Monday
The 6:30am Edinburgh to King’s Cross. The same landmarks, the same coastline, the same journey – but familiarity doesn’t breed contempt here; it breeds thinking time.
This week it’s REITweek in New York and my inbox is already filling with broker summaries and management meeting notes from JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Citi. My US colleagues Jay Carlington and Bill Pekowitz are on the ground, feeding back in real time.
On the train, I read through the early takeaways and think about what rhymes with our European positioning and what doesn’t. The US multi-family cycle is further advanced than Europe’s residential recovery. Same asset classes, different chapters. These transatlantic echoes and divergences are what shape our global portfolio positioning – and a long train ride is the perfect place to let them settle.
I hit King’s Cross and head straight to a management meeting with LondonMetric. The sell-side research notes I’ve already read are not a substitute for a management meeting. It’s about checking the narrative, testing whether the story a company tells in a results presentation holds up when you’re sitting across the table asking the awkward follow-up questions. Do the numbers match the body language? Does the strategy sound rehearsed or lived? Conviction comes from the room.
Then straight into the real estate investment strategy committee, where colleagues from across the platform – including the real estate private credit team – are in the room together. When you’re investing in listed equity and your colleague is lending against the same asset class, you see the same buildings from different levels of the balance sheet. That collaboration – equity eyes and credit eyes on the same market – sharpens everyone’s thinking.
I check into my London hotel that evening. It’s one I know well, and it’s getting closer to the end of its capex lifecycle – the carpet is tired, the bathroom fittings have that mid-2010s look. But the people at reception are wonderful – warm, efficient, genuinely pleased to see a returning guest.
Hospitality is, ultimately, a people business. The hard capex matters for asset value, but the soft stuff is what keeps guests coming back. This tension sits at the heart of every hotel REIT investment case.
Tuesday
Tuesday morning is one of my favourite meetings – the pre-HouseView session on UK real estate. A room of different angles: fund managers, analysts, sector specialists, all bringing their own lens to the same market.
Today the debate lands on UK student accommodation – a sector where supply is structurally short, but the demand picture is shifting as international enrolment patterns change and new supply trickles through in some cities.
Are the valuation pressures we’re seeing a genuine cyclical peak, or a short-term blip in a structurally undersupplied market that will reassert itself? No one leaves with the same view they walked in with. That’s the point.
The afternoon is internal – catch-ups, reporting, the operational rhythm that keeps the platform running.
Tuesday evening, I venture out to a reformer pilates class in the basement of one of the Broadgate buildings. Energetic, challenging, completely mind-resetting. This basement space – previously unused, probably a dead zone on the floor plan for decades – is now a buzzing fitness studio. It’s rent to the landlord, British Land, and an amenity to the tenants upstairs. The buildings that are winning aren’t just places to sit at a desk – they’re ecosystems. If you want to understand why prime office rents are holding up, while secondary stock languishes, come to a reformer class in a Broadgate basement.
Wednesday
Wednesday’s main event is the Aberdeen Investments Future ETFs roundtable at The Rosewood Hotel in Holborn – a media-facing session with sharp journalists who want specifics, not slogans.
My message: every thematic that investors are excited about – ageing demographics, digital infrastructure, the energy transition, the logistics revolution – needs a physical address. And that address is real estate.
The data centre powering your AI query sits on a concrete slab with a lease attached to it. The warehouse fulfilling your online order has a landlord. Real estate isn’t a niche allocation – it’s the physical layer beneath every mega-trend. I think it lands.
In the afternoon, I meet Great Portland Estates’ (GPS) leadership team. If Monday’s LondonMetric meeting was about logistics conviction, GPE is the precise West End office play – development-led, betting on scarcity value in London’s most supply-constrained submarkets. When you can’t build new stock because planning won’t allow it, the existing stock reprices upward.
It is a supply thesis, not a demand thesis, and in a market obsessed with occupier sentiment, that’s a contrarian stance worth interrogating.
Thursday
Thursday is the Aberdeen Gather at Convene near St Paul’s – a company-wide colleague event. You spend so much time in the investment silo that you forget how many brilliant people work in distribution, operations, technology.
I end up in a conversation about how our distribution team is explaining real assets to a new generation of advisers – and realise their questions are sharper than some of the analyst ones I fielded earlier in the week.
Thursday evening is one of those informal industry dinners you can’t put a value on until you’re in the middle of one. A mix of investors, advisers, and operators around a long table – market observations, deal war stories, genuine debate about where we are in the cycle.
Someone argues the office recovery is a London-only story. Someone else asks whether European logistics has peaked. I push back – the reindustrialisation of Europe isn’t just a policy slogan. You can see it on the ground: new manufacturing facilities, nearshoring commitments, government incentive programmes from Berlin to Madrid. That’s structural demand for logistics space, not cyclical.
These evenings remind me that our industry, for all its spreadsheets and models, runs on relationships and trust built over shared meals and honest disagreement.
Friday
Friday starts early. I dial in at 7am to catch my Hong Kong colleague, Tosh Tangiku, before his evening – Japanese logistics demand, Australian office sentiment, and his recent trip to Singapore, where the market is quietly evolving.
By the afternoon, it’s the post-REITweek catch-up with the US team – what surprised them, which management teams impressed, where the consensus is fragile. Two calls, two hemispheres, one global portfolio. The market never sleeps, and neither does the inbox.
Then it’s the train home. Somewhere south of Newcastle I close the laptop and let the mind wander to the weekend. Saturday morning is German revision with my son – he’s working towards his Nat 5 and I’ve decided, in a moment of either solidarity or madness, to join an absolute beginners’ class myself.
Sunday is for the kitchen: a hollandaise experiment to capture the very last of the asparagus season. If I can navigate European hotel capex cycles and UK student accommodation valuations in the same week, I can surely master the art of not scrambling the eggs.
A week in real assets is a week spent thinking about how people live, work, shop, travel, and shelter. Bricks and mortar sounds dull until you remember it’s the backdrop to every human story. Including mine.
