JLL Global CEO Christian Ulbrich: There is no ‘silver bullet’ NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can shoot to make the city affordable again

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Transcript:

Kristin Stoller: Christian, if you could predict for me—is there one big, mega trend that you think will reshape the real estate industry in the next 20 years that no one’s talking about yet? What would you predict that would be?

Christian Ulbrich: You asked me before whether there are any questions which nobody has ever asked me. This is clearly one I have never been asked.

Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next. The podcast about the people…

Stoller: …and trends…

Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Brady: This week, we are speaking with Christian Ulbrich, who is the global CEO of JLL, a giant in the real estate sector. 

Stoller: Yes, he came to us on a really newsy week here in New York. We just had a mayoral election this week—Zohran Mamdani was elected as mayor. We had to ask him about affordability and the housing crisis we have going on. And then it was their earnings week, and he said revenue in the third quarter grew 10%.

Brady: They’re having a very good year, and because it’s a global player, he really has insight into what’s happening around the world with real estate trends, regulation—which is really important for him, both from hiring, but also, of course, building, etc. And [he] talks a lot about what’s going on in places like India, Saudi Arabia—so if you want a sense of the global business landscape, I really think Christian’s one of the best people to chat with.

Stoller: Yeah, and he had a lot to say on the talent wars, on AI. We asked him specifically about if he’s actually implementing it, what it’s doing. So more to come from him. We’ll be back with Christian after the break. 

Brady: Jason Girzadas, CEO of Deloitte US and sponsor of this podcast, joins us now to talk about maximizing business transformation with AI agents.

Jason Girzadas: Great to see you, Diane. Nice to be here.

Brady: So, what should CEOs consider as they assess and prioritize use cases for AI agents?

Girzadas: I think this is on the topic of every CXO conversation I’m a part of. And I think the thought process has to be looking for high-impact areas that may not be necessarily the most glamorous or high-profile functional areas, but are ripe for automation and use of this technology to create efficiencies as well as innovation. And over time, AI agents will be also in customer-facing and growth-oriented domains. In our case, Deloitte, we’re using it within our financial organization looking at very mundane processes like expense management and working capital management. We’re seeing other organizations use it in call centers and with software development that can be automated.

Stoller: What are the key elements for successfully implementing AI agents?

Girzadas: Yeah, it comes down to intentionality. And so, I think that intentionality in going functional area by functional area, in concert with business and IT leadership in an enterprise, it needs to be a mainstream business planning effort that’s budgeted, KPIs are developed, and there’s real accountability for actual business outcomes and impact because of agentic capabilities.

Brady: Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Jason.

Stoller: Thank you.

Girzadas: Thank you.

Brady: Christian, I have to say that JLL is one of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. It’s also been on the Best Companies to Work For [list], but I think we should start by telling people exactly what JLL does. Can you tell us a little bit about the breadth of your business? And welcome. 

Ulbrich: Thank you for having me here. JLL is a global real estate service provider. We are delivering services from cradle to grave when you are owning or occupying real estate.

Brady: Cradle to grave, sounds like you’re in the cemetery business too. So not that.

Ulbrich: Well, yeah, that is not actually included. But no, it just means that we are starting off with people who just have the idea to potentially develop some real estate. But then we take that from that stage with planning and identifying sites, up to helping them to construct, the project management, finding tenants, and then once that building is finished, potentially selling it, financing it, operating it, doing the management for that building, valuing that building every year. So everything you need when you own real estate, especially when you own real estate professionally.

Brady: 80 countries, 100,000 people. How many people do you have now? 

Ulbrich: About 115,000 colleagues. 

Stoller: Wow. Now Christian, we are in New York City, just to give a sense of place here. And days after, we had a big election here. New Yorkers just elected a new mayor, Mayor Mamdani, who ran on this platform housing and this affordability crisis. So I just want to get your take on this. Are we in a crisis? What’s JLL’s role here? If so, how are you thinking about this?

