I am excited to introduce The Subletter, a marketplace for finding and hosting sublets.
I’ve been working on this with my friend Matt Yao for a few months. Here’s the backstory:
As everyone knows, in 2020, the world went remote. People quickly realized they no longer had to live in the city where their office was located. So they left cities like New York and San Francisco for places with lower costs of living, better quality of life, or simply some more space — places like Miami, Austin, Denver, and smaller towns around the country and around the world.
This newfound ability to live somewhere nowhere near your office was obvious. But most people have yet to fully appreciate the second great freedom granted by the sudden shift to remote work. It’s not just that you no longer have to live in the one place where your office is located. You no longer have to live in one place at all. You can live in multiple places throughout the year. You can spend several months here and a couple months there. You can live more seasonally than most humans have since we first became farmers. The only problem is that our current systems are not built to facilitate this sort of seasonal living.
If you have a mortgage or a 12-month lease and you want to go live somewhere else for a couple months, sure, you can find a long-term Airbnb, but it’s priced at a premium. More importantly, you have to continue to pay your rent or your mortgage while you’re away. This is what we call double rent. We do not like double rent.
Double rent prevents people from living the way they want to live. It stops people from being able to live wherever they want, whenever they want, because they have to pay for their place even when they’re not using it. It kills optionality and adds friction between the way you're living and the way you want to live. No more!
Our objective with The Subletter is to defeat the dreaded double rent. Our goal is to create a marketplace where people can post their place with confidence that someone trustworthy will step up to stay in and pay for their place while they’re away. In short, our goal is to increase the liquidity for sublets.
Most generally, we want to help free people to live exactly the way they want to live. It’s a big mission, and we believe this marketplace for sublets is a big step. We hope you’ll join us in these early days by going and finding a place or listing your own at thesubletter.com.
As always, thanks for reading. We appreciate your support.
