家: A Better Way To Travel
We are coming to visit your hometown, and looking for a place to stay. You have rented your apartment for rent on a popular “sharing economy marketplace” such as Tujia, Xiaozhu, or AirPnP.
We really like your place: Artistic, comfortable, there’s great light, and the area around you seems filled with restaurants, galleries, and small shops.
You are charging, say, 350 RMB per night for the apartment.
Hey, we say, we’d really like to rent our your place, we I wonder if we could do it through this alternate network that’s just started: it’s called 家.
“How does it work” you ask.
Well, we both register on Jia using a verified social network account, and once we stay here, we will give approval of each other, so we each get a point, and are verified by each other through connection.
“Why not just use Tujia, Xiaozhu, or AirbnB?”
We explain the three things we like about Jia.
The first great thing is that it’s cheaper than the existing competition: those sites charge an additional platform fee to users and renters. Jia only charges 30 RMB per transaction.
The second great thing is that all the apartments on it are cool because they’ve all been added to the Jia Network by Jia Members.
“That seems hyperbolic” you say.
Ok, sure it’s a little hyperbolic: to be exact, the overall coolness factor of Jia > any competing network because all apartments are added to Jia by users.
The third thing we like about Jia is a little more obscure.
The competing networks advertises themselves as part of the “sharing economy” but what they actually functions as, most of the time, really, is a tool for landlords to make as much money as they can off of their apartments as possible.
The problem with this is that it drives up rents in cool areas, and, in general, just gives money to people who already have the most money: landlords, Venture Capitalists.
Jia, on the other hand, is a worker-owned cooperative supported by that really lets people share their rents with one another: Jia is trying to build a network of people who, essentially, collectively rent out one another’s apartments and can stay in them when they travel around.
“That sounds great” you say. “Sign me up.”
