When I joined Institutional Real Estate, Inc in mid-February as MD, Europe, I went through quite a baptism of fire. In the first week, I had a flurry of London meetings with Geoffrey Dohrmann, IREI’s CEO, and Jonathan Schein from the New York City office, followed by a week at our VIP – Europe conference in Geneva. And since then I have been meeting with some of the leading real estate investment managers in London.

Even though I have 20-plus years of real estate media experience, this relatively niche world of institutional real estate and fund management has been quite an eye-opener. Namely, the sheer scale and volume of deals in the market — and the sophistication of this area of real estate investment, populated, I must say, with some charming and interesting characters.

I previously spent 15 years building up and then running the UK side of the MIPIM and MAPIC shows, and when I started back in 1990 there was in reality very little cross-border real estate in