Tired of working from home? This company will set you up at a neighbors

As many states remain shutdown people are looking to expand workspace options beyond their homes. Globe Founder Manny Bamfo joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to discuss what his company is seeing in terms of demand for renting spaces amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Video transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: How would you like to make a little bit of extra money by renting out your living room, not the whole apartment or house, but just the living room? Manny Bamfo is the CEO of Globe and he can explain how you can do that and why people are actually making some cash right now during the pandemic. Welcome to the program, Manny.

MANNY BAMFO: Good morning.

ADAM SHAPIRO: So I got to ask you, you launched this last summer. It was August, right, when you launched Globe? And you have experience with this. You were there at Recharge.

MANNY BAMFO: Yeah.

ADAM SHAPIRO: So in a pandemic situation like this, why would people rent out their living room and have strangers come in when they might be all, for lack of a better word, germy?

MANNY BAMFO: Yeah, nobody wants germy people in their homes. That's for sure. Primarily, our hosts right now are folks that have a second home or they're a property manager. And so folks that are coming in are not coming into a home where somebody is already living there full time. As to why people will do this. People are doing this simply to get away from their roommates or their spouses. We're not used to being cooped up in the house with our family members.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Amen.

[LAUGHTER]

JULIE HYMAN: That one hit a little close to home for us. I'm curious, Manny, for the people who are renting out their own homes where they're currently living, presumably they go take a walk or do whatever during that time. Do you have sort of a-- I mean, even though people can clean if they must. ' the latest data is showing that if someone is talking in an enclosed space, that the so-called respiratory droplets can hang in the air for quite some time. So do you have any kind of buffer period where you're saying to people, maybe don't come back to your house for a certain amount of time if someone's been there, and likewise don't let someone come in until you've been gone for a certain amount of time?

MANNY BAMFO: Great question. Right now we don't have any homes in the platform where somebody would have to come back after someone has left. We used to do that before COVID but after COVID started taking off, the only homes that we have on the platform are homes where there isn't a full time tenant living there.

Now, to answer your question in terms of timing, we typically only have one guest coming in each day. And we have a rigorous cleaning standard that all of our hosts follow.

INES FERRE: Manny, Ines Ferre here. Which are the areas, cities that you're seeing the most usage in? And also, as tech companies have told their workers that they can stay home for the rest of the year, how is this expected to impact your business?

MANNY BAMFO: Great question. We're-- our biggest markets are San Francisco, LA, and of course, New York. But we're seeing bookings all across the country. Just the other day, I saw a booking in Columbus. We've seen bookings in Jakarta, Indonesia, seen bookings in London. So this company is starting to take off because all around the world people are crammed inside. And on the host side, all of the demand that people were expecting to get from travel has tanked.

To your specific question about enterprise, we're actually picking up a few enterprise clients. We had a product manager at Facebook, another-- another group leader at Goldman Sachs who reached out to us and said, listen, for my team I'd love to use your spaces to be able to organize my staff. And so if you have a team out there and you want them to be able to not be crammed in with their roommates, please email us at enterprise@globeliving.com. And we'll get you going.

MELODY HAHM: And Manny, of course, one of those companies, is one of the darlings pre-pandemic that has been hit hard because of this hit to hospitality is Airbnb. As I understand it, you do not offer overnight stays. It's only during the day chunks at a time. Do you feel like that's the way you're able to find a loophole in terms of the regulatory concerns, just because it is kind of-- you're not actually renting out a place overnight?

MANNY BAMFO: Yeah, we don't take room nights. And we're not servicing travelers. All of our customers are locals that are in their home that are looking to get some work done. We used to go to phone booths, you know, at our office to do a conference call. But now we're not in the office. And so we don't view that as travel. We don't view that as an overnight stay. We view it as an opportunity to get some quiet time and get things done. We're much more similar to Starbucks in that regard, except there aren't hundreds of people coming in every hour. It's just you.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And you can get a seat, whereas at Starbucks when they are fully open, you can't always get a seat. But I've got to ask you. You know, you're convincing some of us who might have been skeptics when we first heard about this idea. But you're going to face competition, I gotta bet, from a field you know well, hotels, because as they are desperate for any kind of revenue, won't they pick up on this kind of thing?

MANNY BAMFO: If I was a hotel owner, I certainly would. And I would encourage many owners to do the same. I haven't seen that they always move that quickly. But right now, I would say, hands down, you know, all of us used to be crammed in the office. Now we're all crammed at home. We got to find a middle ground, right? Going into flu season, we're not going to just all cram in Starbucks or cram in offices. And if hotels are able to pick up that bill, we would welcome that. But we're laser-focused on allowing hosts to be able to earn money in their secondary homes in the middle of the day.

JULIE HYMAN: Manny, it's Julie here. You mentioned asking people to email you from companies. I'm wondering if you have any corporate clients yet.

MANNY BAMFO: We do.

JULIE HYMAN: And alternatively if you are seeing people-- if you know if people are expensing this in some cases to their work.

MANNY BAMFO: This is how we got the idea, because one of our customers was expensing this to Facebook. And so we then used-- we talked to them. We did some customer feedback. And that's actually how Facebook became one of our first clients. So we are working with many enterprise clients. Right now, the entire world is moving to remote work. I even saw the other day there was some-- BMO bank in Canada is now remote. So it's not just the innovative companies like Facebook and Twitter. Even more traditional established companies are recognizing, look, we don't necessarily need this overhead.

But what we have to do now is we need to utilize the real estate in our existing markets to be able to accommodate this new workforce. And that's exactly what we're doing.

ADAM SHAPIRO: There's a liquor store across the street that might be appropriate middle ground that you kept alluding to. But I'm not sure my boss would appreciate that. Manny Bamfo, we wish you all the best. Thank you for joining us. When you get ready to IPO, please consider us as your first stop.

MANNY BAMFO: Sounds good. Will do. Looking forward to it.