Grow Places

GP 39: What’s The Problem You Are Trying to Solve? with James Pellatt of Digital Trees

• Grow Places • Season 1 • Episode 39

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In this episode of the Grow Places Podcast, host Tom Larsson speaks with James Pellatt, founder of Digital Trees and former Director of Innovation at GPE, about the deep structural inefficiencies in real estate—and how data and technology can be the key to unlocking lasting change.

James shares the thinking behind launching Digital Trees, his pragmatic approach to innovation, and why leadership, culture, and curiosity are essential to digital transformation. Drawing from decades in the sector, he unpacks why PropTech often fails to scale, how sustainability commitments created new data burdens, and why AI’s biggest opportunity might be freeing up time for deeper human connection.

From project management to smart buildings, and from open innovation to the lessons of Kaizen at Jaguar Land Rover, James and Tom explore how real estate can stop repeating the past and start designing for the future—with purpose, precision, and empathy.

Tune in for a thought-provoking look at the intersection of technology, place, and the people behind progress.

www.growplaces.com/podcast

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, Tom Larson.

Speaker 2:

James. Hello, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks very much for having me. I think it's more to the point today. Yeah, so before we dive into it, I've got like a burning question. So you were director of innovation at GPE, one of the most respected property companies there is. Why have you left to set up Digital Trees?

Speaker 3:

It was part of an evolution, I guess. Throughout my career, I've always had an aspiration to improve. I think the industry is quite inefficient, and so I'm always striving for efficiency somewhere. And GP was a brilliant business. I still have lots of friends there, but its business plan is literally to own assets in central London and I'd taken it as far as I could take it. Really. We digitized the business. We introduced a data lake and data layer, built new CRMs, integrated technology and I felt like I'd cracked it, and I got to a point in my career where I thought like I've got another 10 years at work, all of this exciting things happening around the world in terms of technology and particularly AI and just you know, toby and I had a conversation. He's always been very honest. We've always like, supported each other.

Speaker 3:

That just really it's time for me to move on, so I just I wanted to do what I've done on a bigger scale, and that's why I set up Digital Trees, because really what I learned was that sort of leadership teams within real estate organizations don't fully understand technology. Ironically, they treat technology the way most technology companies think about real estate, which is it's always going to go over budget, it won't promise what it's going to do and you're going to get ripped off somewhere. And really what I wanted to break down was that point of how can you educate, how can you let a real estate company understand what the technology might be, and then how might that apply to their real estate problems. And because I've got decades of experience in both, I thought I was uniquely placed to help the world of real estate with digital transformation amazing.

Speaker 2:

So and that is the core kind of value proposition then for digital trees at our core.

Speaker 3:

That's. That's basically what we do is we? We listen to our clients, we understand their business plan. We then do, if they're happy with that, speak to their teams, because, you know, at Tishman and GP, everything was managed in-house for the whole asset lifecycle.

Speaker 3:

I worked alongside some of the world's best people in this role. So, whilst I've not led a leasing team or I've not led a property management team, I've seen those problems day and so I can talk to people, I can listen to their problems and then we show them the art of the possible. We talk about what AI is, we talk about what data is, talk about technology and startups, and then basically bring the two things together so you create a vision and then you create a strategy. And then, once you bring the two things together, so you create a vision and then you create a strategy, and then once you sort of apply what technology might do to help solve someone's problem, then you've got much more likelihood of it being utilised or adopted. And for me, it's the main barrier. It's the why PropTech hasn't taken off or can't take off, whichever slice of the pie you're talking at like what's held it back. Those, to me, are the reasons why so hoping to unlock all of that?

Speaker 2:

So what would you say is that kind of nexus then at the moment, that gets you into the right position with clients? Clearly, there's a hell of a lot of noise out there at the moment around AI and technology, and how do you break through that noise in what you do? Clearly, there's there's a hell of a noise out there at the moment around ai and technology, and what's that? How do you break through that noise in in what you do?

