A day by the pool that is not your own is becoming a reality

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Published Date 5/10/2023

We’re so used to it by now. A car comes to pick us up, driven by the car’s owner. The driver is Uber nice and makes conversation with us as we get closer to the airport, and his tip is already arranged for in our smartphones. When we get to our destination, we receive a text from the owner of a gorgeous townhome near the beach, where the owner is waiting for us to arrive to show us all the details of staying at his resort home for a week. His list of AirBnb perks includes recommendations for nearby restaurants, and the fridge already has a few snacks for us. It’s pure paradise on someone else’s turf.

A Northern California 30-something is trying to figure out if she should have a bachelorette party. Her friends are adamant about throwing one for her. There is a heat wave going on and the only thing she can think would make any sense is a pool party. Only problem? Nobody she knows has a pool. But plenty of people who live on the other side of town in their mega-mansions have giant pools and giant backyards. All she wants is a private, intimate setting where a group of millennial women can drink, get Mexican food delivered, and listen to Beyoncé in peace. In other words, she wants to simulate the experience of owning a pool without actually owning one. And she got it — using an app called Swimply.

Just as you can order up a car or a townhome, now you can order up someone’s backyard with the pool in the middle of it. Yup. Dwell.com’s Alana Hope Levinson reports that Swimply is a marketplace that allows users to rent their pools. “The service, which takes a 15 percent cut from hosts (who set their hourly rate) and 10 percent from guests, now lists about 25,000 pools in 125 markets in the U.S., Canada, and Australia,” she says.

In this case, for just $80 an hour, the bride-to-be and her friends would get to float in a saltwater oasis, jump off the surrounding rocks, shimmy down the slide, stand under the waterfall, soak in the hot tub and relax on the lounge furniture. They could use the massive kitchen with a bar and a grill, listen to their music through the outdoor speakers, watch the outdoor TV, and finish up their time with the private bath/shower access offered by their hosts.

California is home to some 1.3 million private pools. Its indoor-outdoor lifestyle dream traces its roots back a century, to when the rich and famous zeroed in on the pool as one of the most aspirational features of a California home. By the late 1920s, architects began designing homes for their Californian clients with pools as integral architectural features. Mid-century brought gunite to the equation — essentially sprayable concrete — and private pools became much more affordable.

But the pool also became a status symbol of sorts — the object of lust of every upwardly mobile American household. Those who had them were in an exclusive club of sorts, to the envy of even their own neighbors. But… back to the short history of Swimply.

Levinson explains how it was 2016, and Bunim Laskin was stuck inside his family home in Lakewood, New Jersey, recovering from surgery. Through one of the windows, he noticed his neighbor’s unused pool. It was originally built for the neighbor’s grandchildren, but they rarely visited. Laskin, the eldest of twelve children, was always on the lookout for ways to entertain his siblings, but traveling anywhere was a logistical nightmare. He wondered if his neighbor would let them swim in exchange for a fee.

Before long Laskin approached five other families in the neighborhood. The payments they received began a chunk of his neighbor’s maintenance costs. Two years later, Laskin—along with cofounder Asher Weinberger — launched Swimply with four pools. “They started using Google Earth to find more, and a combination of knocking on doors and word of mouth helped them acquire 100 pools and 400 reservations; in 2019, they were able to raise about $1 million from family and friends,” says Levinson, who explains how the pandemic ended up being the platform’s ultimate gift. People were desperate for safe outdoor spaces where they could hang with friends.

Soon, the two partners say, they saw a 4,000 percent increase in revenue, which allowed them to raise $50 million from venture capitalists, including Airbnb and Lime co founders, the following year. Both restricted travel and quarantine requirements added appeal to the Swimply tagline “Escape locally.”

But the escape doesn’t revolve only around the pool itself. Ask anyone who owns a pool and they’ll tell you half the fun of owning it is simply hanging out around it. “The calming effects of the pool work whether you get in or not—as a kind of peace by proxy,” says Levinson who adds that Instagram selfies no doubt play a part as well.

More than that, this phenomenon also fosters connection between hosts and guests. Just as you got to know your Uber drive, or went back and were greeted by the same AirBnb hosts, Swimply is marketed as a pathway to human connection. “It’s not just for renting a pool; it’s for becoming friends with neighbors,” says Levinson, who explains how the transactional aspect of it is taken over by the neighborly feeling that builds up.

Bottom line? Throwing a party at a Swimply property makes the user of the app feel rich, and that’s something a public space will never get you. Swimply is now rolling out other outdoor spaces like tennis courts, large backyards, and even home gyms. Interestingly enough, in 2020 Bunim Laskin asked In the panel of Shark Tank to invest, but they all worried the company was wildly overvalued. No doubt a missed opportunity.

Dwell, TBWS

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Guardian Mortgage, a division of Sunflower Bank, N.A.