With the rise in housing prices and lack of available homes, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for students to find housing near their universities. For the fall 2023 semester alone, the Daily Tar Heel reported that approximately 600 students at UNC Chapel Hill were waitlisted for on-campus housing. This meant that many had to scramble to find off-campus housing on short notice.
This issue has led students to search for housing on social media—specifically through Facebook Marketplace, which, according to most rental sites, is among the most popular ways for people to rent out their homes. Because of its easy in-app visibility and the ability to speak directly to the leaser, students often turn to it.
But according to David Hao, the co-founder of Chapel Hill-based Roomadillo, there are many issues that come with listing a rental on Facebook, especially on the side of the renter.
The first time Hao wanted to sublease his Chapel Hill place out while he was going to live in California, he thought he had a reliable applicant to take over. Instead, they backed out on him two days before he left Chapel Hill, leaving him with no choice but to leave the room empty—and be out $1000. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon occurrence.
“When you have a bunch of user-generated listings from college kids, as well as scrape listings from Facebook, you suffer from issues of having inaccurate listings and a bunch of scammers who prey on college kids,” Hao said.
That’s why Hao, along with his co-founder Manas Takalpati, has designed a managed marketplace for second-hand housing, dedicated to making the search for housing as flexible and effortless as possible. With a similar style and experience to Zillow, Roomadillo empowers students to comfortably create their own rental listings and rent from other students.
Roomadillo currently only shares listings around Georgia Tech, NC State and UNC Chapel Hill (both co-founders being recent UNC Chapel Hill grads).
In their previous experiences scouring other student housing rental websites, Hao and Takalpati realized that most aren’t user-friendly or appealing to already-confused college students. Additionally, Hao recognized that most students in this current generation are not on Facebook to begin with. So existing solutions on the platform could feel foreign.
Quick Bits
Startup: Roomadillo
Founders: David Hao and Manas Takalpati
Founded: 2020
Location: Chapel Hill
Website: roomadillo.com
Funding: bootstrapped
“Your average [student] signer doesn’t have residential real estate experience and a lot of times they may not even understand the terms of their lease,” Hao explained. “We want to bring in tools that are gentle and feel honest. We want to give tools that are available to people who are professional homebuyers and democratize them to make it feel as comfortable and safe for students.”
According to Takalpati, in most subleasing situations, the renter and rentee will often sign leases off through an unofficial Google Doc and manage rent payments through Venmo.
Roomadillo creates a safe and secure hosting platform where official leases can be signed and upheld, and official card payments can be processed. The Roomadillo team will even take professional photos on behalf of the sublease so that students don’t have to rely on stock or inaccurate images.
“When AirBnb first came out, I was obsessed with its mission of tying travel, culture and housing together,” Takalpati said. “After I joined Roomadillo, those ideas built on living somewhere for more than a few weeks, but not an entire year, got me excited to work on making housing more flexible and easier for people to get out, just explore and not be tied down to a singular place.”
Roomadillo has been fully bootstrapped and is currently running off its own revenue. Hao and Takalpati are looking to raise a pre-seed round and ask any interested readers who are also experienced in marketplace advisory to contact david@roomadillo.com.
