It was September 2022 and Lexi Pandell, a 33-year-old East Bay native living in nearby Danville, California, was trying to figure out if she should have a bachelorette party. The state was experiencing a heat wave—“the hottest and longest on record” for the month of September, the governor noted. All across the West, more than a thousand heat records were broken. There was only one idea that made any kind of sense: a pool.
“I am in a part of town that’s a lot of ranch-style homes and rentals,” Pandell says. There is no pool at her place or at any of her friends’; none of them live on “the other side of town [where] it’s these mega mansions with giant pools and giant back-yards.” As the world gets hotter, we are becoming a country increasingly obsessed with private pools—there are more than 10 million in the U.S.—but only 8 percent of American households have a residential pool, according to research by the Pool and Hot Tub Alliance.
Pandell wasn’t concerned about having a bachelorette party at all, but her friends offered to plan it. She insisted on something low-key: a private, intimate setting where a group of millennial women could drink, get Mexican food delivered, and listen to Beyoncé in peace. Basically, she wanted to simulate the experience of owning a pool without actually owning a pool.
Thankfully, there’s an app for that: Swimply, a marketplace that allows users to rent pools owned by their more fortunate neighbors. The service, which takes a 15 percent cut from hosts (who set their hourly rate) and 10 percent from guests, now lists about 25,000 pools in 125 markets in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
Pandell’s friends had heard good things about what’s commonly referred to as the “Airbnb for pools.” Given the small size of their town, when they opened the app they didn’t have torocks to jump off, plus a slide, a waterfall, a hot tub, and more lounge furniture than they could possibly use. The outdoor area also included a massive kitchen with a bar and a grill, speakers, and a TV, as well as private bath/shower access and free Wi-Fi. The reviews were all glowing.
