Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome Nick Walkley. Nick is Principal and UK President at global real estate advisory firm Avison Young. Prior to joining Avison Young in 2021, Nick was Chief Executive of Homes England, the UK Government’s land development and housing investor. He led the creation and growth of the new agency, responsible for the management and delivery of a diverse portfolio, including the affordable homes programme, new towns, urban brown field schemes, support to SMEs and infrastructure funding. He served as Chief Executive of two London local authorities, with a focus on building high performing teams during periods of adversity and austerity. And as a seasoned leader, he is passionate about fostering strong organisational culture, driven by clear values. In all his roles, Nick has championed the power of urban regeneration and public-private partnership to improve people’s everyday lives. An advocate for the dynamism and vitality of cities, Nick is a firm believer that the best way to get to know a city is through its restaurants, bars and record stores. So now we are going to hear from Nick Walkley on the challenges of working in the public sector and his recent move to the private sector to run a leading, international property services company. Good morning, Nick, it’s great to speak to you this morning. I think we first discussed doing the podcast almost a year ago so, it’s great to finally be here.
Nick Walkley
Thank you for the invite, Susan. It’s a little strange actually, having talked about doing this for so long. It is a year ago but Susan, I think three and a half years ago when I was still at Homes England, we had a conversation about you and I may be doing something together so I was beginning to think it was me and not you, and maybe I’d done something at some point that had slightly offended you and maybe your listeners therefore were not going to get any chance to hear us have a conversation.
Susan Freeman
Well, I think it was probably complicated by the fact that you moved to a new role, probably slowed us down but I was keen to interview you as it’s unusual to have been Chief Executive of not one but two local authorities, to head a Government agency and now to be running an international private property services company, so that’s quite a track record.
Nick Walkley
It’s quite a journey from my first job in the public sector was actually working in the, the depot at Lewisham Council, working alongside the then director for refuse services during the end of the CCT era, so it feels like quite a long journey from Lewisham all the way to the City, never mind to an international firm. It’s a long journey.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, well you obviously moved from refuse to be Chief Executive of Barnet and then, then Haringey and during, there are periods that were challenging and I thought obviously with, with Birmingham being so much in the news at the moment, I’d ask you, you know, what were the key, key challenges of running local authorities and what’s actually happened now with the sort of underfunding, I mean were these things that you predicted then?
Nick Walkley
Crikey, so, it’s been, it’s been quite a strange start to the year because the crisis engulfing a number of local authorities and I think the local public sector more generally, has meant a number of journalists have turned back to work that Barnet Council did thirteen years ago which became known as the ‘Graph of Doom’ and it may be on my tombstone, ‘Here lies the man who asked the question that led to the Graph of Doom’. Back then we were in an era where we were asking questions of the ‘what if’ nature. What if funding doesn’t improve? What might that look like? And the challenge back then was really a challenge about if the party is over in spending terms, how do you continue to work with these incredibly diverse communities, tackle issues of social mobility and you know both Haringey and Barnet, challenges around an aging public estate, not enough affordable housing, what rule for the private sector, how do you bring about economic development, regeneration in a way that’s both progressive and inclusive and we were imagining a future where resources were stretched. What we never thought was that the ‘what if’ now looks more like a route map and my career in senior roles in public sector unfortunately, is marked every single year by the really, really difficult decision about how I cut more from the budget and what we’re seeing now is, it used to be the case that you would hear of a local authority in some sort of financial difficulty and you think there but for the grace of God go I, you know we got that call right and therefore we’re still okay. What we’re seeing now instead is, it’s as much luck as deliberation as who is and isn’t out of financial difficulty, there’s not enough money to go around and those authorities that have made some bad decisions, those that have taken the wrong bet, are in very severe difficulty. So, you know, I say that the job of a local authority chief executive is now amongst the hardest leadership role you can imagine because you’re running the plethora of diverse services and having to make invidious choices almost every day of the week and what Birmingham shows us is that where this now goes really horribly wrong, fundamentals start to fall away from public service provision and choices get very, very difficult so, I think we’re heading into an era where there’ll have to be rebalancing but that rebalancing won’t come quickly and part of my thinking is now about so what role for the different public and private institutions in what comes next because continuing to analyse just how bad it is, doesn’t help anyone, we’ve got to think creatively about how we drag ourselves out of this hole. And I say this, Susan, you know, had you said to listeners ten years ago there’ll be a consensus amongst house builders, developers and agents that we need to help fund local authority planners, they’d have sort of laughed in a sort of ‘that’s fanciful, they’re the problem, actually, we need fewer of them’. Well, we’ve tried that experiment and what it tells us, it doesn’t work and we are now going to have figure out how to refund the system to make it work.
Susan Freeman
And I mean Birmingham seemed, I mean you talked about luck and Birmingham seemed to have been particularly unlucky with the equal pay liability and problems with a new IT system and problems with IT systems seem to be a theme but I mean if you were running that local authority now, would you be doing anything any differently from what they’re having to do?
