New York-based Life House, creator of lifestyle, boutique hotels at an affordable price point, recently launched its first collection of hotels that promise to be experience-driven, locally-rooted, and accessible to everyone. The first two hotels are located in Miami’s Little Havana and South Beach neighborhoods that recently began accepting reservations. The company raised more than $70 million in less than one year, and is on track to add 20+ hotels to its portfolio by the end of 2019, including a hotel in Denver.
While it’s too soon to reveal the details of the hotel in Denver, Life House revealed in a recent press release that each Life House hotel has its own unique identity that is thoughtfully designed to embody the spirit of the neighborhood, weaving in the local history and culture in a modern way.
Life House was founded by Rami Zeidan, a seasoned hotel and real estate executive and Yury Yakubchyk, a software entrepreneur. The company has raised $70 million in funding to date between venture and real estate capital, with investment from Global Founders Capital, Comcast Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Henley Investments, among others. As the first U.S.-based lifestyle hotel company to be backed by venture and real estate capital, Life House is positioned to modernize an antiquated industry.
“The problems in the hotel industry are multi-faceted and stem from technology and real estate – not solely price, or solely experience,” said Zeidan. “The ability to bring prices down and improve the guest experience requires a holistic solution to the technology, real estate, operations and branding. Life House is focused on all of these components, and our capital and expertise provides us the opportunity to make it happen.”
Life House remains asset-light and signs long term management agreements instead of leases, a rarity in Silicon Valley. Despite the popularity of leases in the real estate tech space, the company is being cautious of signing leases with mismatched duration in a cyclical hotel market. This approach allows the company to scale its revenues without increasing its expenses, much like a SaaS product. Life House’s diverse expertise allows for vertical integration, from construction, design, technology, food and beverage, and operations. Through this model, Life House creates cohesive, expressive hotels, while drastically reducing the cost and time to develop and operate them. Those savings are passed on to investors who in turn pass them on to travelers, providing them a 4.5-star hotel experience at a fraction of the price.
“We are thrilled to see Life House launching such a complex and robust platform only several months after their Series A. With this launch, Life House is poised to quickly scale up in the near trillion-dollar hotel market that has long been ripe for disruption,” states Global Founders Capital Partner, Ludwig Ensthaler.
To power the company’s digital marketing, pricing and distribution, finance and accounting, and on-property operations, Life House created its own technology platform, a single hub of data that can be used to nimbly target the right customers, and innovate as needed. In addition to the back-end technology, the company offers an intuitive and branded booking experience, akin to what modern consumers have become accustomed to from other direct to consumer brands.
“Existing hotel technology architecture is dated and suffers from siloed vendors and messy APIs, leading to unstable, and vulnerable integrations,” says Yury Yakubchyk, co-founder and CTO of Life House. “The solution requires a modern approach to software development and a significant amount of capital; we’ve built a robust team to architect a scalable hotel management platform from the bottom up.”
Life House hotels offer a mix of room types catering to all travelers who appreciate an experience at a conscious price point. The brand will always offer a room category that is less than $149 per night, and for a limited time, rooms will open at $109, which will be a welcome addition to the Denver hotel market.
