Need break from stay-at-home mates? App rents hourly room

Netflix. Peloton. Charmin. These are well-known brands benefiting from the quarantine lifestyle. Here’s one you’ve never heard of: Globe. Its target customer is all of us who are really annoyed with the people we live with.

Founded in June 2019 by Emmanuel Bamfo, 30, and Eric Xu, 36, Globe may be thought of as a daytime, by-the-hour version of Airbnb. Say you are in New York, San Francisco, Miami or London and you simply cannot abide for another second listening to your wife’s work humor on her Zoom calls to clients, or the sound of your roommate slurping cereal.

You need a break. Going to your office, a coworking space or a coffee shop are not currently options. So you flip to your Globe app and look for a nearby empty apartment to rent for a few hours. No overnight stays are permitted, and you have to send a photo of a thermometer showing you don’t have a fever to get access to the check-in instructions.

“At a time when people are hanging on to the fringe of their sanity because we are not meant to be cooped up like this,” Bamfo said, “we give people a reprieve.”

Brittney Gwynn, 32, has been quarantining in Brooklyn, New York, with her boyfriend and really needed a break. “In terms of the time we’re spending together, we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” she said.

Gwynn, a project manager for an online art company, had learned about Globe last fall when she was looking for a place for her and friends to get ready for a fancy after-work gala. More recently, as the days of quarantine wore on, she kept an eye on the app to see if any place within walking distance to her apartment became available. When a vacant apartment in a downtown Brooklyn highrise was listed, she booked it for two hours, paying $100.

“I brought my anti-bacterial wipes, wiped down the desk, the doorknob, the light switch, any area of the apartment I was in,” she said. She conducted an important work call for 45 minutes, and then chilled for more than an hour.

This is not Bamfo’s first foray into the world of very shortterm rentals. He and two friends from Washington University created a startup called Recharge that matched gig workers and professionals with vacant hotel rooms where they could nap or shower when in city centers far from their homes.

But hotel workers balked at the extra cleaning they were being asked to do without additional pay.

So Bamfo decided to broaden his concept and connect anyone who needed a place to chill out to people who wanted to make extra money from their residences. He paired with a different friend from college, Xu, a former engineer at Reddit.

Globe did OK at first. There was supply, there was demand. The entrepreneurs were trying to make it scale.

Then came the coronavirus. According to the company, its biggest current problem is that not enough people are listing homes and apartments they own for strangers to hang out in amid a pandemic. Right now, Globe has 5,500 active hosts and 10,000 guests who have access to the hosts’ listings.

But more than 100,000 people are on a wait list to become guests, Bamfo said, 20,000 of whom joined in the past nine weeks. He said he can’t give them access to listings until he has more available places.