Kinglet wants to be the Zipcar of office space

Alex Kopicki spent a decade in real estate development. His new venture is much smaller: a desk and a chair.

That’s the idea behind Kinglet: entrepreneurs can rent a desk and a chair and landlords with vacant space can find a way to fill it through the on-demand rental site.

The startup, which Kopicki founded with fellow developer and Baltimore native Jeff Jacobson, launched in September.

“It’s been going really well,” Kopicki said. “We have a lot of interest out of the gate for adding supply to the system. We’re finding that landlords big and small find utility in the marketplace and find it pretty user-friendly and easy to use.”

Kinglet, which has four employees counting the two founders, sprang out of the pair’s own space concerns.

“We partly took our own experiences as a small business and used those frustrations to start to think about building a better system,” Kopicki said. “In the big world of commercial real estate, sometimes small tenancy is forgotten about. You’re either going to find a broker to represent you and your interests in the search … or you’re going to find a coworking facility or office-sharing facility.”

Once they saw the need, Kopicki and Jacobson called local landlords and found space available to sublet. Kinglet now offers desk space in Baltimore and suburbs like Towson, Columbia, Ellicott City and Owings Mills. Tenants pay a $50 reservation fee per desk then pay $350 to $700 per month for the desk.

“It’s going to vary widely dependent on the location, dependent on the amenity base, depending on the type of space,” Kopicki said.

Tenants even have the option to try a desk before they’re chained to it. If they use the desk for a day and don’t like the location for any reason, they may get the pro-rated remainder of their rent refunded and try again elsewhere.

Kopicki freely admits he’s not the usual tech entrepreneur.

“We’re real estate guys that are now endeavoring into technology,” he said. “What we’re finding to be somewhat humorous is that most of the technology companies that are technologists … they’re not really changing the mold. They’re using the status quo.”