room to spare as city sprawls

Melbourne, QLD, 12 August, 2009 – A THIRD of Melbourne bedrooms are now unoccupied, according to a state department report.

As the Government extends the city's urban growth boundary by thousands of hectares, a Transport Department report showed there were already 1.3 million spare bedrooms in existing suburbs, enough to accommodate projected population growth during the next 20 years.
Almost 70 per cent of houses within current city limits had extra bedrooms, with the highest proportion in the wealthy eastern and bayside suburbs, and in outer growth suburbs where the blocks are comparatively larger.
The report showed increased wealth had led to homes being built larger than ever, with the number of households having two or more spare bedrooms in the decade to the 2006 census more than doubling. At the same time, the number of people per household had shrunk.
''We are being greedy with space,'' said University of Melbourne's planning expert Philip Goad.
Source: The Age August 11, 2009

A new, innovative online service called SpaceOut has the potential to help make use of these unused bedrooms, making money for the home owners, and at the same time, provide everyday Australians with a solution to their storage problems.

The concept was developed by 3 good mates who saw the need to create a service which caters for the supply and demand of useable ‘space’. The website, www.spaceout.com.au allows home and business owners to advertise their spare space as being available for rent. And now we know there are 1.3 million unused bedrooms in Melbourne – many of which could probably be rented out for storage.

Damon Russell, one of the co-founders says “SpaceOut provides a great platform for people wanting to make an extra income with very little effort. Storage in most cities is becoming very scarce- yet all these houses have spare rooms If you had an empty room why wouldn’t you rent it out and make some cash?”

SpaceOut already has many spaces advertised across Sydney’s CBD, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide and the number of listings is growing fast.

Nathon Irvin, SpaceOut’s marketing coordinator can’t believe that Melbourne has that many spare rooms…”what a great opportunity for those households to earn money from people seeking cost effective storage”.