Student housing in India has always been a nightmare. Think back on your student days — that 10x12ft room which you shared with your noisy (or nosy) roomie, where you needed to stash all of your assets in 1/2 a cabinet break up horizontally (or vertically, for that rely), could open the toilet door most effective wide enough to sidle in due to the fact the study table got inside the manner, had water for just a few hours, harrowing electricity cuts, rickety beds, and, not to overlook, food that would put prison meals to shame.
If you’ve been a scholar (and most of us have, in some unspecified time in the future in our lives), and had studied far from the comfort of your property, you can likely relate to the scene above. And, no, it’s now not an exaggeration. It’s the type of paying visitor or shared room lodging most center-elegance college students may want to afford returned in the day. This is probably actual now as well.
Here comes Stanza Living, a tech-enabled student lodging platform, which wants to take the ache out of pupil residing in India and redefine the distance with its scalable, professionally controlled services. The startup changed into started out by means of Anindya Dutta and Sandeep Dalmia, who realised the huge gap in and the massive capability of the scholar housing marketplace in India and determined to provide college students something past cramped and makeshift cubby holes with unreliable infrastructure, terrible upkeep, and non-palatable meals.
The startup is based totally on a unique community living concept created for college kids transferring to a brand new location. The startup has been running in the direction of setting up the enterprise thru a procedure-pushed carrier version and concurrently reworking Stanza Living into a scalable business.
“We are re-imagining co-living in India with our scholar-first approach and imparting the great residing stories to them. Our awareness is on developing a sturdy generation-enabled scholar lodging platform and we're continuously investing in new technologies such as AI and ML to design, structure, and execute pupil-friendly services and answers in a scalable way across all massive academic hubs across the usa,” stated Anindya.
The Stanza Living Concept
Anindya and Sandeep met whilst doing their MBA at IIM-Ahmedabad and, in 9 years considering that then, their bond has grown from being buddies to co-belongings proprietors concurred that the Indian scholar housing atmosphere needed disruption.
Stanza Living’s underlying philosophy is to always positioned college students first. The founders feel that scholars need an environment that stimulates gaining knowledge of and growth, in conjunction with worldwide living standards, to build the foundation for the maximum critical bankruptcy of their existence — university.
With an purpose to offer such an environment and such living requirements, Stanza Living determined to combination, remodel, remodel, and operate student housing property and provide them to college students, along with vital offerings, at an inexpensive fee.
Stanza Living companions with assets proprietors and developers on a set hire, sales-sharing, or control settlement basis, for a length of 5-12 years. It remodels and redesigns the properties in step with college students’ desires, factoring in services inclusive of food, WiFi, laundry, security, and so forth. The startup then makes such student lodging and offerings to be had on a single tech-enabled platform.
The student accommodation platform claims to have grown exponentially— 20x since its inception — with the numbers of beds it’s managing rising from one hundred to 2,000 within the remaining 12 months throughout academic hubs inside the Delhi-NCR Region. At gift, each their facilities in North Campus, New Delhi, are walking at full capacity, with over one hundred students staying in them, and are presently preparing to launch in Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Indore.
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Stanza Living turned into originally seed-funded via the co-founders and later acquired a $2 Mn increase from Matrix Partners and Accel.
Stanza Living: A Tech-Enabled Student Accommodation Platform
Stanza Living residences offer college students the choice to choose from exceptional carrier applications for college kids, which incorporates simple components like the internet, and food 3 times a day to laundry services, concierge offerings, physician on call and others.
The pupil lodging platform is also laced with multilayer security solutions at access and go out, with a skilled security guard, CCTV cameras and biometric access cards, along with incidence primarily based alerts and a fast reaction team. There is no pricing variety which Stanza Living abides by using. All the centers are low-priced in step with marketplace pricing.
The real backbone of Stanza Living, however, is technology — the startup analyses the marketplace capacity in different instructional hubs and seeks to supply remarkable, scalable carrier offerings to college students. It also performs a key function in designing, planning, and optimising rooms and building the interiors.
“Our consciousness is on creating a sturdy generation-enabled student accommodation platform and we are constantly investing in growing a strong suite of tech answers that use new age technologies which includes artificial intelligence, device getting to know etc, to help expand our business and layout, structure, and execute student-friendly offerings and answers in a scalable manner across all large educational hubs”, stated Anindya.
The startup’s enterprise techniques are based totally on developing a sturdy, deep, and solid understanding of the pupil client and her/his desires, desires, and aspirations. The crew enters into partnership or tie-americawith colleges and simultaneously employs more than a few ambassador and influencer advertising campaigns which conducts activities at some point of the year within their target phase in colleges and universities.
