Dan Nicholson
President
Executive Director, Great Portland Estates plc
Dan is Executive Director of GPE plc, a central-London focussed investor and developer, with responsibility for Portfolio Management and Development Management matters. Before this, Dan spent over 10 years with Tishman Speyer, for the majority of which he ran their UK business. Dan started his career as a surveyor at Lambert Smith Hampton before gaining broad property investment, development and asset management experience in a number of organisations, including at City & West End Property Group, Quintain Estates & Development and real estate private equity firm, Three Delta LLP. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Property Valuation and Law from Bayes Business School.
Ian Marcus OBE
Immediate Past President
Senior Advisor, Eastdil Secured
Ian graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1981 with a degree in Land Economy.
Ian was in the banking industry for over 32 years having previously worked for Bank of America, UBS, NatWest and Bankers Trust/Deutsche, always focusing on the real estate industry. Ian joined Credit Suisse First Boston in 1999 to establish the Real Estate Group, and became Managing Director and Chairman of the European Real Estate Investment Banking.
Ian is a Trustee of the Prince's Foundation, a Crown Estate Commissioner, a member of Redevco’s Advisory Board, the Senior Independent Director for Secure Income REIT and a Non Executive Director for Town Centre Securities Plc. He was appointed as a Senior Consultant to Eastdil Secured and Wells Fargo Securities in 2013. He is also a Senior Advisor to the two new Businesses, Work Life and Elysian Residences.
He is past President of the British Property Federation, past Chairman of the Investment Property Forum and for 10 years chaired the Bank of England Commercial Property Forum.
He is Chairman of the European Advisory Board for Wharton Business School’s Real Estate faculty, a member of the University of Cambridge Department of Land Economy Advisory Group, an Eminent Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and a member of the Chartered Surveyors Livery
Ami Kotecha
Senior Vice President
Co-Founder and Group President, Amro Partners
A successful entrepreneur, investor, board director and advisor, Ami Kotecha spearheads technology and sustainability at Amro Partners, the residential living real estate firm she co-founded in 2012.
She is the driving force behind Amro’s data science capabilities, instilling a culture of innovation and digital adoption at all points of the value chain, including ESG, investment and asset management.
With expertise lying at the intersection of real estate, tech and sustainability, Ami recognises the importance of bridging the gap between the technology and real estate sectors to drive innovation that addresses the most urgent issues we face: shortage of housing; tackling climate change and future-proofing our cities.
As Chair of the UK PropTech Association (UKPA) and Board Member of the British Property Federation (BPF), Ami has played a crucial role in the merger of those two organisations in order to accelerate technology adoption through deeper collaboration between property and Proptech businesses. Ami is Founding Chair of the CULS ESG Forum and incoming President of CULS for 2024/25.
Equally committed to serving and mentoring the wider community in which she lives and works, Ami is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and member of the London School of Economics’ Entrepreneurship & Venture Advisory Board.
Aubrey Adams OBE
Vice President
Chairman, L&Q Housing Association
Non-Executive Director, British Land
Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Wigmore Hall
After University I qualified as a Chartered Accountant with PW (now PwC) and then worked in the management consultancy division for four years before becoming the Finance Director of Peachey Property Corp. plc in 1978. I was appointed Chief Executive of Savills plc from 1991 until 2008; during that time Savills revenues grew from £24m to £650m and a loss of £2m was turned into a profit of £86m. Following retirement from Savills I took on a number of Non-Executive directorships. In November 2011 I joined RBS as Head of Property in the Global Restructuring Group. I continue as a NED of British Land and Chairman of L&Q Housing Association, as well as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Wigmore Hall.
Erik Ruane
Honorary Treasurer
Erik has been active in the real estate industry for over 30 years since graduating from Gonville & Caius College in 1982 with a Land Economy degree. Most recently, he was Partner, Head of Development at Europa Capital LLP, responsible for both developments and Environmental & Sustainability matters. He embarked on his professional career as a graduate surveyor at Weatherall Green & Smith (now evolved into BNP Paribas Real Estate). In subsequent spells as a director of the principal development subsidiaries of City/Imry Merchant Developers PLC and then at Development Securities PLC (now U+I plc), he had responsibilities for a number of large scale commercial developments in the UK, broadening to the European stage when he moved in 2001 to work with Europa Capital. Erik is a Member of the RICS. He is also a member of ULI and active in the ULI European Sustainability Council. Erik holds a Master’s degree in Land Economy from Cambridge University.
Lauren Fendick
Honorary Secretary
Partner, Taylor Wessing
Lauren is a Partner in the Real Estate Department at Taylor Wessing LLP whose practice covers all aspects of general commercial real estate, including investment acquisitions and disposals within the retail, industrial, and high-end office sectors, related financing and structuring issues, development, and forward funding agreements. Lauren and the wider Real Estate team at Taylor Wessing LLP frequently advise international clients who are investing in London and the regions.
