Neighbourgood: Fueling ambitious growth and mastering change management with Cloudbeds

Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitality brand Neighbourgood emerged from a vision of blending community-centric living with working spaces. Founded by Murray Clark, Kim Clark, and St John Gardner, the trio witnessed first-hand the importance of real-world connection – especially in uncertain times. For Nicholas Schooling, Head of Product (Tech), the brand’s mission has always remained clear:

“To create connected spaces where guests feel like they belong and, at the same time, thrive and do their best.”

With accommodation offerings designed for short-, medium-, and long-term stays, Neighbourgood’s innovative hybrid hospitality model adapts to fluctuating demand. By leveraging real-time data, the team is able to successfully adjust dynamic inventory percentages to optimize occupancy rates year-round and combat seasonality effects.

Over time, Neighbourgood has gained traction by bringing people together in unique locations, combining co-living and co-working spaces alongside curated experiences and events. Today, the brand operates 16 living spaces with over 500 keys and 6 co-working spaces across Cape Town and San Francisco.

As Neighbourgood’s growth accelerated, the team recognized the need for a more scalable and flexible system. Key requirements included a modern property management system (PMS) with open API capabilities, to integrate third-party solutions and build a custom tech stack.

“When we were looking at different options, it all came back to having a strong foundation – the PMS system – for our back end,” says Nicholas.

After evaluating several platforms, Neighbourgood selected Cloudbeds for its wide feature list, marketplace tech suite, as well as its integrated channel manager.

Featuring revenue management system integrations like Room Price Genie, this improved Neighbourgood’s dynamic pricing and rate parity. Cloudbeds’ Open API also gave the team the flexibility to build their custom tech stack, offering scalability without sacrificing quality or control.

“You could pick up very early how product-centric the Cloudbeds’ team is. It’s a great product managed by a really strong customer-centric team,” says Nicholas.

Access to Cloudbeds’ portfolio-wide data and robust multi-property features, allowed the team to make informed, real-time decisions on rates, demand, and strategy – especially important given their diverse and dynamic inventory.

Operationally, tools like Cloudbeds’ automated guest communication proved invaluable for self-check-in properties, streamlining operations, minimizing manual errors, and improving the guest experience.

What’s more, improved reliability of reporting within Cloudbeds helped the Neighbourgood team track revenue reporting, booking source reporting, and customer segment data, all invaluable for product testing and high-level strategic decision-making.

At first, there was hesitation from Neighbourgood’s staff towards the system transition, as is often the case when onboarding new tech across multiple teams and properties.

However, the team achieved staff buy-in by focusing on transparency and training, emphasizing Cloudbeds’ innovative solutions to existing problems.

It's not enough to have a good product. We also needed help to transition effectively across

Nicholas Schooling, Head of Product

Led by a dedicated coach, Cloudbeds’ onboarding support helped to ease the transition, making the process feel more like a partnership than a one-off handover.

Operational improvements were immediate and meaningful. Staff found Cloudbeds’ user experience to be more intuitive, simpler, and reliable than its previous system.

The result?

Increased confidence after the initial learning curve; reservations teams became comfortable within weeks, while operational teams took a little more time.
Throughout the system migration and change management process, error rates remained relatively low, despite the significant effort taken to complete the transition.

With aspirations to reach 25,000 units across 10 cities by 2034, Neighbourgood’s ambitions are as bold as ever. Cloudbeds remains a strategic partner as Neighbourgood enters a new phase of “hypergrowth”, enabling them to stay agile while remaining true to their mission.

One of our core values is to always be growth minded but at the same time stay extremely customer-centric and really care about the guest experience.

Nicholas Schooling, Head of Product

Today, Neighbourgood and Cloudbeds are setting a new standard for hybrid hospitality: flexible, data-driven, and deeply human.