Speaker 3:

you, you you're hitting a nail on the head right, which is you get, like the, the bell curve of adoption, like there's only adopters like yourself, right, and there's people who really want to be at the forefront of things, and then there's um, fast followers, and then there at the forefront of things, and then there's fast followers, and then there's the rest right, and in real estate, that bell curve probably is not evenly distributed. The front end is quite thin and you're getting two things really, which is you're either getting pressure from your board to do something about this you may be curious because you're reading about it and you can see. You know, I think that seminal moment November 22, is a pivotal point in which chat GPT became a thing and you could suddenly see something. We've lived with AI for decades, but we just got used to it and taken it for granted. But when you could see it generating things, all of a sudden, that was the unlock. And of course there's a massive hype cycle and of course there's all this other stuff.

Speaker 3:

But the other thing that's happened and I don't think this is spoken about enough is that we've had like a decade of low interest rates and we've got drunk on those. The inefficiency just built on that point and you just kept hiring people. It didn't really matter and you just mass more and more inefficiency throughout the process and no one had to do something about it. But now costs have gone up and suddenly costs and overhead is a really big issue. You do have to think about that point. So there's a twofold thing, which is companies start to look at how inefficient they are and there's this technology that might help them do something about it. And one of the engagements we do is we'll often do a survey of time and we ask does the organisation support what they're doing? And invariably it's no. And B we ask them how much time on average a week do you spend either preparing, collating or issuing a report? And that can vary between a day or two days a week and often at board level that's seen as no. That can't be right. That's nonsense.

Speaker 3:

But we've made these commitments for the right reasons, into sustainability and in 2020, when lots of people were saying in 10 years' time, this is going to be a thing, it seemed okay to make that commitment. But what they didn't realise is that the reporting burden around sustainability was suddenly massive, and for the right reasons. Greenwashing is a you know you desperately need to avoid that point. But that means you've got to measure something. And if you've got to measure something, it means you've got to have data. And if you've got to have data, all of a sudden you've got to think about organising what you have displaced across your business to put it into one place, and that was the unlock of GP.

Speaker 3:

There was two things that we did. One was that we were moving into a customer-focused world, so you've got to understand the customer journey and we'd make this net zero commitment. And actually sometimes those are conflicting arguments. So I saw technology, and data in particular, as the unlock of the thing. To try and measure that point, and often so. You've either got time, you've got a business function that you're trying to move into a customer, or your sustainability, or you've got efficiency, and all of those things come together. Then all of a sudden, it makes sense to think about what technology might do for you and what you might do with it. So that's the unlock.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because a lot of the narrative that you just described there is kind of productivity-focused, isn't it? It's kind of like about how do we find efficiencies and how do we make our existing models kind of work harder or do more, which is obviously like the first rung on the ladder, um, and then where do you kind of see some of this going in terms of kind of moving up that, that ladder over time through innovation or other approaches? So what's?

Speaker 3:

what's really interesting to me. I think people are right to be suspicious of technology. I'm not a tech evangelist. I like to think of myself as a tech pragmatist and I get the suspicion about AI. But to run away from it because you're suspicious of it, it's a natural thing to do. But really, the key question to me is what you see with this. What if it's going to create some extra bandwidth? What do you do with the bandwidth right? So and some you know forward-thinking clients think of it this way that, which is okay. Some clients are sort of sufficient. Go, oh, this is, you know from.

Speaker 3:

From a social value perspective, this is bad news, this is not a good thing, and uh, so just trying to explain to them, yeah, but, but you believe in unlocking social value. You're a b corp company. It's at your core. So your theory of by which this is this is his thing and you need whatever he puts out is what he believes. But that takes a lot of time and a lot of engagement. To me, these tools are the unlock right. It's the bandwidth that you're suddenly getting, and the smart developer, the smart real estate company, will think okay to hit that goal if it means that we're going to communicate with more people, or you're going to visit more customers, or you're just going to think more that's the price here, that's the, that's the win.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I agree fully, um, but as I'm sure you're in a lot of conversations in a lot of rooms where, um, you know, you have to kind of establish some of that common ground around, around terminology, around, um, the sort of the, the basics of a kind of a digital strategy or digital framework. So, let's say, you've now got an appointment with someone, you're in one of those established organizations. What are those steps? What is that kind of roadmap that you would take people on the journey through? Because it is a bit of a house of cards, isn't it? If you want to get to the shiny star of integrated, integrated artificial intelligence, there's some steps you need to go through. There's lots of steps to go through.

Speaker 3:

I think that's that's the.

Speaker 3:

That's part of the point, which is, I think, the first thing is to understand what is it you're trying to get to, and the first thing is really that you should organize your data.

