Co-Living Firm Common Acquires Room Search Tech Firm Skylight
Brad Hargreaves’ (pictured, right, with Ollie co-founder Chris Bledsoe) co-living company Common has acquired sublet search site Skylight, which offers flexible-term rentals and handles rents automatically via credit or debit card.
Skylight CEO and co-founder Michael Lisovetsky, co-founder Jason Marmon and engineer Max Makarochkin have all joined Common as part of the deal. Before being sold, Skylight had received investments from Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, venture capitalist Tim Draper (who previously invested in Skype, Tesla, Baidu and Twitch) and Great Oaks VC.
Skylight has more than 125,000 members in its network. With this larger prospective tenant pool, Common plans to use Skylight’s data stream to better market its own co-living spaces and discover which neighborhoods are in demand.
Skylight’s data also gives Common insight into rental market segments that have been untracked up until this point, like people who use independent apps to find homes instead of brokers. It can also see how room share data compares to studios and one-bedrooms.
