Marketplace Radio: That extra chair in your home office? Rent it out
SpareChair in the News
Normally around 10 in the morning, I’m writing a news memo or interviewing an expert on something like how our ethics change in accordance to our energy levels over the course of the day. But this morning I’m entirely focused on vacuuming up crumbs between couch pillows, and also, where to store squeaky dog toys (found behind the couch). That’s because people are coming over, and soon. And these aren’t typical guests — they’re co-workers, and, bonus(!) perfect strangers who are planning to work, hopefully productively, from my dining room table for the day.
(Nate Graves at a SpareChair session in Brooklyn.)
Together we’ll be beta-testing a new start up called SpareChair, a website that lets you rent out space in your home — like Airbnb, but for workers. And just minutes after I empty the dustpan and take down the trash, 32-year-old Brooklyn residents Jerry Emeka and Nate Graves, respectively a producer/ comedian and a web developer, arrive.
Like Airbnb, SpareChair lets homeowners or renters like me set their own rental rates, and the site takes a cut.
“I don’t think it’s that strange,” Emeka says of the concept of paying to rent a chair in someone’s private home. “It’s 2014 — we’re already dating online, we’re sharing our homes for strangers to live in. And we pay a lot of money to live in our homes. Why can’t we work at home?”
Why not indeed? Well, my apartment, for one, is in Brooklyn, on a traffic circle, and while I’ve become accustomed to the soundscape — which contains more than the occasional blaring of a taxi horn — I wasn’t sure how co-workers would feel about the noise, especially if they were paying. SpareChair lets those offering space list amenities and preferences (such as “WiFi,” “children present,” or “children welcome”) and users get to review them. But because Emeka and Graves were going to be my first co-workers, they didn’t have any reviews to go on.
Luckily, neither said he minded.
“Even though I can see you cringing,” Graves said. “I mean, compared to a coffee shop, this is steps above that in terms of noise.”
Read the full story here.
