I think this is a brilliant idea. One of the most frustrating things for me when I travel is that my requirements are different from what the traditional Hotel industry caters to. All I need are a desk, chair and low latency / reasonable bandwidth internet. I tend to stay at the Marriott because they have their act better together then all the other chains, especially in SF. But that still means I pay up to $200 a night for the room ( with internet + car ) and pay for a lot of stuff that I absolutely don't need.
I'd much rather meet some nice people and stay in a cozy place with a single pillow and good internet.
It took me a while to parse the title: consider "People who need nothing except the internet in order to work" vs "People who only need the internet in order to work" vs "People who need nothing except that the internet should work". I assume the second is intended.
Also, how is this different to a hotel? I guess it's cheaper. So how is this different to a really cheap hostel with shared rooms? I suppose you can only let trustworthy people in.
So yes, I can see it working if they (you?) can get the economics right. Keeping the apartments clean could also be a major challenge.
When you buy time at a hotel, you're buying a bundle of services. You're getting a room, with a door that locks. You're getting regular cleaning service, even if you don't need/want it. You're getting a private bathroom. You're getting privacy from the locals even if you don't need/want it. You're getting geographically limited because you can only get a hotel room in a place where the economics support building a hotel that has at least a few dozen rooms. I mean, hotels that have only one or two rooms aren't very profitable. Which means that hotels tend to concentrate in central business districts and other places where land is expensive.
The point is, all these features that are bundled together have real costs. If you don't need those features, then you ideally you shouldn't have to pay for them.
This is sort of like asking why Zipcar is different from a rental car company. There are efficiency gains to be had in a system where individual cars are scattered all over a city and where customers rent them by the hour as opposed to forcing customers to rent cars by the day from a centralized airport location.
Surely your not suggesting that a hostel always has privacy, a door that locks, private bathroom, prime location in a CBD and the other things mentioned?
Good idea, but what would you be prepared to pay for it? I think this is something a hotel chain should do as a value add, otherwise the cost would be too high. To do it independently I would still partner with hotels and offer a complete package with a nice "laptop ready" workstation, wifi and perhaps tech support included in the price.
Isn't it usually the case that someone "buys" a timeshare, in that they purchase a share of a place, and then get to use it for a certain amount of time per year?
If they're following the zipcar model, someone would pay a monthly fee for as long as they're interested in using the service and then would reserve a spot in whatever is available as they need it.
Alright, so I need this service ASAP. I'm basically spending the next few months travelling to different startup areas before settling down. My lease ended in Miami and I didn't want to commit another 12 months to somewhere. There's certainly a need for shorter term housing that isn't an overpriced overabundant extended stay. I was quoted like 90 bucks a night for an extended stay AND another 5 bucks for wifi. That's just the complete opposite of what's needed.
One thing I've noticed while posting for a sublet is that there's a lot of "scrap" left over in housing both demand and supply. My landlord required 60 days notice, so after the premature ending of my last project, I'm on a lease for two months I don't need. There are tons of people who have gaps between leases and need housing for the odd month or two, and there are tons stuck with ends of leases they don't want. Landlords don't want to deal with that stuff because it's not cost effective for them to vet someone for less than 6 months. Why couldn't an Internet company handle this? Charge people an application fee of $35 or so, vet them like a landlord would, then let them into the lease scraps market.
The vetting would have to be really good, though, due to the big ratio of potential liability to potential income. The potential upside is one or two month's rent, but the potential downside is a renter who throws a big party and trashes the place. That's one reason I've never sublet my place when I've been gone--- the $800 or whatever that I'd get for a month absence isn't worth the risk of ending up holding a $10k damages bill. So I'd only sublease through a service like that if either I was sure the service's vetting was perfect, or the service was willing to insure against any damage done by their renters.
My solution (in a cousin comment) is to actually lease to large corporations and universities. They can allow their employees a short term stay at a rate comparable to regular rental in exchange for assuming full liability. There'd still be vetting of the individuals on top of this.
the hard part would be making this palletable to the landlords.
