CONNECTING TOMORROW’S LEADERS: Good people skills are still as important as an analytical mind for making deals happen, according to a panel of experts at EG’s Connecting Tomorrow’s Leaders conference.
“People gossiping creates links that a computer can’t replicate,” said AXA IM-Real Assets’ head of development Harry Badham.
Investec’s Jonathan Long, who works in the structured property finance team, said the industry is less of an “old boys’ club” than it used to be, when a lot of deals were done in the pub. However, he said face-to-face meetings were still seen as an important part of due diligence when lending.
Long said he is always asked by Investec’s founders during investment committees: “Have you met the borrower, have you looked into the whites of their eyes?” Or if Investec is funding a hotel or a serviced apartment, he is asked: “Have you stayed there?”
He added: “You can run all these financial models but lots of people want to make sure you’ve really done that due dilligence.”
Ellandi founding partner Morgan Garfield agreed that people skills were still important, but said you could no longer get away with not having the “technical capacity” to do deals. He said: “The people element is very important but increasingly people are expected to be analytical, quantitative, smart and people people.”
CLS Risk Solutions business strategy manager Samantha Harden said meeting interesting people was one of the best parts of your job. “The old boys drinking might not have gone, but there’s old girls drinking now,” she said.
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