How Ohana runs on agents.
NYC’s largest medium-term and subletting platform — now scaling across London, Boston, the Bay Area, Sydney, and Melbourne — with an agent for every person on the team.
The playbook that needed to move cities.
Ohana is the largest medium-term and subletting platform in New York City. It’s a business that depends on a human touch — relationships with hosts, a feel for local neighborhoods, the operational care that keeps both sides of the marketplace happy.
That model worked beautifully in one city. The question, as the team prepared to launch London, Boston, the Bay Area, Sydney, and Melbourne in parallel, was how to scale a high-touch operation without diluting the part that made it work.
The companies that figure this out quickly and take advantage of this technology are the ones that are going to win. If you don’t use this, you’re not going to be able to compete.
From “powerful” to “revolutionary.”
Out of the gate, Spawnlabs was useful — the base toolkit alone cut hours out of the team’s weekly research, outreach, and operational work. The inflection point came when Ohana started building their own agents on top of it.
When we started using Spawnlabs out of the gate, it was powerful. Then when we started spawning our own agents, it was revolutionary. It was like having our actual team in agent form.
Each agent was modeled on a specific person on the team — their taste, their judgement, their particular slice of expertise. Instead of one general assistant trying to do everyone’s job badly, Ohana had a roster of specialists, each one indexed to a real operator.
Ohana 3.0 — three weeks in.
The team internally calls this chapter Ohana 3.0. Inside three weeks, the way they build product, run sales, find customers, and monitor the market had changed end-to-end.
The amount that our business has revolutionized in three weeks is beyond anything I could have ever imagined.
An agent for every teammate.
Because each agent is tied to an individual, the work doesn’t stop when that person clocks out. A team member’s agent keeps running their functions off-shift, overnight, across time zones — important when the business now spans New York and Sydney.
The same agents have started showing up in onboarding. When Ohana hires a new teammate for a function, the agent that already knows the role can train them — passing down the specific patterns, decisions, and institutional knowledge that previously only lived in one head.
When there’s a unique skill set for a member of our team, even when they’re off shift, their agent continues to perform those functions. The individuals we’ve hired are much more productive, and when we need to add a new person, the agent can train the real human.
What’s next.
The next frontier the team is exploring: monitoring subletting activity across the world in real time — a visibility layer that would let Ohana move into new cities with the confidence of an operator who’s already been there for a year.
It’s the sort of capability that wouldn’t have been on the roadmap six months ago. With agents doing the work, the roadmap itself changes.
Your team could be the next case study.
We start every partnership with the same question: what’s the workflow that hurts most? Deploy an agent against it and measure what happens.