Housing.Cloud

Educational institutions today are working harder than ever to strike a balance between maintaining on-campus living comfort and preserving their distinct identity and mission. However, with the rapidly modernizing student population, administrators must transition from antiquated systems to more modern platforms that will boost their engagement and enhance their housing management.

Enter Housing.Cloud, an end-to-end housing management ecosystem that empowers campus housing departments to deliver exceptional experiences to their residential students. The software is designed to improve student-community interaction and streamline overall operations.

Campus administrators using classic housing software must often supplement with additional applications and tools to perform core housing functions like roommate matching or room assignment. That means that important information is stored in disparate locations, making it impossible to get a 360-degree view of a student. Housing.Cloud’s cloud-hosted platform replaces all those tools, unifying all aspects of the housing process, from application intake and roommate matching to room assignments and more—all in one place. The roommate finder is even powered by A.I. to help students find their best possible match.

“Before we wrote a single line for Housing.Cloud, we spent over 1,000 hours interviewing college housing professionals to understand their everyday pain-points and to hear how the contemporary student has evolved,” explains CTO Sasha Bratyshkin. “We were surprised to hear the same issues repeated across a wide spectrum of school sizes, types and missions. Everyone essentially told us that they chose careers in education because they want to help students have the best possible experience on-campus. But, instead of spending time working with their students, most housing pros waste their days struggling with their software or trying to generate reports that make common sense and are actionable. We built Housing.Cloud to bring administrators closer to their students.”

The ecosystem integrates with existing systems and was designed to look and act like the apps that people are already familiar with. So Housing.Cloud’s application builder looks like Google Forms and its room selector looks like Airbnb, making it easy for users to use the software without referring to help docs or customer support calls.

This ability to simplify housing operations and maximize profitability exemplifies the ‘why?’ behind Housing.Cloud’s adoption within leading schools, where it is partnering with innovative housing teams to enhance and extend the platform.

From a security standpoint, Housing.Cloud’s System and Organization Controls (SOC2) compliance maintains student data privacy and safeguards administrator access to sensitive information. This creates a safe space for a housing department to share student forms and contracts while gathering critical data.

Staff can independently create, edit, and reuse templates and forms as needed. They can gather student or parent electronic signatures on contracts or documents right within the system. They can manage their own custom fields and tags. Administrators can sort and filter rosters and lists in seconds and save or share their current view with other Housing.Cloud users. Best of all, they can do all of this themselves, without involving the IT department or paying their software provider up-charges.

The reporting tool in Housing.Cloud empowers administrators to produce clear, actionable reports without writing code, and it includes predictive analysis capabilities to aid with planning.

Even though ‘housing’ is in our name, we know our client’s true mission is to create the best possible on-campus experience for their students. Well-managed housing and residential life is the means to create the community and sense of belonging that drives student happiness and satisfaction

Beyond these features, administrators have the flexibility to customize the ecosystem to match their institution's culture and style. They can enforce specific limitations on the information shared among administrators and departments and extend the system to campus partners so that those groups can access only the information relevant to that them.

Housing.Cloud’s prowess at streamlining on-campus living stems from a vision to replace outdated student housing software with a unified, secure, and user-friendly platform. To achieve this mission, co-founders Sasha Bratyshkin and Geoff Bartakovics built a team balanced between housing expertise and technology prowess. Over 30 directors of housing from the country’s most innovative schools provide constant feedback on functionality and design while technology is guided by a diverse group of engineers from top tech companies like IBM, Facebook/ Meta, Slack and others.

“Even though ‘housing’ is in our name, we know our client’s true mission is to create the best possible on-campus experience for their students. Well-managed housing and residential life is the means to create the community and sense of belonging that drives student happiness and satisfaction,” CEO Geoff Bartakovics explains. “After all, your college roommate is often the first best-friend of your adult life.”