Besides of them doing all kinds of leasing models, they put a very thick slab of butter on top with add on services, something nobody else can match.
With a single click you can: get a handyman to fix anything, order renovations, moving, breakfast delivery, daycare, cleaning, maids, buy furniture, order a restyling, get new appliances, remote lock it, pay for every service, or even Airbnb it on your behalf if you leave for extended amount of time, or do that in reverse while you are on a trip to another city.
Effectively they sell life in high end serviced apartments for just a bit more than price of regular rental.
They mainly aim at a rich millennial demographics, bit with few tweaks, you can imagine them making up something for US market
Aggregating and streamlining these services do help. In dense enough areas, some people who couldn't have afforded a personal driver use Uber. But relatively few people have the luxury of contracting out all their day-to-day routines.
Real estate will be virtualized like every other illiquid asset. This means:
* Ownership of real-estate gets rolled up into REITs. REITs are experts at building, buying and selling real-estate and they can do it at scale. "Home ownership" where small-time retail investors buy and sell real-estate will get selected away as its a grossly inefficient model.
* Real-estate property managers like Ziroom and WeWork and AirBNB will take out leases and resell highly customized and liquid packages. They provide not just access to the property but to a wide range of services and auxiliary services.
* The PMs now manage their inventory and pricing in real-time.
At this point you can start to think of real estate as any other "cloud service": acquired on demand, at fluctuating prices, and accessible through a whole clearly defined service/API layer.
We're starting to see this in China and SEA already in a big way [1]. Here again Asia is way ahead of the curve. Real-estate "on demand" means companies and even families are basically moving between different properties every month based on prices and needs. Office desks can be rented for as little as 15 minutes.
The key obstacle here has always been renter quality and the various housing legal regimes. In Asia at least the government seems primed to step in and vouch for renter quality which which will likely evolve into something like a credit rating for renters. The legal questions are still totally up in the air but that's not stopping people for now. Companies like Ziroom have been known to get up to some shady antics like evicting people in the middle of the night or hiring policemen to intimidate people.
[1] https://chinaeconomicreview.com/why-chinese-millennials-are-...
There are corporate apartments in the US but these are usually oriented toward people who have their own place but have to spend a lot of time at some different location for a period of time. I don't know the level of service such places typically have.
So... apartment concierge. Americans already have most of those services, provided by another app. The value added here is the patented one-click single point of failure.
Some of these - renovations, daycare, furniture, appliances - I would want more involvement than just tapping "buy" in an app.
The bigger issue is that I'm not really willing to pay someone what it costs to e.g. take my car in for state inspection, run my errands, etc. I do have some services for things like getting my lawn cut but it's harder/more expensive to get someone to handle unscheduled one-off things.
People with that kind of money, if they're dissatisfied, they just roll the dice again.
