STOW IT, the AirBnB of vehicle storage, has touched down in Texas.
Like AirBnB’s peer-to-peer model, the Fort Collins-based provides a platform for hosts to rent out their extra space to individuals and companies looking for a place to store their car, boat, RV, semi-truck or any other vehicle.
STOW IT, which has just expanded to Austin and San Antonio, is now in Texas’ four biggest cities, including Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, which were added in February.
“Everything is bigger in Texas including the storage market,” CEO Carmelo Mannino told The Real Deal. “The cost of real estate in Texas is just booming there and everyone is moving here.”
Finding a place to store your car in between moves is how STOW IT got started. One of the founders got stuck with a big tab to store his car during a move.
“He paid $400 for 3 days of storage when the selling of his house closed before the opening of his new house,” said Mannino.
“We ran the company on a Google Drive sheet for about a year before branding to STOW IT and building our website to connect property owners to others that need vehicle storage,’’ he said.
The company has now processed more than $2.5 million in payments to hosts in Denver and expects to do much more in Texas.
Since then, about 75 percent of the company’s business is what Mannino calls “long term airport parking” for people with second homes.
In their expansion to Texas, STOW IT immediately targeted the areas surrounding the state’s airports including DFW International, Love Field, George Bush International, Hobby, and Austin-Bergstrom International. The company gets a lot of its business from owners of second-homes traveling to and from the state.
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