OYO LIFE Ties Up With IIT Delhi, Others To Provide Student Housing

Gurugram-based hospitality decacorn OYO Hotels and Homes has today (September 26) announced its foray into student accommodation, through its rental solutions arm OYO LIFE.

The company said that OYO LIFE is tying up with marquee institutes like IIT Delhi and Plaksha University’s Fellowship programme in Gurugram and will be managing over 500 beds for the student community.

Under the agreement, OYO Life will provide affordable accommodations starting from the price of INR 6500 to INR 12,999 per bed, per month. All OYO LIFE buildings will be equipped with essential amenities like Wi-Fi connectivity, television, refrigerator, AC, regular housekeeping, power backup, CCTV surveillance, and 24/7 caretaking.

“We are excited to partner with IIT Delhi and Plaksha’s Tech Leaders Fellowship to offer our first-of-its-kind, end-to-end fully managed housing experience for the students. We are confident that our growing presence in the student housing segment will enable us to scale 100K beds by 2019-end,” said Rohit Kapoor, CEO, new real estate businesses, OYO.

OYO LIFE: Building Rental Business

OYO LIFE was launched in October 2018 and claims to have more than 500 buildings and 30000 live beds. The company says it is adding over 5000 new beds every month. Currently, OYO LIFE is present in 4 cities in India – Delhi, NCR, Pune, Bengaluru and is rapidly expanding its base to 4 more cities – Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

The development comes few weeks after reports surfaced that OYO is in advanced talks to acquire student accommodation assets of Lovely Professional University (LPU). In a deal worth $200 Mn, the company was reportedly looking at a multi-decade, long-term agreement.

Ritesh Agarwal-led six year old company is backed by marquee investors such as SoftBank, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital etc and has raised $1.7 Bn already. The company has expanded its services to more than 800 cities in 80 countries like US, Europe, UK, India, Malaysia, Japan and Indonesia, among others.

In the last couple of months, OYO has acquired multiple portfolios such as @Leisure Groups to venture into Holiday homes and Innov8 coworking to expand its offering to coworking spaces. Recently, Oyo had also acquired Hooters Casino Hotels to expand in Las Vegas. The product portfolio includes OYO Homes, OYO Townhouse, OYO Rooms, Silverkey, Pallets, etc.

Competition In Student Housing Industry

In student housing segment, OYO LIFE is competing against players such as Stanza Living, which  provides affordable accommodation and services in Delhi/NCR, and are preparing to launch in Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Indore. Placio also offers modern living spaces, fully furnished rooms, private rooms and personal apartments near localities and university campuses.

According to property consultant Knight Frank, India’s student housing market has the potential to attract $50 Bn to meet the current demand-supply gap of 8 Mn beds. The firm has estimated that there are a demand-supply gap is expected to grow at 8% YoY to reach 13 Mn by 2025.