After tech entrepreneur Bill Smith sold his same-day delivery startup to Target for $550 million, he turned his attention to the multifamily industry, partly because of the frustration he endured when trying to lease his first apartment.
As he was building Shipt, the company he sold in late 2017, he moved to San Francisco and needed to find a place to live. That experience would lead to him creating a different type of rental system, one that emphasizes flexibility.
"It was actually my first time to rent an apartment. I bought a home at 18 and had never rented one before. And it was a huge pain," Smith said in an interview.
A couple of years later, in 2019, he founded Landing, the Birmingham, Alabama-based company behind a membership program for flexible apartment living that lets renters execute short-term leases and gives members access to its units in more than 80 markets across the country. They can transfer apartments by giving two weeks' notice.
"It's completely flexible. It's completely furnished," he said. "So you literally show up with your suitcase and live. And when you're ready to move to the next neighborhood or the next city, you just open the app, pick the next place."
Members pay a $199 annual fee to use the application in addition to monthly rent.
Landing, which also has created a business that designs furniture that is manufactured specifically for its units, works in tandem with multifamily companies to attain homes to offers its members.
"We primarily partner with management companies and ownership groups, and we list all of their vacant units on our site for our members to be able to reserve," said Smith, CEO of Landing. "Once we receive that reservation, we can furnish it just in time and turn it into a Landing, and then that unit generally stays the Landing for multiple years, and we just move members in and out."
The global health crisis caused by COVID-19 about a year after Landing launched had an immediate impact on the startup and people sought the flexibility the company offered, Smith said.
"We grew a lot during the pandemic, and we continue to grow that way today," he said. "We grew over 500% last year. We'll grow triple digits this year."
Demand has been strong for Landing apartments during the first half of 2022, said Smith, who quit high school and started is first company when he was 16.
"This is a brand new category, and we're really blazing the trail in the space," he said. "And so there's not a lot of supply available, but there are a lot of people that do want to live this way."