The Future We Build is a podcast about sustainability in real estate when it is shaped by innovation, investment, and real commercial decision making.
Hosted by Alex Edds, a corporate sustainability innovator with over 20 years inside the industry, this podcast looks at sustainability through the lens of value creation, resilience, and human outcomes, not just carbon metrics.
This is a show for people building, backing, and buying the next generation of solutions for the built environment, offering rare insight into how sustainability, innovation, and capital intersect in practice.
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The one with.. the $4tn climate coalition transforming real estate
Season 1 · Episode 1
Friday, February 20, 2026 • Duration 42:59
In this inaugural episode of The Future We Build, Alex sits down with Vincent Van Bijleveld from GREEN (Global Real Estate Engagement Network) to explore how institutional capital is—or isn't—driving decarbonization in real estate. Vincent offers a rare investor perspective on the tensions between financial returns and climate goals, the limitations of current rating systems, and why real estate might be easier to transform than we think.
Key Timestamps
[00:03:01] - Why GREEN was founded: where does real estate capital actually come from?
[00:05:09] - Is real estate moving fast enough on climate? Comparing to other sectors
[00:09:13] - The brown discount dilemma: selling problematic assets doesn't solve the planet's problem
[00:14:19] - Decarbonization as the dominant focus (and what else matters)
[00:16:13] - Physical climate risk rising up the agenda
[00:18:23] - Would investors accept short-term performance drag for long-term resilience?
[00:23:03] - GRESB under the microscope: praise, criticism, and what needs to change
[00:27:59] - Can regulation move markets? EPBD vs. SFDR
[00:32:01] - What investors expect from fund managers in 2026-2027
[00:34:17] - Impact investing in real estate: what does it actually mean?
[00:37:05] - What would Vincent like to see change from real estate investors?
[00:39:23] - What one thing would Vincent want from government, business, or individuals to make the change we need?
[00:40:42] - The long view: disappointed by one-year changes, encouraged by 20-year progress
What you'll learn
The Investor Lens on Real Estate Transformation
Why real estate is "relatively easy" to transform compared to oil & gas or cement
The challenge of fragmentation: thousands of managers vs. concentrated sectors
How real estate lags behind wind, solar, and automotive in transition speed
The Brown Discount Dilemma
Institutional capital's flight from "brown" assets—and where those buildings end up
Why bigger green premiums and brown discounts are essential for market transformation
The moral tension: selling problematic assets doesn't solve the planet's problem
Rating Systems Under Scrutiny
GRESB's critical role in driving industry focus—and its fundamental limitations
Thanks to Jason and Sophia for guiding me through this journey.
The Future We Build Season 1 Trailer
Season 1
Monday, February 16, 2026 • Duration 05:47
The built environment accounts for 30-40% of global CO2 emissions. The way we construct, finance, and manage the built environment will determine whether we meet our climate goals—or fall catastrophically short. Beyond that, the construction and maintenance of buildings uses vast amounts of resources, the majority of which are extracted, used and disposed in the typical linear model.
And then there is us. We spend 90% of our time indoors. As Winston Churchill once said "we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."
We need to make buildings and spaces better for us - our health and wellbeing.
Welcome to The Future We Build—a podcast for the people creating fundamental change in how we build, invest in, and inhabit our world.
This isn't about incremental improvements or polished corporate messaging. These are the hallway conversations that happen after industry conferences end—candid insights from sustainability leaders, PropTech innovators, and real estate futurists who are fundamentally rethinking our approach to the built environment.
Season 1 brings you inside conversations with:
🏢 Sustainability heads and former heads from major investment managers including Nuveen, CBRE IM, and Savills IM
🔄 Former sustainability executives now free to speak candidly about what's actually working—and what isn't
🏗️ Leaders pioneering new construction methods, materials, and procurement approaches
🤖 Visionaries exploring AI's role in transforming real estate
🏗️ Industry bodies such as GREEN, Better Buildings Partnership, UK Green Building Council and UK PropTech Association
🌱 Innovators, Venture Capitalists and emerging PropTech companies
Hosted by Alex Edds a sustainability and innovation professional with 20 years across real estate investment management, consulting, corporate innovation, and PropTech.
