VITA GROUP: Energy-Aware Environments Where People Can Thrive

Often, the inception of a visionary company such as Vita will be driven by inspiration. In this case, however, it was Mark Stott’s finding himself remarkably uninspired by the contemporary state of student accommodation in the UK that led to Vita’s 2012 founding.

At the time defined by characterless halls with no real attention to detail or focus on providing an environment for students to succeed, Stott sought to redress the balance, putting the students first and giving them the best start possible to succeed to their fullest and beginning with Vita Student Liverpool.

“Now Vita Group has evolved into an intelligence-driven platform creating tomorrow’s city living,” it proudly states. “It’s represented by five unique lifestyle brands, spanning life’s different stages, in 23 locations, across 13 cities and with residents from over 100 countries.”

LIVING REIMAGINED

“It’s urban living reimagined and it’s constantly evolving thanks to the insights and data being generated through the platform, which in turn help to create new services, experiences, and communities.”

“The mission: to create environments in which people can flourish. A platform to thrive.” This passion for helping people blossom to the utmost degree is reflected in Vita’s values and feeds everything it does, from its overarching approach and its people to the way it designs its buildings.

“At Vita we’re driven by this mission – it runs through everything we do, from how we create buildings to the services we provide,” the company says, returning to the prime motivation and lifeblood of the operation. “It’s a thought process which incorporates all of our stakeholders from local authorities and investors to our colleagues and residents.”

“It stimulates our desire to constantly evolve, improve and innovate and it captures our behaviour.”

Good living, and how to define it, is a conundrum that for centuries has plagued the world’s foremost philosophers, from Socrates to Aristotle. “For Vita as platform creators,” the company says, not shying away from the challenge, “good living is about what gets us up in the morning, what drives us to improve – it’s about being progressive. It’s shared happiness, experiences, and memories.”

“It doesn’t centre around one thing but a collection of actions and behaviours which help to hone our approach, a platform to thrive. Our approach focuses on shared opportunities – a community of people working together to achieve goals. We’re actively promoting social mobility in everything we do and creating spaces to belong where this is easily achieved.”

All of this is built on several interconnected pillars, each dependent on the others in order for the whole to properly function. From place and community, building design and environment to sustainable operations, talent and society, not omitting governance and welfare and wellbeing, everything is considered in sculpting the Vita vision.

“It’s simply not good enough to create a building without thinking carefully about its context and the wider impact it has on its surrounding neighbourhood,” Vita stipulates. “Creating tomorrow’s city living means we must be part of the DNA of that city and partnering with local authorities, connecting with local suppliers, talent, charities and helping to develop surrounding spaces. It’s not just about helping to regenerate cities; it’s helping them to function effectively.”

FUTURE LIVING

“Over the last decade, Vita Group has been doing something very special, and now stands much bigger than the words that define it, and it holds more value than the bricks and mortar which represent it.”

“It’s a movement, a sense of belonging; it encapsulates people, behaviours, insights and technologies which prove, shape and evolve the product.”

A decade spent scrutinising trends and customer behaviour, beholding and learning from the more than 10,000 people living with Vita across different sectors, has resulted in the Vita Group Future Living Report. An undertaking which the business describes as, “a seismic piece of work,” and the largest of its kind, it is driven by Vita’s commitment to searching for living trends, being fanatical about its customers and ultimately trying to hone its products and brands in a way which responds to them.

“Our opportunity to behold and learn from our customer behaviour has never been bigger as our buildings become a canvas for the way in which people live – these insights help us to discover micro trends to interrogate on a more significant scale,” Vita comments, of the conducted on its behalf by independent research company 3Gem study throughout August and September 2022.

The emergent trends proved highly current and all-encompassing, as the deep-dive taken unearthed a host of topics from the post-pandemic impacts on the way we live – such as the rise in hybrid working and pet ownership – to the cost-of-living crisis, impact on utility prices and the challenges ahead for the industry in the face of a shortage of housing.

As Britain has felt a tightening pinch, it is an ultra-keen awareness of energy usage and swift adoption of greener behaviour that have been the most obvious reverberations with even the medium to long term outlook suggesting energy will cost more than it did during the last 10 years. “As a much more significant outgoing, consumers and developers will be much more cognisant to this aspect of living. Whether that’s making improvements to current housing or evolving the specification of future stock, the landscape is definitely moving,” analyses Vita Group COO Max Bielby.

“We can clearly see that the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy bills are forcing people to react and change the way in which they live in some ways,” agrees Giles Beswick, Chief Purpose Officer. “It’s good to see that so many are making sustainability-driven decisions, and by finding ways to be more energy efficient, one hopes that some of these new behaviours are adopted as best practices and people make much more conscious decisions about these things in future.”