Less buying, more borrowing: A new Seattle app connects you with your neighbors

Three months ago, Chris Kevorkian moved to Seattle’s Madison Park from Connecticut.

“And all of our camping equipment stayed on the East Coast,” Kevorkian said.

But Chris’ son Cal was home from college and was planning to go to Sasquatch, the annual Memorial Day music festival held in Eastern Washington. He needed a tent, chairs, and basically hundreds of dollars worth of camping gear. Chris and his wife had downsized when they moved across the country and did not intend on filling up their new house with items they only use once or twice a year.

So instead of hopping in the car and heading to REI, Chris downloaded a brand new app called MyNeighbor, that connects neighbors who want to share and borrow things.

“I borrowed a tent. What else did we get, Calvert?”

Chris’ son Cal jumps in.

“Chairs, we got a grill. It was all great. It was super smooth and easy,” he said. “We went over to the house three days later and picked it up.”

And a week later, they dropped it back off on their neighbor’s porch.

Seattle’s Brendan Benzing co-founded MyNeighbor.

“I was really an early adopter of Lyft, Car2Go and a lot of these other shared economy services,” Benzing tells me, standing in his garage.

“And I thought to myself, looking around my own house, what were ways that I could share?” he said. “There are a lot of things just standing around here in my garage, I always felt, ‘Boy, what if other people could get use out of this while I’m not using it?’ I thought that was a great idea.”

People can post items they’re willing to share.

“That bike rack that’s hanging right there. I just posted this kite, which is a beautiful kite, which I do use,” Benzing said. “I use some of these things, I just don’t use them very frequently. Over here I have a ladder, his and hers bikes, folding table, power washer.”

Neighbors have the choice to share for free, to charge a fee, or to share something in exchange for a donation to a local school or charity.

Or you can post a request for something you’re looking to borrow.

Seattle’s Phil Shigo has four young kids and says he doesn’t have the time to schlep them all to the store every time he needs to buy something.

“I found the service to be super easy,” Shigo said. “I posted a request for some gardening tools and within about a day I had a response back and it saved me a trip down to Lowe’s. For me, it was the opportunity cost and just the time involved on a weekend. That was a big savings for me.”

Right now, MyNeighbor is 100 percent based on trust. If someone borrows your lawnmower and breaks it, it’s up to you two to figure out what will be done.

“We don’t participate in the transaction, but that’s a feature that people have asked us to add,” Benzing says. “But today, we have a set of guidelines around being neighborly and around what we think are best behaviors.”

“At this stage, we’re really just enabling neighbors to find out what’s available and be able to exchange on their own,” he said. “We’re offering, at this stage, mediation services if anyone has a problem. But most of the experiences that we’ve heard have been positive feedback. People end up meeting a neighbor which is a secondary, but also powerful, benefit of the service.”

The idea is a smart one. Does every single person on your block really need to own a ladder? Phil doesn’t think so.

“I think once people start catching on, more and more people get onto the service. I think people are going to realize that there are very few items that they really need to purchase because so many can actually be lent.”