Pro-invest Group is leveraging its hospitality expertise across urban accommodation (Image: Pro-invest Group)
Real estate has spent decades organised around the building: who owns it, what it is worth, and how it is financed. Now with the industry coping with higher interest rates, many of the investors achieving the most favourable returns are those pursuing opportunities in businesses which deliver expertise as well as space, according to the leaders of investment manager Pro-invest Group.
Established as a vertically integrated investment, development and asset management platform in 2010 and led by Ronald Stephen Barrott, FRICS and Dr Sabine Schaffer, Pro-invest Group sees achieving returns from real estate investment over the coming decade as driven as much by the ability to operate real estate businesses as by the nature of the properties an investor holds.
“For decades, real estate has been about the building,” said Schaffer, the firm’s co-founder and managing partner, whose earlier career spanned private equity at 3i and strategy work at McKinsey & Company before she completed a PhD in economics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. “The next decade will be about the operating platform behind the building.”
The firm’s argument rests on a set of familiar market pressures — population growth, constrained accommodation supply, affordability strain and shifting patterns of mobility — reshaping how people choose to live and stay in cities. Rather than treating those pressures as a single housing story, Pro-invest Group draws a distinction between build-to-rent and what it calls urban accommodation: hospitality-backed, flexible stays built around guest experience, operational discipline and investment performance.
Capital Chases Platforms
Institutional investors are increasingly drawn to sectors with long-duration demand and income visibility, according to the firm, and housing and accommodation sit close to that description. People may change how they work, travel or spend, but they still need a place to stay.
Dr. Sabine Schaffer, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Pro-invest Group
The company says the more significant shift is that investors are no longer backing individual assets so much as the operating platforms behind them, a change that favours groups combining development, investment, asset management and operating capability under one roof.
Pro-invest Group’s own fundraising history illustrates the pattern it describes. The manager built its first fund around a national roll-out of Holiday Inn Express hotels developed under a master agreement with InterContinental Hotels Group, then closed a second vehicle, the Australian Hospitality Opportunity Fund II, at A$300 million ($211 million) in October 2020, adding IHG’s voco brand and drawing equity backing from the government-owned Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
Sixteen years after Barrott and Schaffer founded the business, it now manages more than A$3 billion with a track record of more than 30 hotels, flex-living, build-to-rent and commercial properties in roughly 15 markets spanning Australia, Europe and the Middle East.
That growth rests on operating expertise as much as on a capital base, with the company having extensive experience in hospitality investment, one of real estate’s most management intensive sectors.
Pro-invest Group runs Holiday Inn Express, voco, Hotel Indigo and Kimpton-branded properties across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle, Canberra and Auckland, an operational record the firm points to alongside its sustainability performance in 2025: GRESB scores of 81 out of 100 for standing investments and 88 out of 100 for developments under a framework it calls One Earth, Countless Experiences, more than double where the scores stood in 2017.
Coogee Sands Proof Point
The group points to Coogee Sands Hotel & Apartments, on Sydney’s Coogee Beach, as the first asset built around its urban accommodation strategy: hospitality-backed, guest-centric stays, delivered here through adaptive reuse of an existing building rather than ground-up construction. The manager acquired the property in partnership with MEC Global Partners Asia and is raising capital from a diversified investor base for an ANZ Urban Accommodation fund built around the strategy.
The property is being converted into 80 design-led studios, with guest bookings due to open in the third quarter of 2026 and the property itself expected to open in the fourth quarter.
“The opportunity is not simply to offer people a place to stay,” Schaffer said. “It is to remove friction from the experience of staying.”
Delivery Over Demand
With Australia facing an accommodation shortage, Pro-invest Group sees the key constraint on achieving returns on accommodation investments in the country as the ability to deliver projects on time and within budget.
Pro-invest Group chairman and founder Ronald Stephen Barrott, FRICS (Image: Pro-invest Group)
Planning approval timelines, construction costs and labour shortages remain real barriers to bringing new supply to market, and the firm sees Australia requiring delivery models that are scalable and repeatable, including adaptive reuse of existing buildings in the right locations.
“If we only wait for perfect new supply, we will move too slowly,” Schaffer said. “The opportunity is to use capital, planning clarity and operational capability to activate more of the cities we already have.”
Affordability pressure is also changing what people want from where they stay, the firm says, pushing demand toward flexibility, service and professionally managed environments rather than any single type of building. “Affordability is changing the question,” Schaffer said. “It used to be, ‘Where can I live?’ Increasingly, it is also, ‘What kind of experience, flexibility and certainty do I need?’”
The business sees hospitality operators having an advantage in meeting that demand, having spent decades refining service consistency, revenue management and operational discipline — capabilities which are increasingly relevant across residential and accommodation real estate more broadly.
As founder and chairman, Barrott brings that hospitality lens from four decades in global real estate leadership, including leading a $75 billion development programme at Abu Dhabi developer Aldar Properties that included Yas Island (one of the region’s largest mixed-use leisure and entertainment developments), and founding UK-based Stannifer Group before its £1.9 billion ($2.6 billion) trade sale.
“In hospitality, you learn very quickly that experience and performance are not separate conversations,” Barrott said. “The experience is part of the performance.”
Owning Versus Operating
Looking toward the next 10 years, Pro-invest Group expects the real estate conversation to shift away from individual asset classes and toward accommodation platforms, with build-to-rent maturing as a purpose-built rental category alongside deeper, more institutional student housing and retirement living sectors.
The firm sees urban accommodation serving as a flexible, hospitality-backed option for people who want convenience and service in well-located parts of a city.
“The next decade will not just reward those who own real estate,” Schaffer said. “It will reward those who know how to operate it.”
For Pro-invest Group, that means building out what it calls the future of urban accommodation: hospitality-backed, investment-driven accommodation combining operating discipline, guest experience and flexible stays, with Coogee Sands as its first proof point and the broader platform set to carry that same operating discipline into future acquisitions.
