Joseph Woodbury on Neighbor, Peer-to-Peer Storage, and Creative Real Estate Income | From Rents to Roots

Neighbor CEO Joseph Woodbury shares how monetizing unused space creates passive income for homeowners. Learn peer-to-peer storage and real estate strategies for Utah homeowners.

Joseph Woodbury on Neighbor, Peer-to-Peer Storage, and Creative Real Estate Income | From Rents to Roots

Neighbor CEO Joseph Woodbury shares how monetizing unused space creates passive income for homeowners. Learn peer-to-peer storage and real estate strategies for Utah homeowners.

How Joseph Woodbury Turned Unused Space Into a Nationwide Real Estate Revolution

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Resource for Listeners

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The Journey: From a Rushed Move to a Nationwide Platform

The Origin Story

The Draper Middle School Teacher

The LA Gym Owner

Rescuing Distressed Commercial Properties

Preschool Paid by Passive Income

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Joseph Woodbury on Neighbor, Peer-to-Peer Storage, and Creative Real Estate Income | From Rents to Roots

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The CEO of Neighbor on creative income strategies, Utah's housing market, and why peer-to-peer storage is changing how families build financial stability.

Work Hard Mortgage helps families achieve the dream of homeownership in Utah.

Every homeowner starts somewhere.

Take the Homebuyer Journey Quiz to see where you are — and where to go from here.

In this episode of From Rents to Roots , host Ryan Harding sits down with Joseph Woodbury , CEO and co-founder of Neighbor, one of Utah's fastest-growing tech companies and a major disruptor in the real estate and storage industries. Joseph shares how a simple problem — finding affordable storage during a rushed move — sparked the idea for a nationwide peer-to-peer storage marketplace. His story highlights how innovation, community trust, and creative use of real estate can open new doors for financial growth, family stability, and homeownership opportunities.

For anyone exploring homeownership in Utah , searching for passive income strategies , or trying to understand how to offset mortgage costs, Joseph's insights offer a fresh perspective. Neighbor empowers everyday homeowners, renters, and investors to monetize unused space — from garages to RV pads to commercial lots — creating income streams that help families offset mortgages, save for goals, or build long-term stability. Whether you're a first-time buyer searching for ways to make a mortgage more affordable, or an investor exploring new strategies, this conversation offers powerful lessons in innovation, resilience, and the future of real estate.

This conversation is both inspiring and practical, showing how Neighbor is reshaping neighborhoods, strengthening community connections, and giving families new tools to thrive financially in a high-cost housing market . If you've ever looked at your empty garage, unused land, or vacant commercial suite and wondered if it could help you build wealth, this episode will show you exactly how.

Watch the full conversation to hear how Joseph built Neighbor from a simple storage problem into a nationwide platform — and learn practical ways to turn unused space into real income. Prefer to listen? This episode is also available on <a href="https: <a href="https:

Joseph Woodbury

CEO & Co-Founder of Neighbor, a nationwide peer-to-peer self-storage marketplace

Entrepreneurial growth, early-stage startup to national expansion

Real estate entrepreneur; works with homeowners, renters, investors, and commercial property owners

Some people are just beginning to dream. Others are getting financially ready. Some are already touring homes. Wherever you are in the process, this simple tool helps you understand your next best step. Take the Homebuyer Journey Quiz to see where you are — and where to go from here.

Neighbor was born when co-founder Preston and his wife, newly married, needed to find storage before flying to South America for humanitarian work. Every nearby facility was full, expensive, and far away. They eventually stored items in a friend's garage — and Preston returned with a question: why hasn't someone created a marketplace for all the empty space sitting in every neighborhood? That simple frustration became the seed of a company now operating in all 50 states.

One of Neighbor's earliest and most heartwarming success stories is a middle school teacher in Draper, Utah, earning $10,000 a year by renting unused land on her property for RV and boat storage. For a teacher's salary, that is life-changing income — earned by simply listing space that was sitting empty.

A gym owner in Los Angeles with a large parking area and some unused interior space began renting it out through Neighbor. He now generates $50,000 a year in additional income from areas of his property that his fitness customers were never going to use anyway.

Large investment groups have partnered with Neighbor to convert vacant retail and office space into storage, achieving 90–95% occupancy and rescuing distressed properties from financial strain. In some cases, entire floors of high-rise buildings have been repurposed, turning liabilities into cash-flowing assets.

One family wrote in to share that they had decided they couldn't afford $300 a month for their daughter's preschool. The day after listing unused space on Neighbor, they secured a renter. That income now pays for preschool every single month — and they secured the renter within two days of listing.

