Our team’s new feature, HousingHero, is centered around creating a streamlined process for off-campus apartment hunting for students. In designing this streamlined process, we are assuming that the current housing process for students takes an excessively long time and a more efficient replacement is needed. In order to test this assumption, we interviewed 15 college students from around the United States. The geographic breakdown was as follows:
- Three students from the northeast
- Five students from the midwest
- Three students from the southeast
- Four students from California
When conducting these interviews, we wanted to determine how many steps (on average) were involved in the housing process and how many applications were typically submitted. We also wanted to discover how long the process takes from beginning the housing search to actually moving in.
The responses were as follows:
- When determining the average number of steps, the answers drastically varied as some students went into greater detail than others. However, there were still some valuable insights from this part of the process. Some students stated that they wasted time browsing housing options that were not within their budget. Our streamlined process aims to filter housing options to only include relevant, affordable housing for a particular student, so this data confirmed our assumption that our process would be more efficient than the current one.
- On average, the time between starting the housing search and actually signing the lease was 2.67 months. The average time between starting the housing search and moving in was 7.6 months.
- On average, students submitted just over 3 housing applications before being accepted.
While conducting these user interviews, a new potential market/issue arose. Interviewed students had to begin their housing process over seven months prior to moving in, meaning they are beginning the search around December/January. One student claimed that “freshmen don’t stand a chance” in the housing process, as the “nice affordable housing” fills up before they are even admitted to the school. This opens up the opportunity to target first-year students, who typically are excluded from the best housing options simply because the process must begin so early. Although this was not the assumption being tested in this experiment, it is useful to know that an even smaller market exists within our target audience.
