In June, co-living startup Truliv raised capital at a ₹356 Cr valuation, Zostel launched its first hostel in Madhya Pradesh, and Union Living is adding 1,000 new beds in Mumbai

Rent, Share, Repeat

Think back to the stories our parents told us about their early years spent in cramped rooms in Kota, bunk beds in tier-2 towns, or hostels tucked behind coaching centres in Old Rajendra Nagar. 

There were shared bathrooms, home-cooked meals from the landlady’s kitchen, and corners where ambitions took root. Everything was shared because that was the only way forward. 

Living with strangers, adjusting to house rules, and making do with what was available became the unsaid rulebook for first-time migrants.

This was India’s original form of alternate living.

Long before anyone used words like “co-living,” thousands, if not millions, had already lived it through PGs, hostels, and rented rooms passed down through referrals and handwritten notes. 

These spaces were mostly built around affordability, access, and a kind of trust between the tenant and the landlord.

PGs and hostels provided the much-needed backbone to youth migration, that is, affordability and availability. 

Cultural habits also played a role. 

Living with strangers, adjusting to limited privacy, and following house rules became normalised experiences for millions. The idea of “my own space” was not a priority as it was more about survival, savings, and proximity to colleges or offices.

Even as India urbanised, the structure of this early rental economy mainly remained unchanged. 

Word of mouth, local newspaper ads, or a phone number pasted on a noticeboard was all it took to find your next room. Deposits were arbitrary, paperwork was rare, and facilities were basic. 

But for a generation with low expectations, this model worked.

These early experiences somehow laid the foundation for India’s future appetite for managed living. The behaviours shaped by PGs, such as sharing space, adjusting with flatmates, and paying rent monthly, created a mental model that made the leap to organised co-living easier later on.

In a way, PGs were India’s original subscription housing offering a set of services at a fixed monthly price, long before anyone used that term. While the model lacked polish or scale, it succeeded in making shared living culturally acceptable.

By the early 2000s, as more students and job-seekers moved into Tier 1 cities, the demand for such shared accommodations only grew. But the gaps were becoming clearer: no standardisation, no safety protocols, and zero customer experience.

Yet, despite all its flaws, this system did one thing right. It made renting accessible for those with limited financial means. 

In doing so, it became the starting point of India’s alternate living journey.

Listings Go Global

Change started taking shape in the late 2000s.

Fueled by new digital platforms and mobile connectivity, consumers worldwide wanted to maximise underutilised assets in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis.

In this era, peer-to-peer accommodation took centre stage and Airbnb was born.

Pivoting from a quirky “air mattress” idea, Airbnb became the online marketplace for every kind of stay. 

“The hospitality giant without property” clocked 8x growth, surging to 800K nights booked in the second year of operations as budget-conscious travellers flocked to cheaper, more personal stays.

Airbnb’s staggering numbers (As of March 2025)

What began as an experiment in leveraging spare properties had sparked a global transformation. 

P2P accommodation, where individuals sublet their vacant properties directly to guests, ushered in a new economic and social norm for millions.

India’s step into the global movement saw the rise- and fall- of Stayzilla, “the Airbnb of India”. The pioneer aggregator of homestays and budget accommodations in India, Stayzilla, enabled travellers to book stays directly from local hosts, bypassing hotels.

Stayzilla had listed more than 18,000 homestays spanning 1,200 towns but failed to bridge the trust gap. As India urbanised, we weren’t ready to trust technology with our sense of ‘home’. 

Millennials, techies, and young professionals, all products of rising mobility and dissolving joint families, no longer wanted to settle for “good enough.” They craved privacy, predictability, and above all, trust and convenience backed by technology.

The numbers tell the real story. With more than 40% of Indians expected to migrate to urban cities by 2030, an unprecedented wave of demand for flexible living is knocking on the doors.

While P2P accommodation began evolving rapidly, it still remained nascent.

While Airbnb entered India in 2012 and Stayzilla was born, the penetration was very low. Platforms faced hurdles, including low host trust and a lack of awareness. There was also a traditional preference for hotels and guesthouses.

