Good People is a bi-weekly column highlighting McGill students doing community-oriented work on and around campus. Because it’s important to celebrate good people doing good things.
Hundreds of McGill undergraduate students go on exchange every year. But until this summer, there was no centralized platform to help students sublet their apartments and look for living accommodations in another country. Enter: Exchange Sublet, a student-centric digital platform that serves as a reliable marketplace for students to list their homes while looking for new ones abroad. I spoke with CEO and Co-Founder Morgan Balkin, U2 student in International Development, Economics, and Social Entrepreneurship, over Zoom. We talked about the platform’s recent launch, its features, and how he hopes it will positively impact the McGill community.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Enid for the McGill Daily (MD): Exchange Sublet launched on Instagram in April. How did the project begin?
Morgan Balkin (MB): My friends in the year above were telling me how they were so excited to go on exchange but how they were really struggling and spending days on days on Facebook marketplace trying to find [subletters]. They made it seem like the most complex, horrible situation. I had also just started my minor in social entrepreneurship, and what they taught us in class was always, when you look for the little problems, a solution to those could be a business or an entrepreneurial venture. And then it was genuinely a shower thought, like, ‘what if there was an Airbnb for subletting?’
I shared my idea with my friend Rami, now my co-founder, and he was like, ‘dude, that’s a really great idea.’ From there it just took off.
MD: If you were pitching your platform to an investor, how would you describe it?
MB: We are hopefully going to be the Airbnb for subletting. We see ourselves as a platform that is very user-friendly, safe, secure, and centered around this niche study abroad period where students are going to leave their home city.
I would say the difference between us and what Airbnb or Facebook Marketplace is doing is that we have verified profiles with profile pictures, student emails and a safe and secure payment system. Really trying to minimize any scams and uncertainties.
MD: How are you going to grow internationally so that students coming to McGill on exchange can use your platform?
MB: We’re going to start in Montreal and then find ways to grow at schools worldwide. We plan to launch an ambassador program where international students who went on exchange at McGill can spread the word at their own schools. And luckily we’ve grown our team a bit to have a good amount of international connections. We know people all over, and that’s the beauty of McGill, that you have such an international crowd that you can tap into.
MD: What does the future of Exchange Sublet look like? Will it move beyond purely housing?
MB: We have so many ideas on how to expand. Just a few are a Tinder-esque interface for roommates and having in-depth information about local bars, clubs, restaurants, cafés. We have a lot of excitement in terms of finding a way to implement AI into our platform, having these little quick questions about your city or the currency, the people, the language, whatever it may be. Oh, is that club good? You know, what promoter did you use? Or like, is this place gluten-free? Little stuff like that can really be helpful.
Having said that, it’s good to stick to your bread and butter at first. At our base, we’re a subletting service, an intermediary between subletters and listers. We want to get that cycle going a bit before we start introducing these new features, but honestly the sky is the limit.
MD: The theme of this column is “good people doing good things.” In the context of your work with Exchange Sublet, what does being a “good person” mean to you?
MB: I think everything we put into our site and our whole idea is really just to improve this stressful but exciting experience. We hope to reduce stress, increase security, and just ease everyone’s mind. So I think that’s what we try to do to help people and be good people in a way.
Students can find Exchange Sublet on Instagram, @exchangesublet, and on their website, exchangesublet.ca.
If you know good people doing good things who you would like to see featured in this column, send an email to news@mcgilldaily.com.