HostcolReal estate

About

A small firm,
deliberately.

Hostcol Ltd was incorporated in England and Wales on 2 September 2021 and operates as the real estate company of the Grant & Graham group. It is founder-led, and built to stay close enough to each asset to know it.

The idea

Property is an operating business
that happens to own buildings.

The industry is organised around transactions because that is where the fees are cleanest. Ownership is where the money actually is.

An agent is paid when a deal completes. A managing agent is paid to keep things quiet. Neither is paid to tell an owner that the asset is underperforming, that the strategy set five years ago no longer fits, or that the sensible move is to sell. Hostcol exists to sit on the owner's side of that gap: to hold the whole picture, and to be the party whose interest is the asset over time rather than the event in front of it.

From the founder

Why this firm exists.

I started Hostcol because I kept meeting owners who were being served competently by three or four different firms and still had nobody who could tell them how their property was actually doing.

Everyone was doing their piece properly. The letting agent let it. The managing agent managed it. The broker brokered. But no single party held the arc, and so the questions that only make sense across the whole span of ownership were never asked. Is this asset still the right one to hold? Is the income what it should be? What have we been quietly tolerating for years because it arrived one small decision at a time?

The firm is built to answer those. That means staying small enough that the person you speak to is the person doing the work, and disciplined enough to turn down mandates we cannot run to the standard we have promised. It also means being willing to give an owner an answer they will not enjoy, which is the part of the job that most determines whether any of the rest of it is worth having.

Andrew Collins Founder & Chief Executive · Hostcol Ltd

Leadership

Andrew Collins

Founder & Chief Executive

More than thirty years in C-suite roles, building, scaling and turning around businesses across EMEA and beyond.

Andrew founded his first company at nineteen. He scaled Service Industries Ltd from $15M to $220M ahead of its acquisition by NCR, then ran EMEA for the combined business, and has served as interim CEO of Voipro. He is founder and CEO of the Grant & Graham group, the senior management consultancy and interim leadership firm established in 2009, and leads Hostcol personally.

Experience
30+ years at C-suite level
Track record
Scaled SIL from $15M to $220M; acquired by NCR, then led EMEA
Interim leadership
Interim CEO, Voipro
Group role
Founder & CEO, Grant & Graham
Education
Harvard Leadership certificate, 2023

Constraints

Four things we won't do.

A firm is defined more usefully by what it refuses than by what it offers. These are public because they should be enforceable.

One

We won't act on both sides

We act for the owner who instructed us and no one else in the same transaction. Any interest we hold elsewhere is disclosed before you make a decision, not after it.

Two

We won't take undisclosed commission

Any payment reaching us from a contractor, lender, broker or agent connected to your instruction is disclosed to you and credited against our fee.

Three

We won't take on more than we can run

Growth is capped by the capacity to do the work properly. If taking your mandate would degrade the service to an existing client, or to you, we decline it.

Four

We won't invent work

If the right answer is to leave the asset alone, keep your current agent, or sell and walk away, that is the advice you will get, including when it costs us the mandate.

The group

Hostcol within
Grant & Graham.

Hostcol Ltd is a specialist operating company within the Grant & Graham group, whose parent entity is Grant & Graham Holding OÜ.

The group holds several businesses, each kept narrow enough to be genuinely specialist rather than broadly adequate. For an owner working with Hostcol, that means the property work sits with the property firm (its people, its relationships, its accountability) while the governance and standards behind it are the group's. Read about the holding company →

Corporate record

On the register.

Every detail below can be checked against the public register. We would rather you did.

Registered name
Hostcol Ltd
Company number
13600204
Incorporated
2 September 2021
Company type
Private limited company
Jurisdiction
England & Wales
Registered office
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom
Parent entity
Grant & Graham Holding OÜ

The full filing history, officers and current status are published by Companies House at register entry 13600204.