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Mayank Pokharna · Founder, Everything Coliving
13 years in coliving · Reviewed by the Everything Coliving team
India is one of the largest and fastest moving shared living markets in the world, and consulting here means working across a wide spectrum, from student and working professional PGs to branded coliving and managed accommodation at real scale. I help operators and investors build models that survive India's intense price sensitivity and operational complexity rather than ones that only look good in a pitch deck.
The Indian opportunity is genuine, but it is also crowded and often thin on margin, so the difference between a durable business and a cash burning one usually comes down to unit economics, operating discipline, and honest positioning. My work centers on those fundamentals.
With 13 years in coliving I bring a global pattern library, but in India I apply it carefully, because much of what works in Europe or the US does not translate to Indian rents, expectations, or labor structures.
India's shared living market spans a huge range: informal PGs and hostels, organized student housing near universities, and branded coliving aimed at young working professionals in cities like Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and the NCR. Each segment behaves differently on price, tenure, and expectations.
The market has seen strong demand, heavy competition, and several cycles of aggressive expansion followed by consolidation. That history is instructive: many operators grew faster than their unit economics justified. A sober entrant learns from that rather than repeating it.
Demand is structurally strong because of migration to cities for work and study, but the customer is deeply price sensitive and has many alternatives, including informal options. Winning is less about novelty and more about reliability, value, and operations.
Regulation relevant to shared living in India varies significantly by state and city, and can touch on rental and tenancy rules, local licensing or registration for lodging type uses, safety requirements, and how commercial versus residential use is treated. I do not give legal advice and always direct clients to qualified local counsel for their specific state and city.
In general terms, the items worth verifying early are how your tenure arrangement with residents is characterized, what local permissions or registrations a shared living operation requires, and how landlord agreements are structured so you are not exposed if a head lease ends. These are questions to answer with local professionals, not assumptions to carry over from another market.
Structurally, many Indian operators run on leased or managed stock rather than owned assets, which makes the head lease terms and the relationship with property owners central to risk. I spend real attention on making sure that structure does not quietly put all the downside on the operator.
The core Indian coliving resident is a young professional or student who has moved to a large city, wants a furnished, managed, hassle free place to live, and is highly conscious of monthly cost. Convenience, safety, food, and reliable basics like power, water, and internet often matter more than design flourishes.
Because the customer is price sensitive and mobile, small differences in monthly cost and in everyday reliability drive both conversion and retention. An operator who nails the boring fundamentals will beat one with a beautiful lounge and unreliable operations.
I push clients to be specific about which resident they serve and at what price point, because trying to serve students, early professionals, and premium tenants in one building usually produces a muddled product that wins none of them.
In India the operating model is the business. Margins per bed are thin relative to Western markets, so scale, occupancy discipline, procurement, food operations where offered, and labor efficiency decide whether a portfolio makes money. A model that ignores any of these tends to bleed.
Food is often a defining feature and a defining cost. Where meals are part of the offer, the kitchen operation can make or break both resident satisfaction and margin, so it deserves the same rigor as the real estate itself.
I also push clients to grow only as fast as their per site economics allow. India has repeatedly shown that expansion funded by capital rather than by profitable units eventually corrects. Sustainable growth beats headline room counts.
Engagements typically begin with unit economics: I want to see, or build, an honest per site model that shows whether a location makes money at realistic occupancy and pricing, before anyone talks about scaling. If the single site does not work, the portfolio will not either.
From there I help with resident definition, product and food strategy, head lease and owner structuring questions to take to local counsel, and an operating playbook that a lean team can actually run across many sites. The emphasis throughout is durability, not just growth.
I work as an independent advisor. In a market where growth stories are easy to sell, my value is often in slowing a client down until the fundamentals hold.
Worked example
Picture an operator running around 2,500 beds across several cities (illustrative figure) and raising capital on the strength of its growth rate. The headline story is expansion, but the per site model has never been stress tested at realistic long run occupancy.
In an engagement I would rebuild the economics of a representative single site: true occupancy through the year, real food and staffing costs, head lease escalations, and churn. Suppose that honest model shows the average site making only a slim margin, or losing money once a few beds sit empty, at an assumed sensitivity of a 10 percent occupancy drop.
That reframes the whole strategy. Instead of adding beds, the priority becomes fixing the unit model, renegotiating weak head leases, and tightening operations, so that future growth compounds profit rather than losses. In India that shift has repeatedly been the difference between operators that survive consolidation and ones that do not.
Every recommendation is grounded in Everything Coliving’s own research for India.
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