Speaker 3:

So, whatever, whatever it is and and again, this is the sort of even this point a lot of your listeners will be thinking data. We have loads of data. What you actually have is lots of documents. You don't have data which is zeros and ones, and paper which is literally pdfs, and trying to develop the understanding between the two and the value of having a number, value which is simply maybe how many people were in an office floor and how much energy were they consuming and at what date, and then keep recording that every half hour over time. That's how you start to get correlations about patterns and uses. But it takes a lot to get to that point and that's not necessarily understood. But you're trying to help people get to that understanding and then the unlock is like emotional on their part. So what is it that's going to do for that member of that team to their day job and sometimes it might not do anything for that team and that's quite hard right.

Speaker 3:

That's just a prosaic thing about just using SharePoint, like, oh, I've got to put stuff on SharePoint. It's boring, but now it's really important because that is where you're going to find information, or your colleagues are going to find information and they're going to speed up their time to get to something. So it's a real mix. But it's why you've got to go back to what is the problem you're trying to solve. If you can solve a problem, then people know why they're doing something for their colleagues and there's so many examples.

Speaker 3:

But it's like why hasn't the smart building thing really taken off? It's partly because when it goes through the development process, the development team sees zero benefit of that effort and cost of making a smart building, because you may not even have a financial benefit. You've sold the development that time. It doesn't matter. But now if you want to get to a net zero accredited building, you're going to have to have some means of recording something down the line, even if you're never going to touch it. So you need to try and understand the unlocks and tell this. And really it's about telling stories and making the story understandable so do you?

Speaker 2:

do you think in that you have a maybe a different story to a, a CEO or to a board, than you would have to an employee within that organisation?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and that's the crucial thing here is and what I find is lots of pockets of enthusiasm. Any business, in any real estate organisation, you can find somebody like yourself, right, who was there in an organization. I wish we were like this. They're quite not easy to find, but you find them, especially the sort of younger they tend to be but without any leadership support, then you don't get anywhere with it, and that's a common thing.

Speaker 3:

So the three barriers to innovation are a lack of leadership, which is why I target this at c-suite, and it's why I target it at whole organizations instead of a pocket of an organization, uh, and it's why I'm definitely not focusing on smart buildings, because the why isn't really there. Uh, if there's a lot of bureaucracy which there is tons of in our business, because we're constantly reporting something, and then there's a cultural of bureaucracy which there is tons of in our business because we're constantly reporting something and then there's a cultural willingness to change right, the two often lead to the other and unless you're unlocking that thing, you've got a strategy at the beginning. You're not really going to get to the point of where you want to be.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So when you're talking about, you know, company X, company Y. If you're looking over a kind of zero to five-year period in this, what sort of what sort of adoptions do you think you could take over that period of time? Because this stuff isn't instant either, is it? It kind of takes some time and strategy.

Speaker 3:

I think you need to have a look at it. Probably five years is the right timescale. Technology moves us a lot and it's often the blockers use that as the excuse not to do anything, which is especially. My generation will say it's beta max or VHS, which is ridiculous. But you're trying to put something in a timescale that you can make an impact. You need to have a quick win.

Speaker 3:

So a lot of blockers through innovation has shown me a benefit then, and you need to find something in the first years, improve something for somebody. By years two and three you will have definitely noticed a difference. You will have seen having up-to-date, accurate information at your fingertips starts to make a difference. And by year five and I know this because there's other organizations which I've frankly tried to copy and look at the benefits they see are off the charts. Right, it really by year five.

Speaker 3:

You're really grateful that you made that investment in whatever it was you did and you think it's a no-brainer at that time, because you've amassed enough insight and information to make a difference and to make quicker, smarter decisions. And the best example of that is a company called Endurant. Julian Carey did this, went back when he was STEM prop and he invested in this data platform data layer back then. He's then since been bought out and now runs this as a part of a BlackRock company and they can take and literally buy up other companies and go from what were month-long processes to like an hour-long processes and start to see efficiencies and more scale.

