Are there any apps to buy and sell spare space, e.g. in your garage, or basement?
Check out Neighbor (I have no connection)
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/28/neighbor-a-p2p-self-storag...
How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
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Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#42have to post this:
George Carlin Talks About "Stuff"
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#43A lot of storage is a real estate play. Buy land in the direction of where cities are growing. Pay your mortgage with storage facilities sitting on top until the land appreciates.
A neighbour of mine has a spare piece of waste land in an industrial area on the edge of a nearby town. He has opened a storage facility using shipping containers. They come over to the UK from China and are not worth shipping back empty, so you can buy them cheaply and then just supply a padlock to clients.
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#44How common is it for people to live in them? Any data on that?
Likely illegal in 1st world countries. Safety reasons, zoning, etc.
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#45I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units "junk" is a moral judgement that's repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis. In the end, there's no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good mone…
As we have all learned from reality-TV, a good quarter of the units are choke-full with anything but junk: you will find sculpted furniture in pristine condition, civil war artifacts, expensive professional equipment and tens of thousands of dollars in rare baseball cards. The industry must be really struggling to provide adequate security.
I once watched an episode with a unit full of money ( on a pallet ).
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#46I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units "junk" is a moral judgement that's repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis. In the end, there's no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good mone…
Sure, what if the rent/mortgage you pay per square foot in your home is greater than the rent for a storage locker down the road? And there are reasonable use cases for medium-long term storage, such as seasonal items. I don't know how many people use them this way, but I can see reasonable uses too.
One is that I sort of accidentally ended up becoming the keeper of a whole pile of family history -- documents, photographs, memorabilia, handmade things -- and I trust the fire suppression and security systems in my storage unit much more than whatever small apartment I'm renting at the time.
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#47A lot of storage is a real estate play. Buy land in the direction of where cities are growing. Pay your mortgage with storage facilities sitting on top until the land appreciates.
I've been wondering why so many of them are popping up in the city core where I am, instead of more far-flung light industrial areas where they typically existed.
The construction costs $/sqft must be a fraction of commercial building for Class A office or housing.
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#48I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units "junk" is a moral judgement that's repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis. In the end, there's no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good mone…
It's junk if you don't know what it is. My sister's mother-in-law spends about $1000/mo on storage units in 6 cities. They were a military family and moved frequently.
The problem is that they don't remember what is in the storage units, and the cost of traveling across the country to go through a closet is steep and of questionable value. So she is stuck in a cycle of paying for things that she may or may not need. My understanding is that many people are in similar circumstances.
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#49A lot of storage is a real estate play. Buy land in the direction of where cities are growing. Pay your mortgage with storage facilities sitting on top until the land appreciates.
I've been wondering why so many of them are popping up in the city core where I am, instead of more far-flung light industrial areas where they typically existed. The construction costs $/sqft must be a fraction of commercial building for Class A office or housing.
Usually city core real estate is controlled by a small cartel of owners. They usually cover their carrying costs with parking, as the class-B office space is worthless from a revenue perspective in most places.
If it's a small/mid-sized city, sometimes these property guys get squeezed enough by periodic nuking of people at the local Bank of America/etc office that they actually need to do something with the property. Storage is great because it fits with commercial zoning has overhead similar to parking.
Re: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry
#50One thing I've noticed over the years reading old wills and probate records (16th -18th century) is just how few physical possessions even fairly well-off people owned. Estate inventories often list individual coats, shirts, bedding, bowls, tools, etc. I think the material wealth we have today is so incredible we don't even realize how much we've accumulated and could probably do without.
Modern manufacturing is sufficiently weird that it messes with my sense of thriftiness. That it really is possible to manufacture new items less expensively than it is to repair them (especially counting my own time to do so).
Like I can remember my grandmother knitting and darning socks.
But she wished she had one of these sock knitting machines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N7hsho4Sjg&feature=youtu.be...
And now you can buy a 10 pack of decent socks for $1/pair (and they may objectively be of higher quality).
I'm trying to think how I'd even explain this to someone from another time:
"10% of your net worth is this pair of socks? And they took you a day each to make? I just threw away a pair because my toe poked through the top."