Lauren graduated from Queens' College, University of Cambridge in 2006 with a degree in Law
Geoff Southern
Honorary Press Secretary
Studio Director | London UK | Architecture & Urbanism I Arcadis
Geoff graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1996 with an Architecture degree. He has further academic and professional qualifications in architecture and landscape architecture, working on projects in both the private and the public sector up to around £1bn in value.
Geoff currently leads the Out-of-hospital Care subsector for Arcadis in the UK. He is responsible for the design of healthcare, science, workplace, community, residential, and mixed-use buildings and masterplans for Arcadis.
Geoff is a regular commentator on issues including strategic planning, net-zero, MMC, housing design for intergenerational and supported living, and designing for community and wellbeing.
Geoff also co-chairs the Architecture & Urbanism Global Design Excellence Group, leads the UK business’ Carbon Reduction Plan, informing the global business ESG policy, and
heads the Architecture & Urbanism Global Climate Action Strategy & Policy Working Group.
Louise Sherwin
Honorary Careers Officer
Director, Deloitte LLP
Louise is a Director at Deloitte Real Estate, specialising in development consultancy and agency. She read Geography as an undergraduate at Girton College, before completing a part-time MSc in Real Estate Investment at Cass Business School. She qualified as a Chartered Surveyor and has since spent 10 enjoyable years working on major development projects in the UK and internationally.
As careers officer of the Land Society, she is passionate about promoting opportunities within the industry to current students at the university. Her role includes leading the organisation of the annual property careers fair, an event which has doubled in size over the last few years.
Steven Pitchford
Joint Honorary Membership Secretary
Steven Pitchford is a solicitor and partner at DAC Beachcroft.
Steven advises on all aspects of the law which affect the real estate industry and has pioneered several proptech solutions.
His clients include FTSE companies, large development funds and scale-ups who he advises on major development projects, investment transactions and structuring joint ventures.
Steven graduated from Cambridge University (Corpus Christi College) with an MA in Law. He began his legal career at Slaughter and May and subsequently practised at Macfarlanes LLP as a real estate partner for over two decades.
As an officer of the Land Society, he focuses on building professional networks across legal services, accountancy, economics and architecture to benefit the membership and in particular those in their early careers.
Lesedi Kgaka
Joint Honorary Membership Secretary
PhD. Land Economy Student at the University of Cambridge
Lesedi Kgaka (Trinity Hall), a PhD Land Economy candidate supervised by Professor Thies Lindenthal and Associate Professor François Viruly, is currently researching topics in REITs, risk, return, corporate real estate, finance, investment, sustainability, and energy. She has been awarded a Business Science in Finance and Accounting and a Master of Science in Real Estate degrees from the University of Cape Town. Additionally, she was the managing editor of the Journal of African Real Estate Research from 2020 to 2023. Lesedi is a qualified Chartered Surveyor as well as an Allan Gray Fellow. She is based at Trinity Hall. Ms. Kgaka served as a non-executive director and chairperson of the investment committee of RH12J (an RH Bophelo company) and has over ten years of real estate experience in sales, rentals, management, and investment. She is a Teaching Associate in the Master’s in Real Estate in Finance Program at the University of Cambridge. Ms Kgaka brings diversity to CULS from her business and academic experiences and aims to improve membership experience through membership, data and marketing management. Following her PhD in 2026, Lesedi seeks to enter the Private Equity and Finance industries.
Werner Baumker
Honorary Member for the Regions
Werner was ‘Group Director – Property’ at the Howard Group with overall responsibility to the Board for the Group’s property activities. Werner gained extensive industry experience at strategic and operational level during his time with Grosvenor, holding various positions in the CEO’s office. He was also instrumental in the formation of a real estate private equity business for Grosvenor with a global investment mandate. More recently, he was COO at Co-Mission, a non-profit organisation supporting a network of church communities across London, where he took a lead role in property matters as well as shaping its strategic direction.
Werner graduated from Wolfson College, Cambridge University with a PhD and MPhil in Real Estate Finance, and also holds a BSc in International Business from Warwick Business School.
Anna Harper
Committee member
Anna is CEO at GreenResi, a platform helping institutional investors to grow profitable, sustainable portfolios of existing Private Rental Sector homes.
Her previous experience includes:
• Head of Sustainability and Insights for leading European proptech firm, IMMO, which managed €2.5bn Single Family Rental investment
• Developed the strategy and built the seed portfolio for a HNWI-backed fund targeting a £100m+ housing portfolio
• Involved with c. £2bn+ transactions as a Strategist at Deloitte
• Published three books on UK residential/sustainable residential investment
• Hosting a leading property podcast; regularly featured in publications including Financial Times, Forbes, BBC; TedX talk on Sustainable Residential Investment
• Named one of Management Today’s ‘35 Women Under 35’ and Bisnow’s ‘Women Leading Real Estate’
She is passionate about using technology for good and supporting other women - both in business and life - including as part of the Committee for The Nelson Trust, a charity rehabilitating women with complex needs.