Nick Walkley
It’s really difficult to walk in the shoes of others and you know hindsight isn’t only a wonderful thing, it can be a very, very dangerous thing and what I think many of the officer and political core are faced there are state scale problems with only local authority powers. You’re talking about a vast organisation that was always sailing very close to the wind and it’s absolutely right isn’t it that Britain’s second city has ambition. It should have cultural ambition, it should have sporting ambition. Those things are essential for economic growth and to somehow now say yeah but they were sort of grand mistakes is to miss the point. We either believe in devolved, strong, community cities or we don’t and I think Birmingham’s got caught right in the middle of trying to have it all ways, both centrally and locally and that’s just not possible and it’s really, really challenging now to see a way out of this. It must be incredibly difficult if you’re one of those people who’ve been committed to Birmingham for a huge period of time seeing, you know, enormous transformation. We, as a business, are engaged in Paradise Circus, I mean just a fabulous development putting new office development right at the heart of the city, to see all of that achievement against negative headlines and now really difficult cuts, sitting alongside commissioners who’ve got a difficult job as well, that’s an incredibly tough space to be in and there is a moment where clearly we need to hold politicians and officers to account but to what end, because the city needs to move forward, we need the burgeoning West Midlands economy to continue to grow both for the people of Birmingham but also for the rest of the country and I think, you know, if anything, the thing I might be doing differently is getting even more on the front foot around the positive stories out there, no matter how hard it is to do that.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, I mean it will be interesting to see what the role is for the private sector because we talk a lot about public-private sector partnerships and, you know, how you can make them work, what makes them go wrong and having seen things from both sides, I imagine you, you have views on that.
Nick Walkley
So, one of the things that I know of very certainly and a Birmingham example is a good one. I was at the launch of the most recent phase of the Paradise development and Chris Taylor from Federated Hermes gave a very powerful speech and he made the point that commitment to a place, going behind individual assets, means that you can stay with something through multiple versions of the partnership, multiple changes of political control, different capital structures but actually, if you have that long-term strategic view that there is value here, you can be part of helping other institutions ride those things out and reap significant dividend as a result achieve that value many times over, over a long timeframe and I think one of the things that the private sector will have to do, is to think about how it better blends some of those longer term capital structures with shorter term gains to help not just public organisations but places and assets out of the challenges that they face and Paradise is a really good example of just, you know, the timeframe required but also the dividends that can be reaped through that partnership. I would also say what I would have reflected five years ago about a good public-private partnership has probably shifted. Capability and capacity is so denuded in many public partners, there’s a need to fill the void. That doesn't mean the public sector yielding ground and seeing the private sector take over, probably private sector partners being more thoughtful about how they use their resource, what they need to pay for to make a good client and a good partner because the alternative probably looks like it’s really difficult and unmanageable in terms of risk transfer.
Susan Freeman
And I think you wrote something recently on the way city regeneration is going to look going forward and that it’s going to be more difficult, I mean I don’t know whether you want to say a little bit about that.
Nick Walkley
So, Avison Young have been out and about in the country on events looking at the future of key UK cities. It’s been really pleasing just the extent to which people have been really keen to come along for a conversation about what next rather than looking at historic data. You know, in excess of 900 clients, well over a thousand people attending these events and what we’ve got from that and what we’re seeing in our work is that the nature of who we partner with and how we partner is changing and is having to change. So, I’m particularly interested in the extent to which historically we’ve seen the local authority as the natural lead, local partner. They’ve sort of got the name of the place, they’ve got a leader. And we’re moving towards an era of a much more variegated set of public institutions supporting regeneration and development, so the rise of the urban university is critical in delivering economic development and regeneration, particularly as we think about the future for town and centres and for urban locations. It’s much more common in North America where universities play a leading role very often in downtown regeneration and development and are the strong public institution in a place but it seems to me that if you look at the northern cities in particular, they’ve such incredible university infrastructure and applying more of that capability capacity and asset base the opportunity for research, the opportunity for innovation and playing that into the regeneration story but also playing their ability to lead place alongside the local authority and then the skills that go with that and the leadership skills team is really critical to me. And it may not just be universities, it may be further education, it could also be couldn’t it, arm’s length government institutions. I think we’re going to have to go where the capability and capacity is to support these partnerships, which will mean everybody just recalibrating their own power relationships but out of necessity, I think will come some really creative opportunities and everybody refers back to Manchester as being the shining example of this and it is interesting, another version of the Manchester story, apart from the Towers, the Northern Quarter, Castlefield, is the fundamental reshaping of large amounts of the university estate and the way that that has been used as a motor and maybe that story needs to be written for other places as well.