P2P accommodation found its niche among adventurous or budget travellers. The bulk of the activity in this space was concentrated in informal, unbranded spaces.

The period saw early signs of growth but limited mainstream adoption, highlighting the need for platform trust, local adaptation, and consumer education before scale could be achieved.

While co-living wasn’t new, it had started to receive recognition for what it always was.

First Draft of Co-Living

In early 2015, a rapidly urbanising India saw many young professionals and students migrating to cities like Bengaluru, Delhi‑NCR, Pune and Mumbai in search of jobs. The economic survey estimated average annual labour migration close to 9M.

Away from home, they found themselves grappling with deceptive landlords, exorbitant security deposits (often six months equivalent of rent or more), and the uncertainty and friction of finding roommates or safe accommodations. 

For example, in Bombay’s lower Parel, a young techie might shell out multiple months’ rent plus bribes, only to end up in a dingy paying‑guest (PG) with no internet and irregular electricity.

A small wave of startups, including Zolo Stays, NestAway, and CoHo sensed an opportunity and started to build a solution that would productize rental housing - living spaces sold with a service overlay for convenience, safety, and community. 

These operators leased or took over entire buildings or partnered with landlords via revenue‑share models and transformed them into branded residences on a bed‑per‑month model. Tenants would get electricity, housekeeping, Wi-Fi, app-based check-in, and predictable service standards that felt like a curated experience. 

Members could move in with a minimal deposit and begin living, instead of negotiating endless guarantees. Moreover, these buildings were deliberately located close to IT parks, university clusters, or transit hubs, mainly in the top 10 cities with the highest in‑migration. 

Zolo, founded in 2015, grew rapidly to span 10 cities and serve over 50,000 customers by 2019. Young professionals could choose a Zolo room in a fully managed flat, complete with meals, twice-weekly cleaning, and tenant events. 

CoHo, also conceived in 2015, by Uday Lakkar and Amber Sajid in NCR, marketed itself as ‘Dorm 2.0’, converting rental apartments into standardised rooms with shared common areas, Wi‑Fi, recreational zones, and app-based concierge services.

NestAway started as a home rental marketplace offering furnished homes with zero brokerage by cutting the middlemen out. However, by mid-2019, they created a student-living brand called ‘Hello World’ to deliver co-living experiences across ~15 cities. 

With new entrants trying to shake up the rental market, along with working professionals, investors too started warming up to the co-living vibe. Zolo raised a $5M Series A round by the end of 2016. NestAway raised a $1.2M seed round in 2015 and quickly followed that up with $10 million Series A the same year. 

Meanwhile, a handful of early elderly‑living experiments led by players like Antara Senior Living began piloting more assisted, gated living ecosystems for seniors, combining housing with wellness and healthcare support, sowing early seeds of organised senior co‑living.

Co‑Living 1.0 had emerged: tech‑enabled, branded housing for young urban migrants, blending private space with safe, communal living and providing an escape from the hassles of landlords and brokers.

Student Room Upgrades

The problems that plagued working professionals migrating to urban centres also applied to students moving to India’s college towns. Millions of Indian students moved cities for education, to stay in dimly lit, cramped hostels or mom-and-pop PGs that offered little comfort or privacy.

With approximately 34 million students pursuing higher education and 11 million of them migrating each year for college, this was a significant problem. Only 20% of the student housing was served by university hostels.  

Startups sniffed a market opportunity and began reshaping the game. 

Stanza Living, YourSpace, and OxfordCaps were among those to offer a better alternative that provided peace of mind and predictability in addition to a clean bed.

Stanza Living launched with just 100 beds in Delhi’s North campus in 2017 and scaled rapidly to 45,000 beds across 10 cities, including the likes of Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai by 2019. 

Rents ranged between Rs. 5,000 - 25,000 depending on the real estate and facility, but the dorms offered everything under one roof: chef-designed meals, laundry, high-speed Wi-Fi, daily housekeeping, biometric access, CCTV, and onboarding through apps like the ‘Stanza Resident App.’ 

