Abode, a startup founded by University alum Adarsh Dayalan, aims to streamline the housing search for students by consolidating apartment listings and leasing data onto a single platform.
“I originally started Abode as the go-to platform for students to find housing in Champaign,” Dayalan said. “We’re just on a mission to continue making the student housing experience as seamless, social and student-centric as possible while also delivering value, driving occupancy for property owners and leasing groups.”
Abode’s purpose is to ensure the search-to-sign process is as simple as possible for students at the University, according to Dayalan. Features like roommate matching, booking apartment tours and signing leases are all available on the website, essentially setting all the platform’s users up for success, including students, leasing companies and groups.
“Our mission is to have Abode in every college campus town in the U.S.,” Dayalan said. “I’m, right now, very focused on the specific niche of U of I because I want to capture this entire market and build it out so that we have a scalable business model in one college campus.”
Before creating Abode, Dayalan said he saw a huge opportunity in the housing market at the University. With the help of student response and particular mentors in the Lean Launchpad course, he made his vision a reality.
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“Every three years, students would go through the housing process; everybody would complain about it, especially freshmen because it is a very chaotic, fragmented and convoluted process,” Dayalan said. “I talked to a lot of students about the housing process, not saying I was doing a startup, but really seeing how their housing process was, and over half of them had a very strong emotional response of something going wrong.”
Whether the problems stemmed from people dropping out of roommate groups, lease agreements not going through or leasing companies’ issues with manual efforts in housing students at their properties, the housing process was laborious and stressful on everyone’s end.
“I just coded a really quick listing website with all the apartments at U of I in one place, posted a bunch of Instagram stories and it got over 100 users in just a couple of days,” Dayalan said. “It had a pretty lengthy sign-up process as well, so that validated that students are interested.”
Karthick Kumar, junior in Engineering, was looking for candidates for his sublease and found Abode to be the most effective method because of this student verification process.
“I thought it was a great way to find someone other than Facebook because, with Facebook, anyone can see my posting about (my sublease),” Kumar said. “(Abode) made you enter a school username or school email, so it’s trustworthy.”
Kumar was able to find potential candidates for his sublease within a month through Abode. Because most of the communication was either through his phone number or email, it streamlined the process of finding potential tenants.
“In other ways of advertising, like Snapchat, people swipe up, but you might not get anywhere with them,” Kumar said. “On Facebook, if you want to find something, you have to keep scrolling through all the people and postings, and you can’t separate people who are looking for roommates or subleases. With Abode, it was easy to post my sublease and add my own separate section.”
As the head of business development at Abode, Alex Sevastianos uses his experience in real estate to continue growing the company in ways he knows how to: prospecting, cold calling, direct outreach and social media marketing.
“We’ve partnered with Yugo Champaign so far, and then Pacifica on Green, HERE and West Quad,” Sevastianos said. “Also, Smile — they helped us because them showing interest in our company gave us confidence to keep continuing on.”
Sevastianos reaches out to apartments and leasing groups to develop partnerships with them. It strengthens their platform for students and creates meaningful relationships, specifically with Smile Fairlawn Student Living.
“The founder of Smile is an Illini Angel,” Sevastianos said. “They are angel investors that invest in entrepreneurs at University of Illinois, so someone like that is perfect to help guide us in the right direction because he is an entrepreneur and knows the space.”
Dayalan has always been interested in building, and as a computer science graduate who loved coding and wanted to provide for students, forming Abode combined his passions for programming and commitment to student life. Being in a community of founders dedicated to creating new things has allowed Dayalan to grow as a person and as the CEO of his startup.
“The best way to learn how to start a startup is to actually do it,” Dayalan said. “Even though I had tried to learn as much as possible beforehand, you still make those mistakes, and you feel the pain of making those mistakes, and that really emphasizes the value of doing the right things. You’ll never have the right answers, and you’ll never stop making mistakes, so just keep doing it.”
