London has overtaken other major global cities to produce the highest number of Forbes 30 under 30’s, fending off competition from New York and San Francisco. Research conducted by the business comparison platform – Bionic – states that London is the ideal place to be for eager minded young entrepreneurs. Such is the entrepreneurial spirit in the capital, a third of the 340,000 new businesses established in the UK during the first half of 2021 were located solely in London. However, incurred by the pandemic, a rapid increase to the popularity of ecommerce has caused immeasurable disruption to businesses operations across the breadth of the nation, with a scarcity of available storage hampering SMEs and startups.
With only 18.1 million sq ft of available industrial space left for firms in the UK, representing a record low in supply, the glaring vacuum of storage facilities has had a significant knock-on effect for SME’s, including an increase in storage costs due to increased demand for space. Many users of warehouse facilities have seen the price of their storage units quadruple in 2021, a good portion of them being small business owners. However, Stashbee – the UK’s first peer-to-peer marketplace for space – provides a solution for over 2.2 million SMEs in the UK’s retail and wholesale sector thanks to their cutting-edge technology, ensuring an affordable and safe way of storing items that you can’t typically afford the space for, with countless choices for location, size, and price.
Stashbee’s innovative model matches those searching for business storage to those hosts able to provide it, ranging from spaces that include garages, lockups and parking spaces. With everything from climate-controlled high-tech locations to more simple commercial storage units and warehouse storage, Stashbee’s spaces have options suited to all sectors in Britain’s booming SME scene.
Anthony Paine, co-founder and CEO of Stashbee comments on the benefits of peer-to-peer space for SMEs:
“Whilst the UK’s storage industry is growing, we are still well behind many other countries in terms of the amount of storage space available per person. What’s more, most of this space is dominated by a small number of companies, concentrated in clusters that most people can’t access, and it’s costly. There are clear trends to show that people simply don’t have access to the space they need.
“Meanwhile there are at least 2.5 billion square feet of unused storage and parking space in this country that could be put to work. That’s the same amount of space as a huge square going from Wembley, to Wimbledon, to Lewisham”.
