CEO of ExpertAI Advisory, his own consulting business enabling corporates and investment firms to benefit from expert consulting and transactional advisory, Ben Rose spoke at the recent Bayes Alumni Forum about his hopes for the event, the benefits for all involved, his career trajectory, and shifts in the real estate industry over the past 10 years.
Have you attended previous Bayes Alumni events?
I’ve been to various, as they are always a good chance to reconnect with the people who you went to business school with. Everyone’s careers have gone in different directions, so it’s interesting to share with people who’ve set up businesses or a fund, or those who work in commercial real estate, which is where I was at JLL for nearly 10 years.
For example, one of the guys in our cohort took over his family business – they owned the premises of a restaurant, and he has become a kind of real estate restaurateur by refurbishing, renovating, and modernising existing restaurants and then running them. This makes a change from those who’ve simply gone into real estate investment and worked for a fund or a private equity group. In some cases, people go off and use their real estate knowledge in areas like sports or retail. It’s fascinating to compare notes.
What made you want to attend the Bayes Alumni Forum and help run a breakout session?
I like engaging with alumni, plus I wanted to give a little something back as I really enjoyed my time at Bayes. In short, I wanted to come back and reconnect with it all. When I saw the other panellists and the general line-up for today, I thought there were some very interesting people in the room. I enjoy industry events where you have a lot of engaged, active minds in one place, and you hear completely different perspectives to your own. It gives you a much more nuanced approach to the industry.
What will be the area under discussion in your breakout session?
I’m going to be speaking about technological intervention in real estate, namely how AI and machine learning have revolutionised things. We are still at a very embryonic stage. In terms of a moment in time, if we look back in 20 years from now, we will still view this as the time when technological interventions really started trickling down through the industry.
Who will be co-running the session with?
We have Simon Durkin, who’s a global real estate research leader at BlackRock. he works at one of the largest asset managers in the world. He will have a very good macroeconomic, wider trends perspective on the markets, where we are in the cycle, things like that.
There will also be Bayes alumna Natalie Bayfield. She set up a business that carries out financial modelling in real estate. In a relatively archaic industry, people always want to fine-tune their quantitative analytical skills.
As for me, I’ve worked about 10 years since graduation, from a big corporate into setting up my own business, trying to be a bit more entrepreneurial, using the contacts from the industry and from Bayes, and going in a different direction to be a sort of transactional consultant on the back of it, which is a very different leap to being in a big stable, steady ship, like a JLL.
How does the industry differ today from the one you entered 10 years ago?
I would say that the younger demographic of people who were in their early 20s, when I joined the industry, and the slow marching of time has effectively moved out some of the older players of the industry. For better or worse, it has been “cleansed” of a certain generation. Don’t get me wrong, there were some very big characters 10 years ago, but the movement towards modernising everything has meant that views on ESG, diversity and equality in the industry are so much more advanced now.
What benefits will you and those attending your session hope to derive?
I think there are certain things we’ll all want to get out of it, which is sitting in a room, comparing notes with people in the industry, listening to the Q&A sessions to better understand people’s mindsets and how they approach things. You go away and you reflect on that after the session but live there’s a lot of knowledge sharing.
The real estate industry is pretty much all knowledge- and experience-based and decisions are taken on the back of that. That links into why I set up my business, because I wanted to harness that, using AI and technological intervention to streamline everything and make things far more efficient.
It’s a great chance to meet people and you never know who you might meet again in the future and where it might take you. Maybe there’s a time in the future when you’re sat in a room again with someone at one of these events and you both want to do a commercial deal or transaction or negotiation, so it never hurts to have had previous experience.
Did you see your career taking the trajectory it has?
I think so. Towards the end of the course, I was applying to all the big corporate real estate advisory firms, pretty much the top seven or 10 in the industry. I always thought I wanted to do that as a grounding and a way to learn about the industry.
A global advisor has the benefit of so many different departments, meaning you learn a lot, a sort of “cradle to grave” about real estate development project, valuation or transaction. I pretty much knew what the next two or three years after Bayes would look like.
View Ben’s Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-rose-3398398b/
Visit the ExpertAI Advisory website: https://expertadvisoryai.com/