Yo Neighbor app is a new entrant as UAE’s sharing economy takes shape

Krystel Hoche, the creator of Yo Neighbor, has tried to emulate Lebanon’s helpful neighbourly ways. Satish Kumar / The National

The UAE’s burgeoning sharing economy has another entrant – Yo Neighbor – an app that lets users rent and share items within their community.

In the sharing economy, it’s not what you own that matters but what you use. Across the globe, people are seeing merit in borrowing what they need when they need it, then giving it back afterwards – reaping the benefits of ownership without the responsibility.

In the global sharing economy, which is predicted to grow to US$335 billion by 2025 according to the consultancy PwC, it is car-ride companies such as Uber and Careem and holiday-stay platforms Couchsurfing.com and Airbnb that are leading the pack.

But a wave of UAE-based start-ups are now also tapping into the sharing market.

Among them is Yo Neighbor, a “sharing” app that launched in March, enabling users to borrow items from each other they might only use infrequently – from camping supplies to a drill or an inflatable mattress for a visitor.

“Where I come from in Lebanon, it’s normal when you need something to knock on the neighbour’s door and borrow it,” explains the app’s Lebanese creator, Krystel Hoche, who lives in Abu Dhabi.

“When I moved to the UAE, the conversations with my neighbours were always very formal and brief; I didn’t feel I could borrow anything because I didn’t know them well enough.”

Ms Hoche says the transitory nature of expat life makes borrowing more appealing than buying.

“I don’t know if I’m going to stay in my house next year, so I don’t want to invest a bulky item, because I might not have a place to put it in the future,” she says.

“And one day it might cost me a lot of money to ship it home.”

Ms Hoche picked the Lebanese company Apps2You for her back-end development, and gave them her design brief to follow. Those with items to rent can upload images, stating a preferred rate and placing their location on a map.

Those looking to rent can then choose to borrow items located in their vicinity. Communication takes place on the in-app messaging platform, but payments are made in cash, rather than on the app itself.

Yo Neighbor is still a work in progress. At the moment, it’s free to use, with potential for monetisation at a later date.

Ms Hoche claims the UAE is an ideal country to launch a sharing app, because of “the feeling of security and trust” that exists in the country.

“At the end of the day, the sharing economy relies a little bit on trust in humanity. This is a country that lets us feel secure about our fellow residents,” Ms Hoche says.

Another example of the country’s sharing economy is Ekar, which launched in January. It is the Middle East’s first pay-as-you-go hourly car rental service, in partnership with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA.)

“Over the course of the next decade, car-sharing will trump car ownership in the UAE,” says the chief executive Vilhelm Hedberg, adding that Ekar intends to expand its services throughout the region to “airports, public transportation nodes, and universities”. “We are looking to add 500 cars by end of 2018,” he adds.

For those who are reluctant to forgo ownership of a car, how about sharing a parking space instead?

YallaParking, which launched last October, is the UAE’s first and largest online marketplace for private parking spaces. Individuals or businesses looking for an extra space, can log onto the company’s platform to find unused spaces in the same area or building. “Our parking space suppliers are everyone from an individual tenant or landlord listing one extra space, to real estate companies and hotels listing 550 or even 100 spaces,” says the chief executive Craig McDonald.

YallaParking now has more than 500 spots around Dubai in their inventory, with a pipeline of 500 more to be confirmed before the end of summer.

Mr McDonald believes that the sharing economy is catching on quickly here.

“We have friends that are involved in building companies around many different sharing-economy verticals, whether it’s car sharing, ride sharing, logistics, real estate, or fashion,” he says.

But monetising the sharing model can be challenging. In 2012, the Dubai-based Frenchman Benjamin de Terssac set up the sharing platform Take Mine, which, like Yo Neighbor, aimed to connect individuals looking to borrow each others’ belongings.

When the website failed to gather momentum, he and fellow Frenchman Guillaume Arnaud founded Carpool Arabia, a platform for car drivers to offer lifts to those needing to travel in the same direction. That too folded recently.

“This difficult decision was taken as the need to develop such an ambitious project as Carpool Arabia needed more funds, that we could not raise,” the pair explained on their website.

“The sharing economy still has a great future in front, especially in terms of shared mobility.”

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