Clever ways to make money from your home

Mounting bills and mortgage uncertainty got you feeling strapped for cash? Here’s how to turn your property into a lucrative money-maker

Mounting bills and mortgage uncertainty have got many of us feeling the pinch, however, there are plenty of ways to turn your property into a lucrative money-maker. Here are some of the smart ways of generating income from your home.

READ MORE: 10 warning signs that you’re looking at a money pit

1. Rent out your loft or garage: earn around £180 a month

If you have more space than you need in the attic and you don’t need a garage, rent it out to others who don’t want to pay pricey storage firms. This would work best in a city where space is at a premium.

Storemates.co.uk allows members to register spare space. It’s free to register and list your space, but the company takes a 16.5% cut of the monthly rent, plus 20p from each of the payments. You can charge what you like, but Storemates recommends undercutting commercial prices by around 50%.

Another option is Stashbee.com, though this site charges the fee to those renting the space, so it’s free to host. You will also receive insurance to the value of £1,000 for your renter's items. Earnings can vary depending on the size of your space and how many people you’re renting it to. We've spotted a loft in Chelsea, west London, that's charging up to £180 per month, while in northwest London one homeowner is earning £85 per month by hiring out their outhouse.

2. Rent out your drive: make up to £200 a month

You can make a fortune from your driveway or parking space if you don’t have a car or if you leave it empty during the working day. Much of the demand is for parking spaces near major sports stadiums, airports or railway stations. Spaces in Twickenham command an average of £35.65 a day, and in St Ives in Cornwall central parking spaces are around £11 per day.

List your space on sites like yourparkingspace.co.uk, parkonmydrive.com or justpark.com. Online parking marketplaces will take a cut of your earnings or charge a one-off fee.

3. Rent out a room: earn up to £144 a week (tax-free)

Renting out your spare room can be lucrative, and you can earn up to £7,500 per year tax-free under the Government’s Rent a Room scheme (halved if you share the income with someone else). You can list your space on websites like Airbnb, SpareRoom.co.uk, and Gumtree.

If you would prefer not to share your living space, you can always rent out your home during weekends, bank holidays, or perhaps over the Christmas period when you’re away.

Remember, if you do take in a lodger, you must tell your mortgage lender or landlord and your buildings and contents insurer to make sure you aren’t breaching the terms of your mortgage, lease, or insurance. Your insurance company may need to arrange extra cover.

4. Rent out your home to a film crew: make up to £3,000 a day

If you think your home may have movie star appeal or even the makings of a set for an advert, you might be able to sign it up for photo shoots for magazines or filming.

Production crews are always looking for a range of homes. Companies such as Lavish Locations, JJ Media, Amazing Space, Locations Direct, and Shootfactory are worth considering. Locations Direct says the average London home could expect to be paid around £1,500-£2,000, plus VAT and a booking fee, for a 12-hour day. Large homes could earn £2,000-£3,000 a day. It may be wise to inform your insurer should you get selected.

5. Do a house swap: holiday for free

Remember the Cameron Diaz house-swap movie, The Holiday? Well, we can't promise Jude Law will come knocking, but if you sign up to a house swap website you could save a fortune on a holiday. Promote your own home with an enticing description and pictures.

Once you see a potential home that you would like to stay in, you can message the owner to offer a swap. Users rate and review each other, which helps get a clearer picture of who you’re approaching.

Some sites acknowledge that a classic swap, where someone comes to your house and you go to theirs, won’t always be possible when you can’t swap like-for-like or find dates that suit both parties. To counter this, some companies now offer the option to swap your holiday for points. You can use these points at a later date to stay in a different property.

There are lots of membership-based websites that allow you to arrange swaps with homes around the world, of any size, such as lovehomeswap.com, homelink.org.uk, and homeexchange.com. Membership fees start from around £10 a month.

6. Sell your stuff: make £100s

Moving house often unearths boxes of belongings that we don’t need or use. This could be a collection of CDs, DVDs or old electronics.

Once you have rounded up items to sell, there are a number of ways to turn them into cash. Auction site eBay is a good place to start. You can also try cash-for-clutter website musicmagpie.co.uk, which takes DVDs, CDs, games, and electronics off your hands. Just type in what you have to sell, and it will give you an instant price.

Selling ‘tech extras’ such as old remote controls, empty iPhone 6 boxes, computer console instruction manuals, and AV cables is also possible. MoneySavingExpert says it’s seen empty Sony PlayStation 4 boxes go for as much as £30 on eBay.

7. Earn money from your garden: make £100s every year

If you have a big garden, you could rent the space as an allotment. Ideally, you’ll have a gate or access point close to this part of the garden so you don’t have people traipsing through your space while you’re relaxing outside.

