An interview with Stephen Gaitanos discussing his background and the rise of The Living Company as it grows towards its ambitions of being a $100bn Australian property empire.
Published online in The Australian on 14 July 2026. In-print on 16 July 2026.
Living Co co-founders Stephen Gaitanos and Craig Carracher
When Stephen Gaitanos first began thinking about purpose-built student housing in 2013, the opportunity was still hiding between two of the largest forces in the Australian economy. “Education is a huge sector, real estate is a huge sector”, Gaitanos says, and where those sectors overlap was the international student market, one of Australia’s largest export industries.
From that observation came Scape, and from Scape came The Living Company, the parent company through which Gaitanos, and his co-founder Craig Carracher, are trying to build a much larger living sector real estate business.
Gaitanos describes TLC as the “only fully integrated living platform in Australia, and perhaps the world”.
The scale already supports the ambition. The group has about 2300 staff and 40,000 apartments in 117 buildings, valued at $20bn. It has raised about $10bn in equity from the world’s largest pension funds and borrowed about $6bn from Australian and international banks eager to support Australia’s largest living sector specialist.
Gaitanos describes it as a “meteoric rise”, one that is only set to continue, with TLC aiming to own and manage $100bn worth of property.
The Scape international student housing accommodation building in Redfern, Sydney. Picture: Bianca De Marchi/NCA NewsWire
The rebrand from Scape to TLC last year was not merely aesthetic. TLC reflects a structural change in real estate. Investors increasingly refer to purpose-built student accommodation, build-to-rent, co-living, retirement villages and other residential operating assets as the “living sector”. It is the part of property where ownership alone is not enough, the value lies in managing how people live inside the asset. For Gaitanos, “the emphasis is operating at a scale to enable operational intensity”.
In traditional property, scale often means buying power, capital and asset aggregation. In the living sector, it also means staffing, service, technology, brand, data and resident experience.
That is the logic behind TLC’s move beyond purpose-built student accommodation. In June 2025, Brookfield agreed to sell Aveo to TLC for $3.85bn, in what advisers described as Australia’s largest ever direct real estate transaction.
The deal gave TLC a major retirement living platform, with Aveo operating more than 10,000 independent living units across the eastern seaboard. It also confirmed that TLC’s ambit was no longer confined to students. TLC now operates across purpose-built student accommodation, co-living, build-to-rent and retirement living, and Gaitanos defines their potential market broadly as “anything with a residential for rent angle”.
The unifying idea is that much of the operational capability is transferable. Gaitanos estimates that about “80 per cent of the knowledge of property and operational management is transferable” across the different living verticals. A platform that knows how to manage large volumes of residents, maintain buildings, build community, deploy technology and standardise service can apply that capability across multiple forms of housing.
Aveo Newstead in Brisbane
That ambition had a disciplined beginning. Gaitanos studied law and commerce at the University of NSW before spending almost a decade in real estate investment banking across the globe. The work gave him a sophisticated understanding of capital and property, but also a growing desire to build rather than advise. After spending time advising on transactions, Gaitanos wanted to “create something”.
Gaitanos’ appetite for risk was shaped long before his professional career. He grew up in a Greek immigrant family where education and hard work were constant themes around the dinner table with his parents and sister. His parents pushed him, but he says that they were also his “biggest supporters and backers”. Gaitanos speaks admiringly of other immigrant-built Australian property fortunes, and his own upbringing produced what he calls a “why not mentality”, an attitude that risk is not something to be avoided, but something to be worked through to succeed.
For a period, that meant moving back in with his parents at 30 years old, to support the attempt to build something. The same resilience was required during Covid, when the international student market effectively disappeared and Scape’s core business was hit directly. TLC’s plans to expand into build-to-rent were also delayed. Gaitanos is reflective about the period, sharing that “you can’t experience highs without the lows”. Ultimately, the company survived the shock, and the structural thesis reasserted itself. Students returned and housing shortages have continued to worsen despite repeated government promises.
Gaitanos is careful not to overstate the role of government but is direct about the risks of incongruous regulatory settings. He says there are significant tailwinds for investment in Australian housing, but those tailwinds can be reversed by the “impact of sovereign risk from government policies”, with the significant tax changes in the recent federal budget creating such risk. “Capital is agnostic,” he says, “in search of the best returns”. Gaitanos’ warning is that capital must be treated as mobile and if Australia wants global capital to invest in housing here, it must offer a stable framework. That observation goes to the centre of the housing debate. Australia needs more homes, but the homes will not be delivered by government rhetoric alone. Gaitanos argues that “the private sector will be the ones building and ultimately taking the risk”.
Gaitanos and Carracher in 2015
This is where Gaitanos sees regulatory barriers, disincentivising Australian superannuation funds from investing in Australian housing. The current disclosure rules means that when super funds invest in direct property, stamp duty and acquisition costs are captured in fee and cost disclosures, making the investment appear more expensive even where the manager is not charging higher fees. ASIC has recently announced changes so that stamp duty paid can be disclosed over seven years, rather than as a single annual amount, and is also reviewing the regulations more broadly. For Gaitanos, the key point is that the system should not discourage long-term Australian capital from investing in long-term Australian housing.
TLC’s private ownership model is also conducive to its ambitions. Gaitanos sees the company remaining private, giving it “the flexibility to be nimble beyond quarterly earnings”. He is wary of listing development-heavy businesses, arguing that “development companies shouldn’t be listed” due to earnings volatility. Private ownership gives TLC more room to compound. It also gives the company flexibility for growth at a moment when more assets may come to market. Private equity owners need liquidity, and the Aveo acquisition shows TLC now has the scale and capital relationships to participate in large transactions. Gaitanos expects further near-term M & A opportunities, with TLC positioned to be a disciplined buyer of assets coming out of funds nearing the end of their life cycles.
What Gaitanos is building is not just a property portfolio. It is a bet that the future of housing belongs to a platform that can combine capital with operations, and scale with service. In an economy where housing has become both a political anxiety and an institutional opportunity, that may prove to be one of the most valuable positions in Australian real estate.
business@theaustralian.com.au
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