Yolande is a practice professor who spent 33 years researching property markets in industry before joining UCL as Chair of the Bartlett Real Estate Institute in 2018. As head of World Research at Savills, she took a global, cross-sector view of real estate and became increasingly interested in very long run trends.

Her work at UCL is deliberately unfocussed, looking at the combination and interaction of disruptive trends in demographics, finance, technology, society, the environment, and governments in changing global real estate. She believes that real estate, meaning land and everything attached to it, is at the heart of sustainability. Understanding real estate value in all its forms is therefore essential to solving the wicked problems and grand challenges of the 21st century. To this end, she sees as imperative the communication of knowledge and the activation of partnerships between academia and industry.