Student housing app to launch in Coventry
An app which streamlines the process of finding student housing and has grown into a multi-million dollar business is set to launch in Coventry in the next academic year.
Housr CEO and co-founder Harry Panter spoke at the first Coventry and Warwickshire Champions event for 2025 where he announced that students from Coventry University and the University of Warwick would soon be able to access the app.
Housr aims to simplify the process of securing student housing, enabling people to rent a home in just three clicks.
Harry launched the business with CTO and co-founder Ben Clayton six years ago while studying at the University of Manchester after they both struggled to secure student housing.
After realising that the traditional method of landlords paying to list properties on Housr would not work when up against long-standing competitors, the co-founders devised a platform to list homes for free but make money from students also using the platform to pay their bills – with a portion of this revenue also going back to the landlord.
Housr is now beating Rightmove for student lettings, the founders say. It is used in eight cities across the UK, and will be available in Coventry for the next academic year. The app also launched in the USA in December 2023 using a different method of partnering with universities which pay Housr to be their official housing app, and will be used in 10 states by the end of this year.
Harry said: “We launched Housr after realising that everything was decentralised, there were emails here and phone calls to letting agents there, and we wanted to do something about this.
“Because we were building a student solution, it went hand in hand with studying at university as we were solving our own problem.
“We’ve raised around $4 million of funding to date which we’ve used to grow the business and we’re about to close off on a $10 million investment round.
“Locally, we have around 80 per cent of the market in terms of student rental space in Birmingham, we’ve just launched in Leicester and we’ll be coming to Coventry for the next academic year.
“My goal is to build a billion-dollar business and then sell – then you never know, I might even come back and invest in some Nuneaton-based businesses.”
More than 140 delegates attended the January Coventry and Warwickshire Champions event held at Coventry Transport Museum.
The event also heard from Christina Okorocha and Rumbi Mupindu, two of the three founders of digital talent management and digital PR agency Vamp, who met at Coventry University.
They gave an insight into their work managing some of the biggest and most popular black influencers, and championing culture, while working with major clients including Disney, Universal Pictures, Netflix, Spotify, Beats headphones, Gymshark and Arsenal FC, to name a few.
The final speaker was Gavin Ashe, managing director of Kite Packaging, who told delegates how the business, which began its life as a Warwick-based start-up in 2001, has grown to turnover well in excess of £170 million in 2024.
He spoke about how Kite Packaging has embraced new technologies over the years, weathered a financial crash and a pandemic, and now has a national presence with 700,000 sq ft of warehouse space across a number of UK sites and is looking to expand further.
Craig Humphrey, CEO of CW Growth Hub Group, of which Champions is a part, said: “Our first Champions event of 2025 was a fantastic example of the wide range of businesses which are launched by those from across our region.
“All of our speakers gave excellent insights into their businesses, and it was fascinating to hear about everything from multi-million dollar funding rounds and the power of influencers, to growing a business from a small start-up, to becoming a major employer in our area.”
