Storage & parking marketplace
Near Space: renting out the garage nobody was using
Near Space is a marketplace Viva Studio designed, built and runs. It is live, and it is the clearest example in this portfolio of a two-sided product — two kinds of customer, each with a different job, who have to trust each other enough to do a deal.
The problem
Plenty of Australian homes have a garage, driveway or spare room nobody uses, while somebody a few streets away is paying for storage or parking. The space and the demand are already next to each other; what is missing is a way for two strangers to find each other and transact without either feeling exposed.
Who it is for
Hosts with space going spare, and renters looking for storage or parking near where they already are.
What we built
The features that make up the product as it runs today.
- Two kinds of account — hosts and renters — each with a different job to do and a different view of the product.
- Hosts prove who they are before a listing goes live, so renters are never dealing with an anonymous account.
- Listing costs a host nothing, which removes the reason not to try it.
- Renters book on the spot and get instant confirmation, so nobody waits on a reply.
- AI ranks the spaces most likely to suit a given renter — a harder problem than plain search.
- Smart-lock codes hand over access, so there is no key handover to arrange.
Stack and integrations
Built with
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Postgres on Supabase
Talks to
- Smart locks — a live integration with physical hardware, not another web form.
- Identity verification for hosts before a listing goes live.
The hard parts we solved
Any studio can list features. These are the parts that were genuinely difficult.
Making two strangers comfortable enough to transact
A marketplace lives or dies on whether both sides feel safe. Identity checks before listing, instant confirmation rather than a negotiation, and access by code rather than a doorstep meeting are each there to remove a specific reason someone would back out.
Ranking, not searching
A filter returns everything that matches. What a renter actually wants is the few spaces most likely to suit them, which is a ranking problem rather than a query. That is where the AI does real work in this product.
Software that has to open a physical door
Smart-lock codes mean the product's correctness has consequences in the real world: a booking that is right on screen and wrong at the door is a failure. Integrating with hardware is a different discipline from integrating with an API that can simply be retried.
See it running, then talk to us about yours
Near Space is live and you can open it right now. If your project needs something similar, that is the conversation to have.