Beyond the financial benefits, Joseph shares stories of people who met through the platform and formed genuine friendships — and even romantic relationships. The platform is literally bringing neighbors together, reviving a sense of community that many modern neighborhoods have lost.

This episode is packed with practical education for homeowners, buyers, and investors. Here is what Joseph teaches about turning real estate into a more powerful financial tool:

Beyond the financial mechanics, Joseph's story reflects deeper values that resonate with anyone building a life through real estate and intentional living:

This episode connects to the broader From Rents to Roots archive. Explore these related episodes to deepen your understanding of creative real estate strategies, homebuying journeys, and financial growth:

To enhance this episode profile, consider adding these visual elements:

Ryan Harding: All right, welcome everybody to the Work Hard Play Hard podcast. I'm your host Ryan Hardin and today I have Joseph Woodbury with me here today. He is the CEO of Neighbor and we're going to learn a little bit more about what is Neighbor and kind of helping us understand how it fits into real estate and why somebody would want to know about this. Let's kind of dive right in. Joseph, tell me what is Neighbor? What company is this?

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, well first of all thanks for having me. Neighbor is a nationwide peer-to-peer self-storage marketplace. We let people take empty space in their home or their business and rent it out for self-storage. This could be in your home like a shed or a garage or even a parking space. Then we'll put your neighbor's boxes in your garage or their boat on your RV pad. We've got small businesses renting out space where they've got some space in the back they're not using — they monetize it. Maybe they've got some parking in the parking lot, rent it out for vehicle storage. That's generally how it works.

Ryan Harding: And what — so you're the CEO. This was your idea or an idea with somebody else too? Tell me how it started.

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, so there's three co-founders. It's actually my co-founder Preston who gets all the credit for coming up with the idea for Neighbor. He and his wife had just gotten married — this was five or six years ago — and a week after they got married they flew down to South America to work for this humanitarian organization. As you can imagine, getting married, not even moving into an apartment, flying — you got to get storage for your items. They were in a rush and just had a very poor experience trying to find storage. I think it's most people's experience. All the storage facilities close by were totally full. They were going to have to drive to the next city just to find vacancy, and they were going to charge them several hundred dollars a month, which for them was way more than they paid for anything else. You pay $10 a month for your Netflix and $30 a month for your internet. Storage is one of the most expensive subscription payments Americans are making — three, four, $500 a month depending on your city, just for their stuff. So they found a friend that was willing to let him store in their garage. Four months later when he got back and he was picking up his items, he just had the thought: this was such a better experience. I felt so much more peace of mind knowing my items were in a nice clean garage in a neighborhood I trusted, plus I saved a ton of money. There's got to be empty space in every neighborhood in the country. Why hasn't someone created a directory or a marketplace of some kind where I could look it up and book it? So that's where the idea for Neighbor was born. I remember when he told me about it, my instant reaction was: this is amazing. I thought all these ideas were taken. This is such a great idea — how has someone not done this before? Especially in an Airbnb, VRBO age, right? You've got Uber where you can drive people around. You've got Turo where you can rent out your car. There's so many options, and yet no one's created a way to take the space that's sitting totally empty, unused, and monetize that for passive income.

Ryan Harding: So if one wants to do this, how do they go about it? What's the process? Is it super complicated?

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, well we've tried to make it as easy as possible. First by just making it easy to find us — we're neighbor.com, that's as simple as it gets. We're also the number one ranked self-storage app on the App Store. If you're looking to monetize your space, you go on, we take you through this questionnaire that asks you all these questions about your space. Takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. We'll ID verify you as a host, then your listing will actually get manually reviewed by a person. You'll submit that and 24 hours later we'll let you know if your listing's been approved or not to go live on our platform. From there we get you renters. Those renters — you have the opportunity to approve or deny them. Once you approve them, they move in, and you basically do nothing. This isn't like Uber or Instacart or DoorDash where you're driving around doing work. Or even like Airbnb where you may own an Airbnb but they stay for two days and you have to clean up after them and find another tenant. This is someone moves their boat on the side of your home and they maybe come get it a few times during the summer, and the rest of the year you're getting a direct deposit in your bank account while doing literally no work.

Ryan Harding: So tell me about fears people have, like wrecking it or stealing your stuff. What kind of assurances does somebody have that hey, I'm going to be okay? Is there somebody backing me up?

