Staezy Research

The data behind Pakistan’s student housing & accommodation market

Staezy operates one of the largest verified layers over Pakistan’s hostel and budget-accommodation market — 3,600+ listings across 88 cities. That data underpins two open, DOI-backed working papers by Waqih Alam (Abbottabad University of Science and Technology). Both are published on Zenodo under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence — free to quote, cite and reproduce with attribution.

48% vs 28%

Women are ~48% of university enrolment, but only ~28% of Pakistan’s gender-designated hostel supply is for them — the most under-served segment.

3.1M vs ~95M

3.1 million credit cards against ~95 million mobile-wallet accounts (JazzCash 60M+, Easypaisa 35M+) — global booking platforms run card-first checkout in a wallet-first country.

74% / 12%

74% of students find housing offline (friends, seniors, visiting in person); only 12% ever used any property website or app.

17,000–23,000

Estimated budget-accommodation universe nationwide — yet global platforms have organized only ~3,000–5,000 properties, and effectively none of the budget layer.

Published papers

Working PaperJuly 2026

Pakistan’s Student Housing Market in 2026: An Evidence-Based Assessment

An evidence-based sizing of Pakistan’s student housing market, rebuilt from official enrolment data and a primary survey (n=104). It corrects the inflated figures in circulation, places the honest annual market at hundreds of millions of dollars (not billions), and documents a market that is dominated by informal private hostels, discovered almost entirely offline, with measured demand for a verified trust layer.

Key findings

67% of students live in private hostels; only 10% in university hostels.
74% found their accommodation offline; just 12% used any property site or app.
Women are ~48% of enrolment and show higher willingness to pay — the most supply-constrained segment.
Staezy already maps 3,602 listings across 88 cities to 217 universities.

Read & download on ZenodoDOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21510874

Cite this paper

Alam, W. (2026). Pakistan’s Student Housing Market in 2026: An Evidence-Based Assessment. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21510874

Working PaperAugust 2026

The Localization Gap: Why Global Booking Platforms Cannot Serve Pakistan’s Budget Accommodation Market

Why Booking.com and Airbnb have failed to organize Pakistan’s budget accommodation layer. Triangulating payment-system data, online-community evidence (netnography), and platform observational data, it identifies a structural mismatch — card-first checkout and foreign payout rails in a wallet-first, cash-tolerant market — and sets out the localization requirements any viable platform must meet.

Key findings

Card-first checkout in a market of ~95M wallets vs 3.1M credit cards; cash-on-delivery still ~75% of e-commerce.
Platforms can’t pay their own partners: Airbnb offers Pakistani hosts no local bank payout; Booking.com remits via virtual cards local terminals can’t charge.
OTA bookings are frequently used as visa documentation, not actual stays — overstating real market penetration.
The organized short-stay layer is ~3,000–5,000 properties out of an estimated 17,000–23,000.

Read & download on ZenodoDOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22035719

Cite this paper

Alam, W. (2026). The Localization Gap: Why Global Booking Platforms Cannot Serve Pakistan’s Budget Accommodation Market. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22035719

For journalists & researchers

Both papers are open and free to cite. We’re happy to provide city-level breakdowns, the underlying anonymized survey data, or an interview — Staezy holds what is, as far as we’re aware, the closest thing Pakistan has to a national hostel dataset (3,600+ verified listings across 88 cities).

[email protected]

Attribution requested: cite the paper by its DOI and, where relevant, “data via Staezy (staezy.pk)”.