Flexible Living Company Secures $100M to Expand Network
Landing’s blockbuster year suggests demand for its product remains high amid COVID and work from home trends.
Flexible apartment company Landing has secured $100 million in new funding, a commitment that underscores the bet both investors and consumers are making on this particular model in the wake of COVID-19.
Landing’s $45 million Series B round was led by Foundry Group with participation by Greycroft and Maveron, alongside a $55 million debt facility. The fresh capital will allow the company to continue expanding its burgeoning network of apartments to new markets across the US, Landing said in a statement.
When it launched in 2019, the company—based in Birmingham, Ala., and San Francisco—planned to operate its membership-based living model in about 30 cities, CEO Bill Smith told The Wall Street Journal recently. But since the COVID-19 pandemic began last March in the US, Landing more than doubled its expansion plans for the year and surpassed 10,000 apartments in 75 cities.
“Covid has taken a decade of change that I was thinking was going to happen between now and 2030 and kind of compressed it into a year,” Smith told the Journal.
The demand for furnished, flexible apartments is largely being driven by the same trends realigning multifamily markets, as Americans move away from big cities and the work-from-home movement takes root. Lagging demand for multifamily housing in urban centers has led to continued rent declines over the course of the last year, with average rents suffering the most in cities like New York and San Francisco, as GlobeSt reported earlier this week. And while 2021 may be a slightly better year for urban centers, CoStar predicts demand will remain fairly stagnant and rents will continue to decline this year.
Those fundamentals will remain challenged by the continuing allure of work-from-home, which UCLA’s Ziman Center for Real Estate predicts will reshape the US housing market well into the future. While a smaller share of Americans moved in 2019 than in any year since 1947—when the Census Bureau began collecting annual migration data – new real estate, moving and survey data shows that nearly 16 million people left large urban cities during the pandemic.
Enter the flexible apartment model, which allows renters to test out new cities and areas to live, making work from home an even more sustainable trend.