Experience, credibility and progress

Sarah Milne, CEO of Property Box Finance reflects on the industry and how it is changing for women

Sarah Milne has spent her career close to the important decisions in the property sector.  These include how schemes get funded, who gets backed and what works when the market takes an unexpected turn. In this short piece, she looks at how property finance has changed for women, why progress still isn’t parity and why, in a sector built on trust, credibility is something you earn over time rather than claim. 

My route into property finance started with a fascination for ‘place’. What I mean is how places come about. How old and new sit alongside each other. How streets, buildings and communities evolve over time - shaped by decisions that are often invisible, but have a lasting effect on the things around them. 

That interest eventually led me into property finance, though not in a straight line. I came into it gradually, through deals, relationships and learning by doing. At the time it didn’t feel like a career plan. It felt like I was following the work and the questions that interested me. 

Property remains a heavily male-dominated industry. You don’t need a bag full of statistics - or a week at MIPIM - to notice that. For a long time, property finance in particular was a small and fairly closed world. There were few women around the table and even fewer with real decision-making authority. 

That, thankfully, has changed. 

There are now more women leading teams, structuring transactions, investing capital and building businesses. There are more visible role models, more allies who understand that diversity strengthens decision-making and more credible pathways into the sector than there once were. That matters a huge amount because it changes who feels able to stay, to progress and eventually to lead. 

But progress isn’t the same as parity. Visibility isn’t the same as influence. Credibility still isn’t evenly assumed. 

The dial is moving, but slowly and it will take time before it moves fully. Acknowledging progress doesn’t mean pretending the work is done. It means recognising that change happens through accumulation: of experience, of trust and of people who make space for others without needing to announce it. 

Over time, I’ve become less interested in labels: what a website says, what a LinkedIn headline claims or how someone positions themselves publicly. In this sector, experience has a way of revealing itself. Credibility comes from judgement built over cycles, from decisions that hold up and from showing up consistently when things are hard as well as when they’re going well. 

Property finance has always valued substance, even if it doesn’t always say so out loud. 

What I hope continues to change is not just who is in the room, but how experience is recognised once you’re there  and how much confidence we place in people who have quietly earned it.

That, for me, is where real confidence comes from.