The ROAR Podcast: Alex Heriard-Dubreuil

For most of modern real estate history, owning a building meant one thing, collecting the rent and prior tenant renews. Alex Ariadoui has spent nearly three decades proving there's a better question to ask. Today, Adam sits down with Alex, who's the global chief investment officer at Surge. Alex is a civil engineer by training who started his career in Paris, then joined Merrill Lynch to invest in real estate across Europe. 10 years in banking, most of them in London, moving from plain vanilla office towers in Paris to London to development deals in Central and Eastern Europe. Then in 2008, he joined the real estate arm of the Arnault family office, the family behind LVMH. 17 years building luxury anchored mixed-use projects around the world, 13 of them based in Hong Kong. What he learned there reshaped how he underwrites everything. Stop buying cash flow, start understanding the customer. In this conversation, Alex explains what mixed-use development actually means and why it is not simply stacking an office on a hotel on a retail box. He walks through development yield, cap rates, and the math decides whether a project pencils. He makes the case for sports and entertainment real estate as an emerging asset class in its own right. And he explains why the strongest projects deliver two returns, not one. The return to investors and the return to the community. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is The Roar Podcast.

Welcome to the Roar podcast. I'm your host, Adam Grossman. With us today is Surge's global chief investment officer. I'll let him say his name because A, it sounds better when he says it in a beautiful French accent. And B, I definitely don't want to butcher him as we're getting started. So Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Adam, and thanks for having me. And yeah, so my name is Alex Yarduboy, which is, I agree, quite difficult to pronounce, but there we go. You need a French person in your team. Absolutely.

Yeah, exactly. Always good to have a French person on our team. One, thank you for joining us. Two, you know, you and I started around the same time at Surge, so we've both now been there for... several months and excited to talk more about what we're working on together and what you're working on on your own at Surge. But we like to start the podcast like we always like to start the podcast, which is tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to the role that you're in today.

Sure. Happy to do so. And again, thanks for having me. So my background, so I'm a civil engineer. I started my career in Paris where I grew up and I was actually joined an American bank. So it was probably sign here but so i joined merrill lynch to to to effectively invest in real estate across europe and it was it was interesting time because it was the late 90s early 2000 where there was still a very early it was still very early days for for the banks and they were very agile and they were trying to chase yields and and chase new deals so more and more It was about to open new markets within the European environment and chasing more risks, both from a capital structure point of view, as well as from a type of investment. So from a, I would