Emerging Real Estate Leaders Competition: 2024 Winners

In the spirit of EXPO REAL and co-creating the future of real estate, CTP launched the Emerging Real Estate Leaders Competition. This was an opportunity for young students and professionals from the real estate sector to showcase bold, innovative ideas. We challenged them to answer the following question in either in a 500-word essay  or a two-minute video:

What is a key issue in real estate development in Europe with the greatest potential for positive impact? Discuss the challenge and propose a solution. 

The jury of this competition—Alexander Hund (Managing Director, CTP Deutschland), Bert Hesselink (Group Director of Client Relationships, CTP), and Timo Hielscher (Managing Director M&A, CTP Deutschland)—evaluated the submissions and awarded the top three winners to get the following prizes:

1st Place: A one-day job shadowing experience with a CTP Deutschland Director or Manager* of your choice, including transportation within Germany and accommodation if needed.2nd & 3rd Place: A 45-minute online mentoring session with a CTP Director or Manager* of your choice, plus your choice of a 12-month subscription to ChatGPT or a €100 Deutsche Bahn gift voucher.

We were thoroughly impressed with the originality, quality, and deep understanding of the submissions, and they have certainly given us something to think about in our work. Congratulations to the winners. We highly recommend reading their thought-provoking essays.

1st Place: Dilara Albasar, Circular Economics 

Dilara’s essay confronts one of real estate’s largest issues head-on: material extraction and waste. She proposes how the two can be tied together to eliminate, or minimise, each’s negative externalities via the three pillars of circular economic practices, particularly in application to existing assets. She also goes further to address the challenges in shifting to such a system with legislative assistance and awareness-raising initiatives.

Read her essay

2nd Place: Arthav Ravani, Affordable Housing 

Rapid urbanisation and increased economic pressures have ramped up housing affordability issues in Europe. Arthav raises how these two points, paired with housing outpacing supply, high property prices, and complicated procedures of regulatory compliance, can be addressed. He presents multifaceted tools for this multifaceted challenge, such as increased investment via public-private partnerships and rent stabilisation measures among other tools.

Read his essay



3rd Place: Denis Petrov, Harnessing Smart Building Technologies

In his essay, Denis introduces the urgent environmental impact Europe is urgently confronted with — particularly in the real estate sector and amid rapidly growing cities — and how we need to integrate a new approach. Smart building technologies may sound lofty, but Denis concisely identifies tactics our sector needs to integrate across our practices.

Read his essay


Big thank you to our participants and for sharing your bright ideas. We look forward to further connecting with our winners through the job shadowing and mentoring prizes. 

As Susanne Eickermann-Riepe FRICS shared with us in her EXPO REAL 2024 reflection…

“It is very clear that climate change requires new strategies and products, that social issues must be integrated, and that innovation and new technologies must be promoted and that nature-based solutions will also play a role”

… and we need to be brave, smart, and adaptable as these young leaders have illustrated.