Professor Flora Samuel
Head of Department of Architecture
Committee Member
Professor Flora Samuel’s strength is in connecting ideas and people from different backgrounds and fields – the scholarship of integration and application, making connections across disciplines and sectors, contextualising specialisms in the larger context and making sense of them to non-specialists. Her current work focuses on inclusion through planning policy and processes evidenced through digital map making with communities and others, summarised in her most recent book Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (2023). With Eli Hatleskog Flora won a RIBA Presidents Award for Research in the Communities Category for their project Mapping Eco-Social Assets
For Flora climate change is a social justice issue. She is the PI on the AHRC funded Community Consultation for Quality of Life Project, a project exploring the ingredients of inclusive community consultation for planning across all four nations of the UK. The urban room is a place where the community, university, local authority, industry and practice come together to debate the future of their cities. Flora is in the process of setting up an urban room for Cambridge.
Flora is passionate about the importance of developing research in architectural practice, summarised in her book Why Architects Matter (2019). She was the first RIBA Vice President for Research and was twice elected by its membership to Council. She has lead on the development of several reports for industry bodies including the Architects Council of Europe Value of Architecture Report and the RIBA Building Knowledge: Pathways to Post Occupancy Evaluation report.
Over the last few years she has been developing methods for capturing intangible wellbeing outcomes in a format that can be fed into planning processes. An industry expert on social value, Flora was lead author on the RIBA Social Value Toolkit . She has contributed to a variety of social value initiatives across the construction industry and is regularly invited to speak on social impact by organisations across the globe.
An Architect trained at Cambridge and Princeton Flora has strong opinions on the future of architectural education and the changing role of architects. She taught for 10 years at Cardiff before leading the March at the University of Bath. She was then the first woman Head of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. She left Sheffield for Reading University to help set up a new School of Architecture to deliver an education for uncertainty.
Flora began her academic career as a Le Corbusier scholar and has written five books on neglected aspects of his work and practice, several of which have been translated into other languages. She believes that history has a vital role to play in informing future practice.
Flora is a Trustee of the Quality of Life Foundation and on the Board of the Taskforce for Planning.
Roddy Houston MA (Cantab.) MRICS
Committee Member
Roddy Houston is currently a Deputy Director in the Government Property Agency, leading a team refining the Whitehall Campus Strategy and delivering new "Government Hub" buildings in London. The Government Property Agency is a new Executive Agency of Cabinet Office, having been developed out of the Government Property Unit (now Office of Government Property) - it will ultimately be responsible for all of the Civil Estate nationally. "Flagship" major projects under Roddy's remit include: the £60M refurbishment of 10 South Colonnade in Canary Wharf, which will house some 6,000 civil servants from the summer of 2018; Windsor House in Victoria, which was acquired in 2018 as flexible space for about 1,500 FTEs; development of the Stratford Campus, which is currently projected to house some 12,000 staff; and implementation of the Whitehall Campus Strategy to transform the Civil Estate in central London. This portfolio comprises c 70 properties with a total area of c 400,000 sq m ( / 4.3M sq ft ), an Estimated Rental Value of c £250M+ and an estimated total value of c £6.5Bn.
He previously led a team of senior professionals developing the estate strategy for a major national portfolio of some 3,000 properties with an estimated value of c £10Bn+. This follows 11 years as a director at Telereal Trillium (formerly Land Securities Trillium), accountable for all the estate strategy, asset and estate management deliverables under a 25-year outsourcing contract with one of Trillium's major UK-wide clients.
Before joining Trillium in 2003, Roddy was a lead management consultant in KPMG's Property & Programmes Consulting group, which he joined in 1998. Prior to that, he was a property asset manager in Coopers & Lybrand's Business Recovery & Insolvency division for 6 years, having started his articles at Knight Frank & Rutley. He served as an Army officer with the Royal Green Jackets, after reading Economics at Cambridge.
Roddy was President of the Cambridge University Land Society from 2012-2014, and continues to chair its Commercial Property Forum. He is a founder member of the Cambridge Land Economy Advisory Board, and also sits on the Peterhouse Society Committee.
James Lai
Committee member
James is a Director at Public Investment Fund Projects and with speciality in Urban Planning, Masterplanning and Architecture.
He is a LEED Certified architect and has been involved in designing large-scale mixed-use projects in Europe, Middle East and Asia. James sits on the RIBA Membership Eligibility Assessment Panel, RIBA International Validation Board and RIBA Award Judging Panel.
