Last week we held our most successful ULI Europe Annual Conference in Paris to date, with a record attendance of 570 industry professionals from 21 different countries.

The highlight of this year’s Leadership Dinner was a thought-provoking talk from Sir Malcolm Grant, Chairman of NHS England. With a staff of over one million people and a budget of £100 billion, Sir Malcolm was in an ideal position to frame ULI’s Building Healthy Places initiative in terms of what it means for Europe’s cities.

The main conference day included presentations and panel discussions on a diverse range of topics including the prospects of recovery in southern Europe, CRE loans, healthy cities, investment opportunities in Africa and a presentation from Anthony E. Malkin on retrofitting sustainable features into the Empire State Building

Photographs of the conference and copies of the speaker presentations are available to view on the conference event page. In addition, for the first time we captured the conference sessions on video and a selection of highlights are available to view on our new video library

There are many people to thank for the success of this year’s conference. We are grateful to Giancarlo Scotti for chairing this year’s conference as well as to Simon Clark and his Programme Committee for creating a first class collection of speakers and topics. We would also like to thank our sponsors ECE, Generali, AEW Europe, AXA Real Estate, CBRE Global Investors, DigiPlex, EY, HSBC, Kennedy Wilson, Linklaters, PBB, Tishman Speyer, Union Investment, KPF, Lutron, and STAM Europe for their support. Most of all we would like to thank our members and speakers whose participation in this year’s conference made it such a success

As we head towards Spring, we have a busy calendar of National Council events and a full programme of activities at MIPIM in March, including a presentation with PwC analysing the findings of the three Emerging Trends reports.

We are now planning this year’s Real Estate Trends Conference, which will take place in London on 18^th and 19^th June. I would also encourage you to consider attending one of ULI’s other major events including the Spring Meeting in Vancouver in April, the ULI Asia Pacific Summit in Hong Kong during May and the Fall Meeting in New York City this October

I look forward to seeing you at a ULI event again soon.