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Micro Rentals

In a little over a month, my girlfriend and I will be moving from our downtown apartment into a suburban home in North Edmonton. I’ve never actually owned a property and have always enjoyed the freedom from the necessity of maintenance that renting offers. If there’s a problem, I simply call my landlord and they come out and fix it free of charge.

Ownership is different though. For example, I’m about to inherit a lawn and garden which must be tended so I need to buy a lawnmower. Except I really don’t want to buy a lawnmower because it is extremely likely that every other property owner on my street already has one. Do we ALL need one? I contest that we do not.

I’d estimate it takes 30 minutes to cut the average lawn. With a bit of organization, maybe 15–20 lawns could get cut per weekend. Lawns need cutting at most once a fortnight so one lawnmower could cut 30–40 MORE lawns than if it only cut your own.

So what if you rented your lawnmower out to the other residents of your street? Say charge them $5 per cut. A decent quality petrol lawnmower costs about $300 so you need to rent it out at least 60 times to make your money back. That sounds a lot but the lifetime of a decent mower is at least 10 years so you’ll only need to get 6 rentals per year. Manageable I think.

The concept’s extensible too. Here in Canada home owners are obliged by law to clear the snow from the pavements surrounding their properties. I’m British so the concept of a ‘snow blower’ is completely foreign but here they’re relatively common. I think it would be great if I could casually rent a snow blower for a few bucks and save myself a lot of shovelling, particularly as I have a corner lot, bah.

I’m calling this concept ‘Micro Rentals’. Now, let’s discuss why this is a great (or downright terrible) idea.

Posted by Tim Fletcher on January 19, 2010 | Comments (2)

Some comments...

  • It’s a fine idea. Except that I believe most people would not collect $5. Five-dollars is the upper end of favor money. For instance, I have two friends whose websites I host on my server. I believe the time I’ll spend helping or maintaining their sites to be around an hour per month. So I give it to them as a favor. I would not want to collect $5.

    I believe your neighbors would need to collect $10 a cut, so it’s worth the bother. Ten dollars would also add some profit to cover the mowers maintenance and the bother to be home more often so as to lend it. And then it becomes more of a business.

    Do you have set lending hours? Do you expect cash in hand upon deliverance? Do you bill your neighbors? Do they pay 3 months in advance?

    I think the whole thing would work brilliantly… until one neighbor ruins it. Or maybe I’m just a pessimist. In that case, I apologize for my upbringing.

    Cheers,

    Ansel Taft

    Ansel Taft says:January 20, 2010

  • Tim, this is a pretty interesting and very well thought out approach to something that quite possibly hasn’t been analyzed this way before. Not to mention the garage or shed space required to house each household’s collection of equipment!

    Jared says:January 20, 2010

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