IHM’s 2027 ones to watch in travel, hospitality and living
Leadership changes and new platforms
Apo Group has appointed Justine Edmonds as managing director, tasking her with leading the operating platform’s growth. Edmonds arrives with more than 20 years’ experience in UK residential property, most recently at LRG, where as director she held national responsibility for the Living Markets strategy across single-family housing and multifamily portfolios, working directly with institutional investors on capital deployment, operating models and platform growth.
She took up the new role this month and arrives fluent in the policy conversations shaping the living sector, thanks to time on the British Property Federation’s Build to Rent Committee. “I’m delighted to be joining Apo at such an exciting time for the business,” said Edmonds, adding that the company is perfectly placed to meet growing demand through its expertise spanning investment advisory, finance, customer operations, safety and compliance, and development.
Apo, owned by Broadsword Investment Management since 2024, manages portfolios including Invesco Real Estate’s Kew Bridge and Barking Wharf schemes and is growing its reputation as an operating partner. Edmonds’ cross-tenure experience in single-family and multifamily housing makes her a shrewd hire, and one to watch as Apo widens its remit across the living sectors.
A new residential platform, as yet unnamed, has strengthened its leadership team with the appointment of Johnny Langton as head of operations. The platform was founded by Tim Butler, with backing from AustralianSuper, the country’s largest pension fund. It has launched with an initial £500 million of institutional investment and ambitions to become one of the UK’s top five rental home operators within five years, spanning PBSA, coliving and BTR.
Langton joins from Greystar, where he spent more than 12 years across build-to-rent and student accommodation, and previously served as interim managing director at Student Roost, helping steer its integration and scaling following acquisition. That pedigree will come in handy, as AustralianSuper wants a platform capable of institutional-grade delivery from day one. The firm has made its first acquisitions, a PBSA scheme across seven UK cities. With £500 million to deploy at pace over the platform’s first year and serious operational nous now in place, expect Langton’s profile to grow as the platform’s pipeline takes shape.
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Karim Malak has been appointed chief executive of The Boost Society, BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts’s PBSA division. Founded in 2014 and backed by shareholders including AXA and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, The Boost Society develops new-build and fully renovated residences under the KLEY and Hife brands across France and Spain.
Malak’s career sits at the intersection of strategy consulting and hospitality operations: spells at BCG and Accenture were followed by leading the international expansion of Adagio Aparthotels and a stint as chief executive of easyHotel. Timothée Rauly, the firm’s global co-head of real estate, said Malak’s track record of leading ambitious transformations and scaling businesses across Europe would prove invaluable to The Boost Society’s next stage of growth.
Strategic moves and sector shifts
Joe Riley is preparing to take charge of one of the world’s largest vacation rental management groups, Casago. The president will succeed founder Steve Schwab in October 2026, following Casago’s $128 million acquisition of Vacasa in May 2025. The transaction combined Casago’s locally operated franchise model with one of North America’s largest vacation rental portfolios.
Riley formerly founded Patriot Family Homes, a veteran-owned property management company focused on short-term rentals near military bases, before serving as the director for Indo-Pacific Security for the National Security Council. He joined Casago as president in September 2024 and played a leading role in the Vacasa transaction. With a master’s degree and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford, Riley brings a unique blend of public and private sector experience to the role.
Joe Lister has spent almost 23 years rising through the ranks at Unite Students, becoming CFO and then chief executive of the UK’s largest student accommodation provider in January 2024. This year has proven the toughest test yet of that transition. Unite recorded a £417 million pre-tax loss for the first half of the year, against a £186 million profit for the same period in 2025, hit by a £500 million revaluation of its property portfolio and what the company called “extremely challenging” build costs.
Lister’s response has been decisive: a sharper focus on the UK’s top 20 student cities, more than £300 million of asset disposals planned this year, and between 15,000 and 20,000 units identified for sale as Unite exits nine non-core cities. The market is watching closely: Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has cut its Unite stake from 14 per cent to seven per cent, with CPP’s Tom Jackson stepping down as a non-executive director.
