Short-Term Apartment Lease Platform Landing Raises $125M

Investors are opening their wallets as fast as they can to provide financial backing to platforms serving the emerging market for short-term, “flexible living” apartment rentals aimed at migrating remote workers.

In the latest funding deal, Landing, a platform that offers fully furnished apartments for rentals as short as a month, this week announced it has arranged $125M in new backing, including $75M in equity funding and a $50M loan.

Delta-v Capital provided the equity funding to Landing, a startup launched in 2019 that has now raised a total of $237M in venture capital funding and $230M in debt, according to a report in Techcrunch.

The field of VC-backed flexible living players is getting crowded. Earlier this week, online rental marketplace Zumper said it raised $30M in a Series D1 round by Kleiner Perkins, backing the platform will use to expand its short-term offerings.

Last week, Sentral—a flex-living pioneer launched last year with $500M in backing from ICONIQ Capital—formed a partnership with OliverBuchananGroup (OPG) to develop new mixed-use, multifamily projects that deploy Sentral platform for short-term rentals in high-growth US markets.

Earlier this month, WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann secured $350M in backing from Andreeseen Horowitz for a new flexible-living startup named Flow.

Landing’s business model involves signing one-year leases for apartments and then subleasing these units—which Landing furnishes—to tenants who have signed on as Landing “members” for a $199 annual fee.

The members commit to renting a Landing unit for a minimum of six months—but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same apartment: members are permitted to move freely to other Landing-operated apartments during that period, provided they give the company two weeks’ notice.

Birmingham, AL-based Landing acquires vacant apartments and then fills them with furniture made in Vietnam and shipped to warehouses in Austin, Phoenix and Alabama. Landing currently has about 20,000 listings in 375 US cities.

According to the Techcrunch report, the platform marks up the rent on its pre-leased units by as much as 40%, but the company is not yet profitable despite having average rental terms for its members of about six months.

Bill Smith, Landing’s founder, told Techcrunch the company’s longer-term growth strategy envisions partnering with multifamily property owners who will operate using Landing’s platform and standards.

Flow, which also will be offering furnished apartments with short-term leases, is planning to own some of the apartments it subleases. Neumann reportedly has purchases more than 3,000 units for the startup in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville.

Placemakr, a pop-up hotel pioneer formerly known as WhyHotel, also has raised $90M this year to fund a short-term apartment rental venture.