Additionally, Stanza Living additionally runs a variety of engagement campaigns on social media platforms to constantly create greater emblem cognizance and satisfy their needs with the products and services.
Changing The Game Of The Unorganised Student Housing Market
The founders shared that the largest demanding situations they faced to start with had been educating landowners about organising and standardising the quite aggressive pupil housing industry, which for years has been dominated by means of unorganized and fragmented mom-and-pop operators.
“But, on the superb side, we’ve received and still continue to get hold of an amazing response from college students and mother and father. We have seen a recent surge in hobby degrees from landowners, builders, and belongings investors as well, who are enthusiastic about our pupil housing product,” stated Anindya.
When asked approximately opposition within the marketplace, the founders said that they agree with a scholar housing platform is a brand new category in itself that wishes a number of time to grow and form up. However, they do comprehend that there is a massive pool of unorganised players and limited set of organised apartment/PG carrier carriers within the equal space.
“Startups like Placio and Homigo also focus on scholar housing area. Stanza Living is right here to provide a professionally managed, manner-pushed, tech-enabled network dwelling enjoy to college students, designed completely to their needs. And that differentiates Stanza residing from the relaxation,” brought Anindya.
Student Housing: A Sector Ripe For Disruption
For the longest time, there was no innovation or disruption within the student housing enterprise. Leave alone that, there weren’t even any organised players within the area. It turned into just a manner for residence-proprietors to make a few cash on the side by renting out the worst portions of their homes or changing a storage or a room at the rooftop into a slightly supplied, barely liveable scholar’s PG.
However, it's far a great area, with massive potential. A recent record by way of JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle Inc) stated that the supply in the pupil housing marketplace presently stands at 6 Mn beds, and there’s a large shortage of 5 Mn beds. This is the market that Stanza Living is focused on.
Tech startups have disrupted the conventional real estate marketplace and changed the manner actual property enterprise carried on. The Indian belongings market might be going through a slowdown, however tech-enabled real estate organizations are developing unexpectedly, making India one of the quickest-emerging realty tech destinations inside the global.
Opportunities for innovation the use of era abound throughout the actual property enterprise. Some of the most important near-time period possibilities for innovation are:
? Data and analytics: The actual property enterprise is targeted on growing tools designed to perceive, collate, and analyse applicable information to decorate operational performance, inform choice-making, and enhance the experience of members across the residential, industrial, and commercial real estate sectors.
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? Mobile programs: Mobile programs are beginning to exchange the way actual estate transactions work. Customers can pay their month-to-month loan thru their smartphones or make an earnest cash deposit instantly and securely using a cellular app.
Stanza Living: Not Just Another Brick In The Wall
Budget inn room aggregators like OYO and Treebo had been operating for a few years in India now, raking in billions of greenbacks. In truth, OYO currently introduced its foray into the hospitality industry of China with eleven,000 rooms in 26 cities. But the tech-based totally aggregation concept is new to scholar housing.
The market is ruled with the aid of privately owned hostels and PG accommodation, and it’s a difficult mission to convince landowners to organise and standardise their houses and services in keeping with college students’ needs.
The startup, therefore, has been working closer to establishing the enterprise through its procedure-driven, generation-enabled carrier model, whilst simultaneously transforming the startup right into a scalable commercial enterprise.
Stanza Living ambitions at providing an extended-time period value-primarily based technique to residence-owners and developers on the same time enhancing upon its technology. Also, inside the next 12-18 months, the corporation is looking at expanding its portfolio to over 10,000 beds across all essential instructional hubs in India. With admire to sales, it expects to clock $293K – $440K (INR 2-three Cr) in 2017-18.
India has been amongst one the most lively markets out of doors the United States for actual property technology investments. The actual property needs of the us of a are massive and startups have handiest simply begun to scratch the floor of the possibility for generation-enabled innovation. As Anindya aptly concluded, “Given the bucks at threat and the proportion of the wider financial system that real estate represents, there's each cause to agree with the category will produce more than one ‘unicorns’ really worth billions in enterprise price.”
Meanwhile, at the least students appearance beyond cubby holes and substandard PG lodging at living decently in the youth in their life.
This tale became up to date at 10.50pm on June 25, 2o18 to alternate the headline and the replica in which Stanza Living become immediately as compared with Oyo Rooms. The assessment is not in keeping with the site of Stanza Living. Inc42 regrets the error.
