Stephen Jennings: prediction

Transcript context

…Sure. Sustainability means it’s commercially viable. You have a lot of city projects that are massively subsidized by governments, particularly in petrostates. Our models are exactly the opposite. It doesn’t matter what we want or what we might want to pay for. It matters what our developers and our clients and our residents — what do they want, and what are they prepared to pay for? We can bring all kinds of ideas of ours and all kinds of costs, but you can’t do that, and it’s wrong to try and do that. We don’t try and impose solutions or levels of infrastructure people don’t want, or styles that people don’t want. So it’s probably not a question — it’s probably not how we look at things. There’s things that we think our residents will want that are hard to bring. Let me give you an example. You can have good schools that the community is happy with, or you could have a world-class school. In my view, there’s a qualitative difference between those two, because if you have a world-class school, you will bring world-class professionals. The best professionals in the world in whatever that industry might be, they’ll want to come to your city because their children could go to a school that’s as good or better than anywhere else. So that’s the kind of thing that challenges us. Putting aside all questions of politics, if you just think of constraints on the business side of what you’re doing, what’s the biggest constraint you face?…

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