Ulbrich: Well, the challenge that the affordability of living in the major cities of the world is a global one. It’s not unique to New York, but it’s clearly a big issue within New York, and it’s no surprise. What people sometimes do not appreciate is, when you live in a city like New York, you are thinking, I’m an inhabitant of the city. It should be affordable to me. It’s my city. But to be very honest, New York is a global capital. It’s a global capital to the world. So when you look at the amount of people who are coming to New York and experiencing New York, which brings a lot of benefit to New York, a lot of money and a lot of attention, but it comes at a price that it has turned [out] to be really, really, super expensive to live here. And there is no easy answer to that question. Many, many cities in the world are grappling with that, and they try to find an answer. There is no easy answer to it. 

Brady: This whole conversation around affordability, writ large, does seem to be really essentially affecting the zeitgeist around how cities develop, what a good life looks like. I just talked to Steven Ross last night, and he said, Everybody’s going to move to West Palm Beach. But what are you seeing? What in terms of just the conversations around affordability? How is that impacting, if at all, some of the decision making that’s getting done? 

Stoller: And do you really pay attention to races like the Mamdani win here? 

Ulbrich: Well, I certainly pay attention to that specific situation, because New York is a super relevant market for us. And as I said, it’s the capital, or at least one of the capitals, of the world. So it’s relevant. I think I would start off with saying it’s a great example. Companies are part of a community, and the community of New Yorkers have decided that this outcome of the election is now there, which came as a surprise to many people. And my first reaction was, well, that’s great, democracy is alive. And the other story of that remarkable win, is that somebody who comes across as very charismatic, very authentic, can come from left field and win an election within a very short period of time. And we, as a company, as a very large employer, and specifically as an organization which is obviously working in the real estate area, can help here. And so we are very open, if our advice is asked to help the new mayor. What he can really do to improve the situation, as I alluded to earlier, it’s not an easy one. There is no silver bullet he can just shoot and then it’s done. This is really difficult. This is hard work. The whole world has tried to solve it, and nobody is there that he can just look at and say they did it and that’s what I copy and paste, because nobody has solved it completely. There are a few cities who had more success than others, and so we can help here with best practice. 

Brady: What other cities would you point to as being best in class? 

Ulbrich: Well as an outcome for the people living there, the city who has done the best job on it is Vienna. I still don’t like Vienna as an example, because they used it also as a political tool. There’s a massive amount of subsidized housing, communal housing in Vienna, and in the past, they used that housing to allocate those apartments to those people who were in favor of that political leadership and not to everybody. And so I don’t like the process, but as an outcome, they have a massive amount of affordable apartments in Vienna, which makes the city very livable also for people with low-and-medium-sized income. And at the end of the day, you don’t want to live in a city where only people can have apartments which are outrageously expensive. I mean, when you look to the city center of London, that is one of the challenges London has. That a lot of those apartments are just dark because they are apartment number three, number four, number five, of wealthy people, and you walk around there and everything is dark and it’s not lively anymore. We don’t want that either. And so it’s a tricky one. 

Brady: Do you have private sector employers talk about providing affordable housing? Because you go to other parts of the world and that is the norm. You’re building something, one of the things you build is affordable housing? Is that a conversation that’s coming more into the US now, as people are looking at building headquarters and realizing we have to house these people at the same time? 

Ulbrich: I don’t know about an example in the U.S., but that may be down to me. I don’t live here, so maybe my colleagues have an example for that. We have those examples. Obviously, it’s most obviously in the hotel space, where hotel operators, who operate hotels in very expensive locations, have to create affordable housing so that they have staff housing. But you see it now more and more, which is almost the irony when you go back to my home country, Germany. We had a lot of staff housing. So the people who were working for the railway companies, they had their own apartment blocks. And for the post they had their own apartment blocks. All of that was privatized in the 80s and 90s. And so there wasn’t any company housing anymore, and now the first companies are starting to build company housing again, because otherwise they can’t attract people to come to Munich, or to come to Frankfurt, into the big cities. And so they have to build staff housing again, which are normal apartments, but you can only rent an apartment like that when you are employed by this company. So there is a revival of that concept. 

