Challenge

As college students, Ohana cofounders Ezra Gershanok and Jacob Halbert found themselves paying rent on year-long student housing while also covering short-term leases in the cities where they had summer jobs. Paying double rent was expensive, but navigating the traditional subleasing process was difficult and could be risky. People looking for short-term housing options often had to rely on scam-prone peer-to-peer platforms, and hosts had limited means to vet responsible guests. Employers faced similar challenges when housing interns, with few choices beyond expensive corporate housing or those same unvetted marketplaces.

“There’s a lot of subleasing scams that happen in social media groups. Nobody facilitates middle-term housing options reliably; they just connect people directly and don’t process payments,” said Gershanok. “It’s easy for people to be taken advantage of when they urgently need an apartment.”

To address this gap, Gershanok and Halbert founded Ohana in New York City in 2023. They aimed to create a secure subleasing marketplace for stays that fall between short-term vacation rentals and year-long leases. An essential component of their business was providing simple, reliable payments that could earn the trust of both hosts and guests.

Ohana needed a payments infrastructure that could accommodate complex multiparty flows, such as collecting and releasing security deposits and managing monthly rent payments between guests and hosts. The company also wanted support for built-in compliance management and identity verification to make the process more secure and reassuring for users.

Because subleasing transactions are much larger than a typical online customer purchase, Ohana needed a payment processor that could handle high-value payments, with bookings averaging more than $9,000. To allow Ohana to grow outside of the US, the processor also needed to offer different currencies and payment methods, along with strong fraud protection.

Solution

In 2024, Ohana rolled out an integrated payment experience for hosts and guests built on Stripe.

Ohana uses Stripe Connect to manage its complex pay-in and payout workflows, including security deposits, monthly rent payments, and one-off transactions like 24-hour apartment holds. This ensures Ohana can enforce contractual commitments across every stage of a booking. With Connect, Ohana can also route payments from dozens of property listings back to a single host, making it easy for hosts with multiple properties to manage bookings from one account.

Hosts who join the platform are guided through a Stripe-hosted onboarding flow, where they can submit compliance information and link their bank accounts in minutes. To provide an additional layer of protection, Ohana implemented Stripe Identity to give hosts the option to programmatically confirm their identity during onboarding to receive an ID verification badge on their listings.

Ohana uses Stripe Payments to process transactions and chose Stripe Checkout, a prebuilt, conversion-optimized payment page, for its checkout experience. Using Stripe Financial Connections, guests can connect their bank accounts directly and pay via ACH Direct Debit and credit card. Checkout’s Adaptive Pricing automatically converts rental prices into a guest’s local currency using real-time exchange rates. This gives Ohana the ability to quickly enable new payment methods, accept more than 135 currencies, and support more than 30 languages as it expands internationally, including into the UK and Paris in 2026.

To ease the concerns of guests worried about scams, Ohana only processes funds once a lease has been fully executed. Using Stripe’s setup intents within its payment flow, the company can securely save a guest’s payment information during the online booking and charge the security deposit asynchronously, only after both parties have signed the sublease agreement.

Ohana also uses Stripe Radar to screen every transaction for fraud, automatically flagging suspicious activity without requiring manual review or a designated risk team.

Results

Ohana triples payment volume and reaches $10 million per month during peak season

Since launching with Stripe, payment volume on Ohana has roughly tripled, growing from an average of about $3 million per month to more than $10 million per month during busy seasons. The company expects to process $60 million in payment volume in 2026.

With Stripe handling payment complexity, Ohana’s four-person team has been able to focus on growing the marketplace. “Stripe’s reliable APIs, webhooks, and developer-friendly sandbox help our small team to build and test these complex, multiparty payment flows and constantly improve our payment experience,” said Halbert.

Hosts earn more than $38 million with reliable payouts

Since 2024, Ohana hosts have earned more than $38 million in subleasing payouts. Ohana uses Connect’s flexible infrastructure to support both first-time hosts subletting an apartment for a single summer and multiproperty hosts earning more than $1 million across hundreds of bookings on the platform.

“Connect is just really reliable, and we can easily pay our hosts on the first day of the rental period without issue,” said Halbert. “There’s so much we can automate that really reduces manual load.”

Ohana expands into international markets with Payments

Ohana uses Payments to scale into new international markets, giving the company the flexibility to turn on locally preferred payment methods and adapt pricing to each guest’s local currency without rebuilding its payments infrastructure. In just 10 months, London became Ohana’s second-largest market and is already growing faster than New York. Ohana is now expanding to Australia, Berlin, South Africa, and Amsterdam using Stripe.

“With Stripe handling global regulations and payment infrastructure, we can be really ambitious entering new markets and making sure we provide great service to our users, which is where our time is best spent,” said Gershanok.

Ohana reduces payment friction with Financial Connections

Ohana uses Financial Connections to give guests a faster, more reliable alternative to manual card entry, resulting in fewer payment failures and less manual work collecting rent and managing host payouts.

“Guests that connect their bank accounts directly tend to complete payments more quickly and at a higher rate. They’re more committed and likely to follow through, which makes the whole marketplace run smoothly,” said Gershanok.

Ohana attracts more than 1,200 multiproperty hosts with Stripe Identity

For hosts concerned about the risks of subleasing, Stripe Identity verification provides meaningful protection that peer-to-peer platforms don’t offer—leading more than 1,200 multiproperty hosts to migrate to Ohana.

“Stripe Identity verification is one of the key protections we offer that distinguishes Ohana from other platforms. It gives our hosts the confidence to list with us, knowing their guests have been properly vetted,” said Gershanok.