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, a lot of people view us as a storage company because we're the first self-storage provider to ever operate in all 50 states. But internally we don't view ourselves as a storage provider. Our hosts are actually providing storage — they're selling storage. What we sell is trust. Our job as a marketplace is exactly that: to make it the safest experience possible. For our hosts, we have a million-dollar guarantee for them, very similar to Airbnb. Our hosts are of course ID verified. For our renters, we have the best property protection plans of any storage company in the country. We're the only storage company I'm aware of that will give you up to $50,000 in protection for your items. And then just the general concept is safer as well. Storage facilities — most people don't know — they're all zoned industrial and on the outskirts of town. You don't see storage facilities across the street. And the break-in rate is very high: one in 10 storage facilities is broken into every year. Whereas residential neighborhoods or business areas are much safer. If you look at the FBI statistics, something like 10 times safer than self-storage break-ins. So your items are in a safer place with better protection and closer to where you live to begin with. You don't have to drive across town, and you're getting it for 30 to 50% cheaper than traditional self-storage. It's just kind of like a win-win-win for everyone. Even for the host, they're making money for doing nothing. For doing nothing.

Ryan Harding: Do you have a review system then too?

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, we have a review system, we have a vetting system. Again, we take it a step further than most marketplaces do in that you can't just automatically publish a listing on our site. Go to Airbnb, you can automatically publish the listing. We have a human review every single listing. We have listings in almost every city in every state in the country — we're in all 50 states and almost every city — and yet we still manually review with a human every single listing that gets published on our site.

Ryan Harding: So obviously going with you guys as opposed to doing things on their own, there are a lot of benefits there for both the consumer and the host.

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, and that's our job. And that's what obviously makes it successful. So have you had any success stories from that, like people that have come in and kind of used your platform and really taken off?

Joseph Woodbury: It's blown away our expectations. We started mostly with homeowners, and that was very exciting, and we blew that up nationwide. The success stories there are kind of the heartwarming ones. We've got a middle school teacher in Draper, Utah that's earning $10,000 a year on our platform. Think of what that is as a percentage of a middle school teacher's income. She just had some extra land by her house, as part of her lot, and she's renting that out for RV and boat storage, earning $10,000 a year. Then you step that up — we started allowing small businesses to list. We had a gym in LA that has kind of a large parking area and rents out some space inside his gym as well. He's earning $50,000 a year. Then we've now started working with major investment groups. We have $10 billion retail REITs and office REITs and multifamily owners where we'll go to them and say: okay, you've got properties in 30 cities, we know 10 to 20% of your portfolio is vacant. At a strip mall you get all the spaces rented but there's those two in the back that for five years you haven't been able to find a tenant. Give us all those spaces, we'll rent them out on our platform, we'll have them to 90% occupancy in short order because there's lots of demand for storage there. There may not be demand for retail in that space. Office of course has been hit really hard in a lot of states — downtown New York, San Francisco — or we'll go take a high-rise building, convert the first floor or two into storage, and now that's occupied at 95%, generating solid cash flows. On an investment portfolio, your IRR now looks amazing next to the next guy who's having to deal with market vacancies. It's been fun to see even small investors. A guy that owns 5 to 10 rental properties — your cash flow is kind of set once you get tenants in all of them. You may be able to do some rent increases each year, but other than that your cash on cash is set. But then they'll take those properties and rent out the RV pad at each location or the shed at each location. Maybe you were earning mortgage was $2,000 and you're earning $2,300 in rent, so you're making net $300 on that property. And now on Neighbor you're earning an additional $300 and that goes straight to bottom line. You just doubled your cash on cash on that property, and you did it on all 10 properties. All of a sudden your portfolio looks amazing. And that's really just extra space.

Ryan Harding: So if I have a rental, you're talking like a spot, an RV space, or also inside the house? Because obviously with rentals it's typically going to be exterior.

Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, a homeowner might rent out space inside their home, but in a rental you're typically talking shed, some land next to it that's not getting used, an RV pad that's not getting used. And you just tell the tenant: hey, I'm going to be renting out this space. Some investors have realized that this is a better investment. I'll use Utah as an example. If you were to invest $500,000, that buys you about a townhome in Utah. You can rent that out for somewhere between $1,800 to $2,200 a month, maybe $2,500 if you're lucky. So that's going to yield you somewhere between $20,000 to $30,000 in annual rent. If you instead use that property as a short-term rental like for Airbnb, maybe your rents increase from $20,000-$30,000 to $30,000-$40,000 a year. But if you instead took that same $500,000 and instead of buying a townhome you bought a one, one-and-a-half, two-acre lot, you rent out that lot in Utah for $100,000 a year. That's 2.5× the rents that you're getting on a multifamily, and the yield is just so much better. We've had some small investors just switch over to being basically Neighbor investors, where they're just buying up property to rent out for vehicle storage on Neighbor.

