Pimp your ride: why own what you can rent? And why not rent out what you own?

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

IF YOU GET in line early enough at 99 Cents Only on a day when it's celebrating a new store opening or some other special occasion, you can get a new Philips flat-screen TV for a buck and change. During the holiday season last year, Volkswagen sold three factory-fresh Jettas for just $5,995 each on Gilt.com, the Web's leading site for deeply discounted designer goods. In the age of Groupon, everything's always at least 50 percent off. It's never been easier to own stuff, and yet for millions of consumers, ownership is becoming as obsolete as newspapers. The costs are too high, the benefits too negligible.

Zipcar, the urban car-share pioneer, tripled membership numbers in 2009. But as fast as car-sharing is growing, it's failing to keep pace with bike-sharing, which is reportedly the fastest growing form of transportation in the world. New Yorkers renting out spare space in their homes are making upwards of $1,600 a month. These factoids come from the 2010 book What's Mine Is Yours, in which business consultant Rachel Botsman and serial entrepreneur Roo Rogers rebrand "renting" and "sharing" as "collaborative consumption" and position it as the cure for "outdated modes of hyper-consumption" that have left America with seven times more personal storage facilities than Starbucks outlets.

Just a few years ago, President George W. Bush was still touting "the ownership society" as the surest path to prosperity and personal autonomy. But that was before we could easily search our cellphones for the nearest power drills, sedans, and spacious Manhattan closets for rent. What we really want, sharing evangelists suggest, is access, not ownership. And when we can use the mobile Web to pinpoint sharable goods, the burdens of ownership--which include maintenance, storage, and eventual disposal--begin to outweigh the benefits in many cases.

Sensing a sea change in which people abandon their cars and turn their garages into DIY Holiday Inns, several venture capital firms, among them Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital, are pouring money into start-ups that specialize in what a May Fast Company article described as "underused asset utilization." Similarly, Web-based peer-to-peer rental platforms are inspiring a new wave of micro-entrepreneurship among people with underused assets of their own. At Relay Rides, a car-sharing service that helps individual car owners rent their vehicles to others, some owners are making upwards of $600 a month. At Airbnb.com...