Rover Parking is an online and mobile-phone service that allows homeowners to rent out their driveways for customers to park their vehicles in. It’s rooted in a participatory business model where homeowners can be both the entrepreneur and the customer when they are out and need to park somewhere. “People love it,” founder Grant Brigden says. “It has a lot of positive impacts.”

Users do love it, so much so that since the Rover Parking application launched on the App Store in early 2016, approximately 50,000 users have downloaded the app, with roughly 3,000 driveways listed across Canada and the U.S. “I think the aspect of people having some extra cash that they can spend on their family vacation, weekend away, dinner or their phone, from doing nothing — obviously, this makes a lot of sense.” Rover Parking has moved to a “variable pricing model” where the rates vary from $2-3 an hour (depending on the area), as well as $7-per-day and $9-per-night flat rates.

Rover Parking analogizes itself as “the AirBnB of parking,” referring to the marketplace where one’s residence is his/her source of business. However, as Brigden says, the concept of Rover is not only about business and making money. It can be about forming a bond and mutual respect between the parking owner and the renter. “We have parkers that are parking in people’s spots [and] arrive back to their car with a hot coffee waiting for them. We’ve had parkers come back to their spots in the winter, when there was the ice storm [2013], with their windows all scraped, their wipers pulled up — because it’s almost like these individuals that are renting their space see it as a service they’re providing, not just a space.”

www.roverparking.com