Susan Freeman
That’s so interesting because we are beginning to see that with Life Sciences because you know to create our Life Sciences cluster you generally need, you know, an academic institution or a hospital so, you know, for the first time we are seeing universities coming to the fore.
Nick Walkley
I think that’s absolutely right and it speaks to bigger trends as we move away from thinking about the CBD as being where a bunch of office workers go to sit at a desk in a building that looks much like the building next to the one they’re in until the moment where an occupier decides it’s not quite fit for purpose and another building, that’s an improvement on that one, emerges to a different sort of economy for work, that begs questions about what happens to the functionality of our places and it’s certainly the case that we see Life Sciences, wider innovation zones, mixing uses, as being critical to that and that naturally draws in other institutions and particularly public sector institutions who previously, you know, I’ve spent a lifetime sitting in partnership boards and there are always two sorts of partnership board members aren’t there, those whose phone number you have who are creative, want to engage and want to bring something to the table or prepared to put some skin in the game and those who turn up and nod, smile very gently, eat some of the brown buffet, have a glass of cheap red wine and then leave and report back. And I think the balance of who’s in the former rather than the latter camp will change and needs to change if we’re going to really, not just respond to the real crisis involving parts of local government but also to where the economy is shifting.
Susan Freeman
And do you think it’s still true to say that you know there is a sort of language division if you like between the public sector and the private sector and often, you know, the two sides don’t necessarily understand each other.
Nick Walkley
I think that is true. I think what’s actually true is there are now, there’s a different divide, there’s the club that get it, so, you know one of the great privileges of my life was to be involved in the early stages of Brent Cross, whilst I was Chief Executive of Barnet, and now to see Brent Cross Town emerging, the new station, I mean the team there have just done a sensational job but I think, you know, you would find it hard to argue that the Argent team and the Barnet Council team and the GLA haven’t found a common language and it isn’t they know how to get things done, they’ve worked hard at the partnership, they understand things, they have frustrations but they’ve found a way of working through them. And then there’s another group who are trapped in a, they don’t understand us, we don’t understand them, zero sum oppositional game. So I don’t think it’s set to specific anymore, I think there are just two ways now of thinking you solve a problem. I had the privilege of chairing a private round table this week and what I saw there were mayors, often quite traditional local authorities and land owners for the first time realising they’re going to have to figure out their version of the shared language as well so, it is true that there are differences between the sectors, there are different meanings to things but you know people ask me all the time, Susan, so, what’s it like working in the private sector and how different is it from the public sector? Well, apart from the fact I’ve still not quite got used to the extent to which I can take people for lunch and I’m unlikely to be on the front page of the Daily Mail for drinking a decent glass of red wine in public but whilst there are significant differences, I actually think the Venn diagram of things that are similar and the same, is much larger and it’s too easy to spend time talking about the difference, whereas if you begin from what’s shared and common, problems become much easier to solve and I think you’ll find, you know, I’ve done an awful lot of work with the Big Four house builders, is it four or three now?
Susan Freeman
A lot of consolidation going on, that’s for sure.
Nick Walkley
You know, they take a lot of flak in the media, there’s a sort of lot of negativity but actually, what you find very often is many of their local teams and the local planning department have a really clear understanding of what needs to happen and what needs to get done that is little celebrated and the extent to which we are able to deliver housing and, you know, why are we not asking questions around why does that work and why can’t we have more of it, rather than ooh, there’s a huge problem, it’s probably insoluble because you know houses are being built every day of the year, people are moving in them and leading successful lives, could we just have more of that please.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, and we’re going to talk about housing in a minute but before we do, I mean you mentioned Brent Cross and obviously what’s going on there now is fantastic but I always wonder why it’s taken so long to get there because you know people have been talking about redeveloping that side for an, I mean, a long time.
