The One With… the Aerospace Engineer who spotted Real Estate's broken system — and built a firm to fix it

Basil Demeroutis founded FORE Partnership in 2012 with one conviction: sustainability and financial performance aren't in tension — the industry just built a system that treats them as if they are. Trained as an aerospace engineer at Cornell and shaped by years managing the real estate portfolio of Jeff Skoll's family office, Basil thinks in systems. And the system, he argues, is broken — not just the buildings, but the procurement, the capital allocation, and the culture that produced them. This episode goes deep on what innovation in real estate actually looks like in practice. At TBC.London, FORE tracked 2 million components from 565 suppliers. At One Poultry, they partnered with Breakthrough Energy and UKGBC to build a Commercial Retrofit Innovation Map — 160 points of intervention, 100+ products evaluated, 16 adopted — to stop good ideas dying at RIBA Stage 3. And at CADWorks Glasgow, switching to all-electric mid-build didn't cost more. It saved £200,000.