Advertise in the local newsagent or online on Gumtree or spareground.co.uk. Make sure you draw up a basic legal contract that states exactly when the garden can be used, and for what purposes. The National Society of Allotment & Leisure Gardeners can offer advice. According to Moneymagpie, if you rented out three-to-four plots in your garden, you could expect to make a few hundred pounds per year. It's not going to make you rich, but it may well make you feel better about life.

Alternatively, you could rent out your garden to campers during the warmer months. You can advertise your garden for free on campspace.com. List the facilities you have on offer and state how much you want to charge—then wait for bookings.

We found a riverside garden pitch in Egham that charges £50 per night for a pitch in spring. A more modest £8 per night could be expected in the garden of a bungalow in Northumberland.

8. Sell your rubbish: make some extra pocket money

According to MoneySavingExpert, we could all be sitting on a big pile of cash underneath a big pile of rubbish. Yes, that's right, your old toilet rolls, empty perfume bottles, and jam jars may be coveted by someone even if you can't wait to clear them out of your way.

The trick is to sell in bulk—few (if any) people may be interested in buying one toilet roll from you, but a cache of 50 or 100? That has primary school teacher written all over it, while a busy jam maker will no doubt be interested in taking a big collection of glass jars off your hands.

MoneySavingExpert has done a tally of items sold on eBay and says that while the average toilet roll will only make you 6p, with more than 130 bundles sold in a three-month period earlier this year, there is a market for them. The real money-spinner though? Old perfume bottles—they can make £2-£5 each, and thousands of bundles were sold in the same three-month period.

9. Sell old clothes: make enough for a whole new wardrobe

Image: Creative_Bird / Shutterstock

If you’re looking to do a clothes clear-out, then rather than take them straight to the charity shop, you may want to consider selling them.

You can sell bags of clothes by the kilo—companies like wejustrecycle.co.uk pay 50p per kilo of clothes (that’s £5 for a 10kg bag of clothes). The Oxfam and Marks and Spencer ‘shwopping’ scheme gives you a £5 M&S voucher (redeemable when you spend £35 or more in store) for every bag of clothes donated to Oxfam or M&S that contains at least one M&S item—the clothes are then either resold or recycled.

Apps like Vinted allow you to both sell and buy pre-owned clothes, and while you can withdraw any money made from sales, you might prefer to keep it in your account and use it to buy new (used) clothes guilt-free.

10. Get paid to watch telly: earn money for sitting on the sofa

Love Gogglebox? Think you can do better? Then how about getting paid for giving your views on the telly? The Viewers is a consumer research panel you can sign up to for free, which will pay you to give your views on anything from what you watched the night before, to the latest programme you’ve been given a sneak preview of. Payment for group discussions is a minimum of £40, while you could get paid £10 for doing an online survey.

11. Sell books on Amazon Marketplace: earn £100s each month

Image: donatas1205 / Shutterstock

Though you could list any unwanted books on eBay, MoneySavingExpert says that you may find it quicker to sell them through Amazon Marketplace as you can just search for the title and add a quick description (Amazon has reviews of most on its database) and it will then stay up until it sells.

It’s free to list up to 35 books a month, but Amazon will take a 75p fee, plus 5.1% of total sales below £5 and 15.3% for total sales greater than or equal to £5. If you’re selling on some of those bulky and expensive textbooks you no longer have a need for, you could still make a tidy profit.

12. Sell solar power back to the grid: make money and save the planet

Image: Diyana Dimitrova / Shutterstock

According to the Federation of Master Builders, you can sell any unused solar power back to the National Grid. This can help take the sting out of any money you’ve forked out for solar panels in your home.

If you have an export meter and send any excess energy back to your supplier then you could earn between 6p and 9p for every kWh you give back, plus, this energy can be channelled to other homeowners who might not otherwise be able to benefit from renewable energy, which in turn will reduce their use of fossil fuels.

13. Rent out your stuff: earn thousands per month

Image: Tiko Aramyan / Shutterstock

If you have useful gear that others might want to borrow from time to time—a steam cleaner, lawnmower, DJ decks, or even expensive photography gear—then hiring them out could become a good new revenue stream.

According to Fat Llama, which helps connects would-be renters with the items they need—and takes a 25% cut—some borrowers reportedly earn as much as £12,000 per month.

High-worth gear tends to bring bigger yields, and though your house insurance is unlikely to cover items when they are not in your home, the company does offer insurance of up to £25,000.

MoneySavingExpert also says you can make a tidy sum—in the hundreds—by renting out designer clothes through sites such as Hurr and By Rotation.

DID YOU KNOW?

The first £1,000 that homeowners make from their property is tax-free.

You should contact HMRC for any earnings between £1,000 and £2,500.

Any income on your property over £2,500 after 'allowable expenses' will need to be declared on a self-assessment tax return and, depending on how this affects your overall earnings, you could pay between 20%-45% tax on it.

READ MORE: New stamp duty rates could save buyers thousands