Speaker 2:

So it kind of breeds itself as a means of just getting better at what it is you do yeah, and talk to me a bit about like the culture of innovation then, because some of this we've talked about is, um, almost governance or process, but actually not like the culture around an organization.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, to be open and facilitating innovation yeah, I, I learned this the hard way. Um and this is sort of so back at when I was a tishman, I was chatting to my mentor. My boss at the time called Tom Farrell. We ran global design and construction and we were in New York in 2007. And Tishman and Spire were building Yankee Stadium the new baseball stadium for the new Yankees and it was the first time I'd seen a BIM model in full action. And I remember I was sat next to the head of HR and said, wow, this is going to put us out of a job. This is amazing. Get to 2011,.

Speaker 3:

I joined GPE. What I think is one of the best pieces of government policy was the UK BIM mandate, which was, again, it's five years, so five years. I need you to all change and if you want public set to work, this is what you're going to have to do. And it was amazing because it gave me a framework. I'd just joined GPE. I'd seen this in the back of my mind. I'd seen at Moore London, the trade contractors using 3D modeling for installation, but I couldn't work out why weren't design teams using it? Then it didn't make sense. Come into and I'd sort of go yeah, we're going to use this and this is, and the team sort of go, oh okay. What I wasn't doing was listening to their concerns, and the culture of innovation is that you've really got to recognise people. You know you need to be highly empathetic with it. There are going to be complete naysayers and there's going to be complete enthusiasts, and what I'm trying to find is the healthy sceptics. So the middle is my best constituency because they kind of want to come to that point. They see the benefit of it, but they're also is this a flash in the pan? Is it going to work or not going to work? And those are really sort of. Trying to listen to those voices is the key.

Speaker 3:

Once you make a safe environment for someone to do that stuff, like other guests in your podcast talk about. We talk about failing fast or learning, or how do you speed up the knowledge cycle? It's really hard, I'm going to say, because it is slow. Right, building a building is five years. That's taken a long time, so it's quite hard to fail fast in that piece.

Speaker 3:

But can you make a safer environment in a project, in a business, that can learn quickly? And learning from mistakes is kind of the and it's a, it's a way of showing progress because, again, if you're reporting back to a leadership team saying here's something that we're trialing, this is what we've learned, this has worked, this hasn't worked, but we're either going to carry on with it or we're going to stop with it, at least you're framing it in a way that leadership understand okay, okay, okay, you are making progress and the team aren't afraid to say that isn't working. I mean, especially with a lot of the startups that I've worked with over the years, that open innovation piece is an incredible. Once you get to that symbiotic relationship that I've had with people like Twinview and Smart Spaces, that's been incredible because we've learned from each other and you get stuff done and that's how it should be.

Speaker 3:

And then the other piece which we really say very rarely gets to is the culture of open innovation, and Angela was talking, talking the episode just come out about learning from each other and becoming very defensive and we do.

Speaker 3:

It's quite easy to sort of not have it. We've done this better, we're better at this than they are. And instead, open innovation is when you get to the point of we've tried this and it hasn't worked and we got to a gpe because we were in a think tank with five other property companies but, crucially, the reason why it worked is because they were all in different countries, so we didn't feel like we were competing. I think if that uh had taken place with even the five reeds in london, with british land, land, sec, whatever, like it happens in the sustainability world every day because there's a big common goal to get to. But the moment that you feel like you're losing some competitive advantage, the shots come down and people don't want to share it and that's. I don't think that ever goes away. But if you can ever get to the point of open innovation, that's when you're really you know things will really take off.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and are there any other examples from outside of our industry that you look at Because you know, yeah, maybe give us some of those examples for you.

Speaker 3:

One of the pivotal moments in my career was Mark Reynolds from Mace organised a trip. It was with Tony Wall, myself and Dominic Grace and we went to Coventry to go and look at the Jaguar Land Rover factory and a lot of especially. That time you think about modern methods of construction and you go through the process and you see it all and first of all, the factory is not as shiny as you think it is. There's still lots of humans involved with it and you sort of go through the process. I remember asking this question and we're talking about kaizen, about continuous improvement, and kaizen is learning every day about where you're sort of going wrong in the process and what they do is like this sort of box, kite, uh thing that you write down this is where something's gone wrong. And at the end of the week they get them all lined up with the 16 hole points and they sort of see where the blockers are and they sort of work back through the blockers. And so I just asked her how long does it take you to make a defect-free car? And it takes them between 18 and 24 months. And you think, wow, you're essentially building the same thing every day and it's still taking you nearly two years to get to that point for a defect-free something, and that, to me, was really educational because it showed how much effort you need to go into something to make something happen.

