Halter AG & SwissREI

Balz Halter is the main shareholder and chairman of the board of directors of Halter Group AG, a leading Swiss company in the construction and real estate industry. An engineer (ETH) and lawyer, he has been committed to innovation in the construction industry for many years and co-founded URBANISTICA in 2023, an association for sustainable spatial planning and good urban development.

PD Dr. sc. nat. Joris Van Wezemael is the owner of de plek GmbH in Zurich and a renowned expert in spatial, urban, and real estate development. He combines scientific depth with many years of management experience in the real estate industry, in associations, and in complex transformation and negotiation processes.
As a private lecturer at ETH Zurich and former portfolio manager and managing director, he understands the housing issue from a market, planning, and governance perspective. His work focuses on processes, incentive systems, and collaborations that enable inner-city development, redensification, and affordable housing—beyond ideological simplifications.

Professor Peter Ilg studied business administration at the University of Zurich, where he also earned his doctorate, and completed the GMP program at Harvard Business School. He is also a certified public accountant in Switzerland and the USA.
He began his professional career at PricewaterhouseCoopers as an auditor and consultant, became head of finance and accounting at SR Technics, and served as CFO at Allreal and Mikron. Since early 2012, he has been a lecturer and head of the Swiss Real Estate Institute at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (HWZ). In 2013, he was appointed professor at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
His research and teaching focus on various aspects of real estate economics, with a particular emphasis on housing markets.

Philippe Koch has been the Housing Delegate for the City Council of Zurich since 2025. The Housing Delegate is a newly created position that reports directly to the Mayor. His responsibilities include further developing the City of Zurich's housing policy strategy, coordinating activities in the field of housing, liaising and collaborating with all relevant players in the rental housing market, and communicating both externally and internally.
Before becoming Housing Delegate, Philippe Koch was a lecturer and professor of urban research at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). His research interests focused on the interactions between urbanization and political processes on the one hand, and urban space as a venue for democratic practices and a field for shaping political power and imagination on the other. Previously, he was managing director of a transport policy organization (umverkehR), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, and a project collaborator in urban development for the canton of Basel-Stadt.

Reto Lipp has been presenting Eco Talk, Swiss television's business talk show, since 2021. Prior to that, he hosted Eco, SRF's business magazine, for 14 years. Lipp is an economist and previously worked for Radio Z for many years, later becoming head of the financial section of the Handelszeitung newspaper and editor-in-chief of the investor magazine Stocks.
He has over 40 years of experience in business journalism and was named “Business Journalist of the Year” for the second time in 2024 by the industry magazine Schweizer Journalist. Lipp also hosted SRF Börse, analyzes economic topics on Tagesschau and 10vor10, and moderates discussion rounds and panels.