In a little over a month, my girlfriend and I will be moving from our downtown apartment into a suburban home in North Edmonton. I’ve never actually owned a property and have always enjoyed the freedom from the necessity of maintenance that renting offers. If there’s a problem, I simply call my landlord and they come out and fix it free of charge.

Ownership is different though. For example, I’m about to inherit a lawn and garden which must be tended so I need to buy a lawnmower. Except I really don’t want to buy a lawnmower because it is extremely likely that every other property owner on my street already has one. Do we ALL need one? I contest that we do not.

I’d estimate it takes 30 minutes to cut the average lawn. With a bit of organization, maybe 15–20 lawns could get cut per weekend. Lawns need cutting at most once a fortnight so one lawnmower could cut 30–40 MORE lawns than if it only cut your own.

So what if you rented your lawnmower out to the other residents of your street? Say charge them $5 per cut. A decent quality petrol lawnmower costs about $300 so you need to rent it out at least 60 times to make your money back. That sounds a lot but the lifetime of a decent mower is at least 10 years so you’ll only need to get 6 rentals per year. Manageable I think.

The concept’s extensible too. Here in Canada home owners are obliged by law to clear the snow from the pavements surrounding their properties. I’m British so the concept of a ‘snow blower’ is completely foreign but here they’re relatively common. I think it would be great if I could casually rent a snow blower for a few bucks and save myself a lot of shovelling, particularly as I have a corner lot, bah.

I’m calling this concept ‘Micro Rentals’. Now, let’s discuss why this is a great (or downright terrible) idea.