CitiesThe sharing economy meets the mania for decluttering, as people realise they can let others use their spare rooms, sheds and attics for cash
You may not look around a city like London and notice acres of unused space lying empty. But it is there. There might be some inside your own house. Kamal El-Haj and his wife Michelle live in Chingford, and were expecting their second child last summer, so they had just begun to look for new sources of income when they noticed their garage.
“All I’ve got in there is my old car, which she hates,” El-Haj says. “I looked at it, and my car is tucked over to one side, and our bits are all neatly organised, so there’s still loads of space. Maybe we should look at renting it out or something like that?”
He looked online and found Stashbee, one of several companies offering to match people with space to spare and people with things to store. Because that’s the other half of the picture: many city-dwellers wish they had acres of space, but don’t. So-called peer-to-peer storage is generally much cheaper than the traditional kind, often about 50% cheaper. It may be more convenient too, even outside cities, if you can find a host nearby, and hosts can be renters as well as homeowners, as long as their tenancy agreement allows it.
The simplest way of thinking about it might be as Airbnb for inanimate objects, although Store at My House was already trading in 2007, before Airbnb began. Still, it’s an idea that seems to have exploded recently, perhaps as Airbnb has made sharing space feel normal and respectable.
You might remember the three founders of Storemates, who sought investment on Dragons’ Den in April 2012. The Dragons didn’t get it. Back then, the thought of trusting strangers in your home seemed outlandish to many people. “You’re nice guys,” Deborah Meaden told them. “The problem is you’re relying on everybody being the people that you are, and this is ripe for somebody to take advantage of. You don’t even know if the stuff you’re storing belongs to those people.”
Today, Storemates is still going, and the upstart Stashbee, founded in 2016, is about to expand beyond London to compete with it for the whole of the UK. For the time being, focus will follow population density through Birmingham, Manchester and the country’s other big cities, where space is scarcer and more valuable. However, Stashbee co-founder David Mantle suspects the firm may eventually find even greater demand in rural areas, where traditional self-storage is less likely to be available nearby.
In France, the big player is Costockage, which has an established presence in Paris, Marseille, Lille, Lyon and most other French cities. In Canada it’s Stashii, with space to rent in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and its base in Edmonton. It’s Spacer, which also offers parking, in Australia (Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart, Canberra, Sydney, Perth, Gold Coast) and the US (San Francisco, DC, Chicago, Boston, LA, New York), where the company swallowed Roost.
“There’s so much space all around us, in and around peoples’ homes,” Michael Rosenbaum, co-founder of Spacer, told Business Insider. “Things like garages, and also there’s lots of empty warehouses and offices and things like that, that could be divvied up and used for storage as well.”
Far from being doomed to failure, as Meaden believed, peer-to-peer self-storage might be where the sharing economy meets the mania for decluttering, as people all over the world realise they can let other people clutter up their homes for cash.
El-Haj measured up his garage, took some photographs, and offered it for rent in September. He began to hear from interested parties almost immediately. “Every week I’d have at least one or two people in to view the space,” he says. At the same time, El-Haj was evaluating them. Many were retailers who wanted somewhere to keep their stock, but this would involve daily coming and going – a type of “high-access” storage that didn’t suit El-Haj.
Others weren’t right for different reasons. “Some of the things that they were storing I didn’t really want in there,” El-Haj says. “One guy, for example, was making steel drums. He said: ‘I just need the space to put my tools and make the steel drums.’ I said: ‘How much noise are you going to make?’ And he was like: ‘Er … Not much.’”
Another person who came to view the space represented a rally team that needed a garage for their car. “He said: ‘Basically, we’ll take the car, race it, strip it down, rebuild it, then take it out again. We won’t be testing it there.’ But I thought, You will … I just kept saying no until somebody came along who I agreed with.”
That person turned out to be a nice man from Essex who wanted half the space to store his family’s possessions during a house move. So, since February, El-Haj has had some couches, a filing cabinet, bagfuls of soft toys, and various other bits and pieces neatly stored in his garage, for £120/month. He can still get to his tools and his car, but some of his garden furniture has had to come into the house. With a new baby, however, that’s not the biggest inconvenience in his life right now. So far, the guest has returned to retrieve something just once.
Commonly, people use self-storage to ease them through big moments in their life, such as a house move or the end of a relationship, but Mantle says many people also use Stashbee as a kind of decluttering facility. “They’ll rent a space out, move their stuff in,” he says. “They will then spend the next couple of months going through it, organising stuff, maybe selling on things they don’t need, then stopping using the service in the future.”
This would no doubt be slightly inconvenient for some hosts, which makes garages ideal for this purpose. On the other hand, the average income on Stashbee is apparently £180/month, for an average of 15 months, which might tempt even Marie Kondo’s biggest fans. Money can also spark joy.
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