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.