A DULOCH teen has been nominated for the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for his business, Student Rents.

Jamie Stewart, 18, is one of just six young people from Scotland to be put forward for the award and will head down to the award ceremony in London in November to see if his new venture can bag him the title.

He told the Press: "We connect landlords and agents with students who are looking to rent for going to university or college. Essentially, if you think of Rightmove or Zoopla for the rental market, it's, in the short-term, that but for students only.

"It's taking properties, putting them on the website from agents, landlords and universities and advertising them for students and making sure they're finding the right properties for themselves to live in while they're away."

Starting up Student Rents after lockdown, Jamie was set to go to college originally but left after just one week to pursue his business.

"I started to attend college myself and I had friends that were going to university. When they were going off to uni they were struggling to find accommodation and where my college was located I had looked at moving out but all these other websites and advertising portals were complicated to use with too much paperwork. It was quite outdated.

"It sparked the idea that I could maybe make a change to it and create something that is easy to use and everybody can have access to it."

Now that the business is taking off, Jamie has begun looking for investments through crowdfunding and individual investors. As he continues to grow, his big goals this year include adding this award to his resume.

"One big goal of mine would be to win the Young Entrepreneur of the Year, I think that is probably the number one goal for me this year.

"I don't really set goals too much because I just work so much that when I set goals they're met quite quickly.

"We've scaled up from where we were a year ago. We would set a goal and then the next week we were meeting it so we have found as a team that the goals we are setting are quite big.

"It will take a while to meet the goals that we've set!

For anyone else thinking about starting a new business, Jamie said: "I think it is important to have more than one stream of income, you can't just rely on one thing which, as lockdown hit, I think a lot of people realised, things can go wrong quite quickly in a job. People getting laid off and made redundant or just not having a job to go back to.

"If you find a hobby or something that you're interested in and find a way to make money from it, I think it is the best way to go about it. You don't so much see it as a job, it's more a hobby that you get paid for.

"Especially if you're young, it's important to get into side hustles and other opportunities to make money because the cost of living isn't going to slow any time soon."