Yeah. To his condo point, fine. But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? (And if you own a house, you may well have a spare room that can be used as a guest bedroom but you also use for other things.)
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
> But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom?
I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
Honestly, if they're a close friend, buy an air mattress or let them crash on the couch. I've done it plenty of times when visiting someone who didn't have a guest bedroom or there were a bunch of us.
I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
That works fine in your 20s but not in your 30s when your friends are shackled to highly dependent screeching children, or in your 50s when your friends start having shitty backs and can't crash on your couch or leaky air mattress anymore.
I did this by renting a hotel room next to my friend for a few days. It’s actually fun and renting 2 rooms for up to 2 weeks per year is significantly cheaper than paying for an unused bedroom in a city. More importantly you retain flexibility to use that for more than just an empty room.
Couch surfing is also a perfectly reasonable alternative.
> There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.