Stanza Living Peeks Beyond Student Housing To Focus On Wider Coliving Market

Delhi-headquartered student housing startup Stanza Living has announced the expansion of its focus areas beyond student accommodation to coliving facilities for working professionals.

Talking to Inc42, Anindya Dutta, managing director and cofounder of Stanza Living, said that the company has now expanded its value proposition by launching customized living spaces for working professionals.

Starting with a combined 10K beds capacity across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Coimbatore, this will be a separate business line designed around the lifestyle needs of working professionals. This brings total bed capacity for Stanza Living to 55K.

The founders told us that the Stanza Living’s coliving for working professionals plan has been under discussions for the last 12 months and now the company feels it is ready to be launched. The insights gathered on customer needs and lifestyle requirements over the past year have been used to create a customised shared living space for migrant working professionals, cofounder Dutta said.

Dutta added that the company is investing INR 150 Cr towards building this business.

Sandeep Dalmia, MD and cofounder, Stanza Living said, “Our foray into the working professionals’ category follows the journey of our student consumers. As they graduate and become potential migrant working professionals, we want to continue delivering an aspirational lifestyle solution adaptable to their evolving needs, wherever they migrate.”

Founded in 2017 by Sandeep Dalmia and Anindya Dutta, Stanza Living has created a student-centric proposition with living solutions encompassing service-led housing and acommodation, proprietary community-building, personal and professional development programmes, and ecosystem of services for students and more.

Stanza offers a full-stack coliving model, which it claims enables it to design spaces and tailor the services to cater to the specific needs and desires of the customers. The company offers student accommodation for prices ranging from INR 3.5K to INR 25K per month.

Following a similar approach for working professionals, the company is setting up a price range of INR 3500 to INR 15000. Dutta explained that there are different nuances of difference between students and working professionals. While parents pay for students, professionals take up the rent cost themselves and therefore look for a better value proposition.

In terms of the student housing business, the company claims to have grown 7x last year and this year, it claims to have 3x Y-o-Y growth.

Short for community living, coliving has become a rage among the rising young workforce for tech companies and startups in metros. The rising demand comes on the back of the need to solve issues with the traditional rental model — inconsistent rents, high brokerage, nosy landlords and rule imposition.

As per a combined report by Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) the Indian coliving market is expected to increase at a strong CAGR of 17% in the next five years where Delhi NCR will constitute nearly 40% of the potential market opportunity by 2023, followed by Mumbai at 25%. It added that realised demand in the top seven cities stood at about 94K beds in 2018.