Brady: One of the things I love about the sector you’re in is that it is at this intersection of public policy and the private sector. I mean, we’ve talked in the past, Christian, about the role of government here in creating the conditions, mostly in commercial real estate in terms of what we’re talking about, but in general, let’s start with the U.S., because this is seen to be a moment right now where we’re having more deregulation. Is that impacting your ability to grow here? And then let’s move to the rest of the world.

Ulbrich: Well, I mean, regulation can be advantageous, as long as that regulation is strengthening what you are trying to achieve, and sometimes regulation becomes a hurdle because you have too much regulation, too much bureaucracy, and then it slows you down. Now, very large companies like JLL can deal with regulation because we have lots of smart people who will look into it and will find the way we have to deal with regulation. So it’s actually in favor of very large companies. It’s obviously to the disadvantage of small companies. Deregulation can be very, very, very helpful as long as it doesn’t create mayhem. 

Stoller: Now Christian, I know you said that a lot of countries are grappling with affordability. In the U.S. alone, the housing deficit grew to about 4.7 million units in 2025. Are there any models or partnerships you think are really effective for fixing this problem and scaling affordable housing?

Ulbrich: Well, as I said, there’s not one kind of solution to it. You have to do many, many things, and that will, then, over time, help your local market. One thing is that you invest heavily into public infrastructure, public transportation, because you’re widening the commutable area, and that is a challenge, particularly in the U.S., because the public transportation is, compared to other countries, I would say, underdeveloped. You have no fast trains. You know, I used to have an assistant. She was living more than 100 miles away from our office, but she was using a fast train. She was 45 minutes on that train to do a 100 mile train ride. So if you think about New York…

Brady: …that would be a multi-day journey…

Ulbrich: …yeah, then you would have a much bigger catchment area, and that would help. So that’s one area. The other area is, obviously, that you can provide the land for free to the developer, and then the developer gets rent control for using the land for free so you can create affordable space. This is what many countries are using, many cities are using to encourage that. You can go with direct subsidies. I mean, there are all kinds of tools which you can use. You can create skimmed down housing regulations so that you can build cheaper. But, you know, I could go on and go on because we have worked on that topic in Sydney, in many European cities, in Asian cities. Everywhere, they’re grappling with that issue. 

Brady: It’s interesting because I think I mentioned earlier, you’re in 80 countries. The geopolitical landscape has shifted. Opportunities are shifting. Give us a sense, on a global level, where are you seeing the most sort of surprising pockets of opportunity? Or are you spending more time looking at markets this year that maybe weren’t on your radar a couple of years ago? 

Ulbrich: Well, the big shift is clearly, and I have to say that unfortunately, because I’m a European, but Europe is struggling very much so. And so a lot of the activity is now outside of Europe. The U.S. has been able to continue to be the biggest growth opportunity in the world, I have to say, from absolute numbers. Not in percentage terms, but from absolute numbers. We all know that China still has a very healthy percentage growth, but overall it is declining now year over year, and especially within the real estate sector. China is still digesting a lot of challenges. 

Brady: They’ve had a bubble.

Ulbrich: And so that’s why the US is in absolute and in relative terms, very, very attractive. And that attractiveness has grown now. Outside of these areas which I just mentioned, you have to clearly mention India. The development in India is very, very impressive. They have invested heavily into infrastructure the last 10 years. It is amazing. Each time I go there, something has fundamentally changed, and the country is becoming now really competitive on a global scale, and is able to kind of take over roles which were before within China—manufacturing and so on. And then they have a massive amount of talented people graduating each year from college, especially around tech jobs. It’s really impressive the type of talent we are getting. And so for us, India is now the second largest workforce behind the U.S., which used to be China before. 

Stoller: This reminds me of the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, which you were at with us, Christian. Diane, you had a great conversation on stage.

Brady: I’ve got his quote here, and I love this one: other countries have learned to move along much faster and more decisively, and that’s what we’re seeing when you look at growth rates in the world. I’m curious to know, really drilling down on how some of the political decisions and the speed with which these economies are moving, what can we learn from that? You mentioned India, for example, I used to live in India. That used to be one of the worst places to do business. You know, you want to put up a bridge and 75 voices and four years later you’re still talking about it. What do you see changing in terms of where you think now we can learn from the way that economy is conducting itself. 

