The ROAR Podcast: Alex Heriard-Dubreuil

Alex Heriard-Dubreuil didn't set out to work in sports. He trained as a civil engineer in Paris, joined Merrill Lynch in the late nineties to invest in real estate across Europe, and spent a decade in London watching an asset class transform from a passive, collect-the-rent business into an actively managed one. In 2008 he moved to the real estate arm of the Arnault family office — the family behind LVMH — where he spent the next seventeen years, thirteen of them based in Hong Kong, building luxury-anchored mixed-use districts across Asia, North America, and Europe. What that platform taught him is the throughline of his entire career: real estate stops being about cash flow the moment you start paying attention to who actually uses the building.

In this conversation with host Adam Grossman, Alex explains what mixed-use development genuinely means — and why it is not simply stacking an office on a hotel on a retail box. He walks through the metrics that decide whether a project pencils, from development yield margin to cap rates to the inflation and construction-cost pressures that kill otherwise sound deals. He makes the case for sports and entertainment real estate as an emerging asset class in its own right, explains why downtown revitalization has become the central North American opportunity, and describes the work of aligning team owners, city governments, developers, and capital around a single long-term vision. And he closes with the standard he applies to every deal: a project should still be thriving in thirty years, and it should deliver two returns — one to investors, and one to the community it sits in.

00:00 Welcome and introductions

00:59 Paris, civil engineering, and a first job at Merrill Lynch

03:17 Seventeen years with LVMH: Hong Kong, luxury, and mixed-use

06:14 Why real estate: a tangible asset and a people business

08:10 When real estate was passive

10:41 What "mixed-use" actually means

12:39 The metrics: development yield, cap rates

15:20 Geopolitics, curiosity, and the case for a global career

18:48 Has cross-border investing gotten easier in twenty-seven years?

21:18 What you can only learn on the ground

23:20 Asia after 2008: building for the luxury consumer

26:55 Retail's evolution and the speed of change in China

31:11 Thematic investing: tailwinds, data centers, and differentiation

33:47 Why Seregh — sports, entertainment, and an emerging asset class

37:10 Aligning team owners, cities, and capital

41:01 Stakeholders who want in but need a guide

46:53 What makes a good investment: two returns, not one

49:04 Closing thoughts