Episode 50: Ian Livingstone - Co-Founder of London Regional Properties

Feb 24, 2026

Ian Livingstone, co-founder of London Regional Properties and longtime private investor known for buying distressed assets and owning hotels like the Fairmont Monte Carlo. He tells the story of moving from optometry to building a global real estate and operating portfolio. Conversation covers buying during crashes, refurbishing iconic hotels, family-controlled capital, and opportunistic cross-sector investing.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Scaling An Optical Retail Chain By Growing Your Own Managers

Ian Livingstone built Optika Clulow by hiring top staff from employers and training them into managers to scale quickly.
He opened his first store in 1989, acquired David Clulow within three years, and grew to 170 stores including Harrods and Selfridges.

INSIGHT

Contracyclical Buying During Crashes Multiplies Returns

London Regional bought distressed commercial property in 1987 when prices had halved, using leverage from smaller banks to amplify equity returns.
Their contracyclical approach was simply buy when institutions sold and sell when they bought, creating outsized returns.

INSIGHT

Find Institutional Blindspots To Create Edge

London Regional focused on niches institutions ignored: sale-and-leasebacks, mission-critical assets, hotels and PPPs, capturing value where pension funds and public companies wouldn't compete.
That niche focus let them extract higher returns before PE and funds crowded every sector.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Ian Livingstone, co-founder of London Regional Properties, one of Europe's most successful and enduring private investment firms — with over $30 billion deployed across four decades and approximately $10 billion in assets under management today.

Ian's journey began in Ealing, London, where he grew up the son of a dentist. After qualifying as an optometrist in 1984, he opened his first eyewear store in 1989. Within three years he'd acquired the David Clulow chain, growing it to 170 stores across the UK including concessions in Harrods and Selfridges. He served as chairman of the Optika Clulow Group for two decades, building it into one of the leading optical retail businesses in Europe, before selling to Luxottica in 2011.

But the business that would define his career began in 1987, when Ian and his brother Richard founded London Regional Properties at the height of a commercial property crash — buying distressed assets at half price while every institution in the market was running for the exits. That contrarian bet became the foundation of a portfolio that today spans David Lloyd Leisure, Hilton hotels in London, the leasehold on Cliveden House, a $2 billion development in Panama City, and the Fairmont Monte Carlo — one of the most iconic hotel addresses in the world, which Ian acquired in 2007 and spent nearly two decades transforming. Along the way, they provided seed funding for Evolution Gaming, a Swedish online gambling company whose 8.6% stake grew into a position worth nearly $3 billion. Through it all, Ian and his brother have retained full family control — no outside capital, no institutional partners, no compromise.

In our conversation, we explored Ian's unlikely path from optometrist to entrepreneur, the philosophy behind buying aggressively when everyone else was selling, how he thinks about opportunity across wildly different asset classes, the story behind the Fairmont Monte Carlo, what nearly four decades of family control actually looks like, and where he sees the market today.

It's a rare look inside one of the most deliberate and disciplined investing minds in Europe and across global markets — and a masterclass in building lasting private wealth on your own terms.

Presented by: rho.co/generatingalpha