Speaker 3:

But also, we approach zero zen. There's nothing to learn from. If you're building lots of repetitive details in a building. We don't think how could we learn from the mistakes that we've built at the bottom of the building so that by the time you get to the top you've avoided them? Because, again, we make the assumption that the labour supply is constant when they're not. Labour supply is constantly changing. So if you look at site inductions, which is a really interesting leading indicator of what goes on, how many people are being inducted every day, and dryliners most of self-employed people and they will go where they get paid or where there's work. So it's a really good indicator of how well a site's been run and organised.

Speaker 3:

But we don't think about what have I learned at the ground floor that couldn't apply by the time we get to the 10th floor, especially if you're in residential like that repetitive stuff where you've got stuff. So at Rathbone we learned to create little YouTube shorts of this is stuff we learned. Right, this has got better and you could play that back so someone could look at it and go, all right, yeah, I've learned that I do this to get to that point, but you don't. We don't think in that mindset. That and it's again sort of my utopian dream is that you get to the point of process and thinking as to what, how can we get to improvement? And if you've got that culture leading and you foster it within your teams, it's amazing what you're going to get out of it at the end, I think.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So just diving into that example a bit more, can you talk a little bit about how you see our industry in terms of almost like the separation between sort of new business, design, construction, operation and those kind of feedback loops and learnings? Because you know the Tesla example regardless of what you think of Elon Musk is like okay, I'm going to go and I'm going to put my desk on the factory line and I'm going to get all my engineers to come and sit on the factory line because they need to see what happens on the production line to then be able to design something better. Yeah, um, you know, you could say in our industry actually sometimes we get a bit detached.

Speaker 3:

You know, we get totally. Ours is worse no, that's where.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly. So how do you see that and how do you see that as a barrier or an opportunity for innovation?

Speaker 3:

It's a massive opportunity for innovation, but I think it's at its core real estate is dysfunctional. There's a management theory, patrick Lentoni, about functional and dysfunctional teams, and real estate is dysfunctional. There is no open communication, there is no trust. In fact, there's active distrust, and that leads to the policing of tasks and roles. And you think about hiring a project manager. Often people will employ a project manager from trades because they think, oh, I see what all the dark secrets are, because I think I'm being ripped off about something and you might be being ripped off about something, but that in itself leads to culture of blame instead of openness.

Speaker 3:

So how do you flip that on its head? Because essentially, like, if you think about it, between developer, design team and contractor, they've got the same objective, which is you want to finish this product to the right quality at the right time, and the right and the right mindset is everybody should make money, everybody should make a profit from doing this point. Instead, we we flip it to. Here's what happens in case you don't do that point and we're going to whack you with a stick if we do it. And the great myth of design and build contracting, which is like a zero-sum game to me is that I've offset my risk, I've managed my risk, when you haven't. As a developer, you know that the carried interest costs of a late, there's no damages in the world which are going to cover that point, the quality point, none of that's covered. So you have that issue. You then have a chasm between the people who build something and the people who operate something, and it literally is a chasm. It's not, there's not even an understanding. One of my best friends and colleague is a guy called David's not, there's not even an understanding. One of my best friends and colleague, uh, a guy called david o'sullivan and, um, you know david from, uh, from tishman and gp.

Speaker 3:

So we, we worked together for decades and we try and we, we, I could, we could work out. Why is it that because I'm trying to hand over, I'm not trying to cut any corners? Why is it that because I'm trying to hand over, I'm not trying to cut any corners? Why is it that you think that what I'm handing over to you doesn't work? And it's not working, and it took us a while to get to that point. Right, and it is things that we don't necessarily understand, like the commissioning of a building. We commissioned a representative 10% sample of stuff and it's right at a point in time, not how it continually operates. So we don't put it through enough of a test to get to where we need it to be.

Speaker 3:

Metering, which is the most mundane thing in the world, but then not calibrated properly. And if you're not calibrating the metering properly then you're not actually going to get to performance properly. So it is trying to. It's beyond soft landing. Soft landing is a great start, but it's only a start. It is really about trying to create the feedback loop between how a building operates and how a building is designed, and that's there's a massive gap. Everybody's designing a building to SIBC. If you really go back to it, these are SIBC guides from the 1950s. So it's like kind of America in 50s where you were building an office in Arizona and everyone was wearing a vest and so you did call it 20 degrees.

