New start-up launched by group of youth in Canada helping international students who work or study abroad subletting their place during the summer months.
Summer sublets really are a pain and every year, students who are leaving town need to find subletters in a short period of time, which involves a lot of time spent on showing the place and communicating with potential subletters, which can result in no success.
This is why FlatBook, a Montreal-based service launched by three friends who are all 22 years old or younger, has been quite successful. FlatBook offers the students to pay their rent while they are away, guaranteed.
The way it works is quite simple – the students need to apply their place online, submit photos and get accepted by FlatBook.
“Once they press the submit button, and we accept the apartment, they have nothing to do anymore,” said Lucas Pellan, Flatbook’s COO to the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. “We’ll come in with an interior designer, professional photographer. We’ll clean the apartment, and spend the next few months finding people to rent it.”
In order to make profit, FlatBook will find tenants who aren’t afraid to pay a lot of money for a comfortable place in a city of their choice. This means that FlatBook gets the place from a student and rents it out to professionals who travel with family or for business.
In result, an apartment that costs around 1,000 USD per month can be rented out for 200 USD per day by FlatBook. The good news for the subletters is that even if FlatBook fails to find tenants, it will still pay the rent.
FlatBook is running in 18 cities in North America in Europe and is constantly expanding. The ambitious project is not only a problem solver for everyone faced with the summer sublet dilemma but also an innovative business.
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