The stories we tell ourselves can be powerful. They shape how we see reality, whether they’re true or not. The trouble is that the ones which endure are rarely the most helpful. Here’s a familiar story: every industry is privately convinced that its image problem is uniquely severe. This leads to a lot of navel-gazing and going round in circles. Often, however, they’re grappling with versions of the same challenge: trying to explain their value to people outside the room. I saw this play out at two recent conferences related to the built environment: the UK Real Estate Infrastructure & Investment Forum (UKREiiF) in May and IWFM Live last week.
UKREiiF is a massive annual event in Leeds that pulls in the entire UK real estate sector. It covers the whole gamut, from developers to facilities management and everything in between. Panels on data centres provided one of the clearest examples of this communications gap. The sector is very much top of the agenda right now, fuelled by AI hyperscalers and their ferocious demand for capacity. But faces, according to its proponents at least, a striking disconnect between the value it creates and how it is perceived.
Speakers in “Data Centres – Facts & Fiction” described data centres as critical infrastructure underpinning everything from AI and healthcare to financial services and economic growth. Yet much of the public still sees them as large, power-hungry industrial buildings with little obvious benefit to the communities around them.
Tom Glover, EMEA head of data centre transactions at JLL, put it plainly: “The perception gap is our fault as an industry.”
His colleague Eleanor Parry, director of UK public affairs at JLL, added that the sector often assumes its importance is self-evident, but that is far from guaranteed outside the industry. Local debates tend to focus more on the negatives: visual impact, energy demand and the perception that new developments offer little in return.
The panel agreed data centres have moved rapidly from a specialist asset class to a strategic national issue as demand for AI infrastructure accelerates. But the industry’s narrative has struggled to evolve at the same pace. As Glover noted, the sector still talks in megawatts rather than explaining what that infrastructure actually enables. Without data centres, he argued, many of the technologies and services people now take for granted simply would not function.
That sounds like a good place to start.
Worth the commute
It’s a similar story when considering the role of offices today. The commercial property sector clearly has a vested interest in their future and in the ongoing return-to-office debate. But the real challenge is persuading the occupiers and employees who use those buildings that the commute is worth it.
At a fringe event in Leeds city centre, law firm Irwin Mitchell presented its 2026 occupier survey, which found that 78% of business leaders expect office attendance to rise over the next 12 months, up from 74% the year before, even as attendance appears to have stabilised at around two days a week. Meanwhile, employees are increasingly attending beyond mandated requirements, choosing when the journey feels worthwhile rather than simply complying with policy. Irwin Mitchell’s William Scott said this demonstrated the necessary shift towards creating “destination offices”.
Similarly, at a British Council for Offices session back inside the conference, “Hot Desks & Cold Realities”, Delancey chief executive Stafford Lancaster pointed to continued demand for high-quality workplaces. As occupiers seek better environments and greater flexibility, the strongest assets continue to attract attention.
The PFI hangover
Infrastructure shows the same pattern, with public-private partnerships never really shaking off the baggage of PFI. In “Capital That Builds: Unlocking Private Investment in UK Infrastructure”, Kam Patel, partner, strategy and transactions corporate finance at EY, said the sector had “lost the reputational battle” around PFI, even though, by his own figures, around 95% of projects were delivered on time and on budget. Victoria Whitehead, managing director and head of infrastructure and transport at Lloyds Bank, added that 650 projects and £50bn of investment had been delivered through private finance models that would simply not have happened otherwise.
Once again, however, the people who really needed to hear that – and of course the hardest to convince – were not in the room.
Bloom’s tell
IWFM Live is the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management’s official conference, back this year after a three-year hiatus. Keynote speaker Jonty Bloom, the BBC’s former business correspondent, was supposed to provide an outsider’s perspective. Instead, he ended up telling the FM audience something they often tell themselves – that they have a critical role to play in raising productivity, both as its enabler and beneficiary.
Productivity is down, skills shortages persist and investment has lagged, Bloom said, yet economic growth would also mean more factories, offices, shopping centres and schools to run, and someone has to operate them.
Moving right to left
One longstanding hang-up for FM, but arguably a legitimate one, is that many of the decisions which determine how a building actually works get made earlier in its life cycle, before it’s part of the picture, leaving FM deal with the consequences once the building is handed over.
A panel chaired by Justin Kirby, co-founder and facilitator of the Digital Operations Working Group, argued for a “right to left” approach, starting with the outcomes operations actually need and working backwards from there. Steven Boyd MBE, formerly chief executive of the Government Property Agency, said: “The project handover is not the end of the project, it’s the start of the operations.”
The panel split on what to do about it. Anthony Taylor, consultant and founder of Resolve Risk, said the sector needs to come together with one voice and “make noise at all levels”. Boyd argued the opposite: stop explaining operational complexity to the CFO because the CFO isn’t interested and doesn’t need to be. Instead, understand what the client is trying to achieve and explain the consequences of not getting it, in their language.
Telling the story
Jake Drummond, IWFM’s deputy chair, closed the conference by making much the same point. The sector has always understood the value it creates, he argued, but it has not always been effective at communicating that value to others.
“Humans behave on the basis of how they feel, not on what they think,” he said at his UKREiiF keynote, and that can have consequences measured in billions.
The built environment sector, like many others, spends a great deal of time talking to itself. Judging by both conferences, many parts of it are still wrestling with how to tell that story to the people who really need to hear it.