The one with... the godmothers of green buildings. Now is the time for creativity, collaboration and leadership.
Season 1 · Episode 2
Wednesday, February 25, 2026 • Duration 46:50
In this special episode, Alex returns to his roots with two remarkable leaders who shaped the beginning of his sustainability journey. Julie Hirigoyen (former CEO of UK GBC, now advisor to investors and property companies) and Sarah Ratcliffe (CEO of Better Buildings Partnership) were co-directors of Upstream, the consultancy Alex joined back in 2006.
Together, they reflect on 20 years of progress in real estate sustainability—from the creative, pioneering early days to today's systematized approaches. The conversation explores the tension between compliance and creativity, why we're still only measuring half the carbon picture, and the critical need for place-based collaboration. Julie and Sarah share their perspectives on what's needed from industry leadership, the power of grassroots action, and why reconnecting with our dependency on nature might be the mindset shift we need most.
Key timestamps
[00:01:42] -Where It All Started [00:02:35] - The Creativity Paradox - did sustainability become less creative as it became more mainstream?
[00:04:26] - The last 20 years: Awareness to Embedding [00:09:00] - The Decarbonization Machine and the missing 50% [00:12:51] - Will single asset owners struggle to be resilient [00:20:20] - The Role of Industry Bodies [00:21:46] - Radical Collaboration [00:27:18] - The Politicization Problem [00:29:21] - The Role of Government Certainty [00:29:35] - Where We Are Now: Progress or Backward? [00:34:10] - Where Do We Go From Here? [00:35:25] - Getting Leadership Back on Board [00:38:10] - Collective Leadership [00:40:00] - Grassroots Hope [00:42:06] - If You Could Change One Thing
The one with... the ex-Heads of Sustainability. On burnout, role evolution, and going fractional
Season 1 · Episode 3
Wednesday, March 4, 2026 • Duration 49:24
In this candid episode of The Future We Build, Alex brings together two former heads of sustainability—Robbie Epsom (ex-CBRE Investment Management) and Emily Hamilton (ex-Savills Investment Management)—for what Alex calls "a therapy session." The three discuss why so many senior sustainability leaders have left their roles, what's changed in the market, and where they're channelling their energy next. This is an unusually honest conversation about burnout, the shift from strategic thinking to operational execution, and why the fractional model might be the future of sustainability leadership in real estate.
Key Timestamps
[00:01:17] - Why are we all ex-heads of sustainability? Setting the scene[00:02:08] - Robbie's journey to fractional advisory[00:05:34] - Emily's transition: losing strategic foresight in "control mode"[00:08:16] - Have we outgrown the role, or has the role outgrown us?[00:11:07] - Sustainability teams now need to justify ROI[00:15:01] - Emily on resilience: asking difficult questions vs. pleasing the client[00:17:14] - Did in-house roles lose the "challenger" voice?[00:18:38] - Infrastructure booming while real estate churns[00:20:00] - Green hushing: "keep our heads down"[00:21:11] - Emily: we've lost the sense of innovation [00:22:07] - Was net zero set with genuine understanding—or peer pressure?[00:27:09] - Emily: nature is now a strategic national security risk (Defra)[00:31:14] - The future of energy as a service[00:32:08] - Emily on ROI: we're not accounting for wider structural benefits[00:33:40] - Parting wisdom for those still in post[00:38:12] - Protecting your energy and mental health[00:40:06] - The emerging network: fractional work as a new collaborative model[00:42:10] - Final question: one thing you'd want from government, business, or individuals[00:46:50] - The AI/data centre nexus exposing supply chain fragility
What You'll Learn
The shift from strategic, creative roles to operational, task-oriented execution
Infrastructure funds thriving while real estate sustainability roles contract
The rise of fractional CSO
VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) requiring both create and control
The one with ... the VC aiming to remove a gigaton of carbon from the urban environment
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 • Duration 50:00
What does it actually take to back the companies rebuilding our cities? Rahul Parekh is a Partner at 2150, the venture capital fund created by and for one of the Nordics' largest real estate investors — now under the Urban Partners brand — a €20 billion platform that combines real estate capital with venture capital to accelerate the adoption of climate technologies in the built environment.
