Going abroad as a student can become really frustrating when it comes to finding a place to stay in the foreign country you go to. I had to experience that myself, when I came to Chile …
No fun at all! But you don’t have to face that challenge anymore, because also Mariano Kostelec and his team (Leo Lara, Miguel Amaro and Ben Grech) realized that this is indeed a problem for many students and therefore created Uniplaces.
Developed in Portugal at the end of 2011 and 100% bootstrapped, Uniplaces is an online platform for finding rental housings near universities, but not only in Portugal, but now also in Chile.
And given that Santiago has an uncountable amount of universities, imagine how convenient it would be to be able to find university accommodation so easily.
Uniplaces offers the largest availability of rooms and apartments for students near their universities by connecting directly with the respective landlord in order to schedule a meeting to take a look at the properties.
Features
Landlords can easily list their properties, such as simple rooms, whole apartments or residences etc. on the Uniplaces platform, attracting local as well as international students who are in need of a place to stay.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3BAkGt_LwE[/youtube]
Searching for a place is as easy as this: Start typing in a city (in Portugal or Chile) and click on one of the suggestions the search bar will display.
After having chosen a part of the city, a list of available places to rent will be shown, giving you a detailed description of the facilities and the equipment available in the room, either in English or Spanish.
For those who don’t know the city at all, it is useful that you can also simply type in the name ofthe university (e.g. “uchile”) and Uniplaces will show you all the places to rent close to the University of Chile.
And, even better: Each entry also includes a ton of photos to get a better idea of what to expect as well as a list of all the universities nearby!
Collaborations with local universities recommending this platform especially to their exchange and international students but also to students that come from other regions in Chile help Uniplaces a lot to expand and become known more and more.
Expansion in progress!
In only 3 months Uniplaces had already listed about 5000 accommodations in Portugal and so far also secured exclusive partnerships with 25 local universities.
After having won several competitions in Portugal, they even got accepted into the Startup Chile program, which allowed them to expand their platform to Chile. Obviously they felt so comfortable in Chile that they opened an office here and their up-to-date the platform includes over 1500 listings in Chile.
Moreover, they raised a seed round of 200.000 EUR that will be used to develop the platform more in Portugal and Chile, but they are now also planning to start expanding the platform to other countries soon, starting with Brazil.
Continued successs, guys!!