Ryan Harding: Part of me says okay, that's a great idea, but what about local laws? I mean, we don't want a trash heap with a bunch of cars. How do you work with people on local laws?

Joseph Woodbury: Because we operate in so many cities nationwide, we can't know every municipality. Some municipalities it's like you can have three cars per house. Other municipalities there's no rules whatsoever. We always tell our hosts: check with your local municipality. A lot of times if you're buying a large lot, you're not going to buy that in a residential neighborhood, you're going to buy that in a commercial area, maybe a lot that no one wants. We've all driven past those lots that no one can get a buyer on. You can scoop them up for very cheap, perhaps even cheaper than a townhome, and yet you're yielding $100,000 a year on that.

Ryan Harding: So what's the minimum amount of space? Like a shed — can somebody really make money off that?

Joseph Woodbury: I'll give you some extreme examples. Most people are going to rent out at least a 5×5 or a 10×10 space. But in New York where space is at a premium, storage units go for $400 or $500 a month. We had this one host rent out spaces as small as a closet, a 3×3. At the very extreme example, we had a host that rented out the space underneath their bed. They had four or five spaces in their little flat rented out and they were 100% occupied. Literally, that is how in-demand space is in New York City. There is no limit on how small you can go. We provide a lot of tools to help you know what to rent in your market, how to price it, so that you can be successful. In other areas you're going to want to rent out a full bedroom or a shed, a sizable shed, or half your garage. If you have a two-car garage, dedicate half of it to the rental.

Ryan Harding: In New York, what was the cost to rent that closet?

Joseph Woodbury: I think they rented it out for $50 a month or something like that. And how would they access that? All hosts when they sign up, we walk them through a flow where they indicate what access they would like to grant on the space. We have a bunch of different options: 24/7 access, business hours only, after hours only, or by appointment only meaning you have to contact me 24-48 hours in advance, set up an appointment, and I'll let you into the space. We have some renters storing 5,000 vehicles with us nationwide — big fleets — so we have spaces that are very large that can accommodate that. They're going to have very different access opportunities than someone's closet.

Ryan Harding: Are you starting to see big companies come to you? Like maybe big companies that have a bunch of storage units say, hey, let's list it on Neighbor?

Joseph Woodbury: Most of our work — we do work with a lot of big companies — they're typically not storage companies. We work with the largest owner of multifamily properties in the country. For them, a lot of their multifamily properties they built storage lockers in for the tenants. They're 25-30% occupied. We take all the remaining ones and rent them out to the community and get them to 95% occupied. We also take their excess parking outside that the city required them to build — X number of parking stalls per unit — they don't use them. So we take all the extra, rent it out for long-term vehicle storage. Across a big portfolio like that you can earn millions of dollars in ancillary income, which really boosts your NOI. We have had storage facilities list on our platform. We don't prohibit it, but we don't actively seek them. It's not really our main thing.

Ryan Harding: The thing I really like about this day and age with Airbnb, VRBO, Neighbor — it's a much more efficient way to use things. We don't need to build more stuff, we just need to get access to more people so that they know: hey, there is space over here. They're not going to call that guy without you.

Joseph Woodbury: You mentioned the ability to get more efficient. The self-storage industry has the highest occupancy rate of any real estate asset class — it's sitting at 95% nationwide right now. They're supply-constrained. Storage is trying to build as fast as it can just to keep up with demand. The industry spends about four and a half to five billion dollars a year just on new construction. We build $5 billion worth of new construction every year. To us that seems like: okay, we're building all this new space, why don't we just take the space that's already sitting empty in all of our buildings all over the place? We've now built more storage facilities than we have McDonald's, Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Burger Kings, Wendy's, Domino's, Pizza, Walmarts, Home Depots, and Costcos combined. And that's not even counting the little units inside a storage facility. Even if you count cities with 200 people in them, there's three storage facilities for every city in the United States.

Ryan Harding: I want to go back to something you mentioned: commercial properties that are distressed. Somebody owning a commercial property that's having these problems — what options would they have?