Ulbrich: Yeah, India is especially a great example, because it is a democracy. The challenge is that the concept of democracy comes at the price of being slow. And so when we look at the most successful development stories, whether it is China, which has been obviously a remarkable success story of development, but also when we look at the Middle East, UAE, or you just mentioned Saudi, also very impressive development stories, but obviously in a different legal environment where it’s much easier to just say this is needed and bam, it’s done. Versus when you are in a democracy, you are faced with lots of people with different opinions. They have the opportunity to use courts to delay processes, and there are just different roles. India is an interesting one, as you said. They are coming from a world where you could get nothing done because of all the different states and all the different rules. And what has happened, especially over the last 10 years, [is] that they were able to streamline. They realized, if we continue the way we did, we can’t get our country into a position where we can provide decent lifestyles to our vastly growing population. And so they have done their homework. It’s not perfect, but it’s impressive, very impressive. And so I think that is what, especially the European leaders, have to kind of really digest. That the way they were able to operate for a very long time will not keep Europe successful. Europe is falling consistently behind, so they have to speed up now. 

Stoller: Are there any strategies you think Western countries should be using to emulate these other ones that you were saying are doing well? 

Ulbrich: Well, you know, I shouldn’t be in a position to give advice. 

Brady: If I were running this country, here’s what I would do. 

Stoller: You’re very knowledgeable.

Ulbrich: Well, but you know, it’s always easier to talk from the sideline than to execute yourself. But the challenge, I think, is that they find it difficult to convey the facts and the truths to their voters, because they know they are facing an election very shortly. Because, you know, in most countries, it’s at least every four years, and you hardly get anything done within those four years. So very often, the people who are actually telling the truth, which is sometimes unpleasant, they will be voted out for giving that. But I think people have moved on. I mean, people have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work. And I think you can be more transparent and say, Listen, whatever the retirement plans of Europe, where you have these public retirement plans, they are totally underfunded, because life expectancy is much longer. 

Brady: Spend more time retired than working.

Ulbrich: Exactly. So you have to work longer, full stop. That is a message which I think everybody understands. It’s very unpopular, but I think you can give that message, and this is just one example of many where you just have to be transparent to the people and tell them those are the facts. And listen, we can do it like this or like that, but if we do it like this, it will end up badly, and if we do it like that, we stay competitive. So what shall we do? 

Brady: One of the things that surprises me is we still debate a lot about remote work, hybrid work, going to the office. Obviously that has a huge impact on commercial real estate. What are you seeing? What is it that gets people to want to go into the office? Because it feels like we have to change the experience now of the workplace. Are you thinking about that in terms of even just this next generation? Because it’s still a hot debate in the U.S. and everywhere I go, Where should our people work? How should they work? 

Ulbrich: Well, I would say we have been thinking about that for a very long time. It didn’t take COVID to get us to that place. We were always arguing that you have to create really inspiring environments to get the best out of your people. Now, frankly, we do that for a living, and so it’s no surprise that we told that to our clients. But I think, and that’s why I was not concerned at all when during COVID, in the aftermath of COVID, you had all these headlines, the office is dead, and why we don’t need any more offices, and I was absolutely convinced that people will get back into the office. That was just a trend. It was a popular trend, but at the end of the day, we all enjoy being surrounded by people who we like to work with, who are inspiring us, where we can learn from. Especially when you are younger in your career, if you don’t have the opportunity to sit next to somebody who is more experienced, from whom do you want to learn? I mean, my whole career started with the ability that I was allowed to sit next to my boss, and that was still a time when you had traditional phones, and he had his receiver. There was a second receiver. Whenever he was talking to a client, he kind of pointed on the second receiver for you to listen in. That’s how I learned how to talk to clients, how to sell products to clients. That would have never been able [to happen] if I had stayed at home, and he was sitting at home. And so this is why people have to come together for their work, and that has nothing to do with the lack of flexibility. If there’s a reason why you have to stay home a day for whatever, because you have a doctor’s appointment, or your dog is sick or whatever, well then you stay home that day. But that doesn’t take away that coming to an office is the best way to kind of be productive and to move forward. 