2150 has just closed its second fund at €210 million, bringing their total AUM to nearly half a billion euros, deployed into what they call Gigacorn companies — businesses with thepotential to remove gigatons of carbon while generating real financial returns. But the tension is real: venture capital needs returns in 7–10 years, real estate moves slowly, and procurement cycles are brutal. So is VC even the right tool for this problem?
In this conversation, Rahul and Alex challenge both sides — why innovation adoption in real estate is still so broken, what it actually takes for cleantech founders to raise capital and break into the sector, and why the next wave of climate tech might look a lot more like AI than renewable energy.
Key timestamps:
• [00:03:04] From Goldman Sachs to VC — Rahul'scareer path into climate investing
• [00:06:08] The origin story of 2150 — how a realestate business decided to back innovation
• [00:07:43] Thinking in cities, not buildings —the urban tech thesis
• [00:09:13] The climate tech funding gap — whybuilt environment was being ignored in 2020
• [00:10:56] Where 2150 invests — Series A &B, execution risk over technology risk
• [00:12:39] Hardware vs. software — why you needboth to have real impact
• [00:13:15] Portfolio construction — findingwinners across software, hardware, and the combination
• Ember: building the electric buscompany from the ground up in Scotland
The one with... the marketplace innovator and why nobody wants another dashboard
Season 1 · Episode 5
Wednesday, March 18, 2026 • Duration 43:37
Commercial real estate has no shortage of decarbonisation plans. What it lacks is the infrastructure to execute them. Pål Hauff Hvattum, CEO of CQuel, knows this from the inside out — and he's spent the last two years building the solution.
Spun out of Hines Global Ventures with Aroundtown as a second shareholder, CQuel is a tech-enabled implementationplatform for commercial real estate retrofits. Not another dashboard. Not another consultant. A marketplace that connects vetted retrofit suppliers with asset managers who have a decarbonisation plan sitting in a drawer and no clearpath to execution.
Pål brings an unusual perspective: fifteen years building online marketplaces across Europe (including Gumtree), followed by a stint scaling a solar energy marketplace across Europe.
Key Timestamps
• [00:01:35] — Why This Podcast — Incubating Ideas in Real Estate
• [00:02:27] — From Marketplaces to Missions — Pål's Origin Story
• [00:05:02] — The Hines Phone Call — How CQuel Was Born
• [00:07:49] — Sandbox First: Testing Inside the Portfolio
• [00:10:21] — Who Is the Customer and What's the Value Proposition?
• [00:11:15] — The 70% Opportunity — Why Light Retrofits Are the Real Play
• [00:13:58] — The Three Broken Options: Consultant, In-House, SaaS
• [00:14:46] — The Implementation Platform — How CQuel Works
• [00:16:08] — The Brief Builder — Why a Better Brief Gets 40% Better Prices
• [00:16:53] — A Two-Sided Marketplace — 16-Step Supplier Vetting
• Two Corporate Parents: Hines Ventures + Aroundtown
The one with... Real Estate's data crisis, PropTech growth, AI readiness & the new Real Estate UK
Season 1 · Episode 4
Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Duration 44:15
In this episode of The Future We Build, host Alex Edds sits down with Sammy Pahal, Managing Director of the UK Proptech Association (UKPA). As the real estate sector undergoes a massive consolidation with the formation of Real Estate UK, Sammy discusses the evolution of the industry over the last decade.
