Most rental sites start from an apartment and bend it to fit a student. Roost starts from the campus.
Roost is a marketplace for student housing, organised around a campus rather than a postcode — walk times to the gate, per-bed pricing, and an inquiry pre-loaded with a move-in term and budget. It had to work as a no-account directory and an operator console.
Most rental sites are apartment marketplaces bent to fit students. I built Roost to start from the campus instead — walk and bike time to the gate, move-in term filters, not a date picker, per-bed pricing for a community or per-unit for a house. A shortlist saves without an account, and one inquiry carries the term, group size and budget to the operator.
The operator side runs the opposite direction: a building is seeded into the directory before anyone claims it, and sign-in is a passwordless six-digit code to a work email, not a form to fill in twice.
- 01Walk and bike time to the main gate
- 02Move-in term filters in place of a date picker
- 03Per-bed pricing for communities, per-unit for houses
- 04One inquiry with the term, group size and budget
- 05Claim-and-reply console — floor plans, pricing, leads