Stoller: Are you still seeing these high office vacancies? Or what does the landscape look like right now for you? 

Ulbrich: Well, what you see is that the best buildings—and that is true for every city around the world—the best buildings in the cities are almost completely occupied. There’s very, very little vacancy. Rents are rising quite strongly for the best buildings, and we have a clear lack of space for those types of buildings. So as the development pipeline, especially here in the U.S.—groundbreaking for office buildings is at a record low since the statistic started. So what people are trying to do, our teams within JLL, they are analyzing the next layer of buildings and see whether they are able to upgrade those buildings so that they are meeting the expectations of those clients who would have loved to go into a top notch building, can’t find one, and then they go one down. And so that is kind of the trend. Now we still have a lot of vacant buildings. It could be either that they are really outdated buildings in good locations, but very often those are buildings in fringe locations where people just don’t want to have their office. 

Stoller: I’m curious what your clients or customers are asking for, because I went to the new JPMorgan building earlier this year. 

Brady: It’s controversial, not everybody loves it but Kristin loves it.

Stoller: I didn’t get to go inside because it was still being constructed, but they’ve got a pub. They’ve got all these workout studios. Are clients asking you, hey, I need, like, all these amenities.

Ulbrich: I mean, this is obviously at the very, very far end of the spectrum. You don’t have many of those buildings. And there’s no surprise that this is a building which sits in New York. By the way, this goes back to what I said right at the beginning: New York is the capital of the world, and it is the right thing that those types of buildings are standing in the capital of the world. If we were to build a building like that in another city, and I don’t want to be disrespectful, but it would be inappropriate to build a building like that in Dallas or I would say in Los Angeles…

Brady: …too over the top?

Ulbrich: Too over the top. I mean, this is a building which, I mean, this is the most successful bank in the world and the most important city in the world, and they have the right to have this type of headquarters. But it has to sit right. It also has to sit within a community. You shouldn’t create complete outliers where people feel alienated by the type of building. And I sometimes see that when corporate headquarters are in more mid-sized cities, and they want to build a really impressive corporate headquarters, and then that is the only building of that scale in that city, and you kind of go, really?, 

Brady: One of the things that I always enjoyed talking to you about is talent, because you have 115,000 people, you hire worldwide. That’s also an area, of course, where policy can come into play. You mentioned Europe, how is it hiring people in Europe? Now, when you look around the world, leaders are fascinated with the trends in talent. Sometimes we stereotype Gen Z, millennials. What are you seeing, how are you hiring? 

Ulbrich: I don’t think there’s a massive difference with regards to the type of talent we are hiring around the world. Young people around the world tend to share the same ambitions. They have all, when they come to us, usually pretty good education, and they have the ambition to work in a global, super professional environment. Many of them are hoping that one day they can move to another country within our organization. So that’s pretty much the same all across the world. The big difference is—I was just recently in our Munich office, and we had to do quite a bit of restructuring in Germany, because Germany is still pretty much in a recession, more or less for a couple of years, and the economy is still smaller than it was in 2019 so nothing much has happened over so many years. And so people are concerned. And they said to me, Christian, when will that stop? And I said, guys, those are the numbers. I literally put the numbers up on my iPad, and I showed them, those are the numbers. We organize ourselves in the 10 largest countries. We call them the J10. Germany is one of them. And I said, Listen, guys, you are within the J10 countries, and this is how you look. Do you feel good about it? And they said, No, not really. And so what can we do about it? And I said, collaborate. One JLL, work together. See how you can come to the clients and win more business from them, and convince them that we are making them more successful every day, and then your numbers will grow, and then it will become better for you. I mean, it goes back to what we said earlier. Be transparent with people. Treat them as grown ups. 

