Assignment 4- Forming an Opportunity Belief

1)    Beginning Point: I believe there is an opportunity in the housing market in Gainesville. Specifically, the rental property industry. Nearly all apartment, condo and house leases are minimum a year. I believe there should be a rental property offering four-month leases with express renewals to current residents.

2)    Describe Your Belief: The unmet need at hand is students are looking for a housing option that caters to their constantly moving life. Students will frequently have stress and anxiety arise from the difficulty of subleasing an apartment they have a lease for while they are either studying abroad, working an internship or outside of Gainesville for whatever reason for a semester. Students have an unmet need of flexible apartment leases that allow them to lease on a semester basis to insure they will not be liable to pay for rent in an apartment they are not living in. College students in Gainesville are the specific group that has this need. This is a need that has always existed. As rent prices have increased in Gainesville and more students are traveling to different cities and states for internships because of the access to online classes, this need has increased significantly in the past several years. In order to meet this need now, students will book full year leases while knowing they may only be spending four months living in the apartment and instantly start looking for a sub leaser for when they are not going to be living there. At this point, I am 90% sure that there are no rental companies in Gainesville offering 4-month leases based on the university semester schedule.

3)    Identify the Prototypical Customer: The prototypical customer is a University of Florida student that is not in their first year. This includes students in graduate school as well as students ranging from their sophomore to senior year. This customer is intended on studying abroad in a foreign country during her spring and summer semesters but plans on taking classes on campus during the fall semester. This student is looking for an apartment she can lease strictly for the fall semester, rather than having to find a full-year lease and either pay for two apartments or find someone to sublease it from her.

4)    Iteration No. 1: For my first prototypical customer, I interviewed a girl named Sara Setian. Sara is a PR student who studied abroad in Australia last spring. Over a year before her trip began, she had known she was going. Based on our interview, Sara was stressed very early on at the thought of her living arrangement for the school year she was going to Australia. She knew right away she would not be able to afford paying for two apartments at once. As soon as Sara had decided she was going abroad, this became a problem for her which she had severe difficulty solving. In her eyes, she had a few options of things she could do to solve her problem. The first option was to find someone she can sublease from for the Fall semester only. While Sara knew this would be the easiest solution, Sara was concerned of the reliability of subleasing from a stranger and did not want to live with strangers she did not know at all. Her second option was to sign a lease to live with her friends and attempt to find someone to sublease from her when she left. She concerns here were that she did not know if she could reliably find someone, she did not know if she would be able to get her full rent covered by the person subleasing and she did not know how her roommates would feel about this. Ultimately, while Sara expressed adamantly that she felt there was no good solution, she decided to sign a lease with her friends. Sara got lucky and was able to sublease for the spring semester to a girl in her sorority, but she was still responsible for paying a small portion of her rent because of their agreement. Additionally, Sara was responsible for paying her rent for the summer when she was not residing in her apartment. Sara believes the one-year lease system offered by most housing complexes in Gainesville does not make sense and should be adjusted to accommodate the schedule and lifestyle of their main customers, college students.

5)    Identify the Prototypical Customer: A prototypical customer is a student that is graduating during fall rather than spring. They have a job set up and plans to leave Gainesville as soon as they graduate in December.

6)    Iteration No. 2: Carlos Torano is a University of Florida student majoring in Accounting currently getting his masters degree in the UF accounting program. After this semester, Carlos has one left and will be graduating in December of 2020. Currently, Carlos is struggling to find a housing arrangement that will not require him to commit to a year-long lease that will potentially have him paying rent for an entire year. “It is so stupid, why would I ever sign a year-long lease in a city I know with full certainty I will only be living in for another five months? They should offer month to month leases or shorter leases; they know who their customers are and they know what their schedules are like. It is wrong for them to lock you into these leases because they know you are desperate and there are no other options.” When asking Carlos if he knows of any other options or what he plans on doing, he explained to me that if he were to try to sublease it would be difficult because there are not many available during the fall. Most students study abroad in the spring and that is when you can find the subleases. He believes he will most likely sign a year-long lease and hope to find someone planning to sublease his apartment. Carlos also has a unique option that many students do not have. As a member of an on-campus fraternity, he is able to live in his fraternity house and sign a semester-based lease. However, for Carlos this is not an option. As a masters student, Carlos strongly believes he will not be able to focus or get proper rest in the disturbing environment a fraternity house sometimes breads. At this moment, Carlos does not know what he is going to do still. He feels there is no real solution to his problem and he suspects he will be dealing with this fiasco until he graduates, which frustrates him because he should be focusing on his difficult coursework.

7)    Identify the Prototypical Customer: A prototypical customer is a summer student enrolled in the full summer semester, or summer C, living in an apartment that they are moving out of in the fall to live somewhere else for that semester. Frequently these leases end before the semester ends and the new ones start after leaving them homeless for the last few weeks of classes.

8)    Iteration No. 3: Param Mehta is a Business student studying Management at UF. The past summer, Param suffered a severely inconvenient event caused by apartment complexes in Gainesville’s poorly designed lease schedule. Before knowing he would be taking summer classes, param signed a lease for the 2018-2019 school year. He signed a one-year lease, from august 1^st of 2018 to august 1^st of 2019. While he did not expect to be there for the summer, he knew he would not be able to find a lease that ended in May when he would leave Gainesville for his summer vacation. During spring semester, Param decided he would take 6 credits during his summer C semester. This is a semester which at the time ended roughly around august 10^th-12^th (He didn’t remember the exact day). The clear issue at hand is Params lease ended August 1^st. “So I signed a lease that started august first, even though fall classes didn’t start until the 16^th and obviously the apartments know that. Paid 16 days of rent for nothing. Then, had to sleep on my friends couch for the last two weeks of school because my lease ended. I was livid.” Param was forced to move onto the couch of a friend of his who had renewed his lease and was not moving. He was very frustrated with this inconvenience and could not believe the apartments do not have more consideration for their students considering it is their primary, if not only customers. Param said he was fully willing to pay another half month of rent if it meant he could stay and he was declined. He believes an apartment that offered leases based on semesters rather than the calendar year would do very well in Gainesville.

9)    Reflect: These three interviews shed significant light on the problem at hand. When I first came up with this opportunity, I did not even consider the concept of students graduating in fall or summer students being sent to the streets. It is a bigger problem than I expected which makes me even more confident in the opportunity. Additionally, I was very fearful while interviewing these three individuals that there already was an obvious solution to this problem. I felt like there must be; how could there be such a major issue that everyone deals with. Why do they all just accept it without protest? Why is nobody creating a bigger issue about this. It is borderline immoral for all the apartment complexes to band together and agree to only offer one-year lease, almost no students will actually spend a full year in an apartment in Gainesville anyway. However, it seems as though there still is not any option, and creating an apartment that is actually focused around students and caters to their specific schedule seems like something that would be very popular in Gainesville.

10) Summarize: In summary, all of the original opportunity is still there. There does not seem to be any other option for students and there seems to be countless scenarios were semester based leases would be preferred to year-long leases, even if they are moderately more expensive for students. While I originally thought there was only several scenarios that this issue comes up, I realized there are countless issues and it is coming up all over for all different students. Listening to personal individuals specific problems that are likely very similar to things faced by others has helped me shape the opportunity into a specific plan that will create convenient and affordable housing for students in Gainesville. It is very important for entrepreneurs to adapt based on customer feedback. Customers want to see companies growing and getting better. The way to do so is to listen to your clients. By learning what they like and what they want, you can continue to dominate the market and be the favorite player in the game, rather than fearing having a new player come in and steal your market share because they listened to customer feedback.