Property Week- Big interview with SAY Property’s Debra Yudolph: Going it alone

24 Oct 2024By Ciaran Nerval

It was during the global financial crash that Debra Yudolph decided to branch out on her own. She had been working as director of asset and property management at rental specialist Grainger for 10 years, but was made redundant in 2008 after the economy took a nosedive.

Looking back, Yudolph says it was a blessing in disguise.

“I was ready for my next move,” she says.

Yudolph decided to take a break, take on some property management consultancy work and wait for things to improve. It didn’t take long. “From day one, I was really busy,” she says.

In 2011, she teamed up with Charles Seifert to form consultancy SAY Property. “I fell into it,” says Yudolph, now chief executive of the firm. “I never had a plan. I thought I’d go back into a proper job.”

Since those early days, the business – which she is now in sole charge of after Seifert left last year to set up asset management consultancy Inside the Box Advisory – has expanded beyond rental and offers consultancy services on mixed-use schemes.

“At first, I thought I would be spending quite a lot of time working on rental projects,” Yudolph says. “There was a lot of talk about investing in build-to-rent [BTR] and rental living, but there wasn’t a lot happening. But the recovery was quite fast and frantic. A lot of the interest in investing in rental living was driven by the difficulties in the sales market.”

I fell into consultancy. I never had a plan. I thought I’d go back to a proper job

Yudolph’s profile in the property industry has also grown, culminating in her being voted Personality of the Year at Property Week’s RESI Awards in the summer. The judges praised the way she had navigated a difficult year for property development and her reputation for offering great advice to clients.

Her team provides a range of consultancy services, from resource planning to advice on legal and lease arrangements, amenity spaces and energy usage.

SAY’s projects now include acting as an adviser on the 1,225-apartment Cherry Park scheme near Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, being developed by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield; and Waterbeach Barracks in Cambridgeshire, a scheme by Urban&Civic and Stonebond Properties comprising 6,500 homes, three primary schools, one secondary school and 59 acres of open space.

SAY has also provided consultancy services on the management and design of Wood Wharf at Canary Wharf, and on Westminster City Council’s flagship scheme, Ebury Bridge, comprising around 780 homes, half of which will be affordable. “The first phase of Ebury is nearly there,” Yudolph says. “We’ve been working on that a long time.”

The team involved in the scheme has been working hard to ensure it delivers “from a financial and community perspective”, she explains, adding: “I believe it will be successful in creating somewhere where people buy into the ethos of living in a mixed place.”

The residential-led Wood Wharf scheme will create 3,600 homes, nearly 2m sq ft of office space, 490,000 sq ft of shops, restaurants and community uses and nine acres of interconnected boardwalks, squares and parks.

We’ve been building later-living expertise for some time and do quite a lot of work on it already

“The scale of it is very successful,” Yudolph says. “It’s managed to deliver architecture that feels like it’s been there for a while. It feels quite well established, even though it’s new. It feels like a residential neighbourhood, as opposed to an add-on to a commercially led estate.”

She views the work to reposition Canary Wharf as a mixed-use development, rather than just an office location, as a success. “From a retail perspective, no one used to go to Canary Wharf,” she says. “If you go at the weekend, it’s really vibrant and active.”

Unique challenges

While residential is SAY’s speciality, it also tackles commercial and retail schemes and tends to favour large-scale, mixed-use developments. However, Yudolph says the latter create unique challenges.

“A BTR investor will have different concerns and expectations than a housing association or a commercial occupier,” she says. “Most places have a bit of everything now: retail, commercial and community use. Those are very complicated places to plan, set up and run.”

However, Yudolph says that while such schemes are complex, they are also what is needed. “That’s what people are quite rightly delivering,” she says.

Despite SAY’s track record in working across many different types of development, Yudolph says it is often mistaken for a BTR-only consultancy. “There’s a slight misunderstanding of the business,” she explains. “There’s a lot more interest in rental living and a lot more discussion around it. We’re perceived to be BTR experts, which we are. For the first few years, certainly, it was a very small class of our business, and it’s always probably been 30% of what we do. But we’ve always had much more work in complicated, mixed-use spaces.”

Looking ahead, Yudolph says SAY is keen to venture into other sectors, with her eyes firmly set upon student accommodation and later living. “Later living is a big one for us,” she says. “We’ve been building later-living expertise for some time. We do quite a lot of work in it already, and as a sector there’s a lot of interest in it.”

Yudolph believes the student market is overdue a shake-up. “I would like to be part of that from a design perspective,” she adds. “We need to look at different models for student housing. It has been assumed that people don’t want to share a world; that they are happy being in a room where the door has to be shut. But that’s a very isolated way of living; there needs to be more variety.”

Yudolph sees a big opportunity for purpose-built student accommodation providers to create something that satisfies students through their whole time in higher education, as opposed to a focus on “just year one”.

Another thing on her to-do list is to revive the Do Some Good campaign, an initiative she set up in 2020 to find volunteering and pro-bono opportunities for people working in real estate, which fell by the wayside after the pandemic.

As consultants, we’re very lucky that we get to see under the bonnet of different businesses

“I’d be very happy for someone to come and offer to help me,” Yudolph says. “I think that particularly for small businesses and company volunteering days, it is really difficult to find a link with organisations you feel provide good support.”

When looking for new projects, she says: “The things that I personally get excited about are working for clients that are trying to do things slightly differently.” One such scheme is The Phoenix in Lewes, East Sussex, where specialist eco developer Human Nature plans to create almost 700 timber-frame homes on a former industrial site. “It’s very complicated, but the aspirations of it are really exciting,” she says. “I like doing things that are on the cutting edge of change.”

Other SAY clients include Legal & General, Barnett Council and Greenfall. “We’re very lucky as consultants that we get to see under the bonnet of different businesses,” she says.

Winning the Personality of the Year award came as a surprise to Yudolph, but she wonders if it might have something to do with the fact that she has worked with so many people during her 25-year property career.

Yudolph jokes that she is also slightly concerned about the potential impact of scooping the award. “It’s like Strictly Come Dancing. You win something, and then it turns out to be a bit of a curse,” she laughs.

However, while Yudolph is slightly embarrassed about the attention the award win has brought her, she says it was a proud moment for her as a small business owner. “Clearly, loads of people could have won that award,” she says. “But for me, running a small business and being recognised as a leader, without being attached to a corporate entity, is a really positive message for the industry.”