If you have a bunch of power tools, electronic equipment or camping gear collecting dust in your house, why not make some money by hiring it out for the weekend? That’s the idea behind Open Shed, a crowdsourced rental site that lets you loan bric-a-brac to neighbours for cash.
Tools picture from Shutterstock
The concept behind Open Shed is similar to the peer-to-peer accommodation platform AirBnB — but instead of houses and apartments, the site concentrates on equipment hire. The process is pretty straightforward: the hirer simply lists the items they’re willing to loan along with the price. It’s then just a matter of waiting for interested parties to make a connection.
All rental bookings require funds to be authorised through PayPal and are transferred during the face-to-face pickup. The site also has a donate-to-charity feature via a partnership with OzHarvest which allows users to donate a percentage of their rental fee to charity. Hirees can search for available items in a distance radius of their choosing (the standard is 20km).
If you’re looking to make a bit of money on the side, it’s hard to look past this model. Unlike most peer-to-peer retail sites such as eBay, Open Shed allows you to “sell” your equipment over and over again as the buyer is required to return it to you on the agreed date. According to the website, it also encourages people to meet their neighbours, but who would want to do that?
Comments
10 responses to “Hire Out Your Tools For Cash With The Open Shed App”
Oh. God. No.
You’d want to make sure you get a large deposit – I can see dodgy people bringing back their crappy tools back ‘returning your tools’ they hired.
As a blokey meet and greet, it’s a great idea though.
Wow. You hire your faulty, untagged tools to other people; they get injured using them; they then own your tools (and your house, and your car…)
Legally this is so shaky. T&Cs try to cover the operators of the site (they fail; you just can’t put something in T&Cs and think it removes your legal responsibility), but leave the owners of the items twisting in the wind.
There is a reason hire companies have defined, documented maintenance processes and public liability cover.
Edit: If you want a blokey meet and greet, I highly recommend the “Men’s Shed” program.
If you’re hiring out faulty tools, then maybe you deserved to get sued for negligence.
Tagging is only really a thing with commercial uses. Even then, only when forced to by worksafe/unions.
And entering into this hire agreement would be classified as commercial.
Because I, as a private person, aren’t allowed to hire something?
Many years ago I was onsite when one of the idiots got upset as the Angle Grinder suddenly broke and being the genius that he is, started to hit the tool. The power came back on and his finger came off.
Don’t think I sat there and let this happen, I tried telling him the power was out but since the lights where on I was obviously the idiot and talk of separate circuits was just my stupidity.
I can’t imagine this ending well. A while back, I lived in an apartment and wanted access to a workshop for some DIY projects but knew no one with one. Apparently there were services which did daily workshop hire but closed doors due to the red tape.
I love the idea of hiring out a good set of sockets and getting it back with a few Super Cheap replacements for the ones that “got lost”. Or perhaps they mean power tools, and in the age of cordless that could mean they kill your batteries or worse (since most brands use universal batteries within the brand) you could find all your high capacity LiPo Batteries have turned into NiCd or NiMh.
It just seems your asking for trouble or loss here. Your tools could come back mangled, broken or simply the $100 rental per day is cheaper than buying a $300 tool, so they rent it and disappear.
My father many years ago told me to never lend tools to anyone. It took more than a few years of people lending to actually make me realise the simplicity of that truth. Don’t think me Selfish and wouldn’t lend a hand to friend in need, but I go with my tools.
Because my Mother developed the habit of lending the tools I kept at her place I now keep decoy sets there so when somebody asks why the crappy socket set is missing the ratchet and the 10mm socket, I say I have no idea surely you put it back when you returned it.
They do state, on the site, that they provide $1,000 coverage for incidents like that.
Has Openshed been closed? I’m looking for similar sites in Australia.