Nathalie Palladitcheff

Since becoming president and CEO of Ivanhoé Cambridge in 2019, Nathalie Palladitcheff has accelerated value creation and generated sustainable performance for the commercial real estate investment firm and thousands of Quebecers.

IC is the commercial real estate investment arm of Montreal-based pension fund operator Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Palladitcheff also sits on the Caisse’s executive committee, which steers the pension fund’s investments and operations.

She has led IC’s shift to an investor-focused business model and orchestrated the strategic repositioning of its portfolio. Between 2020 and 2022, IC realized its strategic transformation sooner than expected, selling about $9 billion in assets and generating approximately $18 billion in new investments and developments.

In 2022, IC delivered an impressive return of 12.7%, marking its second consecutive year of positive returns and comfortably beating the benchmark index by 3.5%. Its $77-billion portfolio is now positioned in the right growth sectors with the ability to withstand market headwinds, according to the company.

Advocating the need to rethink tomorrow’s real estate, she has championed the intentional and complete integration of environmental and social governance factors throughout the investment cycle, including setting ambitious decarbonization targets.

Today, the operational carbon intensity of the company’s directly-owned portfolio is down 30% from its 2017 baseline, and 60% of assets have at least one green-building certification. IC plans to pursue what it calls a brown-to-green investment strategy for its existing assets and has committed to the World Economic Forum Green Building Principles.

Meanwhile, Palladitcheff has helped other women advance in the commercial real estate industry by propelling IC’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts forward and encouraging her peers to do follow suit with their DEI programs.

In 2022, a dedicated team benchmarked IC’s internal DEI culture and reviewed policies and practices, obtaining the EDGE Assess and EDGEplus certifications and establishing IC as a sustainable and inclusive employer and investor. More broadly, IC aims to impact communities positively through DEI and wellness initiatives and increased support for affordable housing.

Recognized as a catalyst for the industry’s transformation, she chairs French investment company FREY’s mission committee. As part of the mission, FREY aims to achieve functional diversity with 100% of properties of more than 20,000 square feet of gross leasable area and adopt a placemaking approach with all properties above the 20,000-sf threshold.

Since January 2023, Palladitcheff has chaired the Real Property Association of Canada. She is also an at-large member of the Urban Land Institute’s global board and a global governing trustee for ULI Americas, garnering the positions in 2023 and 2022, respectively.

Before taking IC’s helm, she served as the company’s executive vice-president and CFO. Prior to joining IC in 2015, she held executive and managerial positions with France-based entities.