A Covid remodel for India’s co-living industry

Occupancy levels are slowly climbing back up to pre-Covid levels but co-living platforms have found that the old way of indiscriminate expansion is no longer possible. The pandemic has forced them to take a hard look at how to work efficiently with what they already have

At last count, India’s co-living space had around 250,000 beds across the country; supply was expected to grow 5X by 2023

Companies are prioritising survival over expansion—they cut discretionary expenses to make up for the increased spending on sanitisation

To draw business back in, they’re tracking work-from-home schedules of major companies and wooing working professionals

But there’s also a sense of muted optimism; companies are cautiously planning to add more beds and discovering niche demand

In March 2020, Bengaluru-based co-living startup StayAbode was thriving. It had 96% occupancy across its 2,000 beds nationwide. Monthly revenues had touched Rs 2 crore ($270,000). Unfortunately, that would be as good as it got. The pandemic hit, and StayAbode’s slide backwards was shockingly rapid.

In two short months, its actual occupancy rate dropped to a dangerously low 15%. A good chunk of rooms were still booked, keeping official occupancy levels high, but the properties resembled ghost towns. And a month later, in June, it was acquired in its entirety by Hello World, the co-living arm of Bengaluru-based rental management platform NestAway.

AUTHOR

Bhumika Khatri

Bhumika covers e-commerce, consumer internet, and everything startup for The Ken in Delhi. In her previous stint at Inc42, she spent two and a half years writing about a breadth of startups and topics. A commerce graduate, Bhumika completed her postgraduate in journalism from the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, Bengaluru. You can reach her at [email protected]

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