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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Erscheinungs­datum: 29.6.2026, 02:00:00