Spacer, Australia’s leading marketplace for storage solutions, has announced a successful $2.7M Series A funding round, alongside acquiring Parkhound, Australia’s number one marketplace for parking in Australia. The new funds and acquisition will cement Spacer’s place as the dominant marketplace for storage, parking and warehouse space in a market worth $2.1 billion combined.
With the rapid urbanisation of Australia’s major cities and the trend towards apartment living, the self-storage and parking sector is experiencing a massive transformation with marketplaces like Spacer paving the way with new technology.
The key pillar to Spacer’s strategy has been to source, utilise and commercialise unused ‘space’, typically from households and small businesses. The next phase of growth will focus on offering commercial inventory and car park sharing with the acquisition of Parkhound.
“Following our most recent round of funding, the second phase of business growth is focused on tapping into Australia’s $1 billion market for parking space by acquiring peer to peer market leader Parkhound. With cities becoming increasingly densified through urbanisation, many new apartment builds are only allocating one parking space for a two-bedroom unit, making parking ‘rentals’ high in demand along with self storage,” comments Michael Rosenbaum, CEO and co founder Spacer.com.au.
What exactly does Parkhound do?
Parkhound is a thriving online community with over 55,000 members that can easily exchange and lease parking spaces with other drivers. Local residents and businesses make money from leasing a parking space and drivers get a cost effective and hassle free parking experience. Parkhound has over 10,000 locations across Australia, where suppliers can make between $350 to $700 a month renting parking, while those seeking parking can save up to 50% compared with other parking services.
“Acquiring Parkhound is a key milestone achievement for the business and a strategic move to become the leader in ‘space’ globally. Parkhound has built a solid foundation to successfully trade one of the biggest commodities, city parking. This complements Spacer’s business model that already includes parking to expand our offering and become the market leader. We have been following the company for some time and are excited to take Parkhound through its next growth stage,” continues Mr Rosenbaum.
The acquisition, a significant transaction marking the growing value of the sharing space economy in the Australian startup scene includes all intellectual property including database, tech platform and customers, bringing Spacer’s suppliers up to 20,000+ across storage, parking and warehouse space. Parkhound also brings a number of business partnerships with CBD parking operators who improve their yield on underutilised capacity.
“We’ve built Parkhound from initial concept to a thriving marketplace serving the Australian community. The acquisition of Parkhound not only gives both businesses the opportunity to scale and grow, it’s also beneficial to our customers so we’re happy with the outcome. We will continue to work with Spacer for a seamless handover and look forward to seeing the marketplace continue to grow and serve communities across Australia and the world,” comments Rob Crocitti, co founder of Parkhound.
What has Parkhound been up to lately?
With Australian cities consistently ranking in the top 10 most expensive parking cities in the world, Parkhound has offered a much cheaper and convenient experience through it’s website and app booking service. Parkhound members have booked over 5 million hours of parking and its suppliers have made over $5 million in parking revenue this year alone. The founders, in an Australian series first, also rejected three investment offers on the Ten Network’s Shark Tank last year.
Launched in October 2015, Spacer has raised nearly $5 million in total investment from private and angel investors to date, with the company experiencing 20% month on month growth in revenue.
Spacer has seen significant growth in business partnerships from commercial storage and parking operators who are seeing Spacer’s platform as a digital lead generation and distribution channel for their bricks and mortar businesses.
The next phase of Spacer’s business growth is to concentrate efforts in becoming the market leader in parking rentals, building warehouse space listings, expanding further across the U.S. and extending its portfolio with B2B listings.