2016YourOwnRoom starts. The founding read was a mismatch: graduates pouring into the four to six Indian cities where the work is, against flats lying empty, unsold or half-built. The question came from his last job, working with CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield. If they built billion-dollar businesses managing commercial space, why was nobody doing it for homes. Stanford is where he stopped taking one conventional step after another.
2020COVID sends 70% of the tenants home. Revenue dropped steeply, the cost base did not move, and the company was 80% co-living and 20% family on about $1.3 million raised. His verdict is that carrying on with the same model would have collapsed it.
2020-21Families trade up while singles stay away. Only about half the departed singles came back. Families, whose whole life now ran through the flat, volunteered another ₹10,000 a month to go from two bedrooms to three, and the good-quality inventory he had refused to compromise on was simple to repurpose. The mix settled at 50-50.
End 2021Organised co-living stands at 210,000 beds. The Colliers number Vishal opens with, against a forecast of 450,000 by 2024.
2021-22Revenue grows about 70%, and the metric changes. Property management became a line of its own, and Prabhat dropped the bed count for three numbers that describe whether an operator owns anything: assets under management, order book and utilisation.
2022A million square feet, and a pre-Series A. Roughly 400 properties in Bangalore and Pune worth about ₹400 crore, annualised revenue near $1.5 million, an order book close to $10 million and a pipeline of $40 to 50 million. New partnerships bring in owners and developers holding 100 to 200 properties each, on five and seven year terms.
2026The ten-year view. Six years down and four to go, he wants five to ten million square feet under management, a ₹100 to 250 crore revenue business, built by folding in smaller operators who have no platform, process or accounting. A new city needs two or three people and possibly no office.
