I have been silent for the last few weeks. Something personal happened; my grandfather passed away, and I practically grew up with him, so I was taking a bit of time off, and in parallel, the team was working to launch something that can change the way this industry works. Twelve years in this industry, and I have watched operators fail for two reasons. Only two.
Empty beds. And an operation held together by spreadsheets.
I know both from the inside. At Simply Guest I ran 500 units across 17 locations in one city, on master leases, with zero advertising spend. Filling rooms was a distribution problem. Running them was a systems problem. Nothing on the market solved either one properly for shared living, so we built our own.
Everything Coliving now ships both of them. BookMyColiving handles the front of the funnel. JumboTiger handles everything behind it.
Here is what each one does and who should actually use it.
The distribution problem nobody wants to name
Most operators fill rooms in one of three ways. Pay a portal a commission. Pay an agent 15 to 30 percent of the first month’s rent. Or bid on Google for a keyword that gets more expensive every year.
All three have the same flaw. Someone else owns the relationship with your resident.
BookMyColiving is my answer to that. A forever free global marketplace for coliving and shared living operators. Free to list. Free to receive inquiries. Zero commission, no booking fee, no tier you have to upgrade into.
200+ cities. 80+ countries. Every inquiry goes straight to you, not through us.
The obvious question: how is it free?
Because BookMyColiving is not the business model. Everything Coliving is. The marketplace is the front door to the newsletter, the research, the podcast and the directories. I would rather have the entire industry listed and reachable than take 12 percent off a hundred bookings and leave everyone else invisible.
That is the whole answer. There is no upsell waiting six months down the line.
The city pages are the real asset
Every city page carries median rent, average internet speed, cost of living index, best months to book, and neighborhood breakdowns. That is researched data, not scraped filler.
This matters more than it used to. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini where to live in Barcelona for three months, the model pulls from pages with real structured data. Thin listing pages do not get cited. Researched city pages do.
If your property is on that page, it is part of the answer. If it does not, your competitor is.
And here is the opening most operators will miss. We have a full research live for cities where we have no inventory yet. Lisbon is one. Whoever lists first in those cities takes the traffic for the entire page.
Built so residents actually trust it
Every listing is reviewed before it goes live. Every operator profile is verified. Only verified resident reviews are published. Residents message you directly.
That verification is deliberate. A marketplace full of ghost listings trains people to distrust every listing on it, including yours.
Listing takes about two minutes
Register as an operator, add your property, go live. You get a dashboard, analytics, and enquiries in your inbox.
→ List your space, forever free
Now the harder problem
Leads are only worth something if the operation behind them holds.
Generic property management software was not built for shared living. Per-bed inventory breaks it. Shared living licensing breaks it. PBSA bulk intake, BTR amenity booking, flex pricing tiers, B2B corporate channels, housemate matching, all of it breaks it.
So operators do what operators do. They patch the gaps with spreadsheets and five to eight separate vendors, and pay for all of them.
I built and exited a PMS before this. The lesson I took from it: every operator says they want the same software, and every operator runs their buildings differently. Software that forces you into its shape costs more in workarounds than it ever saves in licence fees.
JumboTiger is the anti-SaaS PMS. You are not buying a login to a shared platform. You tell us how you run your buildings, in any format, a call, a doc, a spreadsheet, a screen recording. We build your PMS around it, on your own dedicated instance.
What already exists
Twenty-six capabilities, built and battle-tested across live deployments:
Booking and onboarding, with applications, digital contracts, e-signatures, and deposits
Payments and rent collection, multi-gateway, dynamic pricing, utilities, accounting sync
A fully branded resident and listing website
Inventory and occupancy tracking down to the bed, with vacancy forecasting
Community and events, social feed, polls, engagement analytics
An AI layer doing ticket triage, document processing, predictive analytics and voice agents
Communications, maintenance, housekeeping and task routing
Multi-property configuration, roles, compliance and white-label branding
Integrations hub, plus open API
Real-time operations dashboard. Owner and investor portal with per-asset reporting. Staff app for housekeeping and work orders. Every one of those screens comes from a live deployment and gets rebuilt in your brand with your workflows.
Thirty days, not twelve months
Custom software normally means six to twelve months and a seven-figure conversation. JumboTiger goes live in 30 days because the foundations are already built. The build is customization on top of proven capabilities, not a blank repository.
Four steps. You tell us how you operate. We scope the build. We build it. You go live, and your team gets trained.
The results are on the record
CDA Coliving, Australia: AUD $170k+ annualised revenue impact
Fllat, United States: $210,000+ annualised financial impact
Harrington Housing, Canada and USA: $280,000+ annualised revenue impact
Those are three of the 10+ operators running on a JumboTiger build across the UK, EU, Middle East, India and APAC.
Pricing that is not per seat
No per-seat subscription. No per-bed lock-in. Pricing is scoped to your module set, your portfolio size and your deployment, and you get a firm all-in number within 48 hours of a discovery call.
One platform typically replaces five to eight vendors. Run that arithmetic against your current stack before you assume custom is expensive.
→ Schedule a discovery call or book a demo
How the two fit
They are separate products, and you can use either one alone. Together they close a loop.
BookMyColiving and JumboTiger Job: Bring qualified demand to your door Convert the house and retain it Cost-free, forever Scoped quote, all-in Best for Any operator with a bed to fill Operators past the spreadsheet ceiling Time to value Same day, 30 days What you own The resident relationship The platform and the data
The pattern I see repeatedly: operators solve demand first because it is time-sensitive, then discover their conversion rate is the real leak. Inquiries sit unanswered for two days. Availability is wrong. Onboarding takes four days per resident when it should take two hours.
Fixing the second problem is usually worth more than doubling leads.
Two things to do this week
If you operate coliving, shared living, student housing, BTR, or flex living anywhere in the world, list your property on BookMyColiving. It costs nothing, it takes two minutes, and in cities where we already rank you, you are collecting traffic that currently goes nowhere.
If your operation currently runs on five vendors and a spreadsheet, book a discovery call with JumboTiger. Bring your worst workflow. We will tell you honestly whether a custom build is worth it for your portfolio size, and you get a firm quote in 48 hours.
Reply to this email if you want me to look at your setup directly. I read every response.
Mayank Pokharna has spent 12 years in coliving. He ran 500 units across 17 locations on master leases with zero ad spend, built and exited a property management platform, and has worked with 100+ coliving and proptech brands across 14+ countries. He writes Everything Coliving.