How Curlew Capital has Built Investor Confidence and Strengthened Asset Management

About Curlew Capital

Curlew Capital is a UK-based investment and asset management platform with a focus on PBSA. Founded in 2011, the business has raised and invested more than £1 billion and acquired/developed 11,000 beds across 36 schemes in 22 cities. With a focus on long-term value creation, it combines investment expertise with operational insight to deliver high-quality, sustainable schemes for students and investors alike.

The challenge

As the PBSA market has matured and become increasingly nuanced, Curlew wanted a faster, more consistent way to benchmark markets and validate assumptions. Historically, this was a slow and time-consuming process. Information arrived through multiple third-party sources and required manual checking, which made it harder to quickly adapt rental growth forecasts and react quickly to shifting rents and incentives.

The solution

To obtain a single source of trusted market insights, Curlew Capital turned to StudentCrowd, embedding it across both its investment and asset management teams. The raw data, Analysis and Insights Tool are all used to support decisions from daily rent setting to long-term acquisitions, and improve investor confidence.

The Student Crowd tools Curlew Capital utilises:

• Raw data: Helps the investment team carry out deep analysis of historic data points. 

• Analysis Tool: Allows the investment team to easily track market trends.

• Insights Tool: Enables the asset management team to quickly monitor competitor activity.

The products are used across the business:

Investment team

• Underwriting and acquisitions: Raw data and the Analysis Tool are used to model historic rental growth, changes in supply (including pipeline) and rental spreads to help forecast rental growth prospects.
  
  
• Forecasting and business planning: APIs link directly into multiple analytical workflows; supporting scenario testing, portfolio Power BI dashboards and more recently automated monitoring and forecasting models using AI. 

“That allows us to process millions of rows going back to 2018 and produce more robust, evidence-led forecasts.”

• Investor reporting: Data offers greater insights into trends and the long-term picture to support board papers and presentations.

“It’s helped us move from manual time consuming snapshots to repeatable longer-term trend analysis across all cities in the UK.”

• Interpreting student behaviour: Raw incentives data (e.g. breakdown of cash, vouchers, travel) offers insight into what’s important to students.
  

Asset management team

• Competitor monitoring: Ongoing (often daily) visibility of competitor rents, incentives and tenancy lengths in micro locations and comparable properties.

“It means we’re not missing anything in the market.”

• Rent setting: Dashboards monitor competitor pricing in each city where Curlew Capital has assets and inform proposals on rents and incentives for the income committee.

“If we didn't have the tool, it would take us a lot longer to set rents and make proposals for changes to incentives and tenancy lengths.”

• Market health checks: Quarterly ‘temperature checks’ assess how each city is performing and whether rents are under pressure.
  
  
• Internal and operator reporting: Visual outputs from the dashboards are used in internal reports and discussions with operators to validate views and decisions.

“The dashboards give us immediate, consolidated insight so we can monitor competitor activity and pull the data we need straight from the platform, without trawling through websites or manually exporting charts.”

The results

StudentCrowd has delivered measurable benefits across Curlew Capital’s business, from improved efficiency to long-term investment confidence.

• Greater investor confidence
  Access to historic data and long-term trends enables Curlew Capital to present a much more detailed view of the market for our committees and investor reporting, backed up by evidence.
  
  
• Significant time saved
  What once took hours of manual research can now be done quickly and easily via automated feeds and easy-to-use dashboards.

“Using StudentCrowd gives us all [the] information through one platform, much faster.”

• Better market awareness
  Regular competitor and incentive monitoring means Curlew Capital isn’t caught out by sudden market shifts.
  

The later stages of the plan, taking us closer to the show itself, will be built out shortly and will focus more heavily on speaker highlights, exhibitors, and programme-led content.

• Easier reporting
  Reliable data and clear visuals make reports faster to produce, with greater detail.
  

StudentCrowd has helped Curlew to build a clearer, evidence-backed view of the market that strengthens decisions at every level.

With thanks to Dave Allwood, Director, Fund & Portfolio Management and Kristian Mills, Director, Asset Management, for their quotes and contribution.