French-origin principals are becoming the connective tissue of pan-European real estate capital deployment

The thesis in brief

European real estate investment climbed to €241 billion in 2025, a 13% increase compared to 2024, according to CBRE. The first quarter of 2026 sustained the momentum, with €52.6 billion deployed across the continent, a 3% year-on-year rise per the same source. Savills forecasts that full-year 2026 volumes will increase by approximately 16%, with a further 17% growth expected in 2027. Global real estate investment turnover is forecast to exceed US$1 trillion in 2026, roughly 15% above 2025 levels, according to Savills.

Behind this recovery sits a structural question that aggregate volume figures never answer: who, precisely, is connecting capital to opportunity across national borders? The standard narrative focuses on institutional allocators on one side and local operators on the other. Increasingly, a distinct layer of French-origin principals occupies positions that link these two poles, whether through infrastructure concessions, investment banking, or cross-border fund management. Alexis Riols, Florence Ricou, and Arnaud de Sordi represent three variations of the same phenomenon, each operating at a different node in the capital deployment chain, yet each performing the same essential function: translating institutional intent into executed deals across multiple European jurisdictions.

This is the connective tissue of modern pan-European real estate, and it merits scrutiny.

Who is Alexis Riols, and what does his positioning reveal about infrastructure-adjacent real estate?

Alexis Riols serves as Deputy Chief Executive Officer for Airports at GMR Airports and Investment Director at Groupe ADP, the French airport operator with a global concession portfolio. His focus lies at the intersection of airport infrastructure and real estate, a domain where long-duration capital commitments meet complex operational requirements across multiple regulatory environments.

This positioning is significant. Airport-adjacent real estate, encompassing logistics platforms, hospitality clusters, retail concessions, and mixed-use developments around major terminals, represents one of the fastest-evolving segments of European infrastructure investment. Principals who operate in this space require fluency in both infrastructure concession frameworks and commercial real estate economics. Riols embodies this dual competence: he sits inside a principal and operator structure rather than in a pure advisory capacity, yet his role demands constant engagement with institutional capital partners seeking exposure to infrastructure-grade real estate assets.

The distinction matters. Where a traditional capital advisory intermediary facilitates transactions from the outside, a principal like Riols shapes deal structure from within the operating entity. He participates in capital allocation decisions, influences asset strategy, and maintains direct relationships with co-investors and sovereign allocators. This model of embedded capital connectivity, exercised from an operational seat rather than an advisory desk, represents a different architecture of cross-border deal execution.

For GRI Institute members tracking capital flows into European infrastructure real estate, the Riols profile illustrates a broader pattern: French-trained executives, often educated at the grandes écoles and seasoned through major French corporates, are occupying pivotal roles in pan-European infrastructure platforms. Their networks, built through decades of French institutional capital deployment abroad, function as informal channels through which investment theses circulate and partnerships form.

How are French-origin fund managers and investment bankers reshaping cross-border capital allocation?

The infrastructure-operator model that Riols represents is one variant. Two others complete the picture.

Florence Ricou, CEO of Insula Capital, operates as a fund manager in the Portuguese market, where her firm launched the €100 million RE Capital Property Fund I. Portugal has emerged as a destination for institutional capital seeking yield compression opportunities in Southern European residential and mixed-use segments. Ricou's positioning, as a French-origin principal leading a Portuguese-domiciled vehicle, exemplifies how cross-border fund formation increasingly depends on principals who carry institutional credibility from established markets into emerging ones. Her ability to raise capital from pan-European allocators while deploying it into Portuguese assets rests on precisely the kind of bicultural fluency that pure local operators or remote allocators typically lack.

Arnaud de Sordi occupies the third position in this architecture. As a Managing Director at Eastdil Secured, the real estate investment banking firm, de Sordi joined in 2020 after serving as Head of Capital Markets France at Catella. His trajectory, from a Nordic-origin advisory platform to an American-origin investment bank, traces the path of French capital markets expertise into global intermediation structures. At Eastdil Secured, de Sordi operates at the transaction layer, advising on large-scale dispositions, recapitalisations, and portfolio restructurings that move capital across borders.