Joseph Woodbury: You mentioned term loans where terms are going up. You're going to reset, you underwrote the property at a 4% interest rate and all of a sudden you're going to be at 8%. It's going to hurt. You're underwater. You're going to have to walk away from the property and go bankrupt. Neighbor can really help those folks maintain the cash flow they need to keep paying the bills on that property. We understand the conversion costs very well because we'll do it. People will come to us and we will coach them through the whole thing. We'll lay out a site plan, help them determine the unit mix appropriate for that location, and help them know exactly how they need to build it out. It's very cheap. This isn't like office-to-residential conversions, which are never going to work. You look at the number of properties where it pencils — you got to take a $100 million building and put another $150 million into it just to turn it into residential. You got to redo all the plumbing and the windows don't work for residential. Once you do the plumbing, the structural is all damaged. Residential conversion is so expensive — hundreds of dollars a square foot. Storage, you're typically looking at $15 to $20 a square foot. And we don't even recommend converting all spaces. Some strip mall retail suites — we'll take them as-is and just rent it out, especially if they're smaller, 2,000 square feet. We'll rent that out to someone who needs business inventory storage.

Ryan Harding: On the residential side, interest rates are high, purchases slowing down. Have you seen scenarios where brokers are using Neighbor to sell properties?

Joseph Woodbury: We've seen a lot of scenarios where brokers are using Neighbor to sell properties. Someone's looking at a $500,000 house and a $550,000 house, going back and forth: do we spend the extra $50,000? The realtor goes to them and says: the $550,000 house is 200 feet bigger, the lot is larger. If you just rent out the excess space that property has, your mortgage will actually be cheaper on the $550,000 house than the $500,000 house. There's absolutely no reason — you're getting a bigger house with more amenities and you will pay less every month for the bigger house. Because you earn the extra $200-$300 a month that makes a big difference on a mortgage payment, sliding it down to the lower valuation.

Ryan Harding: Is there that much demand for rooms and garages in Utah? Do you have enough supply?

Joseph Woodbury: We are absolutely supply-constrained as a business. Really, the more supply we can add, the faster our revenue can grow. We have millions of renters that come to our site every year that we're unable to service because we don't have the right kind of supply in their area. And that's with us having supply in almost every city in all 50 states. We still don't have enough.

Ryan Harding: That's a great way to use real estate, especially right now with interest rates being high. It's another way to make this work. As a lender we can't use that as income, but you can. And as long as you qualify for the home on your own, this is going to help make that payment a little more feasible. Creative lenders are definitely opening up to the idea of using income like this on a loan. There are several lenders now that allow you to put Airbnb income on your loan and underwrite based on that. Neighbor income is actually more stable, more predictable. This isn't like driving for Uber where you never know what you're going to make each month. Once you get rented, you're going to make $300, $500, $1,000 a month depending on how much property you're renting out, every single month. That's the beauty of storage: it's recurring, and durations last forever. Renters come in and they never leave.

Ryan Harding: Let's switch gears. You're a Utah company, headquarters in Lehi. You started in 2017, so now six years later. How well is Neighbor doing? Give me some numbers.

Joseph Woodbury: We're the only self-storage operator in the country offering storage in all 50 states. The space we've been able to onboard to our platform would cost a traditional self-storage facility somewhere around $7-8 billion to build. We didn't have to pay $7-8 billion — we just had to pay for the advertising to let people know about this idea. They already had the space, they already bought it, it's paid for. They're just taking that space and onboarding it on our platform. It's grown quite large. We're servicing a lot of renters. We hear stories: big real estate portfolios can earn millions of dollars a year. But just as important are the individuals who onboard to Neighbor and write in to say: I created a bank account that I call Vacation, and the only thing that puts into it is my Neighbor income. When it hits $2,000 we go on a vacation, wipe it down to zero, and Neighbor refills it for me. We had another couple where the dad wrote in and said: we wanted to send our daughter to this preschool and we were doing our budgeting and it was going to be $300 a month. We just finally decided we don't have the money, we don't have $300 a month, and we weren't going to send her. The next day I saw this Facebook ad for Neighbor, I checked it out, listed some space, two days later I got a renter, was earning $300 a month, and Neighbor pays for my daughter's preschool every month. It's really impactful. Despite how big it is in scale, that's the reason we ultimately do it: it's life-changing income for a lot of people.

Ryan Harding: How many employees do you have?

Joseph Woodbury: We're about 100 employees. At the beginning of 2020 we had 10 employees, including the three co-founders. So really the last three years has been tremendous growth. The nice thing is, because we aren't building the storage, it's a very scalable product. This isn't like a real estate portfolio where you got to have a manager at each site — the more property you gain, the more you have to hire. We're able to just scale. Most of our employees are software engineers building product. At some point the product gets to where it can handle as many users as you want to add. We all have a ton of fun coming to work each day and watching how we can grow this thing.

Ryan Harding: Any things you see changing in your industry? Any future projects?

Joseph Woodbury on Neighbor, Peer-to-Peer Storage, and Creative Real Estate Income | From Rents to Roots