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Vanessa Hale has been appointed as the first chief executive of Real Estate:UK, the new body formed from the merger of the Association of Real Estate Funds, the British Property Federation and the Investment Property Forum. She joins from BNP Paribas Real Estate, where she was head of research and strategy and a member of the UK executive leadership team, bringing more than 20 years of global research and strategy experience across BTR, office, retail and industrial assets.
Real Estate:UK’s work will span six pillars: advocacy, research and data, thought leadership and innovation, networking and events, upskilling and training, and standards and guidance. Hale has already argued publicly that the case for investing in UK real estate has not been stronger since the Second World War, and that the organisation’s role is to act as a convener for the whole industry. While not a developer herself, the development community will be counting on her.
Emerging tech and financing
Hani Ahmad Barhoush is overseeing Mubadala Capital’s proposed acquisition of Pierre & Vacances, one of Europe’s leading leisure and hospitality groups. In June, Mubadala Capital submitted a fully financed binding offer for Pierre & Vacances in a transaction reported to carry an enterprise value of approximately €900 million.
The European leisure operator manages around 45,000 units across resort villages, holiday residences and urban aparthotels through brands including Center Parcs, Pierre & Vacances and Adagio. The transaction moved forward in July when Mubadala Capital and Pierre & Vacances signed a tender offer agreement. Shareholders representing 80.13 per cent of the company’s capital have committed to support the offer, exceeding the threshold required for the deal to progress.
If completed, the acquisition would give Pierre & Vacances the long-term backing to invest further in its destinations, premiumise its accommodation and continue its Beyond ReInvention growth strategy. The proposed takeover underlines the appeal of European resort and experience-led accommodation to Middle Eastern institutional capital.
Tokinvest, a digital investment platform regulated by Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, has launched a tokenised BTR product under the leadership of chief executive and co-founder Scott Thiel. It gives institutional, qualified and retail investors access to the economic rights linked to a UK BTR asset through a regulated digital-asset framework, issued on BNB Chain.
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The first asset is Great Hampton Street Works, a 29-unit residential heritage conversion in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, completed in 2025 and now income-generating, with its economic rights available in tokenised form from May 2026. “We built Tokinvest to solve the problem of capital raising for developers and investment access for all investor classes,” Thiel said. “The BTR product allows people to sit at the top table alongside the developer.” With Tokinvest now courting developers, asset owners and distribution partners to bring further residential opportunities to a broader investor base, Thiel’s platform is positioning itself at the sharp end of real estate’s tokenisation trend.
Simon Century, chief executive of the newly launched National Housing Bank, has signalled the bank’s openness to backing new entrants alongside established providers, provided the regulation and long-term commitment stack up. The bank, headquartered in Leeds, has a mandate to support delivery of up to 500,000 new homes by deploying up to £16 billion of debt, equity and guarantees.
Headquartered in Leeds, the bank burst quickly out of the traps, announcing a new £100 million partnership with Aviva aimed at delivering 3,300 homes, followed by a £100 million equity commitment to Long Harbour’s Single Family Housing Fund and a cornerstone £100 million investment in Starlight UK’s Build-to-Rent Fund II. Century has been characteristically blunt about the scale of the challenge, pointing to a housing shortfall of three to five million homes built up over 30 to 40 years, and urging housing associations to stop deliberating and “lean to the left” on tough calls around risk, assets and debt structuring.
Andrea D’Amico is the vice president of hotels at Airbnb, leading the platform’s global expansion into independent and boutique hotel supply. He officially took up the role in June 2026, about a year after Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky said the company will “aggressively” target further expansion into hotels. D’Amico brings 25 years of travel and online distribution experience to the company.
Before joining Airbnb, he led adventure travel platform WeRoad as CEO for four years, and prior to that spent 18 years at Booking.com. A large volume of hotel supply in Southern Europe remains independently operated—the exact region where traditional short-term rental supply is being squeezed hardest by local regulation. Having managed Booking.com’s EMEA operations for years, D’Amico’s combination of regional expertise and distribution know-how gives Airbnb a serious edge.
