Page 53 - INC Magazine-November 2018

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Here’s a trend no one likes: For the
past few years, nearly one-third of
adults between the ages of 18 and 34
have reported living with their parents,
according to Pew Research Center —
making it the most common living
arrangement for that age group. It’s
not hard to understand why. In places
like San Francisco and Denver, Trulia’s
data reveals, a one-bedroom apart-
ment’s cost has jumped 30 percent
or more in the past five years. “Rent
growth is just completely decoupled
from income growth,” says Andrew
Collins, CEO and co-founder of Bunga-
low, which offers a solution. Bungalow,
currently operating in seven U.S. cities,
is an Airbnb-like platform that makes
it easy to find roommates or to rent out
one’s apartment—thus, potentially,
bringing more units on to the market.
Previoius sPread: vincent Fournier/trunk archive; this sPread From leFt: courtesy ZiPline; tom schierlitZ/trunk archive
Especially when you consider that all
renters come prescreened, unlike
those on, say, Craigslist, where any
stranger you agree to live with or
sublet to could turn out to be a dead-
beat (or worse). For homeowners, it’s
a turnkey way to turn a family apart-
ment into income, without the need to
interview for tenants or fears they’ll
trash the place. (Bungalow supplies
weekly cleaning.) Airbnb has been
criticized for driving up rents by
incentivizing owners to take units off
the rental market, but, says Collins,
Bungalow will have the opposite
effect: “For homeowners who don’t
want to be part of the problem,
we’re able to say, ‘Hey, we’re the easy
button.’ ” —JEFF BERCOVICI