OYO Goes Live With Its Furnished Home Rental Service OYO Life In Japan

Gurugram-based hospitality unicorn OYO has gone live with its ‘OYO LIFE’ services in Tokyo with more than 1,000 residential units. Under this new service, the company will offer fully-furnished apartments on rent to its Japanese users.

This development comes in after the SoftBank-backed hospitality company expanded its presence in Japan in February. OYO formed a joint venture with  Yahoo Japan Corporation, OYO Technology and Hospitality Japan to offer its co-living service, OYO Living dubbed as OYO Life. Currently, OYO owns 66.1% of the joint venture.

The company also said that the service has been integrated with Japan’s search engine Yahoo. With this, the service will be accessible to users on Yahoo’s main homepage,  its travel portal and its estate site Fudosan.

“OYO LIFE is focused on creating unique living experiences for the Japanese citizens, students, and young professionals, looking for good quality affordable accommodations,” said Ritesh Agarwal, CEO and founder, OYO Hotels and Homes.

During the launch in February, OYO had said that it will not charge brokerage fees or additional fees such as security deposits for the service. The monthly rental prices will range from $180 (¥20K)- $7,218 (¥800K) as it targets 1,000 listings in Tokyo’s prime areas by March-end.

Apart from the rental service, OYO also introduced subscription-based membership programme, OYO Passport which will offer discounts and deals from the corporate partners in Japan.

OYO’s Giant Strides To Achieve Global Success

OYO has been constantly taking the headlines for the past few due to its expansion and growth stories. Most recently, it was reported that US-based online marketplace for homestays, bed and breakfast hotels Airbnb is looking invest in the Agarwal led company.

In September, OYO had raised $1Bn in its latest funding round led by SoftBank Investment Advisers (SBIA) through SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed India Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Greenoaks Capital.

In February, OYO had also launched its operations in Saudi Arabia. Currently, it has listed 50 hotels with over 3,000 rooms across seven cities in Saudi Arabia on the platform. With this, apart from Japan and Saudi Arabia, OYO is present in India, China, Malaysia, Nepal, UK, UAE, Indonesia, the Philippines.

The company also reported a 4.3x Y-o-Y (year-on-year) global sales growth, with a realised value run rate of $1.8 Bn as of December 2018, from $0.4 Bn in 2017. The company also expects its revenue from global operations to reach INR 1,400 Cr ($197 Mn) in FY 2018-19.