Before they founded Airbnb during the global economic recession of 2008, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were broke and struggling to pay their rent in San Francisco, northern California.
They opted to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to attendees of a conference because all the hotels were booked. They named their service Air Bed and Breakfast.
This accidental experiment in Silicon Valley would later disrupt the global hospitality industry with latest data revealing that it has over 7 million listings across 100,000 cities worldwide as 14,000 new hosts join the platform monthly in 2021.
Now, in Silicon Savannah, Alastair Campbell would discover what he calls “a huge market gap” in the early months of 2019.
In what looks like a similar trajectory to the American platform, teaming up with local innovators, Alastair launched xPodd in June the same year, looking to create a holistic online meeting point between landlords and tenants
“This solution helps to eliminate points of friction when it comes to tenants finding a property or landlords finding tenants. You can connect directly in a convenient, safe, cost-effective and efficient way,” Mr Alastair told Digital Business from Ireland.
When the first case of Covid-19 was announced in Kenya and a subsequent lockdown, the platform, available as a web-based service started experiencing tremendous traffic as companies asked employees to work from home, necessitating the need for an extra room that can be converted into a home office among tenants.
“I needed an extra room to perform my duties without distraction. My job requires high concentration and a noisy environment sucks away my focus,” says Mercy Muthui, who used the platform to shift to a more spacious house in Rongai, on the outskirts of Nairobi.
Deploying the power of Big Data analytics and Artificial Intelligence, xPodd discovered new trends across Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa.
“People were also looking for hotels where they could spend several days on holiday. Actually they were looking for the Airbnb version of Kenya,” says Priscilla Waithera, the communications officer at xPodd.
To identify and enrol landlords and hotel owners, the platform enlists ‘finders’ who search for the right houses and motels on behalf of clients and earn part of the fee paid.
“The finder takes 87 per cent of the access fees paid by prospective clients which ranges from Sh200 to Sh3,000. This is calculated by the app's machine learning algorithms depending on time required, location and budget,” expounds Ms Waithera, adding that the model has provided unemployed Kenyans a source of much needed income.
When Digital Business logged on to the platform to look for a hotel in Mombasa, we realised that once users create an account, they can search for houses for rent, business stalls, hotels and office space from across the country.
They can choose between furnished and unfurnished houses, and are asked to input the estate or city area you want to rent or stay in, then a notification goes to different landlords or owners in that locality whose properties match with the property seekers ‘details, and must respond in 24 hours by sending back three photos plus details of their houses on the platform.
Once you choose the house you love, the platform offers you various movers around the area who can assist to ferry your belongings to the new house. Along the entire process, the user receives real-time notifications via both SMS and WhatsApp.
“The demand for our services of connecting tenants to landlords had initially outstripped the number of landlords in our system thus leaving a huge number of people stranded. But we are working with house owners to match clients on the waiting list,” says chief operations officer Nekoye Inzaule.
With many people now fed up with living and working within the same walls round the clock, xPodd that now has over 15,000 users has been rolling out the service to all urban, semi-urban and peri-urban areas.
“From chic cottages in Karen, Champagne ridge or Che Shale, to roadside lodgings in Mumias, Murang’a and Garsen or homestays in Kibera, Kondele or Majengo in Mombasa, we are penetrating the unserved areas by Airbnb. Ability to accept payments via M-Pesa and Paypal has given xPodd a significant edge as landlords are able to access payments near real time, in these challenging times,” she explains.
Wherever there is a road or a path, whether on business, adventure, going back home or just plainly moving around, xPodd says it will keep offering Kenyans places to rest for the day, night or however long you require.
The platform helps users avoid culling through hundreds of property listings, requesting from websites properties which are already let out, falling for scams through pictures which are photoshopped while ending the back-and-forth negotiations.
“Our aim is to enable people to live, work and earn more easily in an age of a pandemic and digital revolution. Neither the government's goal of providing affordable housing nor the UN’s SDGs can be met unless supply bottlenecks in real estate are addressed,” says Mr Alastair.
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