Kaleb’s self-storage side hustle started small.
Ten months ago, he started renting out a few nooks and crannies inside the apartment he leased while a student at Brigham Young University, along with an extra parking space that came with the rent. To do this, Kaleb used an app called Neighbor, which connects people who have extra space to spare with people that need to stash their things.
Now, thanks to Neighbor, he has completed a professional journey from college kid to part-time landlord-for-stuff. His properties include the trunk of a busted Cadillac (“Not just any trunk, but a Cadillac’s trunk,” his online ad emphasizes), a storage shed behind the home he now owns, and the side of a chain-link fence, where his tenants can lock bikes on a patch of unmowed grass for $4 a month.
“I had no money, so I was like, if I can make any money whatsoever, at all, I’m game,” said Kaleb, who lives in Provo, Utah, and asked that I not use his last name to keep his financial information private. So far, the app has helped him enter rental relationships with 21 tenants, who store RVs, automobiles, bikes, sweaters, and other random items on a month-to-month basis in his eight listings.
Neighbor bills itself as the “Airbnb for storage.” It was founded in 2017, undergirded by three fundamental truths: Most Americans have too many things; some also have too much space; many others don’t have enough. To address this spatial imbalance, most packrats must turn to the self-storage industry. Collectively, people in the U.S. economy storage hustle