Nick Walkley
So long, Susan that when I actually joined Barnet Council the first time around, which is so long ago I’m not actually going to say when, Stewart Murray came into my office and it was quite a novelty for me to have an office, this isn’t the era of best value inspections, absolutely panicking about the state of negotiations with the owners of the shopping centre and whether the inspectors would be interested in it. To which my response was, I know one of the inspectors, I don’t think they’ll understand anything of what you’ve just told me and quite frankly, I understood about 5% of it. So, there’s no doubt we’ve got a problem with delivering big projects in the UK and the bigger they get, the more problematic we seem to make them. It is also the case that we’ve attempted to deliver largescale urban regeneration at some key inflection points in the way cities and places work. So you know if you think about what the Brent Cross regeneration might have looked like had it proceeded at full steam when we initiated it, that would be a giant shopping centre that straddles both sides of the A406 with a bunch of lower level suburban dwellings, mainly for sale, and a bit of one room to one car parking and I put it to you that much of that shopping centre would now be empty and we’d be wondering what the hell we’d done and there’d be an awful lot of high value homes, not delivering the homes that Londoners need. So some of this is actually to do with the profound changes that have gone on. There’s no doubt that there’s also something going on about the alignment of objectives of a city at a local level and the extent to which those priorities have been properly matched and you know credit to Barnet that to kind of hold dear to that and to stick to those things and to make the plan work is a real triumph but we shouldn’t ignore the just tectonic plates shifting around urban regeneration and the really great places are creating solutions that are fluid and flexible enough to be able to ride some of that wave. I would also say we sometimes plan very big when what’s needed are lots of small changes and the balance between you know giant interventions and the need instead to create platforms where the interventions will happen will be a mixture of organic and planned is really significant so, you know, think about the really successful dynamic urban places that we visit around the UK. The Northern Quarter, you know, I don’t think anyone from Manchester held a plan that said what we’re going to do is turn this into probably the most exciting dining, shopping destination, there’ll be a Chanel fashion show in a closed street but what they did create was the environment where entrepreneurialism, where planning would support that. Jules Pipe will often say that you know one of the joys of Hackney and its dynamism was partly because the Council couldn’t cope with everything so, some of it they just had to ride with and I think we need to learn from that as well as asking questions about why didn’t this big project work, the answer may be it probably wasn’t a big project, it was more small projects that we needed to let flower.
Susan Freeman
Interesting, yeah, and just do more of the things that seem to work well.
Nick Walkley
That by the way for people from Homes England will cause them to smile ruefully. I used to say when I was there, “I’ve got an organisation of Jane Jacobs. The problem is, we’re the New York Parks Authority, aren’t we. We’re the alternative to that. We’re the big intervention people.” I’m not going to mention his name because lots of people will switch off at this moment but you get the point.
Susan Freeman
I get the point and we’re now going to talk about your time at Homes England so, you led the creation and growth of Homes England which came out of the HCA and obviously, there was a mandate to intervene in the housing market and support the Government in building I think it was 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s where I suppose we are right now and clearly there were many, many challenges but I wondered what were the like key challenges and how do you feel you did in terms of achieving the targets that were thrown at you?
Nick Walkley
So, I think there were two sets of things going on here. Solving the housing crisis, that’s a really big problem and that’s what deeply compelling about the job and my view was, is and will always remain that Government needs an institution whose sole aim is to intervene to deal with that problem and it needs to be at arm’s length from Government because this is not a Government problem, it is also a market failure problem, it is a choice problem, it is a land problem, it is things that Government can influence but are also deeply invested in the national psyche as well as in the economy. And when I say ‘institution’, I mean bodies stuffed with public and private expertise that withstands political change, economic cycles and is in it for the longer haul and I always viewed it as my job number one, was to go about trying to build that institution and to build the partnerships to do that, to build the culture that goes with that because then once you’ve got that, you’ve got a vehicle to deliver policy nuances as long as you accept the job is to build more homes because we believe that’s fundamental to solving the housing crisis. The second challenge was, this is a big problem. The issue for Government with big problems is, they don’t get solved immediately but it looks dead easy to build a house and the gap in reality between every MP, every councillor, everybody in the system experiencing the building a home, cutting a ribbon, you know one of the problems with housing is everybody’s a damned expert because they live in one, and the reality of the scale and nature of the market interventions needed was a major challenge for not just Homes England but for any organisation and you know, we did make really significant progress, opening up large lines of funding, really big investments but I could never say it was a success and you know the sort of kind messages I got when I announced my departure, I kind of, yeah whatever, this is not about me, this is about this institution, it surviving and thriving and continuing to grow on that mission and occasionally telling Government things that are painful about what it needs to do and you know my, my kind of real sadness is that it doesn’t feel like we’re any further forward in tackling the housing crisis and that any Government, of any colour, will at some point have to grapple with those very big interventions. So, you know, I am an open advocate of those interventions need to include new settlements, every time a brown field land announcement or policy announcement is made, I have to go for a long walk to avoid me simply phoning the nearest radio show and shouting, “Yes, everybody thinks building on brown field land is a good idea, let’s do it.” It won’t solve our housing crisis. So, large settlements, difficult conversations therefore about where. I think infrastructure and maxing out every piece of infrastructure with housing delivery and supporting affordable housing is the job of the State. Private sector can play its role but there just isn’t enough money in that bit of the system. We can all agree that some housing association performance isn’t good enough but tenancy shouldn’t be a mark of who you are in as a person, that there shouldn’t be stigma attached to these things, that customer care isn’t good enough. All of that is true, none of it is an excuse for not building more homes and to build them at pace and so those are really difficult issues because they get to the heart of the way we value housing but whether the Treasury thinks about an investment in housing and how it accounts for it, those are the things that, we saw them nudged at the edges of them and made some progress but by golly, there’s still so much to do.
Susan Freeman
Yes and you know the point you make about private sector not being able to deliver the affordable housing, you go back to the days when the local authorities were, you know, building council homes, that seemed to work pretty well and we started off talking about the fact that the councils are underfunding so, the, they’re not in a position to build more.
