This month, we've been talking to four very different audiences about the same subject: a homeowner deciding whether to open a spare room, a state agency weighing a housing budget, a local nonprofit fielding requests it can't yet meet, and a foundation deciding where a grant could travel furthest. Underneath all four conversations is one question, asked in different currencies. What would this cost, and what would we get back?
That question is exactly why we built Value of a Match, our new research and calculator suite, and why it's launching this month.
Four Audiences, One Question
For a home provider, the return shows up as a few hundred dollars a month and, more often than people expect, some company. For a state, it shows up as thousands of residents housed at a fraction of the cost of new construction, this year, not in three to five. For a local nonprofit, it shows up as something to finally say yes to, instead of another name on a waitlist. For a foundation, it shows up as a region where the home sharing infrastructure outlives the grant that started it.
None of those returns require the same thing from us. They require the same thing from the tool: an honest number, built for the person asking.
What the Calculator Actually Does
Put in your city as a home provider, and get an estimate for your room. Put in your state as an agency, and see the cost and reach of a statewide initiative next to what it costs to build one new unit. Put in your region as a funder, and see what a multi-year grant could seed. Same underlying data, four different lenses, because the honest cost-benefit case looks a little different depending on where you're sitting.
We built this because "home sharing works" isn't a useful sentence on its own. Works for whom, works how, and what does it cost to find out, those are the real questions, and most of what's been written about home sharing has answered them in generalities. This is our attempt to answer them in numbers specific enough to act on.
A Month of Numbers, in One Place
A spare room worth several hundred dollars a month to the household that opens it. A statewide license running $7,000 per site a year against a single new housing unit costing anywhere from $165,000 to $700,000 to build. A $10,000 pilot that can bring a whole community online. A $150,000 regional grant that can seed self-sustaining home sharing across up to ten local organizations. None of these numbers are dependent on each other, and none of them require everyone to agree on the same solution. They just have to be visible to the people deciding whether to act, which is the entire reason the calculator exists instead of another paper full of averages.
If you've read any of this month's pieces, whether you came in as someone with a spare room, an agency with a budget, an organization with a waitlist, or a funder with a region in mind, the next step is the same one. Run your number. Even at one or two percent, it's worth knowing what's on the other side of that question before you decide it's not for you.