Student housing brand Your-Space is expanding to two cities, Hyderabad and Kolkata, this fiscal where it plans to deploy close to Rs 10 crore in each of the cities, Venayak Gupta, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), told Moneycontrol.
In Hyderabad and Kolkata, the company expects to have roughly 1,500 to 2,000 beds over the next five months and will be deploying close to Rs 10 crore in each city from the total kitty of Rs 50 crore earmarked for expansion plans across the country.
The company is currently expanding to 15,000 beds across the country by the end of July 2022 and a roadmap is in place to double Your-Space’s count to 30,000 beds by 2023.
The company has a footprint in Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Dehradun, Indore and Mumbai.
The company has 3,500 beds in Delhi and plans to touch 8,000 beds by next year. In Bengaluru, which has touched 2,000 beds from 500 earlier. The plan is to touch close to 4,500 beds this year. In Dehradun, the company had 500 beds until last year which doubled to 1000 this year. The plan is to be close to about 1,700 to 2,000 by next year.
In Mumbai, the company has close to 2,000 beds, and the plan is to be close to 5,000 by next year. In Pune, it has 1,000 beds at present and there are plans to touch the 3,000 number by next year. In Ahmedabad, there are 700 beds and the number will be close to 1,500 by next year. And in Indore, it has 700-800 beds which will touch 2,000 by next year, he said.
Venayak said that demand for organised student housing has gone up after three waves of the pandemic. “The market is moving from the unorganised sector to an organised sector and we are also witnessing consolidation in the market. Pre-Covid there were like 15-20 student housing players and after Covid, there are 4-5 across multiple cities. Those who have survived the pandemic are witnessing higher occupancy,” he said.
He said that around 3.5 crore students study in undergrad and postgrad colleges in any given year in India. About 50 percent of those or about 1.75 crore move out of their hometowns to go and study and require housing which is usually hostel or off-campus student housing. “The total demand in the market is equal to the number of people moving out of their hometowns to study,” he said.
As for rentals, these have gone up over the last two years after the pandemic.
“With food inflation being high and general inflation touching 7.5 percent, rentals have gone up by close to 15 percent to the pre-Covid numbers across the metropolitan cities and Tier-I. In Tier-II cities like Indore, you will not see the increment, but pretty much everywhere else you will see an average of 15 percent increase,” he said.
Your-Space is an IIM-Cambridge initiative co-founded by former bankers Nidhi Kumra and Shubha Lal, who recognised the disproportion in the student housing environment in the country.
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