Nick Walkley
And look, I’m totally agnostic about who builds affordable homes. As long as the landlord has the interests of the tenant and their social purpose at the heart of what they do, I’m pretty agnostic about that, I just think we need to build the homes. What I would say is, one of the big problems that Homes England were trying to grapple with and you know, to the point where we would just you know spend hours with the economists and others, that era of council house building, of course was underpinned by something that has long gone, which is thousands upon thousands of small developers, small builders, small suppliers, trades, this hidden wiring that allowed places to build. It wasn’t direct council employees, it was the council alongside a vast and diverse infrastructure, you know, Nigel Hugill always has the slide about the complete decimation of the small and medium developer but that then hides and then beneath that, the supply chain of small enterprises that supported the boom in housebuilding and actually, intervening in the market also means reimagining and sponsoring what comes next in that supply chain to ensure that you’ve got that diversity that can create a, you know, a bigger market and more supply and that’s, that’s a massive opportunity, that’s jobs, that’s local growth but it’s also a massive issue about where to begin and how to support that because you’re just going to have to acknowledge not all of it’s going to work.
Susan Freeman
No, and talking about not all of it working, I was so excited with Homes England invested in Urban Splash and Sekisui and the, you know, the sort of offsite construction and sort of sad that didn’t seem to work but you were at least trying something new and different.
Nick Walkley
So, of course, not just Sekisui but Ilke, Top Hat, we were supporting in many and various ways and not just do financial intervention, almost any method of changing the way we build homes, I’m a passionate advocate. I’ve literally swallowed the Mark Farmer Gatorade. The quality, the choice, the design, the ability to diverse… interestingly, one of the things about factory homes is, it allows local developers to derisk. If you can create a market that has large amounts of factory production, local developers can then think about what the right version of that is for their homes and derisk large other chunks so, it has profound impact so we were really, really keen to support. The challenge is really straightforward, unless you can guarantee supply, you can’t support factory production and it goes back to, so you have to solve really big problems sometimes and I view that as the job of Government. Government should be there to solve those things that others can’t and one of those is how do you underpin supply to keep the factories open and bringing together factory production with the need to deliver affordable, both to buy and to rent, homes. It’s a really challenging thing to do in terms of the risk Government is taking on but it’s probably key to transforming the housing market and to raising standards and my guess is, it likewise is probably key to how we tackle the carbon transition in our housing stock more generally. We’re going to have to invest in technologies that are scalable, somebody’s going to have the bear the risk for doing that. There’ll be a VHS Betamax moment but we need to go through that pain.
Susan Freeman
There’s a lot to think about, isn’t there.
Nick Walkley
That was the great bit of the job, apart from the opportunity to build an organisation and sharing creating a culture. There being a lot to think about was the greatest pleasure in the job and not so that I could solve it but actually, you know the rare privilege of working with genuinely brilliant people, you know, from some of the senior civil servants I engaged with, it’s easy for me to disparage a whole bunch of civil servants and, you know, I’m quite happy to do that for hours on end but there were people I worked with whose capability to help me think a problem through were sensational too. Working with, you know, local entrepreneurs, innovators, getting to know Tim Heatley and the way he addresses problems, that opportunity to think about a lot of things and find people to help me solve those problems was just a fantastic thing to be able to do.
Susan Freeman
So, you stood down in 2021. I know, according to the Press, you left for personal reasons, I don’t know if there’s anything else to say about that.
Nick Walkley
I try not to comment about my departure. It was the right thing to do and definitely the right thing for the institution.
Susan Freeman
Okay. And did you have another role in mind at that point?
Nick Walkley
So, I was really clear that I wasn’t going to take another public sector role at that point. I’d reached the point of being in the sector for so long that I thought, just as I thought when leaving Haringey, when leaving Haringey I thought very, very clearly if I don’t take a jump outside of local government, I’m just going to be that bloke who was a chief executive in local government and likewise, having worked in Whitehall and done you know the full gamut of things, it wasn’t I felt like well that’s done, I just thought, this is a moment where I can do something in a different sector. I wasn’t entirely clear what it was, I thought it might actually be an organisation with social purpose. I had the great privilege of spending a few months working at a Premier League supporting that institution as it figured out how to be safely reopen football grounds for the start of the season and work with Government. It was a truly, just a genuinely enjoyable thing to do both as a football fan but also someone interested in technology and then everything in my being was saying the thing that I wanted to do and thing I enjoy doing is working with places and institutions that are interested in delivering change and after a fairly odd beauty parade, I went to Avison Young and part of the reason I went to Avison Young, don’t laugh now, was because they sort of convinced me I wouldn’t be in charge and I was really keen, having been in charge three times that I needed time to not be in charge and instead just to work through how I might help an organisation, I mean make money out of helping other organisations strategically tackle their issues. So, that’s what I decided to do, I mean there were lots of other options on the table, couldn’t quite see myself as a housebuilder, didn’t see myself at that moment as maybe being a private equity advisor. Part of the problem is, lots of these people told me about the car package and I don’t have a driving licence, so it didn’t really work for me and it felt like a lot of the values set at Avison Young matched where I wanted to be and I knew the organisation of old of course. If you’d been involved in urban regeneration in the UK in any guise, their former GVA brand will have touched you at some point, I knew many of the people who were about to become my colleagues and I was actually quite excited about working with some of them. Not sure how excited they were about working with me but it seemed like, seemed like a good choice.
