BY DEEPAK ANAND,
CEO & CO-FOUNDER OF Housr, a premium co-living space
GURGAON| 29 OCTOBER 2026
The hospitality conversation in India usually starts with the hotel room: how many keys, which brand, average day/night fare, but a growing share of people moving through our cities are not checking out on Thursday. An engineer moving to Bengaluru for a two-year assignment, an analyst shifting to Hyderabad, a manager establishing a new team in Gurugram. They need somewhere to live for a year or three, and the market hasn’t quite been built for them.
The gap between a hotel and a home
A hotel is designed for stays measured in days; a long-stay rental assumes a commitment measured on a larger time scale, and professionals relocating for work are the prime target audience for these long-stay properties. A hotel stretched over months is expensive and impersonal, while a traditional lease means buying furniture, paying deposits, setting up utilities, negotiating with brokers, and depending on a landlord whose standards can vary.
These professionals want the comfort of a home without the hassle of setting one up: a furnished space, dependable housekeeping and maintenance, predictable billing, and the flexibility to move when a project ends or a role changes. Increasingly, they weigh service reliability, location and flexible terms as heavily as the rent itself.
A fragmented market with room for operators
India’s rental market is still quite informal, made up of individual owners, local brokers and unwritten expectations. Quality, pricing and service vary from building to building and property to property. This fragmentation is the opportunity for professional operators, who can bring three things the market lacks:
- Standardisation: consistent specifications, safety norms and response times.
- Service: maintenance, housekeeping and, where relevant, food, delivered as a system rather than a favour.
- Transparency: clear pricing, defined terms and documented processes.
The scale of the gap is visible in Colliers’ estimates. Demand for organised co-living beds stood at roughly 6.6 million in 2025, against organised inventory of around 0.3 million. Colliers expects that inventory to approach 1 million beds by 2030, lifting organised penetration from about 5% to over 10%. Even on that trajectory, most demand will still be served informally.
Co-living is one segment, not the whole story
Co-living, meaning private or shared rooms within a managed property, with common spaces and bundled services, is one format within a wider category of managed living. The category also includes serviced apartments, long-stay studios, employer-leased housing and professionally managed rental flats.
Different professionals have different requirements. A first-job engineer, a mid-career manager relocating on a project, and a senior hire between homes will not choose the same product. Treating co-living as the answer to all of them would repeat the mistake of treating “hotel” as a single product. As with hospitality, the category will likely settle into tiers, from economy to premium, each with its own customer, price point, and service standard.
How GCCs are reshaping accommodation needs
The clearest driver is the expansion of Global Capability Centres. According to the Nasscom-Zinnov landscape report, India had 2,117 GCCs operating 3,728 centres in FY26, employing about 2.36 million people, up from roughly 1.9 million in FY24. The Awfis-Zinnov study found that GCCs took 44% of 20.7 million sq ft of office leasing across India in the first quarter of 2026. Bengaluru and Hyderabad together accounted for 67% of GCC leasing demand.
Every one of those square feet will be filled by people, many relocating from other cities, simply because GCC work centers on engineering, data and AI roles; hiring tends to be concentrated in specific corridors and in batches. Employers then face a practical question: where do new joiners live in their first months? A list of brokers is not much of an answer. Corporate hubs increasingly need vetted, ready-to-occupy accommodation near the workplace, and analysts have noted that GCC employees and relocating managers in office-heavy corridors tend to prefer self-contained, managed formats.
Office expansion, in other words, is also a housing story, and the demand lands in a few specific micro-markets rather than evenly across a city.
What this means for hospitality
For decades, hospitality has chased the business traveller who visits the office. The larger and steadier opportunity may be the workforce that sits inside it. These residents stay longer, return less to a booking platform and value consistency over novelty.
Hospitality brings real strengths to this: operating discipline, housekeeping systems, food and beverage know-how, guest-experience training and asset management. Some hotel companies have already begun moving into rental housing, and Lemon Tree Hotels’ joint venture with Warburg Pincus is one example.
The economics are different; however, the prices per night give way to monthly rentals, and prime-corridor lease costs can pressure margins. Success depends on high, stable occupancy, tight cost control, safety and compliance, and the harder task of building community in a place where people live rather than visit. Operators who treat this as a copy of the hotel model will struggle. Those who treat it as a distinct product with hospitality-grade operations are more likely to succeed.
None of this diminishes the hotel. But as India’s offices expand, the definition of hospitality may need to widen with them, from serving people who visit a city to serving those who move there to build their careers.
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