This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rick Neuhoff, 65, a homeowner in Portland, Oregon, who rents out his indoor pool using Swimply. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Before COVID got bad, I was doing marketing for law firms. COVID had pretty much killed my business, because the lawyers didn’t want to expand their portfolio because the courts were closed.
So I was at home, and I was stuck.
For a little while, I was driving for DoorDash. One day, my wife was actually accompanying me while I was delivering, and we saw on our doorbell video camera that something had been left at our door. We had assumed it was medication, but it was this bag from Swimply, an app that allows you to rent out your private pool.
The reason we wanted a pool in our house was for my wife to be able to exercise when she’s home. She had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and working out every day became quite essential.
Here in Portland, evidently, your public records are quite public, so Swimply knew that we had this indoor swimming pool, and they left a welcome bag on our door with a beach ball and a bunch of information.
I persuaded my wife to give it a shot, and we never looked back.
We charge $75 an hour to rent our indoor pool
I don’t think I was driving for more than a year before we gave Swimply a shot. In two days, I made more than I made all week driving.
Within a matter of months, we were starting to do quite well. We started at a few hundred dollars a week, then we were doing over $1,000 dollars a week, and it kept steadily building.
We’ve been charging $75 an hour for about four years now.
My top months I made $12,000 to $15,000 gross, but we’ve had slow weeks, too.
Weekdays during the morning are when we are slowest — and weekdays are slower than weekends, so we have a weekday discount of $60 an hour. Typically, we will get one booking, or sometimes two, on weekdays, generally after school or after work.
I enjoy being able to make others’ events feel special
When we first started renting out our pool, we were a little concerned that it was going to be awkward having people inside our house.
We realized pretty quickly that we had to keep the door to the pool house locked because people would occasionally just open the door and start walking in, looking for the bathroom or whatever.
But the fun and joy you hear coming through the walls is really infectious, and it makes you smile even when you’re having a rough day.
We’ve hosted film shoots, photo shoots, every type of holiday party you could think of, and anniversaries.
We’ve been approached by a number of swim instructors who were looking for a home for their swim school.
We briefly hosted a scuba school. There was a problem with their tank, so they were here for a couple of weeks while it was getting fixed. We are nowhere near deep enough for scuba, but I think it was better for them to keep their classes going than to just put the brakes on.
We’ve had a number of large corporate events during the warmer weather — there’s a large grass back lot behind our house. We have a semi-private walled-in courtyard, and then there’s the pool house. During colder weather, we can accommodate up to 60 people with limited seating and a DJ in the pool house.
When the outdoor pools close, our business increases. There are a very small number of indoor pools in Portland, and of the indoor pools that are in our market, we’re the only one with real space to party.
We still have tons more that we need to do here, but we have really made significant improvements. Our pool house is still shabby chic at best, but the pool itself is incredible, and the environment that we’ve created is as good as we have been able to with the budget.
Because of COVID, Swimply enabled me to make money when my business was out of business. I’ve now changed my business and am more flexible after recognizing an opportunity.
I’m not making quite what I was making while working with the law firms — close to it — but my stress is a lot lower, which is priceless.
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