5. Chris Fleetwood, Chief Operating & Sustainability Officer at Redevco.

In this episode of Development Diaries, John is joined by Chris Fleetwood, a man whose route into real estate began not in a lecture theatre but at a careers fair, in a 45-minute conversation with a chartered surveyor whose name he never caught - yet who changed the course of his life. Chris takes us back to his Birmingham roots and a moment of genuine inspiration that set him on the path to a real estate degree and his first job navigating a deeply hostile early-90s market. What followed was a career that took him through Jones Lang Wootton, J. Sainsbury Developments, Parkridge, and ultimately twelve years at Landsec - where he served as Development Director across a portfolio that included landmark mixed-use regeneration, retail, PBSA, and the long-haul decontamination of a 30-acre brownfield battery site in his hometown of Birmingham. Now at Redevco, Chris operates at a genuinely pan-European level across urban regeneration, logistics, retail warehousing, and a growing debt platform. The conversation covers the leap from agency to development, what it really takes to absorb complex deals fast, the realities of cross-border working, and why the UK real estate industry needs to do a far better job of showing young people - from all parts of society - what a career in the built environment can actually look like.