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IPFS News Link • Housing

Exclusive: Airbnb will start designing houses in 2019

• https://www.fastcompany.com, By Mark Wilson

After launching a home-sharing revolution, Airbnb's founders started asking themselves, "What's next?" They successfully created a global network of more than 5 million homes, castles, and treehouses for rent, and their business is worth an estimated $38 billion. But what else could Airbnb become?

It's a question that led chief product officer and cofounder Joe Gebbia to start Samara, a futures division of Airbnb, in 2016, meant to develop new products and services for the company. Gebbia's answer to what Airbnb can be next: architect and urban planner. Not just the company that provides the housing–the company that provides the houses.

Today, Samara is announcing a new initiative called Backyard, "an endeavor to design and prototype new ways of building and sharing homes," according to a press statement, with the first wave of test units going public in 2019. In plain language, that means Airbnb is planning to distribute prototype buildings next year.


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