Brady: I’m talking to two German citizens here. One soon-to-be German citizen. You grew up in Hamburg. I love the anecdote earlier about listening in on the phone, but tell us a little bit more about what you think were some of the formative moments for you as a leader that you draw on. Because I think a lot of people love to hear, just, what can we learn from your background?

Stoller: Built a career in Germany, now leading a U.S.-headquartered global business. I think that’s interesting. 

Ulbrich: Yeah, listen, I grew up in a family where my parents were running their own business, their own company. They were timber merchants, so they were importing timber from around the world, and then selling it to the furniture industry. And so our life was the company. So literally, every Saturday after breakfast, we as a family would drive to the company, and then my parents would do work, and I was either playing…

Brady: Playing amid the timber? 

Ulbrich: Playing with timber, or doing whatever they used to do. They had all of these forklifts in the company. So my older brother was allowed to drive the forklift already at a very early age, and then I was sitting next to him, and we were driving around the warehouses. So that was how I grew up. And then when I was getting older, I was starting to do little work there and got a little bit of additional pocket mone.y But what it created was a high sense of responsibility. I realized very early on, this is what your parents are doing. They are employees, and those employees are dependent that your father and your mother are taking the right decisions so that it continues to go well. And so this sense of responsibility is probably what I learned right at very early ages, and it’s probably what still drives me today. 

Stoller: What would you say was your hardest moment as CEO? 

Ulbrich: The hardest moment as CEO… at a very young age, I became CEO of a small bank in Germany and it was a restructuring story. They were looking for somebody who was willing to take that on. And so I restructured the bank and brought it back into profitability, and then the owners came to me and said, Listen, we want to cash in. We sell that bank now. And so I was working on their behalf to identify a buyer, and then I was surprised that they had lined up another buyer, which, from my perspective, wasn’t the type of buyer who should, first of all, be owning that bank, and certainly not somebody I wanted to work for. And so I resigned the day they took ownership of that bank, and that was a really tough moment. Because, you know, I was very young when I became CEO there…

Brady: Did you have something else to go to? Or did you just, Honey, I’m home. I just quit. 

Ulbrich: Absolutely nothing to go to. It caught me completely by surprise. And so that was a really, really difficult one. And I was kind of struggling a little bit, but at the end of the day, I was clear that I didn’t want to work for them and that I should keep my personal values higher than this very lucrative contract as a CEO of a bank.

Stoller:  I think you’re the second CEO of the season who’s told us they resigned, so…

Brady: Yeah, you’ve got more hutzpah than me on that front, if I feel I’m on the precipice of financial doom I don’t think I could say I quit. But you had good moral reasons to quit. I’d be remiss not to ask about AI on a couple of fronts. Obviously, how it’s transforming your business. But there is a lot of conversation as well around how AI is going to be impacting, again, talent businesses. Let’s start with how you see AI playing out in your company? 

Ulbrich: Well within JLL, it obviously is already playing a very prominent role, and it will only become more prominent. Because at the very end, if you want to simplify it down to the basics, we are in the data business. We are collecting massive amounts of data, we analyze that data, and then we turn that data into valuable advice for our clients. That’s what we do. And so whenever you have massive, massive amounts of data, AI is favorable. And then the processes which we are pursuing—leasing a building, selling a building, financing a building—we tend to say, this is very complicated, that’s why you need us. But at the very end, it’s not flying to Mars and the Moon. And so there is a lot of opportunity here to use AI to simplify the process, to use the data, and to drive productivity. And so it’s super important for us. 

Stoller: I’m going to say the word that everyone’s gonna groan at, and it’s ROI, because I’ve had this debate with so many executives about where’s the ROI here? Are you actually seeing any tangible value or returns yet, or is it more just laying the foundation for the future? 

Ulbrich: We already see significant returns for us, but they’re mostly on the productivity side. You have obviously two big use cases: increasing productivity or generating revenues. We are still in the phase where it’s mostly around increasing productivity. We see the first products, the first agents, which are revenue generating. But it’s still at its infancy at the moment, so it’s on the productivity side. But as I said, in an organization of 115,000 people, there are lots of pockets where you can try to increase productivity. 