These co-living locations mirrored a mini campus vibe, providing convenience to students but also putting the parents at ease, with safety and hygiene. Stanza offered community programs like sports events, festival celebrations and movie screenings. 

The market was large enough for multiple players. OxfordCaps and YourSpace, offering a similar proposition, also started in Delhi and gradually expanded to increase beds in other major cities with a student population. They too leaned on design, a community-first approach and tech-enabledment.

Money followed the initial success, and the model gained interest from both investors and developers. Post initial seed rounds, Stanza and OxfordCaps raised Series A rounds totalling $18M.

Bigger rounds followed as they expanded to more cities, with Stanza reaching around $500M later in the decade.

Real estate developers began seeing student housing as a stable-yield asset class, similar to malls or office parks. Unlike generic rentals, with very low switching costs, these facilities with added services and community support created stronger customer stickiness. 

Contracts were tied to academic terms, including digital payment and feedback loops, raising the switching cost and turning these buildings into full-stack ecosystems. 

Scale did not come without challenges. Some Stanza facilities had food quality complaints, hygiene issues, opaque extra charges and difficulty getting deposits back. Despite these, the broader value position, in comparison to low-quality PGs, remained compelling.

By bundling housing and community, the student housing model was maturing into a viable alternative living model. It provided a capital-efficient model to scale, and more importantly, reshaped the expectations of student accommodation. 

Holidays Outgrowing Hotels

By the end of the first decade of the millennium, Indian travel habits were shifting.

Domestic tourism was growing at an extraordinary pace, recording over 1 billion domestic tourist visits around 2010, which crossed over 2.5 billion in 2024, according to the Ministry of Tourism. 

Families, groups of friends, and even solo travellers began looking for more than a standard hotel room. They wanted private spaces where they could cook, gather, and feel at home, even while away from home.

Globally, platforms like Airbnb already changed how people stayed on vacation. 

In India, they began to find their audience. By 2019, Airbnb had more than 50,000 listings across the country and had partnered with several state governments to promote homestays. 

A family travelling to Goa could now rent an entire villa with a pool. A group heading to Manali could book a wooden cottage on a hillside. These were not just places to sleep. They became part of the trip itself.

Homegrown players saw the opportunity. 

OYO expanded into homestays and villas through OYO Homes, offering fully furnished holiday houses. Vista Rooms built a portfolio of over 800 luxury villas across 50+ destinations by 2024, catering to travellers who valued privacy, comfort, and exclusivity. Saffron Stays also emerged with seed funding, becoming a potential destination for travellers looking to get into staycations

The reasons for this shift were clear. Hotels, especially for larger groups, could feel restrictive. Vacation rentals offered more freedom: guests could cook together, stay up late, and use the property entirely as their own. 

Social media accelerated the trend. 

An Instagram post of a scenic villa with an infinity pool could inspire the next booking. Design, view, and location began influencing decisions as much as price.

Property owners also started to see the financial potential. A second home, which had been unused for most of the year, could now generate a steady income. Platforms helped professionalise this market with high-quality photography, centralised booking systems, and verified listings, making it easier for owners to reach a broader customer base.

The vacation rental market in India, once fragmented and seasonal, began to take shape as a structured business. 

According to industry estimates, it was valued at over USD 2B in 2019 and was expected to grow at double-digit annual rates as travel rebounded post-pandemic.

By the end of the decade, vacation rentals had secured a clear place in India’s travel market. They had become a mainstream choice that blended the comfort of home with the excitement of travel, fitting perfectly into India’s growing appetite for unique, personalised stays.

Empty Rooms

In early 2020, the alternative living sector faced its biggest challenge yet. As India went into lockdown in March, movement between cities came to a sudden stop. 

Offices shut down, colleges switched to online learning, and domestic travel fell to a fraction of normal levels. The impact on co-living, student housing, and vacation rentals was immediate and severe.

Occupancy rates collapsed almost overnight. 

Co-living operators that had maintained 80 to 90% occupancy in 2019 saw this drop to below 30% by mid-2020. 

