There is at least one networking event in property for every day that ends in a ‘Y’. But a trio of young achievers believe that when it comes to catering for the industry’s newer recruits, theirs is as close as you’ll get to the best, and they’ve got some big expansion plans to prove it.
The Young Entrepreneurs in Property, or YEP, began in 2002 and has 5,000 members from across the property industry in the UK and Dubai.
In September 2016 Johnny Clayton, head of urban design at Bidwells in Cambridge, Sophie Eastwood, founder and managing director of PR firm Holistic, and Angelica Donati, who is co-founder of proptech startup Houzen, as well as chief executive of Rome-based development company Donati Immobiliare Group, formed a board to give the networking group the impetus to expand.
For the past 15 years YEP has provided its members experiences from wine tasting, having their caricatures drawn and hearing from expert speakers on a Shoreditch rooftop at a YEP summer party, to site visits including a tour of the Thames Tideway Tunnel project, riding a mechanical bucking reindeer at YEP Christmas party; axe-throwing, speed networking and more.
While these YEP events have always attracted young entrepreneurs (entrepreneur in mindset rather than profession, clarifies Donati) from the full spectrum of the industry, its activities have largely been London-based. But that is changing.
In fact, YEP is coming to a city near you.
Clayton said: “In the past nine months we have started three further chapters, including the UAE, Manchester and Cambridge, and the plan is by the end of 2018 we’ll have 14 chapters across the UK and Ireland.
“It’s been a tough process this past year, but it’s starting to pay off. We want all the chapters, which will have their own committees, to feel they have their own identity and run themselves. They operate independently and it wouldn’t work if they didn’t.”
The beginning
YEP was founded by an agent, an architect and a lawyer who were struggling to find opportunities to network across the industry.
“There was nothing out there where younger people could go and meet other young people they could do business with,” said Clayton.
He has drawn on his own experiences as a young architect to develop a compelling proposition for YEP.
“If I had conversation with myself 15 years ago when I first came into the industry it would have been to learn to be very good and professional at what you do because you won’t get far if you don’t. But there is this extra 10% and that is get out there and get to know people, build your network. I didn’t do that for the first five years of my career, I started too late.
“I meet people now who are 25 years old and have incredible networks and I know that many of them will be leaders of the industry when they are in their 30s and 40s.”
The importance of youth
The number of new networks for young blood, such as BPF Futures, Young Architects and Developers (YADA), EG People, and the Apprentice Network, as well as increasing innovation in the more established, including ULI UK Young Leaders, RICS Matrics, bears testament to how important young talent is to the industry.
Further testament are the partnerships YEP has forged with the likes of EG, BPF, Centre for Cities and LandAid, even though they have their own ambitions in the space.
And in difficult market times, the relationships these platforms will help forge will surely prevail. And if you can meet Gemma the engineer, or Joe the investment agent while participating in a spot of something memorable – wine tasting, or axe throwing for example, then all the better for it.
“If you are going to give your free time up to go to an event, you want to go somewhere interesting with like-minded people and industry friends. That’s something the corporate networking out there doesn’t offer,” said Clayton.
Donati added: “We have all been that kid in the room at a networking event that no one talks to. But when you know the room is full of people at your level it is instantly a friendlier environment.
It is down to the changing face of property, and the all-encompassing nature of YEP that attracting a diverse crowd has never been an issue at any of its events.
“We are the only organisation that exists whose events are targeted at the whole of the property sector,” Eastwood attests.
If you are young, entrepreneurially minded, and have a contacts book to fill, then what are you waiting for?
To send feedback, e-mail Rebecca.Kent@egi.co.uk or tweet @Writer_RKent or @estatesgazette
