The Sharing Economy Has Moved to Backyard Rentals—for Your Dog

Alma Reed loved bringing her pit bulls to their favorite dog park in Nashville, until two-year-old Emmie started showing reactivity toward other dogs. Worried about public misperception due to their breed, Alma decided to stop bringing Emmie and Nelson to dog parks, only allowing them off-leash play at home, where they have a standard suburban yard and deck area. So, when she saw an ad for Sniffspot on TikTok offering private dog park rentals by the hour, she immediately booked their first visit to a three-acre property in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. "The moment we unleashed our dogs and watched them run, run, and run, we knew we had found our new favorite family activity," she says.

Sniffspot, an online marketplace that enables users to rent land by the hour to use as a private dog park, proudly refers to itself as "the Airbnb for dog parks." While property owners anywhere in the world can list their dog-friendly spaces on the platform, 90 percent of the site’s more than 28,000 listings are located in the United States, with the highest density of spots in Florida, Texas, California, Georgia, North Carolina, and New York. The first page of listings closest to my Manhattan apartment includes the expected residential outdoor spaces across the river in New Jersey, but also a small fenced-in yard with an aboveground pool in Queens, a 500-square-foot Williamsburg apartment rooftop, and an indoor "zoomie room" at a rescue shelter in Hell’s Kitchen. Most listings run between $5 to $30 an hour per dog.

Like the private pool-sharing platform Swimply—similarly called "the Airbnb for pools"—Sniffspot was born out of the frustration of watching covetous private outdoor spaces sit idle. The idea first came to founder David Adams in 2017 when he was living in a seventh-floor apartment in downtown Seattle, and struggling to find somewhere for his dog, Soba, to safely exercise off-leash. Adams, who previously founded the now defunct company HomeSuite (an online marketplace for temporary furnished housing), was "going to public dog parks not having good experiences," he says. "I saw these open yards, open land, and I thought, you could totally Airbnb this. I posted about it on Facebook and over a thousand people interacted with that post. I was like, ‘I’ve got to put up a website.’"

The company is part of a larger societal shift that’s taken Fido out of the doghouse and into the primary residence. Dog ownership in the U.S. is at an all-time high, as is the amount Americans are spending on their pets—not just on toys and checkups, but on special home features like "catios" and dog spas. Amid political, economic, and environmental uncertainty, Gen Zers and millennials are increasingly choosing to raise pets instead of children, opting for dog park socials over playground playdates. (And this trend extends to other parts of the world.) The growing number of pets and amounts that owners are spending on them reflects a wider shift in how we’ve integrated pets as true members of the family. (Taking the concept of designing a dog-friendly space even further, Sniffspot recently launched the BarkLoft, a luxury "doggie dream house" you can install in your backyard for a cool $35,000.)

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Emmie and Nelson’s favorite Sniffspot is conveniently located just five minutes from their house in Nashville, and only costs $5 an hour per dog to rent. "It has everything we could ask for—a water feature where Emmie can swim, open green lawns, and a wildflower area where the moles like to hide," says Alma. She books that Sniffspot every Sunday, but Saturdays are earmarked for exploration. She typically seeks out fenced-in spaces that are more than three acres, since the dogs already have a yard at home. "We see Sniffspot visits as our family adventure time, so we try to book spots in new places we’ve never been before," she says. "We’ve visited some truly amazing locations, including a ten-acre farmhouse with a pond and rolling hills."

While Alma’s dogs are lucky enough to have what she describes as a "decent-sized" backyard for everyday play, many Sniffspot users are pet owners who live in apartments without access to private outdoor space. "Living in an apartment without a dog park with a large, high-energy dog is extremely challenging," says Sophie Wagner, who lives 15-minutes from downtown Phoenix, Arizona, with her reactive two-year-old German shepherd, Archie. "I can’t imagine living in an apartment and not using Sniffspot. It gives so many options with different types of backyards, from just grass to a whole pool to swim in and enjoy."

The ability to borrow private outdoors space has become more pertinent as housing prices and home ownership costs have continued to spike across the U.S., delaying the median age of today’s first-time home buyers (which historically ranged between 28 and 33) to 38, according to data published in early 2025 by the National Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the American Pet Products Association (APPA)’s 2025 State of the Industry Report found that 94 million U.S. households now own at least one pet (up from 82 million in 2023), with Gen Z leading in pet-ownership growth (as well as in multi-pet ownership) and millennials making up 30 percent of American pet owners. Still, a lot of young Americans can only afford to rent apartments the size of a doghouse; forget outdoor space—especially in urban areas, where more than 80 percent of the U.S. population lives.

