Mark Anderson
Student Rents is an Accommodation Advertising Portal in which we connect students with their perfect home whilst in further education.
As a diverse platform we aim to provide property for all, ensuring that everybody feels welcomed with verified and trusted property providers, allowing home-to-home comfort. To ensure students find the perfect home whilst studying.
We aim to achieve this by providing an easy to use platform, a large selection of accommodation and reducing the amount of time users spend on various platforms, whilst improving the user experience.
Tell us about yourself?
Student Rents was an idea by myself whilst trying to find the perfect home during my time attending college.
After I dropped out of college to pursue Student Rents, I then spent time researching the market and finding pain points in the industry that I knew I could improve, partnering with co-founder Grant MacCusker has helped push Student Rents to achieve great success and we both have our sight on becoming the Uk’s number one student accommodation advertising portal.
I myself gained business experience whilst still in school in which I had a passion for shoes and realised quickly I could profit off of it, so I began doing my research and found how to buy stock for a lower price and turnover for a profit, I done this for around 3 years and gained valuable customer satisfaction skills and business experience that I still use to this day.
As the business grew and attracted a larger volume of customers, I sold the business in 2021 and moved on to further my education.
After researching the market about student accommodation, I realised there was a large gap in the market for providing an end-to-end platform.
My journey took me on various different websites for researching properties, document uploads, compliance, property verification, and finding potential flatmates, along with searching for honest, verified agents. Student Rents has an end goal of being the “Uber of the student rental market”.
With being a young entrepreneur, I needed mentorship throughout the journey, partnering with my co-founder has brought experience and clarity to my vision helping me through the fundamental stages of a start-up whilst allowing me to run and grow the brand as I had envisioned.
Whilst we are actively in the process of starting a crowdfunding raise, valuable investment will give student rents an exciting future and by doing this we will strive to provide students with the perfect home.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
I would advise myself to get out there and attend as many events and networking opportunities as possible to grow my connections and develop friendships with like minded individuals.
What problem does your business solve?
When i was in my studies and looking for my own accommodation i would struggle looking for the perfect home, some websites made the process harder than necessary and hard to get in contact with agents and landlords.
Student Rents solves this by having an easy to use website navigating you straight to the landlord and agents.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Student Rents was inspired to help young people find there perfect home and make the process of moving in and out of accommodation as easy as possible.
Students are already facing a stressful time going to a new city and meeting new friends etc so why should they have to face the stress of something as simple as finding a comfortable, convenient place to live.
What is your magic sauce?
The magic sauce here at Student Rent is vital to our growth and success, and there’s no tricks here.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Student Rents is finalising a seed round via crowdfunding, whilst also bringing on new employees to join our growing community to help promote and create content for our social media.
We look to grow the business to every major city in the UK and hope to explore international growth as well.
Our main goal is just to keep the growth as successful as it has been and help match as many students with there perfect accommodation as we can.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
One of the biggest challenges i have faced so far is my age, being a young entrepreneur is always going to be hard as you may be seen as inexperienced and immature, along with the fact startups don’t get enough support as they should making it extremely hard to have any sort of success for upcoming businesses.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
As a growing student community we are always open to new students joining and providing valuable input to help improve the lives of students seeking accommodation.
Here at Student Rents we are always looking to connect with fellow young entrepreneurs and startups as well as sophisticated investors.