Taken together, Riols, Ricou, and de Sordi form a triad that maps the full spectrum of capital deployment architecture: the infrastructure principal-operator, the cross-border fund manager, and the investment banking intermediary. Each speaks the language of French institutional capital. Each operates in a jurisdiction or platform that extends well beyond France. Each functions as a node through which investment theses, relationships, and capital commitments flow.

The French institutional ecosystem, anchored by major insurers, pension systems, and sovereign-adjacent vehicles, has long been one of Europe's deepest pools of real estate capital. What distinguishes the current moment is the degree to which French-origin principals have dispersed across the continent's capital deployment infrastructure, carrying with them the relationships, analytical frameworks, and deal-structuring conventions of the Parisian institutional market.

What regulatory shifts are accelerating cross-border capital intermediation?

Two regulatory developments reinforce the structural importance of principals who can navigate multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

Directive (EU) 2024/927, commonly known as AIFMD II, amends the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive with stricter harmonised rules for loan origination, delegation, and liquidity management tools across EU member states. The transposition deadline reached on 16 April 2026 creates a new compliance landscape that rewards managers and intermediaries with genuine cross-border operational capacity. Funds domiciled in one jurisdiction but deploying capital in another must now satisfy more demanding requirements around delegation arrangements and liquidity risk governance. Principals who understand both the regulatory intent and the practical mechanics of multi-jurisdictional fund structures become more valuable as this regime takes effect.

In France specifically, the Loi de finances pour 2026 introduces the "bailleur privé" status to encourage investment in energy-efficient buy-to-let properties and expands vacant housing taxes. While domestically focused, this legislation signals the French state's continued willingness to use fiscal incentives to channel private capital into real estate, a policy orientation that French-origin principals understand instinctively and can communicate credibly to international allocators evaluating French exposure.

These regulatory shifts do not create the connective tissue formed by French-origin principals. They do, however, raise the premium on the kind of institutional fluency these principals possess. As regulatory complexity increases, the value of intermediaries who can translate between jurisdictional frameworks, institutional cultures, and asset-class conventions rises proportionally.

The structural argument

The tendency in market analysis is to focus on capital volumes and yield spreads as the primary drivers of cross-border investment. These metrics matter, but they describe outcomes rather than mechanisms. The mechanism through which €241 billion of European investment volume materialised in 2025, and through which even greater volumes are forecast for 2026 and 2027, depends on human networks of trust, competence, and institutional credibility.

French-origin principals have achieved disproportionate influence in these networks for identifiable reasons. France's institutional capital base is large and sophisticated. Its educational system produces executives with strong quantitative and legal training. Its corporate culture emphasises relationship-driven business development, a trait that translates well into the trust-dependent world of large-scale real estate transactions. And the French diaspora of real estate professionals, spread across London, Lisbon, Frankfurt, and beyond, maintains cohesion through shared institutional references and professional networks.

The result is an invisible architecture of capital deployment, one that operates below the threshold of most market commentary but profoundly shapes where and how institutional capital finds its way into European real estate assets.

GRI Institute's member community, which convenes senior principals across European real estate and infrastructure through its programme of closed-door meetings and research initiatives, provides one of the few forums where this connective layer becomes visible. When principals like Riols, Ricou, and de Sordi engage with peers from across the continent, the informal networks that drive cross-border capital deployment are not merely represented but actively constituted.

For institutional allocators evaluating European real estate exposure, understanding this human infrastructure is as important as understanding yield curves or regulatory frameworks. Capital does not deploy itself. It moves through relationships, and increasingly, those relationships run through French-origin principals operating at every node of the investment chain.

The numbers will continue to grow. Savills projects 16% volume growth in 2026 and 17% in 2027. The question for market participants is whether they understand the architecture through which that growth will be intermediated. The evidence suggests that architecture is, to a significant degree, French-built.