Kindred Is Raya for Home Exchange

Kindred insists that it is not Airbnb. Instead of a place to list your home (or that investment property you bought to turn into a bachelor party abyss) as a vacation rental, Kindred advertises bills itself as a “members-only home-exchange community.” No money exchange – except for cleaning and service fees and a $300 annual subscription. The startup, which launched earlier this year after raising $7.75 million in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, claims to be agnostic about the homes it offers: Properties can be large or small, rented or owned, as long as they are “safe, well-maintained homes occupied by people who like to travel.” But these manicured homes – a Sausalito retreat with built-ins and bay views; an apartment in Mexico City’s La Condesa with a window wall overlooking a terrace – mostly looks the same kind of expensive: white gallery walls, Monsteras of various sizes and a recognizable selection of DTC furniture. It’s like Raya for real estate exchanges.

Raya curates her mix of celebrities, models, and trust fund babes using criteria like number of Instagram followers and how many other members you know. In its beta phase, Kindred is invite-only and reviews the LinkedIn profiles of people hoping to be waitlisted. Kindred isn’t the first home exchange platform built on this idea — in 2014, Behoma Barcelona-based members-only home-sharing site launched specifically for “creatives and design lovers” – it just targets a different niche.

The sell of Kindred is that you only trade with your peers – like, for example, your colleagues at Bain. “When we said, ‘Hey, you worked at Bain. Swap houses with this Bain pod,” co-founder Justine Palefsky Explain last week, “the Bain person was like, ‘Oh great, I like the people who worked at Bain.'” A Bain Exclusive invite encourages potential members to “join dozens of Bainies” by listing their homes, filling the Bainie philosophy of mutual support: “A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail.” (Right now, it looks like Bainies can mostly swap well-appointed homes in different parts of San Francisco and New York.)

In exchanges featured on Kindred’s Instagram, members show off their stays at Tribeca apartments and beach houses in Hawaii. The clientele is the type to own a rower or a fiddle leaf fig and rejoice in staying at other houses with rowers and fiddle leaf figs. (One listing has “198 plants and counting,” which seems hard to find elsewhere.) If you don’t have an invite code, you can update your LinkedIn and join the waitlist.