Zolo
Website:
zolostays.com
Company:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/zolostays
Seniority: Mid-Senior level
Industries: Hospitality
Job details:
City Head
Student Living | Zolo
Own the city. Grow the business. Deliver the experience.
Why this role exists
Student Living is not just about operating residences.
Each city is a business that needs to consistently acquire students, maintain strong occupancy, deliver a reliable living experience, control costs, and build relationships that enable long-term growth.
As the business scales, success in each city depends on having one leader who sees the complete picture and takes accountability for the overall outcome.
The City Head exists to own the city as a business.
This means bringing together:
- Revenue and occupancy
- Student acquisition and sales
- Property operations
- Customer experience
- Cost and profitability
- Team performance
- Institutional and local relationships
- New property ramp-up and city growth
If this role is strong, the city grows profitably, properties remain occupied, students have a strong experience, teams execute consistently, and new opportunities are identified early.
If this role is weak, functions operate in silos, occupancy suffers, costs increase, customer issues escalate, and growth becomes difficult to sustain.
Your mandate is clear
- Own the complete P&L for the city
- Deliver revenue, occupancy, and profitability targets
- Drive student acquisition and business growth
- Ensure properties operate consistently and efficiently
- Own the end-to-end student experience
- Build and lead strong city teams
- Develop institutional and local partnerships
- Identify and execute new growth opportunities
- Build a city business that can scale sustainably
This is not a functional role.
It is end-to-end ownership of the city business.
About Zolo and Student Living
Finding dependable accommodation has historically been fragmented and inconsistent.
Students and parents often have to choose between location, affordability, safety, quality, convenience, and community.
People settled for compromises because the system offered few trustworthy options.
Zolo reimagined living and hospitality as a connected journey.
Zolo Coliving simplifies urban living and student living creates safe, structured environments where students can focus and grow.
Z Hotels serves the modern traveler with consistency, warmth, and operational discipline.
Today, over 100,000 people trust Zolo across different phases of life.
Our ambition is to build the most trusted living and hospitality ecosystem for the new generation by partnering deeply with property owners who think long term.
Our Student Living business brings together accommodation, operations, service, community, and technology to create environments where students can live comfortably while focusing on their education and growth.
What you will be responsible for
Own the City P&L
- Take complete accountability for city revenue, costs, margins, and profitability
- Build and deliver against annual, quarterly, and monthly business plans
- Understand the key drivers of city-level financial performance
- Identify revenue gaps and cost leakages early
- Take corrective actions to ensure achievement of P&L targets
- Make business decisions balancing growth, customer experience, and profitability
Drive Revenue & Occupancy
- Own occupancy and revenue targets across Student Living properties in the city
- Build strong visibility into demand, inventory, pricing, and conversion
- Work closely with sales and marketing teams to drive student acquisition
- Identify underperforming properties and create recovery plans
- Drive renewals and retention wherever relevant
- Ensure available inventory is monetized effectively
Build the City's Growth Engine
- Understand the student housing market, demand pockets, colleges, universities, and competitive landscape
- Identify opportunities to grow the Student Living business within the city
- Build relationships with colleges, universities, educational institutions, and other relevant partners
- Identify new demand channels and partnerships
- Support evaluation and ramp-up of new properties
- Build a strong local network that enables future growth
Own the Student Experience
- Ensure students receive a consistent and reliable living experience across properties
- Track customer feedback, complaints, service issues, and experience metrics
- Ensure critical issues are resolved with urgency
- Identify recurring problems and drive permanent solutions
- Build strong service standards across properties
- Balance student expectations with practical and sustainable business decisions
Drive Operational Excellence
- Ensure properties consistently meet defined operating standards
- Maintain visibility across housekeeping, maintenance, security, food/service delivery, and other critical operations
- Review property-level performance and intervene where execution is weak
- Ensure operational issues do not remain unresolved or repeatedly escalate
- Build systems and review mechanisms that improve execution discipline
- Ensure new properties stabilize quickly after launch
Lead & Build the City Team
- Lead city-level sales, operations, customer experience, and other relevant teams
- Set clear targets and ownership across functions
- Build strong second-line leaders and property-level teams
- Review performance consistently and address gaps quickly
- Create accountability without becoming the bottleneck for every decision
- Build a high-performance culture focused on outcomes
Use Data to Run the Business
- Maintain strong visibility into city and property-level performance
- Track revenue, occupancy, conversion, costs, customer metrics, and operational performance
- Identify trends and risks before they become larger problems
- Conduct structured business reviews with teams
- Use data to prioritize interventions and allocate resources
- Ensure decisions are based on business outcomes rather than assumptions
Manage Stakeholders & Partnerships
- Work closely with central Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR, Product, Procurement, and Operations teams
- Build strong relationships with institutional partners and other external stakeholders
- Align different teams toward common city-level outcomes
- Resolve cross-functional blockers that affect business performance
- Represent the Student Living business effectively within the city
What success looks like after 6–12 months
- City revenue and profitability are on or ahead of plan
- Strong and sustainable occupancy across properties
- Clear improvement plans exist for underperforming assets
- Student acquisition channels are diversified and predictable
- Customer experience and service metrics remain consistently strong
- Operational escalations and recurring issues reduce
- City teams operate with clear accountability and ownership
- Strong relationships are established with relevant colleges, universities, and local partners
- New properties and growth initiatives are ramped up effectively
- Leadership has clear visibility and confidence in the city's performance
The city begins to operate as a predictable, profitable, and scalable business unit.
Who this role is for
You will likely thrive here if:
- You naturally think like a business owner, not a functional manager
- You are comfortable owning a P&L and being accountable for the final number
- You can move between strategy and on-ground execution
- You understand that revenue, operations, and customer experience cannot be managed in isolation
- You enjoy building businesses and solving ambiguous problems
- You are comfortable taking difficult calls when business outcomes require them
- You can influence teams and stakeholders even when they do not directly report to you
- You use numbers to understand problems but are equally comfortable getting on the ground to solve them
- You have the energy to operate in a fast-moving, execution-heavy environment
- You take ownership when something goes wrong instead of looking for which function is responsible
Experience we value
- Experience owning a city, region, cluster, category, or business unit
- Demonstrated exposure to P&L / revenue / profitability ownership
- Strong experience across business operations, growth, sales, or general management
- Experience managing multiple properties, locations, branches, centres, or distributed operations is valuable
- Strong people leadership and cross-functional management experience
- Experience in Student Housing, Education, Hospitality, Co-living, PropTech, Hotels, Managed Accommodation, Consumer Services, or other multi-location businesses is preferred
- Exposure to institutional / B2B partnerships is an advantage
- Strong commercial and analytical orientation
The strongest candidate may not necessarily come from Student Living.
What matters is evidence that they have owned a business outcome rather than only one part of the business.
The impact you will have
You will directly influence:
City P&L
Revenue & Occupancy
Student Acquisition
Customer Experience
Operational Performance
Team Capability
City Growth
The quality of your decisions will determine how successfully Zolo's Student Living business grows within the city.
Why join now
Student Living is a business where scale creates significant opportunity — but only when growth, operations, customer experience, and economics work together.
As Zolo expands its Student Living footprint, City Heads will play a critical role in building these businesses market by market.
This role provides an opportunity to own far more than a function.
You will own a city-level business, work across the complete P&L, build teams and partnerships, and create a foundation for larger regional and business leadership roles.
This is a path from managing a city to building and leading businesses.
Click on Apply to know more.