Speaker 3:

You think back to the question why do we air condition buildings? Elon Musk would, to his credit as an innovator, go why are we air conditioning that building? And you ask people here and it's a really interesting point go, why do we do it? Because it's in the BCO guide.

Speaker 3:

No, why do we do it and you do get early innovators like Stanholm or Broadgate and it all broad gate, and what we were trying to do was copy buildings in New York to attract investment banks to London. So in 1987, all of a sudden we've got these big VAV air conditioning systems that come into buildings. But New York is on the same latitude as Rome. It's not climate in London is not New York, but we were, and ever since that point we've over-engineered buildings.

Speaker 3:

Because if you're a Deutsche Bank, the standard of office that you have in Frankfurt compared to London, compared to New York, they're all the same organization but you have very different things. Colleagues in Germany will live to a higher set point and they'll open a window. So why is it okay for a colleague in germany if it's not okay for a colleague in new york? And those are the print, like thinking through things that we don't think about. We just follow what we've done before and this is kind of my hope with ai and technology is the point of stepping back. It is to probably opt to do more optimization much earlier on.

Speaker 3:

But to also think through why. So why is it that we're putting all this energy into something for a few days of the year to get to that point when we might be able to use a different material or a different means of cooling? And what I kind of hope is is that as we build up this knowledge over time, the feedback loop to designers gets better, and the smart engineers and consultants are the ones who investigate investing in their own ip now to learn that stuff it's exactly right, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

because these things, that these things are all interlinks, they are, well, you know, you need the strong leadership, you need the culture of innovation yeah, um, and. And you need to kind of understand the detail of what's happening in your production line to be able to unlock these things. So, if I was your client and you have me in an elevator and you say, okay, well, my brief to you is I want to get to a net zero building. Yeah, what do I need to do?

Speaker 3:

First question why do you? What is it you're trying to get to? A net zero building? Yeah, what do I need to do? First question why do you? What is it you're trying to get to? And if the answer is I don't know, I'm not sure then there's perfectly a problem. If the answer is, I fully believe in this. I know the market wants this. This is a responsive thing. But I want to credibly deliver something, and even better it is if it is. I want to maintain customer satisfaction and optimize performance. That big tick. That's kind of where you want to be. So the elevator pitch is that I'm going to help you define what it is you mean and make sure that there is a measurable success criteria to get to that point at the end, because it's not for the sake of it. That's where things become complicated, and often I think it's about simplifying things. A few key metrics as opposed to overcomplicating a lot of other metrics.

Speaker 2:

So do you think it is realistic for us to get to net zero? Then on building X, building Y, without diving into the work that you're doing, I don't think credibly, given the definition of a net zero building.

Speaker 3:

One of my clients at BioWater Properties, the head of sustainability, jay Jack he's a very interesting character because he was a mechanical engineer to start off with, studied data science and has now gone into sustainability, so he gets all of those points and reducing embodied carbon tick right. We can all get to that in our heads and there's probably two or three answers to get to where you want to get to. But then how do you make building a completion that is sustainable? Reduce its embodied carbon to reduce its operational carbon? That's much harder and the truth of it is that, again, this is the point in real estate, we don't think of the customer, we don't think of the end person, so we shouldn't let this building for two, three, five, ten years.

Speaker 3:

Whatever it is, they'll manage it, but even if they are managing it efficiently, their business is going through constant flux and change. We've gone through periods of disruption, of Brexit pandemic, and I'm sure lots of real estate CEOs would wish it was 2014 again because it was kind of nice and steady at that world. But we're not in that world and I don't think we're ever going to be, whatever happens with AI in the workplace, we're going to be having these changes got geopolitical changes coming out of our ears, all of those things. It's just change is constant. So, except that it's constant, except the things are moving, that places need to be flexible and that they do need to adapt. But to adapt means you've got to monitor it, and if you're not monitoring, I don't know how you can actually justify any of this stuff and so so when you look at that future, then 2030 plus.

