“They’ll rent a space out, move their stuff in,” he says. So far, the guest has returned to retrieve something just once.Ĭommonly, 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. With a new baby, however, that’s not the biggest inconvenience in his life right now. He can still get to his tools and his car, but some of his garden furniture has had to come into the house. 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. 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. 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.” “He said: ‘Basically, we’ll take the car, race it, strip it down, rebuild it, then take it out again. 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.’”Īnother person who came to view the space represented a rally team that needed a garage for their car. “One guy, for example, was making steel drums. “Some of the things that they were storing I didn’t really want in there,” El-Haj says. Others weren’t right for different reasons. 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. At the same time, El-Haj was evaluating them. “Every week I’d have at least one or two people in to view the space,” he says. He began to hear from interested parties almost immediately. Photograph: Ojo Images/AlamyĮl-Haj measured up his garage, took some photographs, and offered it for rent in September. “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.”įar 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.Ī poor-quality use of space. “There’s so much space all around us, in and around peoples’ homes,” Michael Rosenbaum, co-founder of Spacer, told Business Insider. 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. In Canada it’s Stashii, with space to rent in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and its base in Edmonton. In France, the big player is Costockage, which has an established presence in Paris, Marseille, Lille, Lyon and most other French cities. 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. 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. 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. You don’t even know if the stuff you’re storing belongs to those people.” “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’re nice guys,” Deborah Meaden told them. Back then, the thought of trusting strangers in your home seemed outlandish to many people. You might remember the three founders of Storemates, who sought investment on Dragons’ Den in April 2012.
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