The conversation explores how the dialogue has shifted from "What is proptech?" to "How do we execute digital transformation?". Sammy shares insights on the psychology of change, the necessity of "getting the plumbing right" for AI adoption, and how the UKPA is working with the government to scale technology in housing. Whether you are a tech entrepreneur or a real estate manager, this episode offers a roadmap for navigating the looming AI disruption and realizing the true value of digital tools.
Key timestamps:
[00:01:16] The Psychology of Proptech Sammy explains how her background in psychology helps her navigate the "human" side of innovation
[00:03:30] Creating "Real Estate UK"A deep dive into the strategic merger between the UK Proptech Association (UKPA) and the British Property Federation (BPF).
[00:10:45] The Proptech Growth Partnership Details on the collaborative work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG
[00:15:30] The Digital Maturity Gap Alex and Sammy discuss the disparity between "Blue Chip" companies with dedicated innovation teams and the "long tail" of smaller property owners.
[00:19:45] Fixing the "Data Plumbing" for AIA critical segment on AI readiness. Sammy argues that before firms can leverage Generative AI, they must fix their "plumbing"
[00:24:50] State of the Market: Consolidation & Investment An analysis of why the UK proptech market has remained at roughly 800 companies for years.
[00:28:15] From Dashboards to Workflows Why the "standalone dashboard" era is ending.
[00:35:50] Engaging the "Long Tail" of Real Estate How the UKPA is working to democratize innovation.
In the closing segment, Sammy shares what she would ask for from the government.
The one with... the AI provocateur and the real estate countdown
Season 1 · Episode 9
Wednesday, April 15, 2026 • Duration 35:24
Antony Slumbers has spent more than two decades at the intersection of real estate and technology — first as a software company founder writing property management systems, then as one of the most widely read voices on AI in the built environment. He runs the Generative AI for Real Estate People course, now on its 50th cohort, and has become a go-to thinker for anyone trying to understand what artificial intelligence actually means for how this industry operates.
This episode is the first of a two-part conversation. Part One focuses on the here and now: where AI has already changed the game for real estate professionals, what genuine productivity transformation looks like (not 5% faster — 80% different), and why real estate, despite its slow cycles, has more reason than almost any other sector to pay close attention to technology right now.
Key Timestamps• [00:06:30] Antony's background: 20+ years in PropTech, software businesses, and how he became a leading voice on AI in real estate
• [00:09:00] Why the 'use cases' conversation has become almost meaningless — and how generative AI has outgrown the 'text, code, images' framing
• [00:09:45] André Karpathy's 'kernel of an operating system' idea and what natural language computing actually means in practice
• [00:11:00] Why cracking Excel changes everything for real estate — and what that means for how analysts actually spend their time
• [00:12:30] The data problem: why most real estate firms' data is still 'pretty rubbish' and why that has to be fixed before AI can do its work
• [00:13:00] Inverting the 70/30 ratio: from 70% wrangling models to 70% thinking about inputs and outcomes
• [00:14:30] Why real estate developers need to pay more attention to technology than almost anyone — the seven-to-ten-year gestation problem
• From SaaS dashboards to outcomes-as-a-service: where the market is heading and who is already building for it
The one with... Property Management 2.0 — Moving from Data Reporter to Value Creator.
Season 1 · Episode 8
Wednesday, April 8, 2026 • Duration 45:25
Carl Brooks leads sustainability for CBRE's property management business — a role he built from scratch when he joined as the first embedded sustainability hire in the PM division. With a career spanning 25 years from waste management consultancy to developer-operator roles at Hammerson and MAPP, Carl now oversees sustainability across one of the largest property management platforms on the planet: 19,000 buildings, 3.2 billion square feet, across 41 countries. This episode is a ground-level look at what it actually takes to deliver on the sustainability ambitions that investors and landlords are writing into contracts.