With the continued rise of U.S. urbanization and, according to the APPA’s report, an estimated 51 percent of American households owning dogs, there’s been an evolution in how we bring our dogs into public spaces. Fido isn’t just an at-home pet anymore, he has weekend plans at his local dog-friendly bar and puppy playdates to attend in Central Park. Even before the pandemic puppy boom, the Trust for Public Land’s annual city parks survey reported a 40-percent increase in public dog park developments between 2009 and 2018 in the 100 largest U.S cities. In New York City, where the major increase of pet dogs in public spaces has fanned heated discourse about the social etiquette of those pets’ owners, there’s even been a rise of members-only private dog runs with luxury amenities and steep fees, akin to a Soho House for your Labradoodle.

The concept that there’s a way to make the world a better, more livable place for dogs is on both sides of Sniffspot’s business equation. According to Adams, the advertising messaging that’s been most resonant with Sniffspot hosts is about helping dogs, not earning money. "When they talk about loving Sniffspot, they talk about loving the fact that their land can be used to bring dogs joy, and that they can be a part of that," he says. "And making the money is great too." So far, Sniffspot hasn’t seen "megahosts" like those on Airbnb joining the platform to list multiple properties in one market as a business endeavor.

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Like many Sniffspot hosts, Danni Bova Keane benefits both financially and emotionally from the equation. Her private backyard in Sykesville, Maryland, has been rented around 800 times since she listed it on Sniffspot in January 2023 while anticipating being laid off from her job of 22 years. "I thought it would be a good way to bring in extra money while having fun and feeling good about myself by giving reactive dogs a safe place to run off-leash," says Danni, whose Instagram account for her own American Bully mixes has more than 20,000 followers. "[Annabelle and Norman] are reactive as well…I didn’t realize how stressful it can be. I love being able to give owners of reactive dogs a place where they can relax while watching their dog run free without worrying about other dogs or people." Danni charges $15 an hour per dog, and, like many Sniffspot hosts, has continued to evolve her backyard to provide more value for both her canine and human renters. "My son had already bought me a caterpillar tunnel for our dogs, so it seemed logical to add more pieces and use our new Sniffspot adventure to convince my husband to fulfill my dream of having a doggy playground," she says. In addition to the tunnel and a large fenced-in area for fetch, there’s now a kid’s playhouse, two climbing structures, a climbing dome, a tire tunnel, a yellow punch buggy car bed, and a giant purple tire (all of which were acquired from Facebook Marketplace). As her Sniffspot has grown in popularity, she’s added things like poop bag holders, trash cans, a water cooler, bowls, and lighting for nighttime play. For the bipedal guests there are multiple seating areas, and even a canopy in case of rain.

Clearly, the effort has paid off. Danni’s Little Monsters Playground has more than 460 glowing reviews on Sniffspot with an average of five stars, and she says she and her husband have been lucky to have almost all positive experiences hosting over the past two years, finding guests to be very considerate of the space and their rules. They’ve hosted two corgi parties—total corgi attendance undeterminable.

As with any public marketplace, not all listings are created equally, and the onus falls on the consumer to read the fine print. "You definitely get what you pay for," says Jennifer Mazza, who experienced a wide range of Sniffspots of different sizes near her home in Colorado before landing on the ideal spot for her energetic Bernedoodles, Max and Ruby. One inexpensive listing at a round pen horse enclosure was full of poop. "I’m like, do you know what dogs who are around horse poop a lot do? They roll in it. Not cool," she says. The fenced-in, two-acre yard where she now takes Max and Ruby regularly costs $15 an hour per dog and isn’t all that far from her own house, but offers much more space to tire out her dogs than her own backyard.

There are, of course, many things about any sharing economy to take note of, including the impact on the local community, why so many people are desperate for multiple income streams, and, in this case, how rising housing prices might be leading more people to rent private yard access. But it would be hard for anyone searching through Sniffspot’s social media mentions to think much about any of those things when there are so many happy dogs running around and smiling into the camera. Is it really the gig economy if you get to host a corgi party in your backyard?

Top photo via Getty Images

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