Interview: The 24-year-old tackling the ‘toxic’ student rental sector
NewStart speaks to Hannah Chapette, the Co-Founder and CEO of HYBR, an award-winning platform supporting first-time renters as they navigate finding student housing.
Many people have experienced the stress of securing their first student rental home. For most, having only left their families months before, the experience of dealing with landlords, choosing housemates, and signing their first rental agreement can be daunting and mystifying. Driven by her experience as a student at the University of Bristol, Hannah Chapette launched a new platform aiming to support young renters and landlords and improve their often-difficult relationships.
As the platform continues to expand into new cities and partner with new companies, NewStart caught up with Hannah to discuss the issues facing the student rental market and why she is so passionate about solving them.
For readers who are unfamiliar with your company, can you please briefly explain what you do?
Yes, so we are a shared accommodation platform that supports first-time renters. We are aware that as a student it can be a very intimidating process, not knowing your budget, dealing with a lot of money for the first time, and finding a place to live, while also dealing with university stress and trying to find housemates. We wanted to create a bespoke personalised service to help students deal with all of the information and understand their rights and obligations as a tenant.
That’s great, and how many cities are you operating in at the moment?
We are now in eight cities across the UK, including Bristol, Lincoln, Liverpool, Lancaster, Exeter, Sheffield and Bath. We are rapidly expanding and getting used to these new cities to help as many students as we can to find properties and support them throughout the year.
What motivated you to launch a student-centric rental platform?
When I was a student, I was really fascinated that every year there is a constant cycle of students that go through the same ordeal and waste their time in disputes with landlords and agents. There is just so many problems constantly and it’s a really toxic relationship, and I didn’t understand why. But obviously there is an imbalance of power: you have landlords, their letting agents and their legal teams versus students by themselves with no one to defend and protect their interests. I thought that if students had the support and felt like there was a platform that they could trust, it would help restore that balance and help them enjoy their time at university without the stress of renting.
What do you think are some of the biggest problems in the student rental market at the moment?
I’d say there is a big problem with rising rents – it’s no longer affordable for students to find accommodation options. Every year, rent goes up by sometimes £15 per person, and as that carries on increasing, it means that Bristol is getting very similar to London prices which is crazy.
The second issue is the fact that student renters are sometimes as young as 18 years old, so they are really young, and renting can have a lot of legal implications. You can find yourself in very difficult situations with no one to go to for support. There is also a lack of concentrated marketplaces where you can find all accommodation options. Many agents just protect the landlord’s interests, so as a student you don’t really know where to go.
One of the things that is unique to student renting is the requirement for guarantors, and there has been a lot of criticism of it in terms of being difficult for students who are from low-income backgrounds. What is your opinion on it, and does your company require them?
It is massively problematic because a lot of students either do not know their birth parents or they might not have a good relationship with them. Their parents also might not be employed, or they might be international and not have anyone in the UK, and the replacement services that exist are frankly too expensive. If you come from a low-income family, you probably don’t have a lot of money to spend on what is basically an insurance fee. Having guarantors is free and it should be free, so I don’t think the standard replacement services are good enough.
We are currently building our own solution to bring to the market. What we do right now is we encourage all students who are struggling to find a guarantor to come to us and we can build them up a profile. We ask if they have got a review from anyone they have rented from in the past, a course teacher or someone at the university, or from a part time job – anyone that can vouch for them as a good character and someone that is trustworthy, and we use that to build them a rental passport. Then we look at whether they have a student loan or a grant and that builds them a profile that says they are a good renter and they should not have to pay six or 12 months rent in advance or an insurance fee.
I’ve heard you say in other interviews that the root problem as far as you are concerned is communication between landlords and students. I was wondering why you think communication and trust is so bad between those two different groups and how you are hoping to repair it?
Good question. I think that it’s because of the press a lot of the time. There is such negative press around trashing landlords reputations, so it means that students are on the backfoot, very defensive and very scared, and it means that as soon as anything goes wrong, they’re the first to jump down the landlords throat, sending these very aggressive keyboard warrior emails. That means that even if you are the best landlord in the world, you can’t help feeling agitated and feeling like you’ve put a lot of effort into this property and this group do not appreciate it at all and are causing problems. And it just means that from the get-go, it’s a difficult relationship and there’s a lack of understanding and that causes so many issues.
Whereas if you go about it right, using HYBR and our advice we can put together a template email for you so you can learn how to communicate in a clear and polite manner. Then you can go to the landlord when there’s a problem with electricity for example, and the landlord will say, ‘I’m sorry that’s awful, let me help you,’ rather than attacking the landlord and sometimes not getting our message across very clearly.
It all comes back to school behaviour in terms of just treating people with decent humanity and respect, and it can go a long way. I also think that for students feeling that they have a support system around them and being access that HYBR platform, customer service team, and lots of educational content and informative blogs etc., then the students should hopefully feel like they have other options. Hopefully that should help relationships, set them up on the right notes and have clear expectations between the two.
Lastly, you’ve recently partnered with Coliving – what is the plan to expand your business, and do you have any further collaborations or plans for the future?
Definitely. We’ve got a lot of new partnerships – we just started publicly announcing them. So what we’re doing is opening up supply options. We know that it’s difficult for students to find accommodation options for short term tenancies and long-term tenancies, so we no longer just offer HMO properties which are from the typical landlords you’d expect, but we’re opening up to purpose built accommodation and co living and other types of schemes, in large HMO portfolios, etc. So you have a range of prices and types of accommodation options for all types of students. We have a lot of exciting partnerships in the pipeline. So you can find somewhere super cheap, and maybe not as nice or somewhere with an ensuite and a huge living room. If that suits you better. Really we just want to provide all types of options for all types of students.
Photo Credits: HYBR and lilartsy