Nearly all residential leases prohibit subletting (and essentially make the renter liable for the rent for the entire lease period, regardless of actual use.)
If you could find a way to solve that problem, that would have a great deal of value. However, like I said, the big stumbling block (and why this problem has yet to be solved) is that nearly all leases prohibit subletting.
I think I know how to make this palatable to landlords. Instead of renting these pieces out to individuals, instead lend them out to corporations and organizations like universities. Require the leasing corporation to assume liability in exchange for being able to offer their employee a short term stay at a price comparable to ordinary rental. The clearinghouse can still vet the individual on top of this.
well, if your organizations are going to assume liability, they are going to need to charge more than an ordinary rental. One wild party can screw up an apt. as much as six months of living, and if you are there for 6 months, well, the damage can be amortised over a whole lot more rent.
Having been a landlord (I quit when I realized I had lost the last vestiges of my faith in humanity) I would say "Holy crap, not in my place" to this.
As an Internet denizen who travels, I love the idea - but I have no idea how you'd protect people from the many, many jerks out there who think it's funny to break windows and stab refrigerators during parties.
The way they word it makes it sound like that isn't the case, though. It's possible that by "access to a network of places to stay all over the world" they mean access to a network of places they own and operate, but I'd take it as hinting otherwise. The "places to crash" and "instant friends" especially makes me suspect that these apartments will be owned by other people, possibly even inhabited by them? But it's rather unclear. If they did own them all, I'd be impressed that they were able to quickly build up an international network of property holdings, and the support staff to clean/maintain them!
If they don't own them, then the novelty seems like it'll be in the payment/pricing structure, which they seem to hint will involve ZipCar-like membership fees and daily pricing. Otherwise it sounds quite similar to AirBnB or any of the other "vacation condo rental" or "short-term apartment rental" sites.
I think it's more like publishing. They lease a bunch of space (apartment space, ad space), and they have a bunch of clients who want to use the space (people, ads), and they match them together.
Someday, I'd like to see a network of people with long, flat, driveways or big stretches of free street parking right out front, and WiFi, so I could pay someone $5-$15/day to park my RV in front of their house and use their bandwidth and optionally plug in to their power and fresh water. That'd be really cool.
It seems like the places I really want to visit often feature a significant lack of RV parks, and also often prohibit overnight street parking.
Another useful insight: I rent an apartment with a standard lease. I'm gone almost every weekend and definitely gone for at least nine hours per day monday through friday. Someone could easily use my apartment for an office (in the context of current discussion) while I'm not home since it has internet, chair, desk, couch, fridge, stove, heat, air conditioning, water, bathroom etc. The point is: my fully functioning apartment is vacant about 55% of the time (9 hrs/day five days a week + 48 hours on the weekend)... and these are contiguous blocks of time (9 hours straight on weekdays and 48 hours straight on the weekends). Seems like someone could use this space. (and I think many other people are in the same situation)
Just got the hostel analogy from the way it was described I suppose, the idea of meeting people and having a place to quickly plop down at if you need a place to crash when you're someplace new.
I love this idea in principle. I'd love to use it as well as be a host for people, but I wonder how they're going to keep out people who rob/murder you in your sleep?
We should put together a HN equivalent of couchsurfing .. and on that note, I have two sofas in San Francisco that are free until I move the middle of august!
There seems to be a small but growing movement of nomads. The first I met was @ioerror and at least in the way he travels he was quite inspiring. My personal goal with every move for the past three years has been to reduce my amount of "stuff". When I moved back to SF from Seattle everything fit in an SUV. With this coming move, except for those two couches and a stand-up office desk, I could fit everything in that SUV and have 2 or 3 passengers.
It would be awesome if more of the hacker labs around the country were live/work so that visiting hackers could crash there. I know a couple of companies in SF that have "visiting hacker" lofts, like Squid Labs.
I'd much rather meet some nice people and stay in a cozy place with a single pillow and good internet.