Enough space for everyone – the self-storage revolution

Julian Doorten, co-founder and chief executive of Storage Share, the Dutch-based company that turns vacant spaces into self-storage locations, explains how the sharing economy can be beneficial to real estate owners Living in a city is becoming more and more expensive. Paying rent or servicing our mortgages is one of our biggest monthly expenditures. In order to be able to afford a place to live, city dwellers are having to live in smaller and smaller flats. That is exactly what happened to me when I moved from the countryside to Amsterdam city centre. I moved from a place where space was affordable and everybody had a relatively large house to a tiny flat in Amsterdam. Suddenly there was no room for my mountain bike or my skis. What was I to do? I could leave my personal stuff at my parents’ house, but when I needed it I had to travel for two hours to get it. Or, I could put it in self-storage much closer to me, but the cost was – and still is – simply too high. While all this was going on, Airbnb was gaining popularity and the public was undergoing an important mind-shift. While 10 years ago you may have been called insane for renting out your house to complete strangers for the weekend, now it is socially acceptable, fashionable, even. Combining my personal problem with this trend led me to launch Storage Share. Storage Share is a marketplace for storage space that allows clients to let vacant commercial properties, such as empty offices, for use as storage. It connects the individual and the provider, enabling local space to be found at reasonable rates. For the property owner it means earning money on vacant space, while for the individual it means a storage solution at around 50% of the cost of a traditional self-storage unit. The concept originally focused on private individuals offering space, but soon the commercial market saw the opportunity to make money from vacant offices, garages and other commercial space. By helping renters to search for vacant spaces in existing buildings, we believe we are helping to optimise the built environment. Whereas marketplaces traditionally have had difficulties balancing demand and supply, we see that peer-to-peer or consumer-to-consumer marketplaces are shifting towards business-to-consumer marketplaces. Whether those spaces are owned by individuals or companies has become irrelevant. The relevancy is the shift from possessing stuff to using stuff. By adopting new technology, being transparent and acting accordingly, real estate owners can benefit from this shift. Traditionally the real estate market has been a relatively slow market. Who isn’t familiar with the hog cycle market? But, in my opinion, these cycles are changing and are changing because of technical innovation, transparency and flexibility. By having technical innovations in place we should be able to act directly upon the needs and wants of individuals and businesses before they arise. For example, for the parents whose children are moving out of the house, why not rent that space to your neighbours who are expecting their first child but don’t have enough space in their house to store all the kit they are collecting before the baby arrives? Real estate has traditionally been static, but the changing nature of how we live and work means that it now needs to be fluid. It needs to react to the changing needs of the population. And while it might not change within the next few years, it will change, and that fact is hard to ignore.