Marc Bertrand, Emeritus

Having spent a quarter of a century in the highest echelons of the French real estate industry, Marc Bertrand has developed an obvious passion for real estate, a sector for which he was not necessarily predestined. Brought up in the south of Paris in a family of four - his father was an engineer and his mother a homemaker - young Marc attended the Lycée Marie-Curie in Sceaux, where he took a scientific Bac. "I was a pretty good pupil and understood quite early on that, to have peace with your parents and your teachers, you had to work reasonably hard," recalls the Chairman of the Management Board of Præmia REIM France, with the outspokenness that will mark our entire exchange. "I've always been more of a mathematician than a literary type, that's for sure", he adds, stressing that he received "a fairly broad culture" from his parents, "in particular from a father who instilled in us from an early age a love of nature, from birds to botany to entomology".