New-To-Philly Real Estate Start-Up Turns Rowhouses into Mini-‘Co-Living’ Dens
Bungalow, a real estate start-up, has arrived in Philadelphia with a business model that could have been cribbed from MTV’s The Real World, casting young strangers as housemates one city at a time.
The San Francisco-based company, which officially began its Philadelphia operations Thursday, leases private homes from their owners for years at a time so it can rent those dwellings out by the room.
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Bungalow also may be limited by Philadelphia’s zoning code, which generally prohibits homes from being shared by more than three occupants who are not related, said Peter Kelsen, a lawyer specializing in land-use law at Blank Rome LLP.
While its listings in other cities offer space in houses with as many as nine bedrooms, all of the properties it has under lease in Philadelphia so far are three-bedroom homes.
Bungalow may "have figured out that this number issue could be a problem, " Kelsen said.
"New-To-Philly Real Estate Start-Up Turns Rowhouses into Mini-‘Co-Living’ Dens," by Jacob Adelman was published in Philly.com on May 16, 2019.