Susan Freeman
So that explains why you went in as President of UK Strategic Advisory…
Nick Walkley
Yep.
Susan Freeman
…and very quickly became Principal and UK President. So, it didn’t take you long to move into the being in charge role.
Nick Walkley
Look, I’ll say two things about that. I’ve said this to lots of people, I’m not that enamoured by the being in charge bit, I don’t particularly sort of do any of that status comedy, I mean my sort of long standing friends think the fact I’m called ‘President’ is reason enough to poke fun at me almost every day of the week. What I was really keen to do as the organisation was both growing and going through a period of tremendous change is to add my experience of leading organisations to that and I think this might be reflection more generally on the sector, the extent to which there’s huge raw talent and capability but it can often be quite narrowly focussed on how we become a broader and more collaborative organisation was a real interest to me. So, quite an honour and I was really keen to support and get involved. It was also the case, you know, GVA having been acquired by Avison Young, there was still work to do to bring the organisations and the full capability of being a global organisation to play and that was a completely new environment for me, you know, I do tell the joke, I did once go to a management meeting in Mansfield and when I got the new job at Avison Young, I did go to a management meeting in Miami. Strangely, they’re both quite the same because they were in a room with no windows and there was an awful lot of numbers on the screen but it was a new experience for me to be part of a global organisation with very different cultures, different ethos and I was really interested in what that might be like.
Susan Freeman
And how does it affect the business, obviously it’s based in Toronto.
Nick Walkley
Yes.
Susan Freeman
So, does the sort of culture if you like of the HQ affect the way you run the business in the UK?
Nick Walkley
I think the answer to that is, in both directions. So, yeah, it’s worth saying we’re a principal owned and led business, we’re privately held. My peers, the people and colleagues are the people who own the majority of the business and that’s the founding culture and the Canadian culture. We’re a significant institution in the Canadian economy and that aspect of confidence of being a rapidly growing company but a company where the people who take the decisions are the people you work with does impact on the UK and actually, one of the things we’ve been working on over the past eighteen months is making that really meaningful here in the UK, understanding what those levers are, how we bring governance together, how we make sure the voice of those people who run the business is better heard. But it’s also in the other direction, the business in Canada and particularly in the United States is heavily focussed on brokerage so we’re able to bring to bear our deep professional cultures in planning, in valuation, in project management, so, you know, my opposite number in the United States, Harry Klaff, he and I have an incredibly strong partnership, Steve Cowperthwaite, who runs our regions, you know, our heritage is a regional as well as a London business, has helped Avi in thinking and reshaping what the regional structure might look like in the US and what we’ve learned from the reorganisation we’ve done here, so that sense of there being interchange is really important. I’d also say we’re learning a lot, our north American business is sharp, it’s smart, practical, it knows how to sell, it understands the sector and it regularly provides a much needed jolt that at times we can be a little comfortable and there are other ways and so cultural exchanges are never easy, there are always jarring moments but I wouldn’t be doing the job if I didn’t think that the sum is already greater than the part, so it can be much more.
Susan Freeman
I was going to say well at least you speak the same language but sometimes the language is quite different.
Nick Walkley
It’s really interesting, we do of course have a European operation and a large affiliate network across Europe. One of the great things about heading out to MIPIM next week is the chance to actually connect with all of them and I don’t think my French colleagues have yet to understand at least 95% of the jokes I tell – mind you, my family would say the same – and my disparaging comments about the state of French popular music, Daft Punk aside, are probably not helping me in that regard.
Susan Freeman
Maybe cut the jokes.
Nick Walkley
Yeah. I’ve been told that before, Susan.
Susan Freeman
So, Nick, I mean you’ve talked about sort of restructuring and your vision, you know, for the business, how are people going to see it change?
