About The Future We Build
The Future We Build is a podcast about sustainability in real estate when it is shaped by innovation, investment, and real commercial decision making.
Hosted by Alex Edds, a corporate sustainability innovator with over 20 years inside the real estate industry, the show draws on his experience working within large property companies, advising venture capital, and advising PropTech and climate tech disruptors that are bringing new ideas and products to market.
Rather than treating sustainability as a reporting exercise, the podcast explores how innovation actually enters corporate environments, how buying decisions are made, and why so many promising technologies struggle to move beyond pilots. It looks at sustainability through the lens of value creation, resilience, and human outcomes, not just carbon metrics.
Through open, mostly in-person conversations with asset managers, sustainability leaders, PropTech founders, and venture capital investors, The Future We Build examines the realities of scaling innovation inside real estate. It surfaces the internal constraints, commercial pressures, and unspoken objections that shape adoption, as well as the ideas and approaches that successfully break through.
This is a show for people building, backing, and buying the next generation of solutions for the built environment. It is not about hype or headline friendly innovation. It is about what actually works, what doesn't, and why.
For asset managers protecting portfolio value, sustainability leaders driving change, PropTech founders refining go to market strategies, and investors seeking scalable impact, this podcast offers rare insight into how sustainability, innovation, and capital intersect in practice.
Season 2
New episodes drop weekly
Season 2 Trailer
Season 2 Trailer
The Future We Build is back! After a first season spent mapping the landscape — exploring where capital is flowing, how sustainability frameworks are being applied, and what it means to lead change from inside real estate — host Alex Edds returns with a sharper question for Season 2: what does it actually take to execute?
Episode E011
The One With... the World’s First Green Bond in Real Estate
Anna Denell is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Vasakronan, a Swedish office real estate company managing 2.4 million square metres across Sweden’s major cities. Owned by three state-controlled pension funds, Vasakronan has been embedding sustainability into its business model since 2008 — so this is a chance to hear from someone that's been there and done it.
Episode E012
Click on the links to watch and listen to previous episodes
The One With... The Sustainability Valuer - There's No Such Thing As a Green Premium.
Sam Carson leads sustainability within CBRE’s Valuations practice — a role that sits entirely separate from the firm’s sustainability function, by design. After fifteen years in consultancy, Sam joined CBRE to solve the question the sector had been dancing around for years: what does sustainability actually do to value?
Episode E013
The One With... The Investor Who Switched Sides To Run The Climate Standard For Real Estate
Andrea Palmer is one year into the role as CRREM's first CEO — appointed after leading ESG integration for PGGM's global listed real estate portfolio. She previously worked at LaSalle Investment Management, GRESB, and Triodos. In this conversation she draws a hard line between two ways the industry uses CRREM — and argues that collapsing them is where the confusion starts.
Episode E015
Episode E014
The One With... The one with... the Housebuilder Seeking To Decarbonise 8500 Homes A Year
Bellway builds around 8,500 homes a year, and roughly 60% of its entire carbon footprint comes not from construction but from the homes people live in after they buy them. Jamie Bursnell, Group Head of Technical and Innovation at Bellway Homes, has spent six years working out how you actually decarbonise a new home at scale
The One With... The One With... the QS Who Went All In On AI
James Garner has spent 20 years as a quantity surveyor and now leads AI and data at Gleeds. He sits on the RICS panel that wrote the profession's new AI standard, and hosts Project Flux. This conversation is about practice, not projection — where AI is genuinely changing decisions, and where the industry is quietly kidding itself.
Episode E016
The One With... the Team Who Mapped Every Barrier to Scaling Sustainability in Real Estate — UKGBC
The built environment doesn't have an innovation problem. It has a scaling problem. Emily-Rose Garnett and Philippa Birch-Wood of the UK Green Building Council authored the report mapping why sustainable solutions in real estate keep dying in pilot.
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The Future We Build is a trading name of Edds Associates Ltd.