1. What do you think is the next major innovation or development in real estate and the city that you are most looking forward to?
I think the next major shift, which we’re already starting to see, simply concerns how the city functions as a whole. This shift is multifaceted, profound, and its consequences for the real estate market are considerable.
Today, we must reconcile several major transformations. The first is obvious: fewer people are going to the office daily. This is due both to remote working and to a more challenging economic climate, which has mechanically reduced the demand for traditional offices.
The second change concerns living arrangements. Households are changing, there are fewer children, more small living spaces, and above all, a gradual weakening of intergenerational and intragenerational interactions. This raises a real social question: how can we rebuild connections and these interactions within the city?
Finally, there’s the question of lifestyle. Spending an hour or more each day commuting is no longer acceptable. Some are forced to do it, of course, but it’s no longer a desirable model.
Real estate innovation therefore lies in our ability to design multi-use assets capable of simultaneously meeting the needs of work, housing, services, and social life. Places where everyone can find a coherent balance between where and how they work, where and how they live, and the human and social environment in which they evolve.
2. On what topics have the younger members of your teams led you to reconsider your way of thinking or working?
The younger members of our teams have led me to fundamentally rethink my perception of the relationship to work and place.
For a long time, office real estate was based on a kind of assumption: commuting daily to a centralized location was the norm. Newer generations are clearly challenging this model. They expect more flexibility, more meaning in the use of spaces, and a stronger work-life balance. This has led me to reconsider certain assumptions, particularly the idea that an asset’s performance is primarily measured by its occupancy rate or location.
They also changed my perspective on the concept of user experience. Where we used to think in terms of square meters, returns, or asset types, they think in terms of quality of life, services, mixed-use development, and accessibility. This approach led me to more systematically integrate the question of the actual, everyday use of spaces from the very beginning of the design phase of our projects.
In my work, this has translated into a more collaborative and open approach. I use junior profiles as true sparring partners, testing the relevance of our concepts with them, and listening to their objections, expectations, and intuitions. They provide us with extremely valuable early warning signs about upcoming societal changes.
In reality, they force us to think longer term. They will be the main users, decision-makers, and investors in the market tomorrow. Listening to them today ensures that the assets we develop will remain relevant in ten or fifteen years.
3. Which part of your business do you think artificial intelligence will have the most difficulty replacing?
It is interesting to answer this question from a different perspective. Artificial intelligence can already, and will be able to even more so in the future, intervene in many aspects of our profession, functional design, organization of spaces and technical optimization, provided of course that it is given the right instructions.
However, what AI will probably never be able to replace is precisely the exercise of defining these instructions. Determining the nature of a project, the relevance of a mix of uses, and the suitability of a real estate concept to the life, work, and social expectations of a given population.
AI can also help us improve the environmental performance of projects, particularly in a context where we seek to build the city on itself, limit the artificialization of soils and optimize the use of energy, which has become more expensive and more complex to produce.
But human intelligence will remain essential for arbitrating, deciding, and giving meaning to projects. Once these strategic choices have been made, AI can be a powerful execution tool.
4. Looking back on your career, what professional decision had the most long-term impact, even though it wasn’t obvious at the time you made it?
At the beginning of my career, I worked in real estate development, between 1990 and 1997. In 1997, I made the decision to leave this profession, which I was nevertheless practicing successfully, to move towards asset management, first at Archon, then at Morgan Stanley.
At the time, this profession was still in its infancy. Anglo-Saxon funds were beginning to structure these approaches, but nothing was straightforward. Leaving property development to give my career a much more financial dimension was a difficult decision. I vividly remember some sleepless nights after leaving Bouygues Immobilier, wondering if I hadn’t made a huge mistake.
In retrospect, this decision shaped the rest of my career. It allowed me to go on to lead Carrefour Property, and then, most importantly, to take over the management of European real estate investments at ADIA from 2012.
This choice allowed me to combine two essential dimensions: the brick and mortar, the concrete fabrication of projects, operational management, and financial analysis. Today this seems obvious, but in 1997, it was not at all.
Concluding remarks
Real estate is an exciting profession because it combines financial dimensions with very concrete and physical realities; real estate is a tangible object, not an abstract concept, but also, and above all, profoundly human dimensions.
Designing and managing real estate projects ultimately means managing human relationships across the board. And this human dimension remains, in my view, absolutely central and irreplaceable.
