Eminent CIO's Of India 2026

TECH-HEAVY, ASSET-LIGHT: HOOLIV REDEFINING STUDENT HOUSING EXPERIENCE

 

Gaurav Vij
CDAIO - HooLiv.com

 

HooLiv.com serves a digitally native demographic, Gen Z and Millennials, moving to India's education and tech hubs. They demand seamless, instant and secure living, and our IT strategy is the backbone of delivering that standardized experience at scale.

We have adopted an "asset-light, tech-heavy" approach. Our infrastructure runs on scalable hybrid architecture (AWS), letting us launch a property in a new city and bring its digital systems live within 24 hours. Aligned with the Digital India mission, we have integrated India Stack layers such as Aadhaar e-KYC and UPI into onboarding, making move-in completely paperless while ensuring compliance and security vetting.

We have shifted IT governance from a support function to a strategic NOI driver. A centralized, cloud-native Property Management System, a first-of-its-kind operating system for co-living, enforces standardized processes from lead management to maintenance across thousands of beds. By tracking maintenance Turnaround Time, with a KPI of 90% of critical tickets resolved within four hours, we improved resident satisfaction (NPS) by 15% in two quarters, lowering churn and lifting occupancy.

AI is woven into this operating system. An AI lead-scoring engine ranks every enquiry by likelihood to convert, while a 24x7 conversational assistant across WhatsApp, web and app answers queries in multiple languages, schedules visits and captures KYC, cutting response time from hours to seconds. Maintenance tickets are auto-classified and routed to the right technician, and churn-prediction models flag at-risk residents for proactive outreach. Occupancy-forecasting models read demand from academic calendars, admission cycles and live enquiry velocity to predict bed-level occupancy weeks ahead, feeding a targets-provisioning engine that sets occupancy and revenue targets and recommends dynamic pricing.

AI also runs the back office: auto-reconciliation matches UPI and bank settlements against ledgers, and a statutory compliance tracker monitors GST, TDS, labour and safety filings across states. We even build HooLiv with AI, using coding copilots to ship features faster and generative assistants for communications, reporting and site selection. The discipline never changes: every AI use case must tie back to a measurable KPI, whether occupancy, NOI, TAT or NPS.