After Justin Cambra retired early from Amazon in 2022 to pursue a career in real estate, he never imagined that his smartest investment wouldn’t be a house but a half-acre parking lot near Seattle.
“I had tons of unused parking space at my duplex—the area had always been overgrown with shrubs and weeds, but it had great potential,” he recalls. “A friend who’s also a real estate investor told me about an app called Neighbor that helps you rent out parking spaces. Once I learned about the high demand for long-term parking, it was a no-brainer to turn this unused space into passive income.”
Cambra posted some photos of his paved lot on Neighbor, and within a few weeks, cars, boats, and RVs began rolling in. “The process works very similar to Airbnb: Customers request the space, and I approve it,” he explains. Since his lot is just three miles from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, “most of my customers are taking long international trips and stay between two weeks and two months. I generally have between eight to 10 cars in my lot at any given time.”
Best of all? The half hour of work Cambra puts in every month rakes in $30,000 per year, which breaks down to about $5,000 per hour.
The Airbnb of storage
One in nine Americans rent a storage unit, and many more need parking spaces for their cars and other vehicles. Meanwhile, plenty of people have extra space in their driveways, garages, attics, basements, or yards that can now earn their keep on StoreAtMyHouse.com, PeerStorage, Park4Share, and other peer-to-peer platforms. Customers not only save money—paying about half what professional storage facilities charge—but may also enjoy a closer and more convenient place to stash their stuff, since free square footage can pop up just about anywhere.
“You’d be surprised what people will rent if the price and location are right,” says Neighbor founder Joseph Woodbury, recalling a 3-by-5-foot closet in New York City that rented almost immediately. He even uses the app himself, leasing part of his driveway to a camper. Similar to Airbnb, Neighbor takes a cut of host earnings to cover operations and liability protection. The big difference is that Neighbor hosts spend an average of 16 minutes per month working on their rentals, making it what Woodbury calls “the least time-consuming, most-efficient form of passive income available nationwide.”
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Peer storage has become a powerful gateway for beginning investors who lack the capital or time to invest in a whole house. But it also appeals to veteran investors eager to fully monetize their properties, repurposing empty sheds into self-storage units and unoccupied land into long-term parking.
“It’s really set and forget, and has become a key part of my investment strategy,” says Neighbor host Mike Lowe, who is poised to earn around $100,000 annually renting out spots on his 10 acres of lakefront land in Florida to campers and RVs. “Now, whenever I’m looking to expand, I want acreage and a house so I can produce cash flow from multiple sources from one property.”
Could peer storage and parking disrupt the $500 billion parking and self-storage industry, much like Airbnb upended hotels? With average occupancy rates over 93% at traditional self-storage facilities, Woodbury says, “I don’t see the industry becoming supply-saturated anytime soon.” He also points out that even large storage operators, such as Public Storage, use Neighbor to fill vacant units. Office, retail, and multifamily REITs also use Neighbor to lease vacant space on their properties.
“We’re seeing a lot of creative listings: vacant retail space, old barns, even unused church parking lots being monetized,” Woodbury adds. “It’s clear people are waking up to how much value is sitting in their unused real estate.”