OYO Living for India’s Youth and Growing Population

Kavikrut, Chief Growth Officer, OYO Hotels & Homes speaks to Realty Plus about OYO’s newest offering OYO Living. He describes the reason for venturing into the rental space and the goals the company looks to achieve in the New Year.

1. What was the aim when foraying into the rental space?

At OYO, we are committed towards creating world class stay experiences worldwide and are willing to invest in each and every form of real estate and convert them into quality living spaces. OYO Living was conceptualized based on the feedback and demand from our valued customers and asset owners. We saw this as a tremendous opportunity and decided to leverage our hospitality experience to offer a first of its kind end to end fully managed living experience. Given our existing scale of operations, technological prowess and a nationwide network of asset owners, we can acquire and operate OYO Living properties at lower costs. This advantage is directly available to our customer making our, pricing extremely competitive. With prices as low as INR 7999, OYO Living promises a hassle-free living experience that comes without the liability of long-term financial deposits or upfront furnishing costs.  

2. What is the target audience OYO Living is looking to cater to?

With OYO Living, we are targeting the always-on generation of millennials and young professionals looking for fully managed housing accommodations, who look for ‘when one stays at home’ feeling during their stays. Our robust design and data science team, has helped us understand this need and has curated OYO living into inspiring, artsy, modern, comfortable, and adaptive.   For instance, since most millennials consume entertainment on phones, OYO Living residences have TVs only in the common areas and not in the rooms. Or, a lot of people who're living away from home want to be in touch with their parents and friends. So, we have created phone booths or Skype corners in all our homes.  

3. Amenities provided by OYO Living to the customers

Each OYO Living accommodation is equipped with essential amenities like Wi-Fi connectivity, television, regular housekeeping, power backup, CCTV surveillance, and 24/7 caretaking. Apart from that, it also offers space for reading books, work-from-home desks, yoga and meditation zones, Facetime and Skype corners and so on. Most importantly, there is a feeling of living at home which is an essential aspect for the target audience of this segment.

4. What makes OYO Living different from the general renting process?

Finding a good house is never easy as there is a huge trust deficit across the entire experience cycle of finding and moving into a rented home. From deciding where to stay, finalizing a place to rent, engaging with landlords and brokers, finding roommates to arranging for the high deposits, the whole experience of accessing housing when moving to a new city, whether for your first or second job is always challenging. While most players in the market as focused on solving only a few parts of this problem, we identified these gaps and issues and turned them into an opportunity with OYO Living.   The brand proposition of OYO Living is such that we take care of everything that comes with shared housing. A customer has to only move in with their bags into a private room that’s part of a larger shared home or apartment. The design of OYO Living is wholly modelled on the needs of millennial guests seeking a homely atmosphere. It is ideally suited for the changing housing needs of India. This category will offer an end-to-end managed, comfortable, high-quality living experience that eliminates the hassles of finding, accessing and managing common housing. These residential units are designed keeping in mind our audience so they can connect to the space.  

5. Any additional information you would like to share?

Currently, we have over 100 properties with 5,000+ rooms across Noida, Gurgaon, Bangalore, and Pune. We plan to expand to the top 10 metros by the end of 2019 with over 50,000 beds under our belt. Our idea is that in a year from now, when you travel to any of the cities, you should be able to pick a mall or office building or train or metro station and find an OYO Living property close by. Eventually, we aim to make OYO Living a preferred housing option for India’s young and growing population.   Within a short span of time, OYO Living has witnessed nearly 90% occupancy with 95% of the folks renewing their stay and choosing us as the preferred stay option. We will continue to deliver quality-assured experiences to our guests in the months to come.   ****