Scape Brand Guidelines: Student Housing Co-Founded in 2013, Now Part of The Living Company

Two investors and a 2013 start.

Scape is an Australian owner and operator of purpose-built student accommodation. The company says Scape Australia was co-founded in 2013 by Craig Carracher, now its executive chairman, and Stephen Gaitanos, its managing director, and that the brand launched in Australia in 2014. Independent reporting names the same pair: the property news site Real Estate Source described Carracher and Gaitanos as Scape’s co-founders in November 2026.

Both came to student housing from finance and law. Scape’s own biographies say Carracher was a partner at the law firm Minter Ellison and general counsel of Consolidated Press Holdings before moving into investment, first as chief executive of Arctic Capital and then as a co-founder of Telopea Capital Partners. Gaitanos worked in investment banking and real estate at Macquarie Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley before co-founding Telopea with him. Both were involved with PAD Student Living — Carracher as executive chairman, Gaitanos as a non-executive director — before they started Scape, the company says. The Fifth Estate, reporting in July 2025, gave the same short histories: a former Morgan Stanley investment banker and a former Minter Ellison partner.

The business is organised by city. Scape’s website groups its buildings under Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, the four study cities where, the company says, it runs more than 18,500 beds in more than 40 buildings. In May 2023 the marketing trade magazine B&T described Scape as Australia’s largest student living provider, and the company uses similar language about its scale on its own site. Each city page lists the nearby universities and colleges the buildings serve, from the University of Sydney and UNSW to RMIT, the University of Queensland and Flinders University.

Buildings with names, campaigns with residents.

Scape names most of its buildings after streets, suburbs or campuses: Scape Redfern, Scape Swanston, Scape South Bank and Scape Waymouth among them. A smaller group pairs a place name with the brand, such as Broadway x Scape, Boundary x Scape and Mountain x Scape, as listed on its Sydney pages. The website is built around booking: each city has its own list of buildings, nearby universities and room types, and in November 2026 a banner across the site announced that rooms for the first semester of 2027 were open for booking. Beyond the booking pages, the site carries sections addressed to parents and guardians, to students under 18 and to international students, and a food programme it calls Scape Eats.

Its advertising leans on residents rather than staged interiors. In May 2023 B&T reported on “A Place For Humans,” a campaign by the agency Jane Doe Creation that used what Scape’s marketing lead called journalistic-style photography, together with a Scape Creator platform for content made by students, running across outdoor, print, social and digital media, including trams and airport sites. In April 2026 the same magazine reported a follow-up, “You Had To Be There,” again by Jane Doe Creation, built from stories collected from residents and filmed in a mixed-media style by the director Mick Wong of Beautiful State. That campaign ran on YouTube, Twitch, Meta, TikTok, Reddit and outdoor sites, with events in Melbourne and Sydney, and came with an on-site programme the company called “The Hello Effect”: welcome door knocks, shared dinners and monthly birthday gatherings.

Scape’s site lists the awards it has received. They include student-accommodation development awards at the PropertyGuru Asia Property Awards for Scape Redfern in 2023 and Scape Victoria Street in 2024; an Asia-Pacific Student Accommodation Association award in 2022 for Scape Franklin in Melbourne; an Urban Taskforce urban-renewal award in 2021 for Scape Redfern, part of the Pemulwuy Project; and recognition at the Australian Good Design Awards in 2022 for the Col James Student Accommodation project, made with Turner Studio, Deicorp and the Aboriginal Housing Company. These are the company’s own listings.

How student housing brands present themselves.

Student housing operators sell a room, a building and a city at once, and their websites are built around that order. Booking sites usually begin with a search by country, city, university or residence: Yugo’s menu runs city by city across 14 countries, and Unite Students keeps a page for each UK city it serves. Room types are named in plain terms, such as studio, en-suite or non en-suite, and the companies stress what is included in the rent rather than the architecture.

Photography does most of the selling. The operators publish their own pictures of bedrooms, shared kitchens, study rooms, gyms and lounges, and present communal space as part of the product. Apps extend the same promise after booking: Unite Students says its app handles check-in times, flatmate chat and maintenance requests, and Yugo runs programmes under its own name for residents.

Building names are a brand decision in their own right. Some operators put the brand in front of a place name, as with Yugo Adelaide City, or rename a building when it changes hands; C-VILLE Weekly reported in December 2025 that The Standard in Charlottesville would become Yugo Crestline. A large group can also run more than one consumer brand for different years of study, as Unite does with Unite Students, aimed mainly at first-years, and Hello Student, aimed at later-year, postgraduate and international students.

Behind the student-facing brands sits a second, corporate register. Listed companies, funds and joint ventures publish separate sites for investors and university partners, with timelines, portfolio maps and fund pages; Unite Group’s name GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, as its London joint-venture partner, and The Dot Group’s name Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing as a US partner of GSA. This guide treats both registers, the cheerful booking voice and the plainer corporate one, as part of each brand.

From student housing to a wider living business.

Scape now sits inside a larger group. In July 2025 The Fifth Estate reported that Brookfield had finalised the sale of the retirement-living operator Aveo to “Scape’s rebranded parent business,” The Living Company, bringing 65 retirement villages in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania into the group. The same report said South Korea’s National Pension Service had recently invested in the company. Later trade coverage uses the new structure: in April 2026 B&T credited its campaign report to “Scape by The Living Company,” and in November 2026 Built Offsite described Scape as “part of The Living Company.”

Building work continues in Melbourne. Built Offsite reported in November 2026 that Scape is developing State Library Exchange, a 58-storey tower above the new State Library Station at the corner of Swanston and La Trobe streets, in partnership with RMIT University. Under the plans described in that report, RMIT takes the first nine levels for teaching, research and industry work, with rooms for about 1,400 students on the floors above. The head contractor, Built, has appointed the manufacturer Interpod to supply 1,373 prefabricated bathroom pods in two standard layouts, as Interpod did earlier for Scape Franklin.

For a design guide, Scape shows how a student housing brand can be built around named buildings and resident stories rather than a single flagship. Compare Unite Students and Yugo, two other student housing operators in this series. For this guide we use a brick red, charcoal, sand and a eucalyptus green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Scape’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.