The central tension Alex and Carl dig into is one that anyone who's sat on either side of a property management agreement will recognise: investors want more — more data, more insight, more active performance management — but the property management model is structurally low-margin, fragmented, and historically designed for risk reporting rather than value creation. Something has to give. The question is whether the model gets rebuilt around genuine performance, or whether the pressure just keeps compressing margins until the system breaks.
Key Timestamps
• [00:00:00] : how does property management actually deliver on sustainability commitments made at investment level?
• [00:03:50] Carl's career origin:, working with Diageo and Nike out of a seven-person office on the South Bank.
• [00:05:00] Moving into real estate 18 years ago — starting at Hammerson
• [00:06:00] Why Carl joined CBRE: the opportunity to build the first embedded, decentralised sustainability function in the PM business from scratch — at global scale.
• [00:07:00] The "big green machine" problem: how siloed business lines inside firms like CBRE and JLL mean clients see one brand but get fragmented services
• [00:10:00] The spectrum of client maturity globally: three broad contractual buckets
The one with... the $140bn Real Estate investor. On embedding sustainability, the ESG backlash, and data!
Season 1 · Episode 7
Wednesday, April 1, 2026 • Duration 43:35
Abigail Dean is Head of Strategic Insights at Nuveen, one of the largest real estate investment managers in the world. Her role is unusual: sustainability doesn't sit in a silo at Nuveen — it lives alongside research and PropTech under a single team, deliberately designed to give a more unified view of what's actually driving real estate value. Abigail came up through sustainability at JLL before taking on this broad role at Nuveen, and that journey — from specialist to strategic integrator — shapes everything she talks about in this conversation.
The central question Alex and Abigail wrestle with is one that every sustainability leader in investment management will recognise: how do you make this stuff land? Not just at theinvestment committee — that, Abigail argues, is too late — but embedded into deal sourcing, underwriting, due diligence, and asset management from day one.They get into the mechanics: how voting rights at IC actually create accountability upstream, why having ex-asset managers inside the sustainability team changes everything, and how Nuveen is navigating the anti-ESG noise from the US without changing what they actually do.
They also talk about the housing crisis, the role of private capital in affordable housing, and the data problem that Abigail — after 20 years in the industry — still finds staggering.
If you're a sustainability professional, an investment manager, or anyone trying to understand how institutional capital is actually making decisions right now, this one's worth your time.
Key Timestamps
• [00:01:00] Alex introduces Abigail and her unusual role: sustainability, research, and PropTech under one team at Nuveen
• [00:03:00] Abigail explains the logic of the team
• [00:04:00] How mega trends, demographic shifts, and the energy transition are interconnected
• [00:07:00] Nuveen's scope beyond real estate: infrastructure and natural capital, and what cross-asset collaboration on strategic insights looks like
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In a world where sustainability performance is now table stakes for raising institutional capital, we explore the practical tensions between financial returns and climate goals, the regulatory complexity reshaping the industry, and the emerging technologies that promise to help us build differently.
New episodes available weekly.
Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we're building—together.
Thanks to Jason and Sophia for guiding me through this journey.
Have senior leaders outgrown the role, or has the role outgrown them?
Can't separate climate adaptation, biodiversity, and net zero—need integrated approach
Water, land, supply chains: nature's fundamental impact on real estate
Current ROI calculations only account for single-asset benefits, missing wider structural benefits: grid contribution, area regeneration, systemic value
Mental Health and Burnout of CSOs
Advice for CSOs and sustainability teams
The AI race and the natural resources it depends upon
Thanks to Jason and Sophia for guiding me through this journey.
