Housing start-up Placio is helping students find a home away from home

Providing accommodations for students pursuing higher studies outside their hometown has always been a pain for institutions as many a time they fail to meet the demands. Placio, a Noida-based student housing start-up, is helping bridge this supply and demand gap.  

The start-up was founded by Rohit Pateria, a chartered accountant, and  Ankush Arora, a post-graduate in hospitality, in 2016. The startup’s digital platform curates modern living spaces, fully-furnished rooms, private rooms and personal apartments near localities and university campuses. 

Incubated at the Amity Business Incubator, Placio recently raised $2 million in pre-series ‘A’ round from Prestellar Ventures, a Singapore-based private equity fund. It had raised Rs 6,000,000 in two rounds of seeding in 2016 and 2017.

“Placio has been able to address the needs of the rapidly expanding college student population of India by providing safe, clean and amenity-filled housing with a strong community and technology backbone. The company has been able to grow its footprint so far with limited resources, and we hope to provide the company with capital and our in-house platform for its next phase of exponential growth,” said Rabindra Shrestha, managing partner of Prestellar Ventures.

Started as a marketplace for students’ housing property, it entered the manage property model in 2017.  Placio launched its first set of 18 properties with 1,000 beds, clocking a GMV (gross merchandise volume) sales of Rs 90 million. It plans to enhance the number of beds to 7,500 beds in 2018-2019.

The company works on two business models — flagship and assurance. Under the flagship model, Placio takes properties on lease and manages them. Placio, this year, plans to add 3,000 beds in its flagship model.

The assurance model, a partnership model, allows owners of the properties to operate under the Placio-defined standardised operating procedures. Its operating margin is 15 to 20 per cent for the assurance model and 20 to 25 per cent for the flagship model.

The total number of beds in campus housing and private hostels currently available in India is close to 6.1 million. There is an immense untapped market with 50 million students studying in colleges and universities and 60-65 per cent of them studying outside their hometown. 

With the funding now in place from Prestellar Ventures, Placio intends to capitalise on this potential market. The company is chasing the unorganised student housing in India, which is estimated to be a $50-billion market.

“The higher education institutions have a limited capacity and they cannot offer housing facilities to all. Their facilities are also not modern. They could not meet the expectations of the millenials. For example, the Delhi University could not serve even 5 per cent of the demands. Students are bound to live in accommodations outside campuses which are largely fragmented and not well-managed. We are organising the entire space by offering modern facilities, with a focus on cleaning, food and security,” said Pateria.

By 2019-20, the company seeks to bring 200,00 beds under management and clock a turnover of nearly Rs 1 billion.  By 2022, it aspires to create a capacity of 100,000 beds with a GMV of Rs 15 billion. 

The company has a presence in five locations — Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Lucknow and Indore. In 2017, Placio acquired a company, Click a Home, founded by Atul Kumar Singh. The founder of the acquired company became part of Placio. It is also eyeing southeast Asian and south Asian countries. “Our balance sheet will hit profit by 2020,” said Pateria.