Nick Walkley
The first thing to say is cultural change is, structural change is easy, I mean I don’t mean it’s really easy but ultimately, getting yourself better organised, lining things up and making sure that you’re properly facing into clients, that your professionals are properly collaborating, that they’re preparing and the bringing people together, that’s fairly straightforward but culture is not seen, it’s felt and of course we can do things to signal that we’re really serious about our culture and doing what we say, so you know next week I think nearly 60% of our delegation are getting the train to MIPIM, now we intend that to be virtually everyone next year, so we’re hiring carriages, we’re doing the whole thing because we’re not just saying ‘sustainability really matters to us but we’ll get the plane if it’s a bit difficult, we’re actually going to make a virtue of doing it. So some of it can be seen in terms of living what we do but it ought to be felt, it ought to be the case that both our new clients but particularly our longstanding clients get this genuine sense that they’re getting the whole organisation capability even if they’re only asking for a particular services because our view and our vision is given the scale of the transition facing real estate, whatever the question you’re asking is, the solution is going to involve far more than a simple transaction or a simply planning application in the future and we need to help clients both frame questions but also respond directly to their needs and that’s where we’re trying to position ourselves. I think that’s really exciting for colleagues as well as for clients. It’s a profound cultural change for many, you know, I’ve been a fairly vocal critic of RICS, I mean it’s an easy thing to join that club but that extent to which our professionals are actually getting this collaboration, joint working skills, are we turning people out with the right skill mix, I think that’s questionable but we can do more to support them and actually no, it’s great fun hunting in packs, isn’t it, it’s even better fun if you’re able to represent a bunch of people who are going to win if you win.
Susan Freeman
And what’s the size of the organisation now? How many?
Nick Walkley
So, 1400 or so people here in the UK across all disciplines, all sectors and about 5000 professionals globally. So, we’re a significant organisation, you know we’re a £160-170 million business in the UK, we’re the sort of not the Big Four, next one but we don’t just want to be the alternative to the other four because we’re all the alternative, we want to be the third advisor for a reason, that’s our really kind of big thing. And in scale, we’re probably unique now in maintaining a presence in all the major UK cities and by presence, we don’t just mean an office with our name on the door, we’re aiming to be full service in every office. The people who serve clients in Liverpool, live in Liverpool, part of the Liverpool economy and contribute to the Liverpool economy and we want to make that case, the case right across the country, we think regions matter, we think they’re real growth opportunities as well, so we maintain that significant UK footprint, including Belfast and Dublin. I think the most exciting thing we’re doing at MIPIM is a Dublin-Belfast corridor session where we’re bringing together public and private leaders from Belfast and Dublin to talk about just the unique real estate opportunity there is and the growth opportunity there is in that space. And very proudly, we’re hosting a real estate balance breakfast on the Wednesday morning for young and emerging talent at MIPIM to come together, to listen to some very high profile speakers but more importantly, to network with each other.
Susan Freeman
Sounds brilliant. You’re going to be very busy, I think, Nick. So, there’s obviously been press around the financial restructuring which I know you’ve talked about a little bit. Is that almost concluded and does that effect your plans for the company?
Nick Walkley
It’s really difficult to comment on the specifics but almost concluded includes sort of my inbox filling up with things as the deal closes, hence the announcement that we were over the line in terms of, at reaching an agreement. The really important thing here is having completed the financial restructuring, we’re not in the position of having to think about ‘24, ‘25 and ‘26 as being wait and see moments, we’re good to go and we are going. We’re hiring, we’re implementing strategic plans that we’ve been working on, we’re not sort of looking over our shoulder in the rearview mirror how dreadful ’23 was for the market in general. Instead there’s a bit of, somebody said, “you’ve got some confidence and swagger” which is totally hilarious for me because I have neither and when I do have them, I tend to have drunk too much and fall over but what we definitely do have is a confidence off the back of our ’23 results, increased profitability, a settled financial future, the fact that we remain in private ownership and our colleagues retain the controlling share. That’s a quite unique place to work in the sector and particularly for an advisory firm. We won’t be having a difficult conversation with shareholders in April about share prices, we’ll be recruiting people, we’ll be growing and we’ll be out there with some really significant mandates.
Susan Freeman
Well that sounds very positive and one of the other things I wanted to ask you about was the business group leaders because I was told that as part of your restructuring, you, you’ve reduced 21 business group leaders down to 5 and I just wondered what that was about, how you select the people who are now going to be those leaders?
