ENJOY FINANCIAL BENEFITS FROM UNUSED SPACE AT HOME|平價.安靜.舒適 倫敦"住家分租辦公"新風潮

Would you rent out your home as an office workspace? Online platform Spacehop allows independent professionals to book privately-owned home offices for daytime use. So it's essentially the Airbnb for workspace or an alternative to busy and noisy coffee shops. This family home on a quiet, residential street in London might not look like a place for professionals to get their work done. However, for those struggling to find a quiet and comfortable place to do business, renting a short-term office space at other people's home has become a popular option. ==LAVINIA OSBOURNE financial consultant, hopper== Sometimes when you're in your own home you can become a bit lackadaisical and so it's nice to be in a different environment. Also I find coffee shops dirty, noisy, sometimes you can't sit where you want to sit, and sockets don't work. So it's not conducive. Equipped with tea, coffee, and microwave, the home office does not tempt their guests to spend money on food and drink as most cafes do, another reason why Spacehop keeps customers coming back. I'll leave you to it. Please help yourself to tea and coffee and water and the microwave if you need it for your lunch. Spacehop, where Airbnb meets the laptop entrepreneur, is an online platform that connects freelancers and small businesses with their ideal home-workspaces at an affordable cost. As space itself becomes a commodity, opening up homes to strangers every day has been proven to be quite lucrative. Taking a share of UK's fast-growing sharing economy, homeowners can benefit financially from their unused space. ==MATTHEW BEATTY co-founder, Spacehop== So we've had a couple of hosts on Space Hop who are doing very well, they open up their home almost every day to every booking request they get and they're earning upwards of a grand and a half (GBP £1,500) a month. For most people, letting strangers enter their house is not an easy thing, as there are multiple concerns over safety. To protect properties of Spacehop hosts, Spacehop offers an insurance policy that covers property theft and damage and provides trust and safety tools including stringent ID verification. There is also a review system that creates a self-regulating community. So far, there have been no issues. ==CLAIRE BRYNTESON, space host== Letting people you don't know into your home is certainly something to think about. I certainly have to consider the fact that my house is being used for something else for the time it's booked and that people are paying for that, so I can't run in and out of the kitchen as much as I might do ordinarily. Office and studio rental rates in the UK are some of the highest in the world. Besides Spacehop, UK company Vrumi provides a similar home office renting service. There is also a resembling service called Breather operating in the U.S. and Canada. It is estimated that over the next decade, there will be a 30 percent growth annually in UK's expanding sharing economy, with platform revenues generating at least GBP £18 billion every year. By 2025, sharing economy will create GBP £140 billion worth of transactions a year. TRANSLATED BY：ARIEL HSIEH