PODCAST: Ivanhoé Cambridge CEO Nathalie Palladitcheff On Inflation, Asset Allocation And Driving Diversity In CRE

Bisnow's audio series, Bisnow Reports, examines every facet of the international commercial real estate industry — from the murky future of retail and office to real estate’s reckoning with diversity to the effects of climate change on the built world, and so much more. You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music, or scroll down to listen in your browser.

On this episode of Bisnow Reports, we sit down with Nathalie Palladitcheff, the CEO and president of Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate giant that is a subsidiary of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, an institutional investor that manages the pension plans and insurance programs of Québec.

Palladitcheff is the first female CEO of Ivanhoé Cambridge, and her appointment in 2019 made the company the only major pension fund in Canada with a woman in the top job. Last week, she spoke at Bisnow's inaugural Rise Initiative event, which recognized commercial real estate companies making real progress with their DEI initiatives.

On the podcast, Palladitcheff spoke about diversity in hiring, how real estate is responding to the climate crisis, balancing a $60B portfolio and how the pension funds view real estate in an environment of inflation.

“If you look backward, inflation has always been in favor of real estate in terms of asset allocation, because doing bonds current is quite tricky, stock exchange is very volatile, the geopolitical risk is really rising from day to day so going to tangible assets, illiquid assets could make sense,” she said. “So I think it’s very good for infrastructure and real estate as soon as you are able to pass on the inflation to the tenant.”