SpaceOut was featured in one of the cover articles from the September 2010 edition of Money Magazine  – An Extra $200 a month renting out spare space.

The Money Magazine “Smart Money” article outlines some of the many benefits of renting out your spare  space and Quotes our Technical Director (Andy Henderson) :

“Almost everyone has unused space around their home,apartment, or business – whether that’s your garage, your parking spot, your shed, a spare room or even your fridge – you’ll find there is someone out there willing to pay you to use it.”

Private rentals are increasingly becoming recognised as real alternatives to traditional self-storage facilities – and are often much more convenient, and significantly cheaper as well.  Using online services such as www. SpaceOut.com.au, ordinary Australians can lease out their excess or unused space privately and make a little extra cash on the side.

“Many of us have got a spare bedroom or shed. More often than not it’s half-filled with our own junk,  Why not do a reshuffle and rent it out?”

Private storage suits all types of people – particularly retirees and “empty nesters”,  who wouldn’t dream of  getting in a tenant (and sharing their house and lives with someone), but are very happy to store someones furniture in the spare room for a few months or more while the person is off travelling.

“Typically you are looking at between $100 and $200 a month for doing little more than putting stuff in a room and shutting the door”

If you’d like to read more about how you can make money from space, and turn your unused bedroom, shed or garage into an extra regular income, get out today and get your own copy of Money Magazine – September 2010.

Shed a nice little earner

Empty driveways, garages and sheds around Perth are being turned into cash cows.

Scores of people are pocketing up to $500 a month by renting out empty space they think could be useful to someone else.

SpaceOut.com.au is a website the matches “SpaceOwners” with “SpaceSeekers”.

Founder Damon Russell said. “When home and business owners realise that their unused space could be earning them a regular rental income with little or no effort, it is a real no-brainer”

Bayswater resident Carol Marshall is hoping to make some extra cash out of her back shed. She is asking #90 a week to rent it.

Mr Russell said the idea cam to him when he needed somewhere to store his belongings while he went overseas.

Workers on park avenue

Fed-up city workers are ditching expensive CBD carparks for cheaper backyard spots.

Brisbane was ranked as the seventh moist expensive city in the world for parking in the most recent Colliers International Global CBD Parking Rate survey, with motorists having to pay a median monthly cost of $596 for parking.

The survey found Brisbanites were spending more on their parking than those living in Tokyo or New York.

But a local website is revolutionising city parking by matching desperate motorists with inner-city tenants who have room to spare in carparks backyards and garages.

SpaceOut.com.au advertises private car spaces for rent, and places ads for commuters hoping to find cheap car parks close to their work.

This morning the site offered an undercover parking space in South Brisbane for $50 a week or $160 a month

Meanwhile a space with double-swipe security protection at Spring Hill was being advertised for the bargain price of #240 a month.

Spaceout’s Andy Henderson said many private carpark providers were inner-city residents who lived and socialised in the city and chose not to have a car.

“We’re getting a lot more inner-city accommodation, and a lot of those, for example are being filled by foreign students who don’t have a car.” he said.

“They see this as an opportunity to subsidise their rent.“

If you have any spare space like a spare room, sunroom, shed or garage, you could earn a lazy $100 a week by putting it up for rent as space.  Lots of travellers like a place to store their stuff and commercial storage is getting expensive.

It’s a tenant without the hassle says Roget Hawley, who told Value Hunter a few months ago that he had a two-car garage in Brisbane’s north-side, but with only one car, and decided to offer the space for rent on www.spaceout.com.au.  It’s now earning him $180 a month.

Today’s article is a follow-up on a piece that Jane Hansen did in August this year where SpaceOut was featured on Value Hunter’s “Cash in Your Spare Space” article.

If you’ve not yet heard of Pitch Club – it is an organisation that runs events Australia wide – where Entrepreneurs, Startup Businesses and Ventures (many looking for investment) have an opportunity to “pitch” their business idea.

At the event  9 ventures (and 1 ‘Lucky pitch’ drawn on the night) get an opportunity to step into a miniature boxing ring where they have 90 seconds to ‘pitch’ the concept of their business to a crowd of investors, business angels, VCs and other entrepreneur enthusiasts. Then 3 or 4 finalists (selected through group voting) have 5 more minutes with the audience before the winner is chosen by all.

This was Brisbane’s second Pitch Club event (the first was held in March this year) and the evening was a great success.  I had the opportunity to present the “SpaceOut concept” to a focused group of approximately 100 of South East Queensland’s entrepreneurs, investors and business advisers, and had a chance to chat and network with many of them as well.

Whilst 90 seconds is very little time to get the concept across, – I found it to be a very worthwhile exercise having to reduce the 5 minutes of things that I simply” had” to say down to a mere minute and a half.

I was not completely happy with my pitch on the night – fumbled and bumbled a little, and didn’t quite get to say everything that I wanted to, but I did manage to get the overall concept across, and had a lot of very interesting discussions with a wide range of people later in the evening.

