Helen Spencer

Director of Development
Great Places Housing Group

Helen has worked in housing for 18 years, delivering a wide range of regeneration, development, and housing programmes and projects. Helen has played an integral role in the delivery of 6,000 homes for Great Places in the last 10 years.

Helen’s role at Great Places is to lead and shape the development pipeline, and lead the Development (including land and new business, housing delivery, regeneration and construction) and Sales teams. The focus is upon building high quality homes and places, in line with the Great Places ‘Building Greatness’ corporate plan which has a target of delivering 8,000 homes by 2028.

Brian Ham

Executive Director, Development
Home Group

Brian joined Home Group in early 2014 from London key worker housing developer, Dolphin Square Foundation. He has worked for over 25 years across the public, private and not for profit sectors in the fields of urban and regional regeneration, property development, planning and housing.

Earlier experience includes holding directorships at Metnor Property Group, ONE North East, Newcastle City Council, and more junior posts in various local authorities in the Midlands and Merseyside.

Brian’s role at Home Group is to lead and shape the development pipeline, and lead the Development, Delivery, Regeneration, Sales and Design teams to build high quality homes, in line with the Development strand of Home Groups strategy: ‘Building homes, Independence and Aspirations’ Strategy, which has a target of building 10,000 homes by 2021.

Michael Dong

CEO
Investar Property Group

Michael Dong is the CEO of Investar Property Group, the multi-award-winning property development and investment company based in Manchester. A true industry success story, the 38-year-old entrepreneur moved from China to the UK in 2002 to study for a master’s degree and purchased his first buy to let in 2008. Over the last 10 years, Michael’s typical deals have grown from single buy-to-let units to large scale developments with values surpassing £100m. This was a direct result of dealing with retail and institutional investors, both in the UK and internationally. Michael’s rapid trajectory - from a small-time single property investor, to operating Investar Property Group - is the result of building strong business relationships across a strong network in the UK and the Far East. Using his expertise of these different markets, he continually strives to achieve win-win results for every stakeholder with whom he works.

Paul Richards

Director of Development and Regeneration
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

Paul is the Director of Development and Regeneration for Stockport MBC and has previously been Property Director for Findel PLC, Homeforrm Group and Wine Cellar.

He has extensive senior level experience of managing occupational property portfolios and capital transformation programmes and is a Chartered Surveyor.

In his current role within the Council, he is responsible for the £1 billion investment into development and regeneration across the Borough, in addition to its culture and leisure team and economy, work and skills.

Anna Sabine

Chief Executive
MPC

Anna is the Chief Executive of Meeting Place Communications, which helps developers secure planning consents through work with politicians, communities and the media. She has been at MPC for 10 years, running major pre- app consultation programmes for housebuilders, universities and financial investors. Before this she worked as a Campaign Manager for the Lib Dems and in the voluntary sector; she has a PPE degree from Oxford University. Anna is passionate about involving more women in the planning and development sector, and about growing the use of social media in the industry.