Four Reasons You Should Be Renting Your Gear Out on ShareGrid
The popular camera-sharing community ShareGrid is expanding into all fifty states. Here’s how you can make their equipment rental model work for you.
1. Maximize Your Income
In the last few years, ShareGrid has paid millions of dollars in rental revenue to individual equipment owners, while also saving customers 30-50 percent on gear, compared to traditional rental houses.
The company started small, building its platform one city at a time to maintain the integrity of the ShareGrid experience. And it proved to be worthwhile: In just seven cities, 50,000 members have listed over 500 million dollars of equipment, with built-in fraud prevention and the option to purchase insurance with a single click at checkout.
Now, as ShareGrid goes national, equipment owners across the country can self-design the part-time, full-time, or sometimes jobs of their dreams.
Some Facts:
- ShareGrid is the first company to feature an exclusive insurance partnership; the coverage is sold on the website so renters can rest easy knowing that their equipment is protected against damage, fraud, and theft.
- ShareGrid’s cut is only 15 percent — that’s less than any other consignment-style rental site on the market.
- Over 50,000 ShareGrid products are listed on Google.
- The guessing game is over. Live results of top-searched-for and top-rented gear are available through ShareGrid; this process can actually help you decide which pieces to invest in next in order to turn your collection into a side hustle.
- On the flip side, renting gear from someone else on the site can offer you the opportunity to try pieces out before you decide to invest in them.
- The list of popular choices on the site includes not just cinematography but photography equipment as well. Your speciality is someone else’s speciality: ShareGrid’s community can help you find the market that will make you the most money.
- People who list their gear on ShareGrid report a huge range of monthly earnings, from a few hundred extra bucks to a total annual income of over $100,000. The more time you invest, the greater your earning potential.
2. Let Your Investments Work for You
Cinema equipment is expensive, and it often quickly depreciates in value, both through use and due to technological advancement. If a cinematographer purchases an expensive camera and is not constantly booking work, that cinematographer is actively losing money on that investment.
But you don’t have to let your equipment sit in your metaphorical (or literal) closet. By renting out gear on ShareGrid, individual equipment owners can turn their investments into assets. This applies to a whole range of equipment types. In fact, some of the most searched-for pieces on the site are mid-range cameras and accessories. Any piece could turn into a big earner when properly curated.
Use this sliding calculator to see how much you can potentially earn listing your equipment on the site.
3. Reclaim Your Time
The filmmaking hustle is this: notoriously long hours, heavy competition for jobs, and (at times) lots and lots of “no.” It’s not uncommon for indie filmmakers to find themselves thinking: “What did I do last month? Where did my money go?” With ShareGrid’s equipment-sharing community, your gear can earn you passive income for potentially the first time in your career.
Film-worker and ShareGrid veteran Jayson Rahmlow tells us: “I was burnt out after being in L.A. for ten years, and I found myself thinking: ‘What else can I do to make money . . . besides sell every second of my time?'” Rahmlow, like many others, found a solution in renting equipment he wasn’t actively using every day. “Is your gear making you money?” he asks.
Long story short: your gear should be making you money.
4. Come For The Cash, Stay For The Community
The community support experience ShareGrid offers is two-prong. There is a substantial amount of feedback and advice available for renters and customers alike from the ShareGrid team. Then, there’s an entirely separate and more unexpected sense of camaraderie that has sprung up in the camera-sharing community.
ShareGrid Perks:
- The site offers a live-chat feature that is active for more than 12 hours every day. Here, both renters and customers can receive real, thoughtful human advice on how to best rent equipment. In-house tech support (no outsourcing) ensures you’ll receive the most accurate information on the site’s policies and current statistics.
- The range of tips ShareGrid’s tech gurus can offer renters includes which pieces of yours are in highest demand at any time, which pieces to combine into rental packages, which pieces to invest in to maximize your rental income, and so forth.
- Alternatively, the range of tips ShareGrid’s tech gurus can offer renters includes which pieces are best for the look you’re going for, which accessories to include, and how to achieve your “10,000 dollar dreams on your 5,000 budget,” so to speak.
People Perks:
- ShareGrid is ultimately a peer-to-peer space. This means that all individual rental transactions will include dialogue and a human discourse that can be valuable for renters and customers alike.
- Plugging into the ShareGrid community of knowledgable equipment owners and users offers you insight, perspective, advice, and support. “It’s like the human version of insurance,” one ShareGrid community member reports.
- The ShareGrid community is consistently growing, and with the advent of PRO, those valuable relationships can develop between customers and rental houses as well.
- The filmmaking and photography worlds can be challenging and incredibly isolating at times. Finding and connecting to like-minded creators can be highly rewarding. The opportunity to find those people is a fortunate side effect of listing your gear on the site. Rahmlow reflects that “I love almost everybody I’ve ever rented to. We’re all in this grind together.”
All images via ShareGrid.
Looking for more video gear tips and tricks? Check out these articles.