I couldn't afford to buy rental properties at 25. So I started renting out cars instead.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Saimah Chaudhry, cofounder and chief operating officer of Zevo. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Back in 2015, I was working for a SaaS company that I’d founded. It mostly served clients in the restaurant industry, where my parents and grandparents were both entrepreneurs.
One day, I was meeting with an out-of-town client who was staying in Manhattan Beach. He mentioned he’d rented the BMW he was driving from Relay Ride (which later became the car rental app Turo).
That was the first time I heard of car sharing. I was working from home, and my Smartcar was definitely an underutilized asset. On a whim, I listed it for rent. A grad student at UCLA booked it for three months, and I pretty much never saw that car again — after that, it was always rented.
I quickly got 2 more cars to rent
My day-to-day car use was pretty minimal, but I still needed to drive occasionally. I leased another Smartcar because they were very cheap at the time. I listed that one too, and soon acquired a third car.
At the time, I was about 25. I couldn’t afford to buy real estate to get into the short-term rental market. But renting cars gave me an accessible way to turn an underutilized asset into a productive asset.
My friends and family thought I was crazy, but I loved the business’s efficiency. I began researching what cars were most in demand in greater LA. I bought mid-range luxury cars like Corvettes and BMWs, which were popular with tourists. Before long, I had a fleet of more than 50 cars and was making hundreds of thousands annually.
Maintaining my fleet was challenging
A little more than a year after I started renting, a client offered to buy my SaaS company. It wasn’t a hugely profitable sale, but the timing was good because it allowed me to expand my rental business. I also started a YouTube channel teaching other entrepreneurs how to manage their fleets. That was hard to monetize, so rentals accounted for about 90% of my income.
I learned a lot about operations and logistics. At first, I had cars parked all over my neighborhood in free public parking. Eventually, I leased a small lot. There wasn’t a ton of storage needs, because the cars were always rented out.
The bigger challenge was vehicle maintenance. They took a lot of wear and tear, and I couldn’t always account for when things went wrong.
My company now focuses on renting to gig workers
About five years ago, another owner found me via my YouTube channel. We thought we could do something similar to Turo, but better. We wanted to focus only on electric cars. Not only were they the way of the future, but they also had fewer moving parts and maintenance demands.
We launched Zevo in 2021. Today, our rentals drive about 8 million miles each month.
I love that the business supports entrepreneurs on both sides. The people who own vehicles typically have fleets of five to 250 cars. We work with dealership partners to help them purchase the most in-demand vehicles. On the other side, most of our renters are drivers for the gig economy. They typically take longer-term rentals of about 90 days.
I believe that everyone — even a 25-year-old woman like I was when I started — should be able to play in the asset class. Control of those assets shouldn’t be concentrated just with big tech companies.
I paused from renting my own vehicles while we got Zevo off the ground. I just recently purchased a Tesla to list on the platform, and I’m excited to be back in the game.