Swimply is like Airbnb for renting strangers’ backyard swimming pools. We tried it. Was it weird?

Through the service Swimply, we rented a private, heated in-ground pool in Lake County for our family.

I wondered if, despite the generous welcoming and the cost — $75 an hour — I could feel transported to something approaching tranquillity, particularly while walking around a stranger’s backyard shirtless in swim trunks, in broad daylight. I would get into their car without hesitation, but theirNot included in the cost of a Swimply backyard pool is your inhibition, which Swimply cheerfully ignores.

Swimply claims to have put 1 million people in private pools since it began four years ago. Despite unsuccessfully pitching itself on “Shark Tank” as “the Airbnb of pools,” the company’s timing was good, taking off as just as the pandemic forced people out of public spaces. By late 2021, it had raised $40 million, from investors that include co-founders of Airbnb and Lime, the e-scooter provider.

Laskin had stumbled onto a truism: “Pretty much all backyard pools are underutilized. Even owners who say they use it a couple of times a week often don’t use itAfter Swimply takes 15% from each rental, pool owners have made, on the high end, $10,000 a month; but on average, Laskin said, they make a few thousand here or there. In Chicago, with its shorter swim season, owners say they take in closer to hundreds here or there. But, they add, they’re doing little.

He was also startled when, soon after listing his pool, because the app wasn’t alerting him to rentals, “I’d have no idea people were coming. They’d just show up, knock at the door and ask where my pool was.”But on an app that blurs the private and public so intimately, larger problems were inevitable.

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