My pitch can’t have been all bad, because I was  awarded a “prize”  to attend a business development seminar to be run by QUT Creative Enterprises, and provided with an opportunity for a couple of hours face to face consulting.  As a direct result of this pitch -and subsequent networking, I’ve also managed to schedule a few other meetings over the next few weeks and feel so much more informed about some of the great opportunities for developing innovation and small business in Qld.

All in all a great night, resulting in lots of fabulous opportunities and outcomes for the future development ands growth of SpaceOut.

• Inside Self Storage – Hot News
  SpaceOut Conducts Survey of Australia Self-Storage Prices, Reveals Results
  Provides a summary of our Australia wide Self Storage Price Survey
  
• Money for Jam Blog
  Money tight? – Now you can make it out of thin air
  It is now possible for average Aussies to make real money out of unused space in their homes or businesses by renting it out as storage.
  
• Lifehacker Australia
  Storage Priciest In Sydney, Cheaper From Independents
  It’s no big surprise that renting storage space costs more in Sydney ($800 per month for a garage-sized space) than anywhere else. But it might surprise you to learn that independent storage providers are generally cheaper than national chains.
  
• Optus Business Biz Think Tank – Featured Business of the Month
  The Optus Biz Think Tank showcase a different business every month that have used a mix of innovation and technology along the way.  SpaceOut is the featured business for Oct/Nov 2009.
• Low Budget Prosper
  Crisis business idea – renting storage space
  Seems like a perfect crisis business idea… paying for unused office space or ignoring the opportunity to earn money by renting spare space or a parking spot is truly impractical. This business idea just hast to be successful!

• TechNation Australia is a technology news, review and analysis website with a focus on startups and Internet companies related to Australia.
  Here is the Story – SpaceOut – Make Money out of Thin Air
• Lifehacker Australia is a technology blog which delivers all the best Lifehacker tips from the US, and adds an Antipodean flavour with local updates and articles to ensure that Lifehacker’s down under have all the best and most relevant tech tips at their disposal.
  Here is the story – SpaceOut Lets You Find or Rent Spare Space

This is great news for SpaceOut members as mentions like this raise the profile of SpaceOut and increase traffic to the site – which means that more and more people are looking at your listings – and creating new listings of their own too.

SpaceOut was featured in today’s Sunday Newspapers (Australian Wide) in the highly regarded  Value Hunter section.  Value Hunter is a consumer advocacy column that has been appearing since the beginning of 2009 in all News Ltd Sunday newspapers. The Value Hunter Column provides useful, simple, and  practical information about how to make and save money.

Following is a transcript of of the Value Hunter Column – “Cash in your Spare Space” , by Jane Hansen – published Sunday 30 August, 2009.

Cash in your Spare Space

You Can Help Us Promote SpaceOut

We love it when SpaceOut makes it into the news – and in fact it is important for the ongoing growth of our service.  The higher our profile, the more people get to hear about our service, the more visitors we get to the site, and the faster our members are able to rent out their spaces, or find a space that meets their needs.

We regularly get contacted by the media wanting to talk to our members – but we are not prepared to pass on member details without your permission.  So if you are a SpaceOut member and have a story to tell, or are willing to talk to the media, please let us know, and we will put you in touch – and as a thank you we may also do a feature post on you or your space on the blog – or maybe even offer you an enhanced listing.

The Today Tonight Story

I think the TT report was a great piece, and whilst SpaceOut’s primary focus is Storage, we were still mentioned on the TT website, which generated a reasonable amount of traffic and some extra members and listings as well.  The story also featured some great comments from Matt Mitchell of Findacarpark (a great service that focuses exclusively on Car parking Spaces).

In case you missed the story … here it is.., I think that it is definitely worth a look :

The Australian-first concept of helping people rent space has been launched in the form of spaceout.com.au a free service for those trying top let or find storage space.

Mr Russell, when looking to travel overseas, decided that the average home could be turned into a small goldmine while providing a cheaper alternative for those trying to store their things.
“We launched around January and had a re-launch three weeks ago. We had a really good look around the world to see what else was out there, (the US) has a similar concept, but we couldn’t find anything really in Australia,” he said.

While originally about space in general, feedback and an increase in demand has added a whole other dimension with designated areas for storage space, office space, and parking spaces, and the market has really opened up in metropolitan areas.
” We find in the city areas where space is such a commodity, (they) are the first areas where we’ve found a strong market. Markets like Wagga might take a bit longer, might not be as big a need,” Mr Irvin said.

“There’s plenty of people around here who have got 5 acres with plenty of space out the back. It’s a great way to make a bit of money on the side.”
The brains behind the initiative describe themselves as an “IT whiz in love with his work’, ‘a marketing guru with his finger on the national pulse’, and a “self proclaimed ‘generalist’ travelling overseas who couldn’t afford to store his things with a traditional storage facility’.