In student housing, the decline was even sharper. With over 35M students suddenly studying from home, organised hostel operators were left with empty buildings for months.

Vacation rentals saw bookings fall by over 70% in the first six months of the pandemic.

Smaller players could not withstand the shock. Without steady rental income, many shut operations, returned properties to landlords, or exited the business entirely. 

The sector, which had been in an expansion phase, shifted into survival mode.

Larger, well-capitalised operators tried to adapt. Some co-living providers converted vacant properties into quarantine centres or temporary accommodation for healthcare staff. Others offered flexible stay options, single-occupancy upgrades, and rent relief to hold on to tenants. 

Student housing operators extended fee waivers and maintained skeletal services for those few who could not return home. Vacation rental hosts repurposed properties for longer-term stays targeted at remote workers.

The crisis also changed what people valued in shared housing. Before the pandemic, the appeal of co-living came from community events, shared lounges, and networking opportunities. 

During COVID-19, the focus shifted sharply to privacy, hygiene, and safety. Demand grew for private rooms, regular sanitisation, and touch-free services. Operators who could demonstrate strong health protocols were able to regain some trust.

By late 2021, as travel resumed and offices began calling staff back in phases, occupancy levels started to improve. 

Recovery was uneven, but the operators that survived emerged leaner and more focused. They had streamlined operations, cut unprofitable properties, and invested in technology to manage tenants and services more efficiently.

The pandemic became a dividing line for the sector. It ended the era of rapid, unchecked expansion and marked the beginning of a more cautious, disciplined phase. The empty rooms of 2020 left behind lessons in resilience, adaptability, and the need to build housing models that could withstand shocks to the system.

The Rent Now Comes With Expectations

By 2022, the alternate living sector was finding its footing again. 

Travel had resumed, offices were reopening, and students were returning to campuses. But the market they were coming back to was not the same as before. 

The pandemic had reshaped what people expected from a rental home.

Privacy, hygiene, and personal space moved to the top of the list. In surveys conducted by property platforms in 2022, more than 70% of urban renters said they preferred private rooms over shared ones, even if it meant paying higher rent. 

Demand grew for secure, tech-enabled entry, in-room workspaces, and the ability to customise services. Tenants wanted both flexibility and safety in equal measure.

Co-living operators responded by redesigning spaces. 

Many added gyms, wellness areas, co-working zones, and improved food services. Technology became a standard feature rather than a bonus. 

App-based systems for payments, maintenance requests, and community communication were now expected as a given. In some properties, biometric access replaced traditional locks, while others introduced fully contactless move-ins.

The shift was equally visible in student housing. 

Operators such as Stanza Living and YourSpace invested in better study zones, recreational facilities, and on-site counselling. Parents, who had grown more cautious during the pandemic, now looked for proof of safety protocols before committing to a facility. This willingness to pay for a higher standard of living pushed the average rent for organised student housing up by 15 to 20% between 2021 and 2023.

The market was also consolidating. 

Smaller operators who had survived the pandemic found it challenging to compete with larger, better-funded players. Several exited the market or sold their inventory to established brands. 

Real estate developers began showing greater interest in the sector, launching built-to-rent properties explicitly designed for co-living or student accommodation. For example, in 2022, multiple top-tier developers in Bengaluru and Pune began dedicating entire towers to managed rental housing under revenue-sharing arrangements with operators.

This was also the period when senior living began to see a real push. 

Communities targeting the 55-plus demographic have started integrating healthcare, concierge services, and recreation into their monthly packages. The Indian senior living market, valued at around USD 3B in 2022, was projected to grow at over 25% annually through the next decade.

The rental home had moved beyond being just a place to stay. For a growing number of people, it was now an all-inclusive living service. 

The decision to rent was more than just about location or price. It evolved to ask for the experience, trust in the brand, and assurance that expectations would be consistently met.

Owning the Lease, Not the Building

In the years after the pandemic, operators in the alternative living sector began rethinking how they expanded. 

