Rob Moyle, CEO of Collegiate AC, shares his journey in hospitality and student accommodation with Guy Westlake, founder of Lavanda.

Rob Moyle is CEO of Collegiate AC, an award-winning UK PBSA operator. He has over 32 years of operational management experience gained working in Australia, UK and USA. In a trend that’s increasingly common, his career has spanned both the hospitality and student accommodation sectors, featuring senior roles at Wyndham, Campus Living Villages (CLV) and Arlington Advisors amongst others.

A committed father and husband, passionate leader, prolific traveller and a true champion of innovation, Rob’s professional focus is to design and deliver exceptional living experiences for students at scale. A creative superpower, he is able to always prioritise the end customer journey, and regularly seeks inspiration and best practices from well beyond the student accommodation industry.

About Collegiate AC

Collegiate Accommodation Collection is an operator and manager of student accommodation. Collegiate UK creates home from homes for over 10,000 students across the United Kingdom working in partnership with investors, developers, universities and stakeholders. For more information please visit: www.collegiate-ac.com

In this episode Rob shares:

• His journey from working in 4 and 5 star hotels in Australia to running an award-winning PBSA operator in Europe
• Why he sees so much untapped opportunity in professionalising the student accommodation sector
• The challenges of leading a life that’s split between UK and Australia
• Scaling Collegiate from 3,000 beds to 10,000+ during the pandemic, and the various challenges that’s posed
• How he’s adopting business intelligence tools to become more data-led as a business
• What the future of university education looks like - on campus or online?
• His vision for a single, integrated platform that holistically solves PBSA management and offers students a “one click experience”

Paddy Allen is Head of Operational Capital Markets at Colliers. He shares his journey in real estate with Guy Westlake, founder of Lavanda.

Before joining Colliers in February 2021, Paddy was a Partner at Cushman & Wakefield working across the European student accommodation and residential build-to-rent teams, providing joint venture, disposal and acquisition advice to global platforms and investors. After spending the bulk of his early career in European fund management, he then joined Global Student Accommodation as an early employee where he led the acquisition of £1bn of student accommodation across the UK & Europe. In 2013 he co-founded fintech business Acasa, which provides financial services to tenants of residential accommodation.

Away from work Paddy is Chair of the Board of Pathways to Property and is a trustee to the Reading Real Estate Foundation.

About Colliers

Colliers (NASDAQ, TSX: CIGI) is a leading diversified professional services and investment management company. With operations in 63 countries, 17,000 Colliers professionals work collaboratively to provide expert real estate and investment advice to clients. With annual revenues of $4.5 billion and $81 billion of assets under management, Colliers maximises the potential of property and real assets to accelerate success for its clients, investors and team. To learn more visit www.colliers.com

In this episode Paddy shares:

• How he started out in UK estate agency before jumping ship to join Halverton, a business that is today run by the team behind M7 Real Estate.
• His early years moving around Amsterdam and Germany, cutting his teeth in commercial offices, industrial warehousing and retail before switching to residential following the GFC in 2008.
• Being an early employee at Global Student Accommodation and over the course of 4 years building a multi-billion dollar student accommodation platform across 8 different countries.
• Why his role is to challenge the notions of his clients, help them identify under-served customer groups, and support them in building breadth and depth in their business plans
• Why data and insight, including demographic and psychographic profiling, is growing in importance when it comes to real estate decision making
• How his professional ambition and career decision making has been shaped by multiple influencers including Nick Porter, Richard Croft and Jos Short.
• Why personality and authenticity are two key traits of great leaders, but how ultimately the one that trumps all others is knowing how to get deals done.
• Why smart building tech, customer experience tech and tokenisation/NFTs are key technologies shaping the future of the industry.

Vivi Cahyadi Himmel and Karolina Saviova, co-founders of AltoVita, share their journey in real estate and travel tech with Guy Westlake, founder of Lavanda.

Vivi Cahyadi Himmel is CEO and Co-Founder of AltoVita. Having started out working in Asset Management for Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers, and having had to relocate to multiple cities including New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London for work, she became acutely aware of the challenges around relocation. In 2018 she launched AltoVita with co-founder Karolina Saviova in 2018 to disrupt legacy practices in corporate housing by bringing forward a technology-first solution paired with duty of care. Vivi is listed on the 2021 Global Mobility Top 100. Outside of AltoVita, she’s also an angel investor and a Limited Partner in several UK venture capital funds.

Karolina Saviova is COO and Co-Founder of AltoVita. Born in Prague, Karolina worked for a consultancy in Brussels and then went on to become a business journalist in the energy sector travelling across Turkey, Indonesia, India, and Gabon. It was as a journalist that Karolina became tired of the issues that came with corporate travel and felt inspired to change the sector for the better. Karolina is passionate about delivering dynamic hospitality and it was this that led her to co-found AltoVita alongside Vivi in 2018. Karolina was named a "Rising Star" in the 2021 Shortyz Awards.

About AltoVita

AltoVita powers the corporate accommodation sector with enterprise software coupled with a human-centric approach that provides every business traveller with exactly what they need.

AltoVita’s award-winning technology creates a cloud-based bridge between the highly fragmented property distribution system and Global 2000 companies, SMEs, and business travellers. The fully customisable platform reduces the legacy 48-to-72-hour bidding process down to a few minutes, providing instant access to a diverse network of 1 million+ housing options worldwide – including serviced apartments, professionally managed homes, aparthotels, and co-living – with the ability to sort by desired amenities, pet friendliness, sustainability scores, and more. All properties are fully vetted and verified to provide duty of care and compliance, backed by an extensive Four-Tier Quality Control system.

AltoVita’s fast-growing global footprint currently spans 165 countries and 1,238 cities. They are headquartered in London, with regional offices in Singapore and Dallas, TX. For more information visit altovita.com

In this episode Vivi and Karolina share:

• How they both met and came up with the idea for AltoVita.
• Where AltoVita sits as an OTA vis-à-vis Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO
• The problems faced by corporate travel buyers when booking accommodation, and how AltoVita solves them.
• The various challenges AltoVita has encountered in aggregating the business accommodation supply chain.
• Why extended stays are a different market segment to short-term rentals.
• How smart, proactive vetting of the accommodation has led incident rates to drop to 0.5%.
• Why sustainability is becoming a key factor for travel buyers when selecting accommodation - and how AltoVita is embracing this.
• The role of technology within AltoVita, and their technology vision.
• How co-creation with their target audience of travel buyers has been a key factor in finding product market fit.
• How they are taking steps to set a new benchmark with regards to equality, diversity and inclusion in tech.