James is the Immediate Past Chair of Urban Land Institute UK NEXT Group in UK and past member of the ULI Executive Committee. He is also acting as a member of the Wandsworth Council Design review panel and a frequent Guest critics at various Universities in the UK.
Colm Lauder
Committee Member
Colm Lauder is a real estate analyist with Goodbody. Prior to this he was with MSCI Real Estate – IPD responsible for UK and Ireland market consultancy and leads investment analysis for the UK, with a focus on London, and Irish markets. He graduated from Cambridge in 2011 with an MPhil in Real Estate Finance from the Department of Land Economy.
Noel G H Manns
Committee Member
Noel Manns FRICS, a Principal & co-founder of pan-European fund manager Europa Capital LLP until 2017, currently serves as Chairman of the Pollen Estate; a Trustee of Clinton Devon Estates and Deputy Chairman of The Henry Smith Charity. He is a former Board member of INREV and the Investment Property Forum. He also volunteers as an adviser to the Diocese of London and other charities. He studied at Pembroke College Cambridge and at the London Business School.
Rod McAllister
Committee Member
Architect
Rod McAllister is an architect, product designer and film maker. He was a founding partner of King McAllister (now ShedKM) then a partner and design director of Sheppard Robson. During his career, he led numerous award-winning projects including London Business School and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital in Johannesburg. Rod has also been a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, visiting professor at La Sapienza University, Rome and external examiner at the University of Nottingham. He is a trustee of the Higher Education Design Quality Forum and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is currently working with Fred Pilbrow, a fellow committee member of CULS APEC Forum.
Dominic Reilly
Committee Member
Dominic graduated from Gonville and Caius College with a degree in Land Economy in 1978. He trained and qualified as a chartered surveyor with Weatherall Green & Smith and subsequently practiced with both King & Company and Jones Lang Wootton. He jointly founded Kingfisher Property Finance in 1988, an intermediary advising clients on all aspects of finance for UK commercial property which he successfully ran until 2007. He rejoined King Sturge in 2007 which was then merged with JLL in 2011. He resigned from JLL in 2014 and currently holds two non-executive positions with Howard Property Group in Cambridge and with the Ashtenne Industrial Fund. He is a course leader on the IPF Advanced Education Programme and a volunteer in the UrbanPlan UK pilot visiting schools. He is also a consultant with Marick Capital.
James Stevens
Committee Member
James is a partner at Saffery, based in Peterborough and leads the firm’s Land & Rural Practice Group in the East of England, as part of a national team of 170 people spread across 9 offices and representing more than 1,000 estates and rural businesses and more than 3 million acres of land across the UK. James left Christ’s in 2005 with an MA in Social and Political Sciences, and prior to Saffery had stints at Dixon Wilson and Deloitte. He is an accountant and tax adviser, a member of the ICAEW and STEP, a trustee of a number of property and rural business trusts, and a season ticket holder at the Oval.
Charlie Stoneham
Committee Member
Charlie Stoneham, is an Associate Director working in Savills Central London & International investment team. He specialises in advising a range of international and domestic clients on investment strategy and transaction execution for both acquisition and disposal mandates. Charlie is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered surveyors, having completed the Savills graduate scheme, working in departments including Valuations, Property Management, Retail Leasing and Cross Border Investment (from Hong Kong).
Charlie is the Co-Chair of the Silver Street Group, and is a mentor on the WCCS Pathways to Property scheme.
Charlie graduated from St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge in 2016 with an undergraduate degree in Land Economy.
Brian Waters
Committee Member
Architect, The Boisot Waters Cohen Partnership
Brian Waters, MA DipArch DipTP RIBA MRTPI ppACA FRSA Co-Chair of the APEC Forum, is a chartered architect and town planner. Principal of BWCP he is also chairman of the London Planning & Development Forum, has chaired the National Planning Forum 2013-2017 is President of the Association of Consultant Architects, a former vice-president of the RIBA and past master of the Architects’ livery company. With Paul Finch and Lee Mallett he co-publishes and is executive editor of Planning in London magazine. See bwcp.co.uk and planninginlondon.com
James Webb
Committee Member
James Webb is a Senior Vice President at Eastdil Secured. James joined Eastdil Secured in September 2014. Having previously worked on a number of transactions and financings across Europe and asset classes, James now specialises in property sales, joint venture recapitalisations, development funding and structured financing transactions in the UK. Over the past eight years, James has worked on a number of high-profile trades in London including The Leadenhall Building, 20 Fenchurch Street and White City Place.
James is the Co-Chair of the Silver Street Group.
James holds a degree in Mathematics and Physics and a masters in Real Estate Finance from the University of Cambridge, class of 2014.