Ohana Aims to Ease Summer Subleasing
If you’re a student renting off-campus, when summer hits, your bank account sweats more than you do. Students often pay grueling Santa Clara rent for residences they don’t occupy for long months of internships. Few resources exist to ease the burden.
Founded by two college students facing the same issue, Ohana is a service that allows students to list their rooms to a specific market of subleasers.
“We experienced the problem of suffering through Facebook and Craigslist scams to find housing for our internships at Apple and McKinsey, while we were paying for an apartment we did not need on campus,” said co-founder Ezra Gershanok. “Our goal is to help college students save millions in rent by subleasing to interns coming to their city for the summer.”
Gershanok estimates that Santa Clara students spend upwards of a combined $13 million on unused housing each year.
Ohana fills the housing market gap, strategically positioned between the short-term rentals offered by Airbnb and the longer-term leasing options provided by Zillow. The company has been able to land partnerships with Wells Fargo, eBay, NVIDIA and other major San Francisco employers to help those companies’ interns find housing.
“As a large population of Santa Clara students live off-campus but leave over the summer, for winter break or to study abroad, along with the fact that many interns around the world come to the Bay Area and need a place to stay, this service is perfect for our community,” said first-year Juliana Roesner, Growth Strategy Leader of the Ohana team at Santa Clara.
On the startup’s online platform, students can list or look for rooms in six major cities encompassing ten universities. Each listing provides detailed property information, introduces current roommates, and showcases available bedrooms. Ohana prepares a customized sublease agreement in coordination with the landlord for final approval between parties.
“After being a part of Ohana and talking to upperclassmen, the issue at hand seems like a large concern for the masses,” said first-year Kyle Chew, Ohana’s Santa Clara Director of Partnerships. “Students are worried about having a place to stay for their summer internships or losing thousands of dollars from a place they are not staying in.”
Chew and Roesner, along with fellow first-year finance major Ryan Pool, make up the startup’s Santa Clara campus growth strategy team. Ohana has established ten of these teams on college campuses nationwide, each with the goal of finding subleasers for 250 students. If all goes according to plan, Ohana will save college students across the country a total of $10 million.