Built by an operator, not a consultancy.
Rob Towey has spent more than twenty years on the operating side of the industries Alvo now advises: property, lending, media and proptech. When Alvo shows a broker where the growth is, it is because he has run that funnel himself.
Twenty years of running the businesses Alvo now helps grow.
I did not come to this work through consulting. I came to it by sitting in the seat. For the better part of two decades I have been the person in the room responsible for making a property or finance business grow, with the revenue target, the partner contracts and the product roadmap all landing on the same desk.
The longest stretch of that was fifteen years at Domain Group, first inside Fairfax Media and then as a separately listed company, where I arrived to build partnerships and left having started businesses. The portal reached millions of Australians every month, and the question that kept coming back was what else those people needed at the moment they were looking at a home. The answer became Domain Home Loans, a joint venture with Lendi Group that I ran as founding CEO, and then Domain Insure, built with Hollard and Zurich. Both were exercises in the same thing: putting a product in front of a customer at the point they are actually ready for it, with the banks, brokers and aggregators as partners rather than channels on a slide.
Since then I have run the commercial side of proptech and fintech businesses, at Openn, at RealtyAssist and now at Axtec, and spent time inside the operations of lenders, agencies and recruiters as an adviser. What I noticed everywhere was the same gap. Owners could see where the time and the margin were going. What they lacked was someone who had run a comparable business, understood the systems they already paid for, and could build the improvement rather than describe it.
That is Alvo. When we tell a broker where the funnel leaks, or an agency principal what their stack should really be delivering, it is because I have run those funnels and negotiated those contracts, and then built the thing that made them work better.
Alvo also builds. If we recommend a pathway, it is one we would build ourselves. Often we already have.
Still shipping.
The same build capability behind these ventures is what Alvo brings to client engagements.
Alvo
Operator-led advisory and build for Australian property, lending, recruitment and construction businesses. Educate, assess, partner, build.
Foleo
An independent buyers agent matching platform: structured buyer briefs, archetype matching and hand-vetted agent panels. Live at foleo.au.
Role Relay
A separate company Rob co-founded and chairs. Listed here as a venture, not as Alvo client work.
A career in the industries Alvo serves.
Domain Group, fifteen years
Inside Fairfax Media and then as a separately listed company. Business development, data and strategic partnerships, then Director of Consumer Solutions, establishing Domain's consumer businesses on a portal with 100M+ monthly page impressions.
Domain Home Loans, founding CEO
The joint venture between Domain and Lendi Group. Built and ran the acquisition funnel that produced the benchmark data behind Alvo's broker work.
Domain Insure, founding CEO
Embedded insurance distribution with Hollard and Zurich, at the point in the property journey where the customer is actually thinking about cover.
Inside the operations, as Alvo
Rob has not run a building company or a sales office, and does not claim to. The construction estimating engagement and the agency work are built by sitting with the estimator, the principal and the property manager, writing down how the business actually runs, and calibrating to its own numbers.
Role Relay, co-founder and Chair. Savage Recruitment Academy, partner
Co-founded and chairs Role Relay, a recruitment technology company, and partners with Greg Savage's Savage Recruitment Academy to take practical AI implementation to agency owners, from desk economics to the privacy and risk guardrails a recruiter needs before any tool touches a candidate file.
Openn, RealtyAssist, Axtec
General Manager of Partnerships, Chief Commercial Officer and product and partnerships leadership across partner-led product and embedded payments.
Lenders, property and recruitment businesses
Advised businesses from Athena Home Loans to PropHero on growth, partnerships and product, and worked with RCSA on AI adoption across the recruitment industry.
Talk to the person who will do the work.
Every Alvo engagement is led by Rob directly, with specialist partners in AI engineering, security and industry education behind it where the scope calls for them. Alvo caps active engagements so each gets the hours its milestones need, and that cap is written into the proposal. Rob's role at Axtec is a contracted product and partnerships engagement, kept entirely separate from Alvo client work. How that works in practice ›