyne has provided more than £2.5B of debt, preferred equity or equity to London development deals, with standout projects being the 235K SF, £450M Row One office development on the South Bank, the 1.4M SF Vauxhall Square development in south London, as well as the conversion of 65 Fleet Street in the City into 875 student bedrooms. 

Since Stickney joined Cheyne in 2008 from ING, the firm has become the go-to debt fund partner of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. 

She may be leaving the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund at the end of the year, but GIC Head of European Real Estate Tracy Stroh has left an indelible mark on UK and European real estate in her 25 years at the company.

GIC has been the backer of some of the biggest development projects in London, including the overhaul of Broadgate in the City and Paddington Central in west London. More recently, it is providing the financing for an innovative £500M subterranean scheme in Cavendish Square. 

Outside the capital, it is funding a major life sciences scheme in Oxford and has been a major player in the logistics sector, financing acquisitions and developments alongside investors including Kennedy Wilson and EQT.  The company did not respond to requests for a headshot of Stroh.

First at Schroders, now as global head of real estate at CPP Investments, Sophie van Oosterom has led some of the biggest investors in UK and global real estate over the past decade.

At Schroders, she helped pivot what was a fairly sleepy institutional investor into new sectors like hospitality and increased its global investment activities. 

At Canadian giant CPP, she is putting major capital into the UK, particularly in the vital rented residential sector. The company has a joint venture with Kennedy Wilson that will invest up to £1B in UK single-family housing, one of the largest investments in the sector, providing affordable (with a small a) housing across the country.