Antony Slumbers

Antony Slumbers has had an unusual left brain/right brain career. Having studied History and History of Art at Bristol University he worked for some years for one of the leading 19th Century British & European Fine Art Dealers in London’s Belgravia.

This morphed into developing high end residential apartments, before an abrupt change of heart in January 1995.

On checking out the UK’s first ‘Internet Cafe’ he became deeply enamoured with the potential and prospects of the then nascent World Wide Web. Seeing as real estate involved multiple documents and multiple parties in multiple locations the ‘Web’ felt like a natural bedfellow. So he launched Estates Today as the first commercial real estate website in the UK. With the entire HTML specification then amounting to just 35 sides of A4 even a History of Art graduate to could learn to code.

This lead to deep immersion in the online world, years spent learning increasingly sophisticated software, and a total of five startups, ranging from real estate research to CRM and Project Management applications.

His main startup though was as a joint venture with British Land Plc developing ‘Vicinitee’, a mashup of property management and tenant engagement software that was used by tens of thousands of office workers in dozens of the most prestigious office buildings in London and across the UK.

Having been bought out of Vicinitee by British Land he turned his focus to thinking deeply about the future: of real estate and technology, of work, of cities, and of society. Fundamentally how does, and will, a world of increasingly powerful technology impact on us humans? In terms of how we work, where we’ll work, and most importantly the nature of the ‘work we do’? And how will this, in turn, impact on us outside of work? We spend 90% of our time inside real estate of some sort or other – how will this world around us change? How do we want it to change? How much agency in that do we have?

Long a believer in the power of ‘megatrends’ Antony is well known as a macro thinker. What are the trends that will sustain, and will shape, support and constrain our futures. As individuals, employees, employers and members of society? What can we dictate and what do we need to avoid having dictated to us?

Within the real estate industry Antony is well known as the original ‘chief evangelist’ for #SpaceasaService, or The Trillion Dollar Hashtag as he calls it. Spaces that enable each of us to be as happy, healthy and productive as we are capable of being. And as a major proponent of AI, from the predictive type he has written and spoken about for years to the more recent explosion of generative AI which looks set to turbo change every mega trend.

Antony is a fan of William Gibson’s well known saying ‘the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed’, and sees his job today as helping others see just that little further over the horizon.

Antony’s style is bracingly independent, high energy, expansive, and upbeat. He aims to act as a catalyst of change, and a cheerleader for forward thinking, positivity and the power of inspiration.

To book Antony Slumbers contact The Speakers Agency on +44(0)1332 810481 or email enquiries@thespeakersagency.com