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Biography
John Forbes is an independent consultant advising real estate investment managers, investors and others in the real estate industry on the structure and operation of real estate funds. He has advised on the restructuring of high profile open and closed-ended real estate funds in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, as well as the establishment of new funds. He has advised service providers to the real estate investment management industry on the strategic implications of regulatory and other changes.
John is is non-executive chair of the Urban Splash Residential Fund and a non-executive director of the Patrizia Hanover fund. From 2014 to 2022 was independent chair of the Supervisory Board of the UBS Triton property fund..
Prior to setting up John Forbes Consulting LLP on 1st July 2013, he spent over twenty-five years with PwC, six of them in Russia where he led the firm's real estate practice in the mid 1990s. He later led PwC’s Real Estate Industry Practice in Europe, the Middle-East and Africa across all of the firm's services to the real estate industry. At PwC, John was for many years a leading adviser on the establishment of international real estate funds. He was a tax partner by background, but also advised on a range of regulatory, governance and operational matters for real estate funds, Sovereign Wealth Funds and similar investment vehicles. He was the firm's international Subject Matter Expert for real estate funds.
He is a regular conference speaker and the author of a number of papers including “Ammonites, extinction events and the real estate fund management industry” and “Unlisted funds - lessons from the crisis” and was also one of the authors of the highly regarded PwC / Urban Land Institute Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe report from 2009 to 2012. He is the author of the 2017 AREF / INREV report on cost transparency in listed and non-listed real estate.
Until 2020, John was a vice chair of the UK Executive Committee of the Urban Land Institute https://uk.uli.org and co-chair of its Capital Markets committee. Although he has now stepped sown from these roles, he continues to organise its UK capital markets forum. He is a member of the Indirect Property Funds Group and Solvency II working party of the Investment Property Forum https://www.ipf.org.uk. He was a member of the AREF/INREV/IPF "End of Fund Life" Project Team (see here). He is a judge for the IP Real Estate Global Awards. John is a member of the Society of Property Researchers http://www.sprweb.com/. in 2017, he undertook an independent review of fund manager behaviour following the EU referendum for the Association of Real Estate Funds (AREF). He has subsequently joined the AREF Public Policy Committee (see here) and as part of that, AREF's BREXIT working group. John won the 2017 Association of Real Estate Funds (AREF) award for "Outstanding Individual Contribution"
John is a Chartered Accountant, a Chartered Tax Adviser and a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
You can read a review of John's tenth year as a consultant here.