Nicolas Boffi is the Managing Director of MIPIM, the world’s biggest real estate event, held every March at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. MIPIM now runs year round, through the MIPIM Asia Summit in Hong Kong and the launch of MIPIM Middle East in Riyadh this October. In this episode of Tell Me More, Nicolas reveals several pieces of news about MIPIM 2027 for the first time.

Before he ran the world’s largest property event, Nicolas spent two decades in urban development and city planning. He grew up in Besançon, trained as an engineer at EIVP, the City of Paris engineering school, and added a master’s in urban planning. He worked on the Grand Paris Express, the largest metro infrastructure project in Europe, representing 40 billion euros of investment and 200 kilometres of automatic metro, along with the urban development of around 70 new districts around its stations. He then spent almost sixteen years at Arcadis, ending as City Executive in Paris, sitting between elected officials and private investors.

We discuss:

– Why mid-sized cities in Europe have a strong future, and what is driving new investment and infrastructure into them

– What the Grand Paris Express taught him about transit-oriented development and land value capture

– Why real estate projects stall over trust and risk perception between the public and private sector, rarely over ideas or capital

– What public leaders and private investors each need to change to turn urban ambition into concrete project pipelines

– The new matchmaking service built into the MIPIM app, and the shift from spontaneous networking to intentional deal making

– How MIPIM 2027 expands beyond the Palais des Festivals into a city-wide experience across Cannes

– The new MIPIM destination for luxury residential and branded residences

– Why the MIPIM Challengers programme for leaders under 31 matters to the future of the industry

– How the MIPIM Asia Summit in Hong Kong and MIPIM Middle East in Riyadh, built around the region’s giga projects, fit into a global platform

– The one book he recommends to anyone starting out: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Whether you are planning your next MIPIM in Cannes, working between the public and private sides of a development project, investing in European real estate, or building a career in urban planning and the built environment, this episode is a rare look inside the world’s biggest real estate event from the person running it.

Subscribe for more conversations with the people redefining real estate, capital, and leadership across the globe.

Erez Cohen is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Urbium GDI, a real estate investment platform focused on the Mexican industrial sector, and the author of Real Estate Titans. Throughout his career, he has been involved in more than $5 billion in real estate transactions in Mexico, the United States, and Brazil.

He started in investment banking in New York on the sell side, moved across to the buy side in private equity at Carlyle, and then made the harder crossing from analysing deals to owning them. He worked on some of the first REIT structures in Mexico, ran investment as Chief Investment Officer at Thor Urbana, and in 2018 co-founded his own platform.

Most of this conversation is about Mexico, and not the headline version. Where the capital actually comes from, what the politics do to a development timeline, how you underwrite security risk city by city, and why he concluded seven years ago that industrial would beat every other asset class in the country.

He does not romanticise that last step. When you advise, your job is to spot the risks for someone else. When you own the asset, your job is to decide which of those risks are worth taking, hire the people who will execute, and carry the outcome yourself. He calls the path hellish, says entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and reflects that the humility it forces on you is exactly the point.

We discuss:

– What changes in your head when you stop advising on risk and start choosing which risks to take with your own capital

– Why he redefined success from working at a great firm to owning something, and what that cost him

– The Sam Zell story that explains Mexican industrial: an 8 cap in Dallas, a 13 cap across the border in Monterrey, the same tenant in both, and dollar financing at nearly the same rate

– Why 2010 and 2011 were the turning point, when REITs and the Mexican pension funds finally gave managers an answer to the question every LP asks second: how do I exit

– The two very different Mexican industrial theses, peso-denominated logistics in the centre versus dollar-denominated manufacturing on the northern border

– How he prices political and security risk city by city, and what he tells investors who read Mexico as one uniform market

– Where the next decade of Latin American real estate sits, and why liquidity decides which countries are investable at all

Whether you sit on the buy side, the sell side, or somewhere in between, this is a detailed look at how an emerging market gets institutionalised, and what it takes to build a platform inside one.

Subscribe for more conversations with the people redefining real estate, capital, and leadership worldwide.

Audrey Klein is a Partner at Spencer House Partners and one of the most respected capital-raising voices in global real estate. In this episode of Tell Me More, we dive deep into her personal and professional journey: from investment banking in New York, to Bank of America in San Francisco, to founding Caskar Partners in Germany, to becoming one of the first formal local European fundraisers for Blackstone’s London office through Park Hill Real Estate.

We discuss:

– How Audrey built a global fundraising career across the US, Europe, and Asia

– Why investors back the people before they back the product

– What real integrity looks like in private equity and playing the long game

– How to find your anchor investor when raising capital for the first time

– Founding WIRE and championing women and mentorship in real estate

– Why success is never a straight line, and how you get back up

Whether you’re raising capital, building a platform, or navigating a leadership role early in your career, this episode is full of hard-won wisdom from someone who has helped shape how capital moves across the industry.

Subscribe for more conversations with the people redefining real estate, capital, and leadership across the globe.