It’s no longer just spare bedrooms going up for rent. A whole host of inventive new enterprises are popping up that are allowing homeowners and businesses to turn a profit on every room in the home.
Kitchens to rent, living rooms as offices and hireable gardens are fast becoming a huge part of the sharing economy, a socio-economic ecosystem that makes the most efficient use of space, resources, services and goods. It’s all enabled by the rapid growth of internet and peer-to-peer rental services connecting people who want something with the people who own it.
With demand for rented and shared spaces that cater to a wide range of needs and requirements, the bedroom is no longer the only room in your home for rent.
Kitchens for rent: commercial and domestic
Kitchens for rent are not new, but they have grown dramatically in popularity and demand in the last few years. London based Dephna have fallen in line with other rentable space companies, but instead of offices, they offer kitchens to rent. Their commercial kitchen spaces work as the next step up from home business for food trucks, meal delivery services and pop ups.
Similar to serviced offices, kitchens for rent provide affordable, scalable solutions for food entrepreneurs who are either just starting out, or testing expansion. Similar projects in the US include ‘kitchen incubators’, which are large facilities that provide kitchen space for rent and even collaboration opportunities for aspiring chefs.
But it isn’t just commercial kitchens, other enterprises are making kitchens to rent available for general public use. The Kitchen Table is a private kitchen and dining room in NYC designed to host dinner parties and private events. Much of its popularity is also owed to the lack of adequate facilities in New York’s space-strapped homes.
Private homeowners can even find small scale spaces, like Kitchen2Rent, which attract one-person businesses looking to cook up a storm of artisanal goods. With these more personal, less commercial, projects, kitchens needn’t be state of the art, just well-located in desireable locations.
Your living room for rent
When we talk about living rooms to rent, those that make headlines are a little, well, odd. There was this shed in a sitting room on the market for a bargain £480 per month, even this tent-cum-bedroom that was advertised by one creative pair.
Rather, the appeal of living rooms for rent is more targeted for professional use as offices to rent. London rented office providers i2Office make the provision of business lounges, described as quiet, comfortable, professional places to work and hot desk, hold meetings or simply relax.
They’re similar to, but not quite the coworking spaces that have proliferated in the nation’s capital over the past few years. Business lounges, by contrast, are rented offices furnished with soft seating, interspersed with just the odd hot-desking area. The focus, however, is still on providing a home away from home.
Meanwhile, home sitting rooms are popping up on rental sites, providing freelancers, entrepreneurs and the self employed with a home office to rent with the slight variation of being in someone else’s home. Spacehop is a kind of daytime Airbnb that lets people rent out your living space as an office. They’re being dubbed “air-biz-nb’s”.
The idea of creating a network of daytime workplaces for rent out of homeowners’ “idle assets” is proving highly lucrative. They see most most future expansion coming from the growth in ‘millennial’ coworkers in their 20s and 30s.
Your garden and driveway to rent
Stashbee is a firm that connects householders who have free storage space, such as garages or garden sheds, with people who those who have furniture, clothing and even retail inventory to store. Its fulfilling a real need in space-strapped homes in London.
It’s not all about storage though. spare ground is one example of a peer-to-peer rental platform that lists available driveways and carshare spaces, garages and empty or unused lands for a host of purposes, including space to erect a shed or store a mobile home.
One wanted listing on the sight describes a “Working family looking to live somewhere quiet and a little more simple! Wanting to have two caravans to live in on rented ground where we can also plant our own veg and fruit.”
There are those seeking more temporary accommodation too. Suburban gardens qualify as ‘micro-campsites’ on the site campinmygarden.com. Bigger landowners can make a profit on renting out outdoor spaces for corporate garden parties, weddings and outdoor events.
With kitchens to rent, living rooms to rent and gardens to rent, all available online, this truly is the advent of the sharing economy in the digital age. It might just be the perfect time to make other parts of your home available to rent.