Before 2020, many scaled by taking large properties on long-term leases. While this gave control over supply, it also created high fixed costs. When demand collapsed during lockdowns, these costs became difficult to sustain.

The response was to shift towards asset-light models. 

Instead of fixed leases, operators increasingly entered into management contracts or revenue-sharing agreements with property owners. 

The owner kept the asset, while the operator managed it, marketed it, and provided services in return for a share of revenue. This reduced capital risk and allowed quicker expansion. 

By 2023, over 60% of the co-living supply in major Indian cities was being run under these models.

Many operators adopted a hybrid approach, keeping a smaller portfolio of leased flagship properties while shifting the bulk of supply to managed arrangements. 

Developers began dedicating entire towers for managed rentals, especially in Bengaluru and Gurugram, with operators running them as fully serviced buildings.

The move to asset-light models also pushed operators to diversify income beyond rent.

Co-living brands introduced tiered service packages for premium housekeeping, meal plans, co-working access, and leisure facilities. Partnerships with gyms, mobility providers, and event organisers created additional revenue streams. Industry estimates suggest that ancillary services contributed 10 to 15% of revenues for leading operators by 2023.

Student housing providers followed a similar path, bundling rooms with exam preparation support, wellness programs, and curated events. Vacation rental platforms evolved to offer guided tours, private chefs, and adventure activities, increasing the value of each booking.

This evolution brought alternate living closer to hospitality. The focus shifted from filling rooms to maximising yield per customer. Operators became service providers first and space managers second.

A New Kind of Renting Is Taking Over

In India, owning a house was once seen as the final step in life’s journey. For millennials, it is still the case.

But for many people today, mostly Gen-Z or under 30-year-olds, that idea no longer holds the same meaning. Especially in cities, younger Indians are choosing to rent. It is not that they have no choice or can’t afford it; the idea is that renting suits their lifestyle better.

Renting gives more flexibility as jobs are more mobile, families are smaller, and home prices have grown far beyond reach in many urban areas.

This shift is creating a new way of living. 

More people want homes that are easy to move into, fully managed, and free from the usual stress of finding brokers or dealing with landlords. This is how subscription-based housing is growing. 

Just like mobile plans or streaming apps, people want to pay one fixed amount each month that covers everything. Co-living brands such as Zolo and Stanza Living already offer Wi-Fi, furniture, cleaning, and customer service all bundled into one monthly fee. 

In some cases, tenants can move from one city to another within the same network without paying new deposits or doing fresh paperwork.

Student housing is also changing fast. 

Operators like Good Host Spaces and YourSpace offer well-managed facilities that include food, laundry, internet, mental health support, and community events. 

These are not just basic hostels. Most have transformed into full living experiences. Parents prefer them because of safety and quality. Operators benefit from stable, longer-term bookings. 

Senior living is also following this path. Communities like Antara and Columbia Pacific offer monthly or annual plans that include healthcare, food, assistance, and recreation. For the elderly, this means independent living with help always available.

This model is also attracting investors. 

India’s commercial REITs have already reached INR 1.2 lakh crore in asset value. Residential REITs could be next. Co-living alone is expected to grow from around INR 40 billion in 2025 to INR 180 to 200B by 2030. Student housing remains underdeveloped, with organised players serving fewer than 5% of the country’s 35 million students.

For this future to work, policies must improve.

The Model Tenancy Act, 2021, is a step in the right direction. It suggests standard rent agreements, limits on deposits, and quicker dispute resolution. But most states have not yet implemented it. Rules on service tax for bundled offerings and guidelines for elderly care are still unclear.

What is happening is an actual shift in thinking. 

It is a shift in how India lives, moves, and plans for the future. Renting today is no longer about affordability alone. It is about access, trust, and ease. 

If the ecosystem of regulation, capital, and consumer experience grows in the right direction, subscription housing could become a part of India’s urban infrastructure just like roads, banks, or telecom. 

It may not replace ownership, but it can offer something different: the ability to live well - on your terms.

Writing: Parth, Jayanth, Rajiv, Vishal, Aviral Design: Omkar