Shared Housing Startup HubHaus to Shut Down

September 14, 2020
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The venture-capital-backed home-sharing platform HubHaus is to close after failing to attract the necessary funding to keep going according to a report published last Friday. The company was founded in 2016 by Shruti Merchant, a medical student looking to make it easier for young professionals to find a place to live while creating a sense of community. The company had raised around $11 million from various American VCs and was one of a number of similar companies to have sprung up in the United States centered around the concept of co-living and flexible housing and becomes the latest to succumb to pressures brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

Airbnb backed Zeus Living saw a valuation cut and lost funding, short term rental startup Lyric has lost many of its landlords and has lost a co-founder while property management company Stay Alfred has had to close down. 

Although HubHaus was once valued at around $40 million, it has seen a number of disastrous events leading up to this point with 100 tenants with bad credit evicted last year and around 15 redundancies at the firm in February. According to a report by The Information around 30% of its rooms were empty, and 75% of its properties were loss-making. With little room for maneuver financially, dwindling demand, and no interest from investors, the company’s remaining employees are to be let go.

September 14, 2020
Since March 2020 Edmund's job has been to read about, write about, collect data on, analyse and generally know about real estate marketplaces and the companies that run them. Before that he worked at the aggregator Mitula Group (which became Lifull Connect) for five years.

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