Nick Walkley
So we went from 23 to 7. It’s a shrinkage; it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Look, this is not about collapsing our capability but it was about making sure that there was better alignment of skills and people and they were really, really clear about what we’re trying to achieve for clients. There’s also something for me around 23 people in a room, it’s a football match with substitutes, it’s not a team. 7 is a team who can work together, who can argue, agree, disagree and then move on. So the structure is about creating opportunities for collaboration but also for professionals to feel like they’ve got a home. So, you know the most profound example of this is, we brought together all of our planning, regeneration, land and development, including acquisitions and disposal skills, with our deep and brilliant technical knowledge in things like CPO, I mean everybody in the market knows Virginia, I think she’s the best advisor, you know, that exists in that space. I’ve been a client of hers many times but bringing them together into a business group called ‘place’ because actually whether you’re making an application to deliver a Build to Rent block, you’re trying to buy a piece of land or you’re considering a complex CPO, you are part of the functionality of a place and the way to get the right answer is to think about the place, and what we’re doing through the business group is bringing those professionals together because you know what, that’s what they care about, that’s what they want to talk about, to allow them to collaborate but also then for us to talk to clients in a holistic way about the solution that they might be able to deliver and we think that will help us both win work but also deliver real value to clients. So it was about going through the pain of a reorganisation so that we’re better aligned and also we’re able to give people who joined real career structures, real opportunities, you know there’s a strong culture isn’t there with a lot of real estate firms of teams of four or five people and then them sort of competing with each other. That’s not the way the modern economy works, it’s not what younger colleagues want, they want to be part of a wider culture, they want to see that progression, they want to see opportunities outside of their own area of expertise and that’s what we were looking to offer through this. In terms of selecting, I just chose the seven most attractive people. That’s not what I did by the way. It’s a mixture of some youth, some people who were really keen to move forward, some real, deep expertise and heritage but this has always, and I’ve been saying this in my internal meetings, we’re just at another moment of transition, you know, as the culture now becomes our focus, as we really begin to work on that collaboration and working together, that will see further change over the next two to three years and that’s not because people, you know, I’ve got my eye on anyone but that’s just a natural part of the evolution of any organisation and one that is healthy and we want to encourage and, you know, I’m on record, “and more women” and more female senior leaders, you know, it’s one of my proud achievements at Homes England, the extent to which we managed to elevate so many women in the organisation and that’s a, that’s a massive objective for me here at Avison Young, young talent, female talent, let’s be the home for more of that.
Susan Freeman
Sounds really positive and very exciting. And assuming you do sometimes have time off, I sort of guess from the football analogy and what you’ve said about music, that music and football are things that might keep you busy?
Nick Walkley
Football, a little. I am a music obsessive, it is absolutely true that my life ambition is to work in a record shop.
Susan Freeman
Ah, well you, you may be able to do that. Apparently, there were some figures out this morning saying that it’s a sort of ten year high for independent record shops which is amazing.
Nick Walkley
So there’s a sort of weird, other version of my life, I spend a lot of time in record shops. I do say that the person who has benefitted most from my career, is not my family, it’s Nigel House, one of the co-owners of Rough Trade Records because most of my bank balance is now in his bank balance and you know, sitting down with Nigel now, it’s this very strange thing of, we used to talk about, we still do talk about recent releases but I also now talk about the retail market and where they might want to expand to. So, yeah, music takes up a lot of my life. Really, really, I read a lot, I get teased, I read an awful lot of non-fiction, sort of like I like a good, dull book, my family would say, and I really, really love cities, I love being in them, I love spending time thinking about them, I spend as much time as I can trying to find out new things, trying to find new places to go. I also, this is not meant to surprise you, I like the ballet, I’m quite a fan of both traditional and modern dance. I like the cultural life of a city, it’s really important to me, I think it’s part of what makes, you know, urban life fantastic and trying new things, had you said to me five years ago, you know, you’ll be watching the National Ballet programme to see what’s coming up, I would have laughed at you but that’s what a city affords you, isn’t it, the opportunity to try something new, something different and take a swim in different bits of cultural life.
Susan Freeman
Well I think it’s a good thing that Avison Young has a strong arts and cultural consultancy group, isn’t it.
Nick Walkley
Our London Urban Future session took place in the new Soho Place Theatre, which we project managed, I mean what a privilege to be involved in things like that. And what a fantastic team, you know, a group of project managers who found a niche of trusted client base, just amazing to be able to say, “we did that”, it’s a real privilege and part of the reason I joined in the first place, you know, you can walk around most UK cities and you can say, “we had a hand in that” and that’s a, that’s a fantastic thing to be leading.
Susan Freeman
Sounds terrific. And Nick, thank you so much. I look forward to the sort of the music on the Avison Young stand at MIPIM.
Nick Walkley
I finish with the story, it’s become a bit of a source of tension with global colleagues actually, that whenever we have a global get-together there’s always the sort of music that people either come on to or before it starts online. I’m not a fan of the choice of some of my fellow executives would be a way of putting it.
Susan Freeman
Well I’m sure it’s not going to be long before you change that, Nick, I have great confidence.
Nick Walkley
There’s a fantastic Toronto punk rock scene, I’m just not sure that some of my fellow global management members are quite ready for it yet.
Susan Freeman
Nick, thank you so much, I’m so pleased that we finally got this together, so thank you for your time.
Nick Walkley
It’s such a pleasure and I guess I’ll be seeing you in the South of France very soon, Susan.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Nick Walkley. We talk a lot about the need to bring public and private sector together to enable regeneration so it’s fantastic to speak to someone who has the experience of senior leadership roles in both. So, that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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