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!

A new Australian Government report released yesterday, reveals that a frightening number of Australians suffered financial pain in the first six months of this year.

The survey of over 1600 families found more than a third considered themselves financially worse off in the six months to June 2009.

• 1 in five families reported levels of hardship that meant that made it hard for them to pay their utility bills.
• Of the families unable to pay their rent or mortgage on time, nearly 80 per cent were suffering this way for the first time.
• Of those who had gone without food, 70 per cent had not experienced this before.

Coincidentally, the government survey was released on the same day Anglicare Australia released its annual State of the Family report. The Anglicare report also highlights that Families have been under increasing pressure because of rising costs.

Families are using a variety of strategies to save money and reduce their costs including :

• One in 10 is putting off plans for a new job
• Five per cent have put off having a child until the economy improves
• Five per cent have postponed their wedding celebrations in order to save money
• One in three is travelling less
• One in four is spending more time with the family
• One in five is planning to grow their own vegetables

Obviously SpaceOut also offers a great option for many struggling families – to either make money by renting out unused space in their homes – or to save money on self storage costs.

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 :

When they need something, rather than going out and buying it, people are talking to their friends, colleagues and neighbours and increasingly, swapping and sharing the things that they need. According to the article,

“A car-sharing service has had a 70 percent membership increase since the recession set in. Governments are putting bikes on the street for public use. How-to-swap Web sites are proliferating.”

Obviously the services offered by SpaceOut fall right into the realms of the Washington Post article… and it’s not just in the US, or Australia – it is world-wide that people are getting smarter and maximising the benefits they can get out of everything they own (not just their space).

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’.

We’ve decided to offer free space rental listings as a response to member feedback.  Whilst most members thought that $30 was pretty good value for the potential to earn $200 – $400 a month, they felt that while the site was still new the chance of the right person finding their listing was reduced.  We agree – and for the foreseeable future we expect that all listings will remain free.

We may switch back to paid listing at some stage in the future, so we suggest you take advantage of Free Listings right now!  We may also offer in the future a Premium Listing option, with more features and functionality, so please let us know any other features you’d like to see on the site.