Creating the Next Big Thing in Toronto’s Rental Market
After graduating from Schulich, Arnab Dastidar (MBA ’19) found it difficult to find affordable rental housing in the downtown core. With the help of classmate, Gaurav Madani (MBA ’19), they decided to launch a co-living property management startup, SoulRooms, to solve the problem that others are experiencing as well.
The duo included “Soul” in their company’s name, because they wanted to redefine this industry by making people see their service as a community of homes owned by real people. To date, the majority of the tenants are young professionals.
They were able to get their company off the ground with the help of Zahra Properties, who provided resources and investments, and the knowledge they gained from their Schulich MBA.
“From the exercise of coming up with a name to understanding our core value proposition, the lessons we learned during our MBA are applied each day,” shared Madani. “We recently went through Professor Joshi’s marketing decks, before designing a major advertising campaign that will go live in subway cars in the first week of January 2020.”
What makes them stand out from their traditional counterparts is that they have integrated technology at every stage of their operations, in order to induce efficiencies and gather actionable insights. “We will be launching a full-service mobile app, called Inside SoulRooms, so that our tenants can report on maintenance issues, participate in community events and earn loyalty points for engagement,” revealed Madani.
“Much like what we found at Schulich, at SoulRooms we are trying to create a network of diverse individuals with shared values forming meaningful relationships.”
Dastidar and Madani are anticipating to house 2000 individuals by the end of 2021, by partnering with prominent home developers and reaching out to their network of investors and incubators.