Joseph explains Neighbor, a peer-to-peer marketplace that rents out unused residential and commercial storage space. The U.S. has more storage facilities than McDonald's or Walmart locations, with 96% occupancy nationwide. Neighbor partners with major retail and office REITs to monetize their vacant space while letting homeowners rent garages, sheds, and basements.
Chapters
helpful maybe if you can kind of give us like an overview of, you know, what Neighbor is too. Absolutely. So Neighbor is a peer-to-peer self-storage marketplace. You can rent it out. We work with any sort of unused, underutilized space. Just a brief overview of the market for those that are interested in kind of those market dynamics. Self-storage feel like it very much fits the bill of one of those big old archaic industries like taxis and limos or hospitality that hasn't been disrupted yet. We now have more storage facilities in the United States than we do McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, Burger King, Starbucks, Walmarts, Home Depots, and Costcos combined. So we build a lot of storage in the United States and it's It's about 96% full nationwide. That's the nationwide average occupancy. And so these storage facilities are leaving money on the table by not building, building more storage. And they are trying. The industry spends around $5 billion a year just on new construction of facilities, and 100% of the $5 billion in new construction gets filled every year. Before the year is over. So it's a very high occupancy industry, very supply constrained, which is part of the reason you see the high prices. For many Americans, storage is the single largest subscription payment that they make. You know, you think about, you pay $10 a month for your Netflix and $30 a month for your internet. There aren't too many items that Americans are paying $300, $400, $500 a month for. Besides their mortgage, which, you know, at least you get something for a mortgage. So very large industry. It does about 8 times the amount of revenue that the entire taxi and limo industry that Uber and Lyft disrupted does. So large category, ability to build a large marketplace. And so we have people that rent out their garage, their shed, their basement, their parking spot. Most of our users are residential. Like that. But then we also have this commercial contingent on our platform. These are big retail REITs and office building REITs that operate at 80% occupancy. So they have 20% of their spaces that just go unfilled. And we'll work with these $10 billion REITs to onboard 10% of their portfolio to our website. And then we rent it out for storage, which increases their cash flows and their cap rates on the building. So we have, we have kind of both components, although we're predominantly a residential marketplace. I think we always will be just because there's, there's more volume there.
