A week after Eric and Katalin Thune put their Northern California home up for sale, they received a strange message from their pool service technician.
“I got a text from my pool guy saying, ‘Do you know there’s people at your pool?’” Thune said.
From his home security camera, Thune was able to watch a family heading to his family’s backyard pool for a day in the water.He said his mind was spinning because he was so shocked. “It’s a violation right? It’s your property. You don’t expect to hear people you don’t know are there,” he said. But when Thune’s service technician put the invading family on the phone to talk to him, Thune got a further shock. The family told him they had rented his pool on Swimply, a site similar to Airbnb where you can rent private backyard pools by the hour.
“He said, ‘Your pool is listed there.’ And I said, ‘No it’s not. You’re trespassing. You need to leave, or I'll call the police,’” said Thune.
But it turned out it was true. Thune’s pool really was listed on Swimply. Someone had posted the pool on the site and was charging $46 an hour.
Thune was bewildered. How was it possible to rent out a pool without Swimply verifying that you actually own the property?
Investigative reporters with a local NBC affiliate contacted Swimply and learned that the company simply doesn’t verify ownership. But they did say that listings are not immediately searchable after they are posted, and they use fraud detection to catch false listings they remove within 48 hours.
The reporters decided to put Swimply’s fraud detection to the test. A Los Angeles producer for the network placed an ad on the site for a San Francisco Bay Area pool that belongs to an executive of the channel. Meanwhile, a Bay Area intern for the network placed an ad for the Los Angeles producer’s rooftop patio, with pictures of the patio taken from Zillow. Both properties were posted to the site immediately and stayed listed there for weeks.
The NBC reporters pressed Swimply for answers. A spokesperson for Swimply said that the company’s “extreme growth resulted in some instances of fraud slipping through [its] cracks.” The company stated that fake listings are “extremely uncommon,” and it's “committed to catching fraudsters.”
But Thune thinks that homeowners need to be aware of how easily thieves can make money off of other’s property.
“I just want people to know, especially if you’ve got your home for sale, you need to watch out for this. A lot of times properties are vacant for a long time,” he said. Concerned homeowners should remove photos of their properties from common real estate marketplaces such as Zillow, Redfin, and Trulia.