Brady I want to ask a little bit about sustainability, because you’ve been on the front lines with sustainability, and just in terms of the footprint, etc., the zeitgeist has shifted somewhat here around those conversations. Does that impact anything about what you’re doing, or are you seeing any new challenges on that front? 

Ulbrich: That was a German word, Zeitgeist. 

Stoller: She threw that in just for you.

Brady: Germany has brought so much to my life, including the word Zetigeist.

Ulbrich: You’re really making me feel at home here. Listen, it is super important to us. It’s deeply embedded into our purpose: shaping the future of real estate for a better world, and we really mean that we live it. We have our own science-based targets. We were one of the first companies accredited for their science based target to reduce our carbon footprint, and we are well ahead on that journey. What we are seeing from our clients is that they continue to move on that journey because it’s good for their business. 

Brady: They just don’t talk about it. 

Ulbrich: They just don’t talk about it that much anymore. And that’s fine. You don’t have to talk about it and brag about it. Maybe that was a bit of the issue, that people were bragging about it before they were actually doing something about it, and now they do something about it, not talking about it that much. But at the end of the day, we are in business. And business means you have to make money, and a lot of the things that we do for our clients on their journey to become more sustainable will actually save them money, make them more profitable, attract better talent, attract better clients, make them as a brand more popular. There are so many values and benefits coming with that journey, and that’s what they do. And the things which do not make any sense, well, then they don’t do that one. But so far, we are still very comfortable. Obviously the scope one and two of our clients are our scope three, and we are committed to net zero, so we also have to get our scope three down. So we are watching very carefully what our clients are doing on their emissions and on their journey. And so far, I’m still comfortable with our own target. 

Stoller: Good. Now, as we come to, sadly, the end of our time here, I want to look more forward-future thinking. So Christian, if you could predict for me—is there one big, mega trend that you think will reshape the real estate industry in the next 20 years that no one’s talking about yet? What would you predict that would be?

Ulbrich: You asked me before,whether there are any questions which nobody has ever asked me. This is clearly one I have never been asked. 

Stoller: Yes, then I’ve done my job.

Ulbrich: A mega trend, 20 years out…  I wouldn’t call it necessarily a mega trend, but we will have buildings that will measure everything which is measurable. Going forward, we start to see that already, you enter a building, and your camera will detect you. The building will know where you are, what you are using, where you spend your time. Everything will be measured. And that can be scary. And there are elements if you don’t keep the privacy rules, which are a bit scary. But on the other hand, it is very beneficial, because we will be able to operate those buildings at a much lower cost level. We will only use the heating, the air conditioning where we need to use it. We will only clean where we need to clean. I mean, the whole operations of buildings will become so much more efficient going forward. So a building needs to be operated in the future, much more than it has ever been done before. 

Brady: We have facial recognition coming in here. I have to say, it sounds more delightful than Orwellian, to your point. Do you think it’s going to be more delightful for us 20 years from now based on this technology? Or do you worry it’ll be scarier? 

Ulbrich: Well, I think we will get used to it. There are so many things which are scary when you are first coming to it, and then you get used to the benefits of those developments, and then you don’t think about the negatives anymore. The only trouble with facial recognition I have, that I made once, a very big mistake, I had to extend my passport, and I didn’t want to take a new picture, and so I just took the old picture. Now my passport picture is quite old, and when I’m using…

Brady: …you look fantastic, I’m not gonna ask your age…

Ulbrich: …to come to the US I have now kind of a mismatch between my passport and how I look, and they always call me out, and say, is that really you? And so I’m regretting that I didn’t take a newer picture for my passport. 

Stoller: Those are the important lessons.

Brady: That is a life lesson we’re going to end on right there. 

Stoller: Thank you, Christian.

Brady: Thank you very much.

Ulbrich: Thank you for having me. 

Brady: Leadership Next is produced and edited by Hélène Estèves.

Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.

Brady: Our head of video is Adam Banicki.

Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.

Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.