Our story
We started from the problem we had
In 2013 two students away from home were looking for a place among notes pinned to a noticeboard. Twelve years later HOMA runs university residences and property portfolios across Italy. In between there is a change of form, and it came in the worst possible year.
How it started
Two university students and a need to answer
Carlo Monticelli and Antonio Caputo are just over twenty-three and share the problem of every student away from home: in 2013 finding a place means newspaper ads and notes pinned to university noticeboards.
They enter Principi Attivi, the call through which the Apulia Region's Bollenti Spiriti programme funds young people's business ideas, and they win it. Those resources start Apulia Student Service, a cooperative doing one thing: helping students away from home find a place to live. The service is called Cercoalloggio, and the need behind it is precisely their own.
- 2013, in Lecce
- Principi Attivi, Bollenti Spiriti programme, Apulia Region
- Apulia Student Service, a cooperative
- Cercoalloggio, the Italian platform for students away from home
The turning point, 2020-2021
We changed form in the year everything stopped
The pandemic closes universities and freezes the student rental market: for a company born in that market, the worst possible moment. It is the year we choose to transform instead of defending ourselves.
It is not a new sign over the door. From that point the business stops being a student service and becomes property management, for any kind of building and owner: the five years that follow are the years of real growth.
- Conversion into a joint-stock cooperative
- Capital opened to impact investors
- HOMA — HOusing MAnagement
How we work
Three choices made at the start, never changed
The site visit
We did not publish what people sent us: we went to see the apartment.
Saying no to cash-in-hand rentals
We refused listings from owners renting off the books — and twelve years ago there were plenty. More than that: we talked owners into signing proper contracts, often just by explaining what a proper contract meant.
The virtual tour
In 2016 the technology became affordable and we were the first in Italy to put it into rental listings: since then you can walk through a home room by room before boarding a train.
Year by year
Twelve years, six periods
How we got here
Running a student residence takes three trades at once
In 2025 HOMA became a national student housing operator. It is not a new trade learned for the occasion: it is what happens when three skills, picked up one at a time over ten years, end up serving the same building.
Student demand
Since 2013 we have known how a home for students fills up: rankings, enrolment timing, the channels where demand actually is.
Day-to-day management
Hundreds of networked apartments taught us contract administration, rent collection, maintenance and the people living there.
Whole buildings and rules
Social housing put us in front of large complexes, capped rates and obligations to public bodies: the grammar of convenzionato housing.
Today
The third phase has just begun
Property management is the core business, for any kind of building and any owner: convenzionato student residences, networks of apartments, social housing, homes for workers. Cercoalloggio remains the channel that brings demand, no longer the boundary of the company. If you have a property, a project or a housing service to activate, this is what we talk about.