Startup Launches Luxury Apartment Membership for the Mobile Millennial
Young professionals no longer stay at a job for decades: Instead, they are often forced to job-hop, moving from city to city in search of a job that provides the salary, benefits, and fulfillment they crave. All this moving around creates a housing headache: breaking leases, searching for a new apartment, and moving across the country all come at a price. Landing, a short-term rental startup that essentially subleases to these mobile professionals, is attempting to solve that issue with its rental memberships. Members pay more than their neighbors for the same apartments, but since the furniture is all included and there is no security deposit, the startup says renters can save money in the long run—if they can pay for the rent from Landing in the first place. The cheapest rent in New York City weighs in at just over $4,000 a month.
When entrepreneur Bill Smith moved to San Francisco to work on Shipt, his grocery delivery startup, he found the most painful part was dealing with housing. Specifically, the constant hoops he needed to jump through to find an apartment for his family, and move all his material possessions across the country.
“I’ve seen the pain of establishing a home in a new city,” he says. “It just doesn’t make sense to have to own all these pieces of furniture and have all this cash tied up in things.”
His experience inspired a new business meant to solve these rental woes. Landing, a short-term rental startup that launched last June, complete with a whimsical, millennial-friendly logo font, uses a membership model to offer a turnkey solution for renters and a new way for large landlords to maximize profits. Renters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Nashville, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., and Birmingham, Alabama (Smith’s hometown) can lease a fully furnished Landing apartment on a month-to-month basis with no security deposit, and cancel their stay with a 30-day notice.
“We’re serving the mobile professional, people who are 25 to 40, professionals who want to be open to opportunities and be able to move around if they need to,” Smith told Curbed. “Our value proposition is that you can sign up for an apartment immediately online. Think about the hassle of renting in New York, with all the calls and followups and headaches.”