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An increasing number of homeowners and tenants balance out their mortgage and rents by sharing their car spaces for a tidy profit when they're not using them.
They're currently making up to $90 a week on car spaces in prime locations during 9am to 5pm, when the owners have driven to work and left the space empty, as reported by Fairfax media.
"Parking can be extremely expensive in some areas of Sydney and Melbourne, so people are finding they can really help their budgets by allowing others to use their car spaces," said Nick Austin, chief executive of Divvy Parking, the company that handles bookings and payments for privately-owned car spaces when they're not in use.
"Lots of people leave their spaces vacant for times when they, say, drive to work, so we're helping them unlock the value of these assets.
“For owners it may help with their mortgage payments or household bills, and for tenants it helps with their rents,” he added.
In Sydney, where one car space in Elizabeth Bay in the eastern suburbs recently sold for a record $210,000, the uptake since Divvy Parking's web-based system launched in late 2011 has been increasing exponentially.
Currently, about 1,000 people are leasing out their car spaces - mostly in apartment buildings - for various periods, and about 2,000 are regularly renting them, with those figures expected to triple in the next 12 months.
Spaces in the CBD go for the highest rates, from $55 to $120 a week depending on location, with those in North Sydney reaching $90 a week, Surry Hills up to $80 a week, and Redfern, Pyrmont and Potts Point up to $70 a week.
In Melbourne, where the system will officially launch in two weeks, there's already been a huge number of enquiries, and people who have car spaces that are vacant at times have already started registering and listing their locations.
The most popular are likely to be the CBD, for up to $90 a week, with other areas in demand set to be Docklands, Richmond, Hawthorn and St Kilda.
The idea of people sharing their car spaces was inspired by the stellar success of the Airbnb online collaborative consumption model, where people go online to rent out their property, or rooms in their homes, to visitors.
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