[00:19:30]
• [00:21:00] The co-pilot obsession in real estate firms — and why locking people into inferior internal tools creates a governance vs capability tension
• [00:22:00] From engineers writing code to engineers managing agents: how Karpathy went from 80% human/20% machine to the reverse
• [00:23:30] Why JLL, CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield lost 25% of their market cap in two days — and what the market is actually pricing in
• [00:24:00] The structural shift: from human-plus-software to agents-plus-APIs, and what that means for building management
• [00:26:00] Domain expertise as the killer advantage: why the people getting the most out of AI right now are those who already know what wrong looks like
• [00:27:30] The junior talent paradox: cutting graduate intake may look efficient now but hollows out domain knowledge in a decade
• [00:31:00] Bloom's Two Sigma problem and the prospect of AI as a personal tutor that compresses years of professional development
• [00:35:30] Closing out Part One: the environmental and social paradox of AI that will be the focus of Part Two
Organisations Mentioned
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Google DeepMind / Google Gemini
• Tesla
• Salesforce
• JLL
• CBRE
• Cushman & Wakefield
• LaSalle Investment Management
• Hines
• CQuel
• 2150
• UK Green Building Council
• Better Buildings Partnership
• McKinsey & Company
• Knight Frank
• NREP
• GREEN
• Google (NotebookLM)
• Microsoft
The Future We Build is a podcast exploring sustainability, innovation and systemic change in the built environment, hosted by Alex Edds.
New episodes released weekly.Filmed at Mute showroom, Great Sutton Street, London.
• [00:29:00] The real people problem in PM: on-ground building teams care deeply about their buildings
• [00:30:00] "We want 20% more for 10% less" — the recontracting dynamic that is slowly destroying the value of property management
• [00:33:00] COVID as a watershed moment: property owners suddenly understood who was keeping the lights on and the doors open.
• [00:34:00] Centralised delivery vs. engaged delivery: why implementing solutions without involving building teams almost always reopens the performance gap
• [00:39:00] Carl's closing answer: he wants sustainability to be the actual objective — not just a filter applied to investment decisions.
• [00:42:00] The data blind spot: social impact, occupier engagement, and placemaking generate huge amounts of value that never gets captured, structured, or reported
Organisations Mentioned
• CBRE
• JLL
• LaSalle Investment Management
• MAPP (previously referenced as MAP)
• Hammerson
• Better Buildings Partnership (BBP)
• BBP Managing Agents Partnership
• UK Green Building Council (UKGBC)
• DeepKi
• Measurabl
• Diageo
• Nike
• Amazon
• Google
The Future We Build is a podcast exploring sustainability, innovation and systemic change in the built environment, hosted by Alex Edds.
New episodes released weekly.
Filmed at Work.Life Farringdon
Follow the Show
• LinkedIn: The Future We Build
Connect with Alex
• LinkedIn: Alex Edds
More About Our Guest
• Carl Brooks on LinkedIn
• CBRE Property Management: cbre.com
• [00:08:00] How sustainability and research feed into the investment committee
• [00:10:00] Why the IC vote is too late: the real work happens at pre-IC, underwriting, and due diligence — and what that looks like in practice
• [00:12:00] The debate: should sustainability sit on the IC? Abigail and Alex agree to disagree, and both have a point
• [00:15:00] How Nuveen's sustainability team is structured — and the shift from roughly 50/50 reporting vs. strategy to two-thirds execution and client engagement
• [00:16:00] Why hiring ex-asset managers into the sustainability team was a game-changer for integration and credibility with the investment side
• [00:20:00] The anti-ESG backlash in the US: how serious is it, and how Nuveen is navigating it without changing what theyactually do
• [00:21:00] Reframing sustainability as building efficiency: why every investor agrees with it when you strip away the labels
• [00:24:00] Tracking corporate SBTi commitments — still rising — and why US city-level regulations like Local Law 97 may actually have more teeth than European equivalents
• [00:27:00] The housing crisis and private capital
• [00:29:00] What government needs to do to unlock private capital for affordable housing
• [00:33:00] What problem are you trying to solve?
• [00:37:00] Is the green premium real — and does it roll out from prime to secondary markets
• [00:40:00] If you could change one thing
The Future We Build is a podcast exploring sustainability, innovation and systemic change in the built environment, hosted by Alex Edds.
New episodes released weekly. Filmed at Work.Life Farringdon
