Why I’ll be hot footing it to FOOTPRINT+ again next year

Real estate events are a bit like music festivals. The bigger they are, the greater the chance that you’ll miss as much as you see. That’s why festival-wise I’m more of a Latitude lady than a Glastonbury gal and real estate-wise, I often enjoy more focused events such as FOOTPRINT+, which I was privileged to moderate three sessions at earlier this month.

It was only the second outing for FOOTPRINT+, which took place on 6-8 June in Brighton, but the brainchild of co-founders Tim Pyne and Emily Day attracted an impressive 2,100 people during the three-day event, despite clashing with the likes of the Ecocity World Summit in London, the BCO Conference in Dublin and the ULI Europe Conference in Madrid.

BE News was delighted to be one of FOOTPRINT+’s media partners for the first time this year, but it wasn’t my first time at the event. When I was between jobs last year, the organisers kindly invited me to moderate a couple of sessions. I thought the event was so good that I leapt at the chance to get involved again, this time as editor of BE News.

I wasn’t disappointed. Billed as ‘The UK property event for a zero carbon future’, the event boasted a stellar line-up speakers and an unusually strong conference programme, which focused on the practical detail we haven’t heard before rather than the navel-gazing stuff we have.

Take the three panel sessions I moderated. I would like to take the credit for them being as interesting as they were, but I can’t. In each case, the conference producers came up with really meaty topics, enlisted industry experts to help develop the briefs and lined up a brilliantly diverse range of operational leads (as opposed to just senior managers) as panellists.

So, when I moderated the session posing the question ‘How does ESG performance impact asset valuation?’, the panellists – Lindsay Taylor from Deepki, Linda Makrodimitri from Schroders and Malcolm Hanna from LGIM – drilled straight down into the detail of what each of their businesses are doing to integrate ESG performance into the asset valuation process, before sharing real-life examples illustrating the impact of good and bad ESG performance on asset valuation.

There were similarly practical versus hypothetical takeaways from the session on ‘ESG and B-Corp: different approaches to the same goal.’ The panellists – Richard Garland of Gradient Consultants, Lisa Gunn of TFT, Rob Bearyman of Bennetts Associates and Basil Demeroutis of FORE Partnership – had all gone through the process of B-Corp certification and as well as sharing why they did it and what the benefits were, they talked frankly about how long it had taken, what the challenges were and how much it had cost.

Perhaps the most eye-opening session, though, focused on a debate that the industry has not yet had in a meaningful way, on ‘Gen Z: what the next generation want.’ Representing Gen Z, the frighteningly composed Connie Bellass, an architecture student from the University of Manchester, set out her generation’s stall to fellow panellists Tyler Goodwin of Seaforth Land, Shane Ryan of Puma Property Finance and James Shearman of Scape. Friendly but firm, she made it clear that Gen Z expects the industry to meet its needs and that it will hold it to account if it doesn’t. As Goodwin posted on LinkedIn after the event: “Be prepared for some positive disruption.”

He’s right. There is much to learn from Gen Z, but as with FOOTPRINT+, the emphasis is on the word positive. Be ready. Don’t be afraid.