How to use unused space in the house with benefits

When Anthony Payne broke up with his girlfriend, he urgently needed to find a place where to store all his things. When he closed the door for the last time to his former apartment, he realized the irony of the situation: in the neighborhood, each person should have a sea of free storage space.

All he needs is to somehow contact them. So, they, together with their business partner David Mantle, were burning with the idea of creating their own business, similar to the popular service Airbnb, only for storing things. How can you make money on empty premises? Is warehousing such a promising business?

Startups in the storage industry

The result of their labors was the company Stashbee, which allows people with a free seat in the garage or attic to contact those who are looking for an inexpensive place where you could store your things. This is just one of the start-ups in this area, companies of this type are appearing everywhere more and more often, testing the strength of the framework of the consumed economy fueled by technological progress. But how does this work in practice?

Example of use

Suppose a person makes repairs at home, and he needs a space where he could store three boxes, a bag and a set of golf clubs. And he turns to Stashbee for help. The company's website allows you to find a woman who lives nearby and has so much free space in the attic, which you can only dream about. This woman believes in the economy of joint consumption. She believes that resources that are not used on an ongoing basis can be used in a wider application, and this is very good.

Feel

But is there any unpleasant feeling that there are things of strangers in the house? People who have already used this service say that every person who offers his place for storage has the opportunity to meet personally with those who want to leave their things. And if your intuition tells you that these are not the people you want to deal with, then you can safely refuse.

Cost

How much does it cost? To store the previously described set of things for a month, you will have to pay about fifty pounds in the UK. In this country, the traditional industry associated with the storage of things has an annual turnover of 440 million pounds, and in the US the turnover of this industry is $ 20 billion. However, the industry is dominated by famous giants such as Public Storage and Big Yellow. Will small start-ups exist in such conditions?

Comparison with large warehouses

Carlos Sousa, sales manager for Access Self Storage, one of the largest firms in the industry in the UK, is skeptical about this issue. "We can store things 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "If you leave things with a stranger, there is no guarantee that he will be at home when you need to pick them up." If you keep the same set of things discussed above in a similar warehouse, you will have to pay 75 pounds, and further payments may follow.