To celebrate International Women’s Day 2026, which took place on 8 March, BE News is running a series of interviews with inspirational women who work across the built environment sector
Name: Rebeca Guzmán Vidal
Job title: Co-founder, Curate Real Estate
What I do: Curate was built with the desire and conviction that real estate can be done differently to deliver better quality products and services that truly put the end user front and centre of every decision. We specialise in mixed-use repositioning and we are thematically focus on retail, F&B, leisure and hospitality.
Why I got into the property industry: I was fascinated by the importance of real estate in building luxury brands and how brand equity is so intrinsically linked with the place. As a huge design and architecture geek, I thought it would be a good industry to go into to better understand how the world worked!
How I did it: I was lucky enough to have a brilliant career coach at university who helped me get two internships at Cushmans and later CBRE. After I graduated, I got back in touch with my boss at CBRE and started working for her in Madrid a few weeks later.
My first proper job: Surveyor in the CBRE Spain high street retail team. The team was led by a terrific woman, Dolors Jimenez, who had two right hand women with her, Susana and Alicia – looking back I could not have asked for a better start!
My first big break: A few months into the CB role I met some of the leadership team in France and the UK and essentially begged to be considered for a transfer back to London. I managed to persuade two directors in the London office to give me a shot and I moved to London a few months later.
My inspiration(s): Anyone who has built something from scratch. I have huge respect for founders of big and small businesses alike for putting themselves out there and forging their own path. It wouldn’t be fair to omit my mum from the list either. My grit and perseverance are one of her many gifts to me.
The biggest challenge I’ve encountered to date: Being an outsider in more ways than one. I didn’t read land economics or real estate at university and chose quite an unusual path to get to where I am now, so I didn’t have the network you benefit from through an undergraduate, masters or even the graduate programme. That said, I don’t think this has held me back. I am lucky to have had great opportunities throughout my career to build a network and have done my best to keep growing and nurturing it as the years go by.
My greatest achievement/proudest moment to date: Founding our business. It’s exhilarating, terrifying, wonderful and tremendously demanding all at once. For me, it was liberating to do it after what felt like years of daydreaming it.
The biggest misconception people have about the property industry: That you must do a certain degree, at a certain university, followed by a certain masters and a qualification after. There are so many strands to how the built environment adds value to society as a whole and there are so many sectors we collaborate with too – it’s a wonderfully varied sector that touches so much of what we use every day as citizens. You don’t need a special degree to get in – in fact, what we need is more generalists with more varied skills!
My biggest bugbear about the industry/the one thing I would change about the industry: The notion that what we do has a limited impact in terms of time and space. As a whole, we have this huge impact on how our cities are shaped, how they grow and how they operate. Many in the built environment have a conscious or unconscious bias around this and it’s something we need to change.
Why I’m so passionate about DE&I: Because it makes economic sense. It’s easy to politicise DE&I today, but if you strip it all back the data is clear. More balanced teams make better decisions that yield better outcomes and better returns – aka a win-win situation.
Where I’d like to be in five years’ time career-wise: Growing our Curate business and spending more time on angel investing and paying it forward – informal mentoring is extremely rewarding and something I’ve always enjoyed doing.
Who I’d invite, living or dead, to a dinner party: Warren Buffett, Celia Cruz, Stephen Fry, Mo Gawdat, Simon Sinek, Emma Grede and my mother as the wild card!
What I do in my downtime: Travel – to see family, to get lost in a new city, to get inspired. My four-year-old son is very active so we play lots of sports and hang out at the local pub more than I had imagined before we had kids!
The job I’d be doing if I was not doing this: Probably working in research or economics, looking at big-picture macro movements and how those impact how our world works.
My advice for someone just starting out: Don’t overthink it. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll say the wrong, thing but guess what, we all do. How you choose to recover or correct that is up to you… and be yourself. Not everyone will like you and that’s ok.
My motto/mantra: Too many to say! One of my more recent ones is to never beg for a seat at the table.
