College students are in a peculiar situation when it comes to finding housing. You don’t want to be too far from campus, but too close may be out of your budget. You’re probably looking for a room, not an entire apartment, and don’t have much money anyway. And then you have to think about parking and transportation. Where are you going to park and how are you going to get to campus?
The Austin startup Comfy, which runs the site RentComfy.com, has made the lives of many college students all the more simple.
Comfy’s co-founder, Jordan Wright.
“Unlike non-student housing, student housing is booked months in advance,” said Jordan Wright, the cofounder of Comfy. “ApartmentGuide.com and sites like that are built for people who are going to be leasing in the next month or two. They’re not built for people leasing 12 months or six months or even three months from now. That’s one of the reasons why targeting college students has been such a great opportunity.”
On the Comfy website, students can create profiles and browse apartments and houses targeted directly to them, based on a useful algorithm. Leasers can also look at individual’s profiles and send one (only one) email if they’re a good match. The service is available for students at every college across the country.
The company formed in 2012, in Provo, Utah, and now has three full-time employees in the Austin area, as well as nationwide student ambassadors. Comfy raised $600,000 in seed-funding within the last nine months, using the money to market, expand the team and “nail the solution to the student housing problem 100 percent,” Wright said.
Thankfully, Comfy has no plans of leaving the Austin area.
“We were choosing between the San Francisco Bay area, Boston, New York City and here,” Wright explained. “Austin attracted us from a business perspective because of no income tax. We get to keep 13 percent more of our money. There’s also a good tech scene here and it’s a good place to raise a family. We’ve loved it here ever since.”
If you’re a student looking for housing, check out RentComfy.com.
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Photos: Rebecca L. Bennett, Brave Bird Photography.
