A Crisis in Plain Sight
In amongst the everyday Silicon Valley push to create better and better Solutions To Problems You Don’t Have™, a very real problem is happening. Let’s illustrate it with this highly detailed and technically complex diagram:
See the problem? On the one side, it’s great that great numbers of new jobs are being created in our cities at a fantastic rate. Sounds great.
What’s not so great is the now standard experience of renting an apartment in San Francisco. If you’ve ever been to an open house in Nob Hill or SoMa, you know the drill. Search Craigslist for those ephemeral gems hidden in the chaos and scams, reply to posts that are sometimes so curt and undescriptive you’d think Craigslist was now owned by Twitter. Then, show up and form an orderly everybody-for-themselves mob, where only those who have been through it before have learned how to come out on top with the reward of the basic human need of shelter.
They’ve learned the tricks the out-of-towners haven’t yet: Bring your deposit check, credit report, job offer letter, pay stubs, references, a pre-filled out application, and a coffee for the landlord. If you don’t have that submitted within twenty minutes, the place is gone. Your other option is to get out of the city, live away from the place need to be every day, and drive an hour in and out through the city traffic… every day. That insanely high rent for that nice morning stroll to the office now seems worth it.
With the recent job growth and increased numbers of people working in the city each day, it makes sense that we should build more housing near the city. Unfortunately, some prioritise neighborhood quaintness over neighborhood affordability. Quaintness is nice, but it’s usually not $3,600/month nice.
So given we’re at a standstill for building new homes, what can we do?
San Jose’s answer is to call for a limit on the number of jobs, so that rent prices don’t increase any more. This does not seem like the best approach.
UberPOOL’s approach to reducing traffic in cities is a smart one:
Step 1) Get everyone’s travel requests into a big database.
Step 2) Match up requests that will work well together.
Step 3) Learn to share.
And bingo bango, we have better use of our limited number of city-street clogging cars. Computers now organise the use of the assets by time and requirements.
Could we do the same for our long term housing? Sure. Why not?
Databases with up-to-date data in them are beginning to organise what we do, where we go, how we get there, and how we work. Not to mention what we watch (when chilling or otherwise), what we buy, and where we stay when we travel.
So here’s the plan. Get people’s housing preferences together into a database (Moving date? Next month. Budget? Sensible. Fancy lounge? Yes please.) And start matching. Get four people together who by themselves couldn’t cover the income requirements of a 4-person luxury apartment, and with their powers combined, they’re living in style, and walking to their work. Using the network and social effects of Market Networks, the larger the pool of people looking for housing at any one time, the better their housemate matches will be. That’s the experiment we’re running at HomeShare.
HomeShare’s product is a standardised, luxurious, affordable city living experience. We convert luxury apartments, match and manage who your housemates are, so that your rent is cheaper, your commute is shorter, your housemates are cooler, and your lifestyle is better.
We launched two months ago in our first San Francisco apartment building in Potrero Hill, and we now have nearly 100 customers living in our managed spaces.
We’re part real estate developer, part concierge, part leasing agent, part data analysts, part city welcoming committee, and part high growth tech startup. We’re building an automated housemate matching system, a self monitoring lead generation system, and a rental payment aggregator. We use Docker, PHP, Rails, Datatables, Stripe, Plaid, and AWS. And email.
“Your rent is cheaper, your commute is shorter, your housemates are cooler, and your lifestyle is better.”
We like the work that Common, The Negev, Airbnb, WeLive, PodShare and Apodments are doing, but no one is focusing on making rent cheaper. No one is addressing this very real thing that people want.
Why is no one tackling this? Does it just look like an unfixable problem?
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter. If you know someone looking to live in San Francisco, enjoys fancy rooftop terraces, and saving hundreds of dollars each month, send them our way. If you want to live in a nice place without commuting an hour each way each day to your new job, hit us up.
See you in the heart of SF!
