Borrowing next door with Peerby
Where: The Netherlands, mainly cities
Category: Peer-to-peer community sharing
Costs: none / voluntary contribution
For whom: Personal or business
Peerby is a free service that enables you to borrow (or lend) items you do not need very often from people in your neighbourhood by connecting requesters and owners of various items. It saves you buying more stuff and filling up your house. Think drills, ladders, barbecues etc.
Plus: Great initiative for items you don't often need or use for and also a great way to meet your neighbours and it's free! High chances of a quick reaction because of pro-active request sending. New possibility to get items insured is promising!
Minus: No user profiles & reviews or security checks - everything is based on trust between you and your neighbours. It's not (yet) possible to search on items directly. The use on Mac was not optimal, PC worked much better.
When Peerby appeared on my horizon, I was curious to try it. The idea of having to own less and borrow instead is great, we already have too much! Checking participation in my neighbourhood was a pleasant surprise:
Quite easy, free, no obligations, Facebook log-in optional (pfew....). You can add a picture, choose a language AND....delete your profile. Quite important and never to be taken for granted!
Post the item you are looking for on the website, or on the recently launched app
A request is sent to neighbours. They receive an e-mail stating that X is looking for a Y, do you have it? YES/NO/NOT NOW
Your answer is stored in the memory of the system.
Sending continues to a growing circle until you stop the search
It's recommended that you describe what you need the item for, to make it more personal and create goodwill
I was presented with a long and seemingly random list of items where I had to indicate which ones I owned. Here, I worried...what to fill in? Who could see this list? Thieves scanning the neighbourhood? I did not tick all boxes and wonder about the purpose of the list as you cannot search or make a direct bid on someone's items - maybe in the future?
My first request was for a tent, sent to 109 neigbours resulting in 2 offers within a day. I started a chat with the offering neighbours. Neighbour A. uploaded the tent as a profile picture, so I could see it. We agreed a pick up date and a price: 10 EUR for a long weekend. The face-to-face pick-up was very pleasant and a nice way to meet new people from my area. We did have some issues after the return, as afterwards the tent was sold via 'Marktplaats' and the buyer claimed it was not complete. It made me realise mutual trust can come with risks too. Next time it may be wise to take pictures of the pick up and return of the item just to be sure.
Definitely fun to try, it won't cost you a single cent or sweat!