Speaker 2:

I think we've been saying 2030 for about the past five years, so we probably need to adjust that, that timeline. But over the next sort of 10 to 15 years, you know, and maybe on like a personal level for you kind of like, why is what you're doing, you know, important for you to be doing this? Why, on a personal level, do you feel, like you know, setting up digital trees, investing your time, energy and the uncertainty of doing that is worthwhile?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, good answer. That is worthwhile. Yeah, it is, I'm certain. So I think the key thing for me is Peter Drucker right, what gets measured, gets managed. And to me I understood quickly what the sustainability piece was. I can understand the operation piece, I can understand the building piece. I can understand the building piece. But to me, unless you're measuring that stuff, we're never going to hit any of these targets. Because to get to that piece of constant improvement means constant measuring and monitoring. And that's my answer.

Speaker 3:

I think I can have the most impact by getting to that point. We took part in a round table we did a couple of weeks ago where legal and general were talking about not appraising the ground floor income and that there was a turnover rent thing. But when you ask someone to model a turnover-based rent for an open community, no chain engaging space that's quite hard for someone to model. But you can iterate to that point and you've got to learn from that point because it might you know what it might have actually been the wrong decision. It sounds right as a developer that that's what the community wants. But I think if you can show that you're continuing to learn, then that's the key thing with it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And James, as well as your digital trees work, you hold a number of kind of advisory positions. We can go into the detail of that as you wish, but also the kind of like the why to doing that for you and why do you see these other spaces, whether it's software or internet things or the bits that go around, the kind of core property business? Why is that of interest to you and relevant um?

Speaker 3:

partly, I think it's my. So I'm a venture partner at PyLabs, which is a consultation for a day a month, and I'm a strategic advisor for a startup called Layout. I would kind of do those for free but in an ideal sort of retirement that's what I would keep, because I love the enthusiasm that entrepreneurs have. I love that sort of growth mindset going yeah, we're going to go and do this stuff and helping coach them and seeing them grow. There's companies like Qflow I just love those two, I really do and seeing them grow to now growing in America, that's, I guess, sort of a nice sense of satisfaction. But out of those growth companies are the solutions that people like yourself are going to use down the line and those are the. So it's partly I'm seeing what's coming up and what you're seeing now, what's really interesting over the last 12 months. So if November 23 was ChatGPT the big unlock then what you've seen about a year later is the point of I'm getting the years wrong, I think. But anyway, november 22 is that point, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So what you're seeing now is the unlock where you've seen people in their day job who've done a mundane task, like Cristiano at Layout. He did later space planning, he meets up with someone from a tech background who understands how large language models work or how algorithms work, and you bring them together and you've got, instead of software as a service, you've got service as a software. And you've got, instead of software as a service, you've got service as a software. And so that is all of a sudden you're finding this tool which someone's found mundane, and that is a massive unlock. There's loads of these companies coming up where people have had sort of a mundane day job and they think this is repetitive or boring. There must be a better way. They've found a way to unlock it which is saving everybody time, and that is hugely exciting to me as to where things could get.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely to me too, and so maybe it's quite hard to do. But if I was to say to you, describe how a CEO in a REIT talks about the real estate industry and the problems we're facing and one of these energetic young startups talks about the real estate and the problems we're facing, you should give them both the same question. How do they answer that?

Speaker 3:

This is the most telling answer. I would have thought the startup would say that the real estate CEO isn't listening and arguably the real estate CEO would say you're not listening to me either. There's lots of you can find lots of commentators out there who've bemoaned real estate is backwards and it's not doing stuff and it's never going to innovate. That's not true, because there are pockets of innovation. There's pockets of technology which we use all day, every day, that we've taken for granted. I think what there is in both cases is a lack of clarity as to what's the problem we're trying to solve, and it kind of comes back to why I'm, why I set up digitrace in the first place, which is, if you're solving a problem that both the ceo and the startup can feel like they're answering, then you're going to get, then you're going to have a conversation about a solution. But if it's like, oh, you don't get me or you're not listening to me, then that's why things don't work, and that's kind of hitting it as a nutshell really.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so maybe that's a good place to end, James. Leave it on that cliffhanger and people can think about what their response to that problem would be. But, as you say, if you can, kind of this awareness that these different kind of strands within industry are probably all pulling in a similar direction. But where can you find that common ground is an interesting and involving challenge. So, yeah, I look forward to watching what you do at Digital Trees and continuing to work together.

Speaker 3:

I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1:

It's going to be exciting Thanks, james Good. Thank you for listening to the Grow Places podcast For more information. Thank you for listening to the Grow Places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.