April 2025
Live Near Friends is on a mission to help people live happier, healthier and more connected lives. We believe that home is more than the walls of your house – it's about the people in close proximity.
The product allows people to find housing right next door to friends and family. This is a common fantasy (⅔ of people really want it according to one of our recent surveys), and our job is to make it a reality. We break down the behavioral, logistical and real estate barriers to making their dream lifestyle possible.
Initially, we are focused on helping people make the dream happen using existing housing stock "in the wild" – whether it's coordinating the purchase and rental of homes within a short radius, co-buying a duplex or home with an ADU, or leasing multiple units of an apartment building.
But our eventual goal is to change the nature of the built environment itself. We will spur developers to build new housing specifically for groups rather than individuals or atomic family units. We will work with lenders to underwrite groups rather than individuals.
We want fences to come down. We want neighborhoods to be reinvigorated. We want places to have meaning. We want cities to look different in the next century than they did in the former one.
We want to shift how people think about place and inextricably tie it to the people nearby.
CEO Phil Levin was a founding team member of Culdesac (the first car-free real estate developer in the US, $200m+ raised) and started Radish - a groundbreaking co-owned housing cluster with 20 people (and their 5 kids) in Oakland.
The team (engineering, design, brand/content, GTM) is filled with start-up vets.
Live Near Friends is backed by top proptech and consumer tech investors. We've been covered in Architectural Digest, Vox, Axios, Business Insider, The Guardian, SF Standard, and Bigger Pockets.
Read more about the living near friends movement in The Atlantic, Bloomberg News, and in Culture Study.
Live Near Friends is hiring a freelance consultant to lead a short-term engagement (1-2 months) focused on testing and learning through paid social campaigns. You’ll set up and manage ad campaigns to evaluate which messages and target audiences respond most to our newest value proposition around multigenerational housing.