Spacer, Australia’s leading peer-to-peer marketplace for self-storage and parking space, recently announced its acquisition of Roost, the pioneers of space sharing in the United States, and the rebrand of the company to become Spacer.com.
The acquisition is part of the company’s growth strategy to become the global leader in shared storage, commercial and parking space. Valued at $28 billion, the U.S represents the largest self-storage market internationally, approximately 33 times the size of the Australian market. This follows Spacer’s success since launch in October 2015.
“Expanding into the United States is a significant milestone achievement for the business, and a strategic move to take on the biggest market globally. Roost, the pioneers of space sharing in the U.S., has built a solid foundation to successfully trade one of the fastest growing sectors of commercial real estate in the U.S. market,” comments Mike Rosenbaum, CEO and Co founder of Spacer.
What does this deal mean for Spacer?
The acquisition includes all intellectual property including database, tech platform, customers and to keep consistency globally, the rebrand of the name to Spacer.com. The acquisition also includes partnerships with several of America’s leading car rental services including Zip Car, Enterprise and Maven Drive, to offer car parking spaces through peer-to-peer sharing across the West Coast of America.
Jonathan Gillon, co founder and CEO of Roost says, “this acquisition is a great acknowledgment of the success we have achieved and the huge growth potential of space sharing in the U.S. We are happy to pass the baton to Spacer, and have the utmost confidence in their ability to build on the foundation established by Roost.”
With the rise of urbanisation, population growth and smaller living areas, space has become a valuable tradable commodity. Total public self-storage rentable space represents more than 210 million square metres, that’s 1400 football fields of available storage space in the U.S. and growing.
“We look forward to taking the Roost business through its next growth stage, by adopting our Australian learnings and translating it into the world’s largest consumer market. Our intention is to build an international business, with the right mix of on the ground staff supported by our global platform,” says Roland Tam, Co-founder of Spacer.
Spacer will concentrate the investment and efforts in San Francisco, Washington DC and Chicago, before looking to scale to other cities. The U.S. head office will be in Silicon Valley, where Spacer’s tech platform is housed, and the company will keep on U.S. staff to ensure a seamless transition and handover.
Going from strength to strength in Australia
Spacer has enjoyed exponential growth since launching in Australia, where the company is currently experiencing 30% month-on-month growth and captured an impressive market share in a short period of time.
“Spacer is helping families and businesses earn income where they previously didn’t. Whilst peer-to-peer remains our most common transaction, we are also finding strong support from businesses who want to generate easy income from underutilised office space and car parking. On the demand side, the value proposition is simple: cheaper, flexible and more convenient,” says Mike Rosenbaum, CEO and Co founder of Spacer.
Traditional supply sources like single centre and mid-size (5-6 facilities) operators, have also embraced Spacer as an alternate channel to acquire customers. As offline businesses, small operators can use Spacer’s platform and digital marketing capabilities to reach customers searching online for space.
Spacer is part of the emerging sharing economy, which is worth over $500 million in NSW alone. Spacer has been aggressively expanding its footprint to dominate this sector and the storage market globally.
Founded by ex-DealsDirect CEO Michael Rosenbaum and former private equity professional Roland Tam, the company closed a Series A funding round of $1.2 million from angel and private investors in October 2015.
