![A vehicle trailer, cage style, parked on gravel ](https://images.prismic.io/sharetribe/WlMOgNcp2ikeRH9s_67ce15a7-134e-4fcb-b528-922c2c28484d.avif?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&w=3840)

![A headshot of Duncan Banks, founder of Local Trailer Hire](https://images.prismic.io/sharetribe/6Qu7DciQLXNr0VLx_Screenshot2026-09-10at9.44.47am.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&w=1920)

Duncan from Local Trailer Hire

# Local Trailer Hire built a rental marketplace with better security, reliability, and assurance.

From renting his own trailer to building a marketplace with millions in GMV, Duncan has stayed focused on building features that will serve a niche market.

“Sharetribe provided an excellent foundation from the beginning. We still use it as our core engine, but everything that sits on top is built by the team at Local Trailer Hire.”

**Duncan Banks** discovered the demand for a trailer marketplace through personal experience. He had outgrown his pickup truck—or _ute_, as they are known in Australia—and purchased a trailer. Although he needed the trailer to move items between his Melbourne home and rural property about once a month, it sat unused most of the time. He thought, “I must be able to make more out of this asset,” and listed it for rent on Facebook Marketplace. Requests soon rolled in: “it was actually quite lucrative,” he says. 

Those initial rentals proved that a market existed. However, Duncan says that his Facebook Marketplace MVP “only proved that a transactional model was operational. It didn’t prove that the model could scale.” He knew the basics of the marketplace platform model, having already launched, managed and shut down a marketplace for wine. “Let’s say it together: It was a great learning experience,” he jokes. While catching up with an ex-colleague also in the tech space , the two hatched a plan to create a [niche marketplace](/how-to-build/niche-marketplace/) for trailer owners. 

![](https://images.prismic.io/sharetribe/YFFfldvDxG7sDsYm_6987070d-a3bc-4493-9bef-de250e852df4.avif?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&w=3840)

Although Facebook Marketplace was the de-facto solution for peer-to-peer trailer rentals, Duncan saw its breadth of items, services and rentals as a weakness: “If it doesn't fit anywhere else, it goes there,” he says, “we could make a more streamlined experience specifically for trailer owners.” He drew on his own experiences as a renter and identified the needs specific to trailer owners. Formal payment management could discourage no-shows. An insurance-like feature could protect trailer owners and renters from inevitable mishaps. Scheduling, messaging and a performance dashboard could support owners as they grew from occasional rentals to managing side hustles. 

> We considered whether we should build a bespoke platform from the ground up, or have a look at the platforms out there and work out which one is customizable.

Ultimately, Duncan and his cofounder chose Sharetribe so that they could get [Local Trailer Hire](http://www.localtrailerhire.com.au) running quickly and build features as they went. “At an abstract level, a marketplace platform is not the world's most complex thing,” Duncan says, “but when you get into it there is a lot of complexity that you need to get right. There’s communications channels, there’s rating systems, there’s image optimization.” Beyond the basic features, a platform for trailer rentals would process sensitive personal information and the cost of a breach would be high.

> You're asking people for driver’s license details. So it's essential to build on a stable foundation. We pretty quickly wrote off the idea of just building this thing from scratch.

Since then, the small team at Local Trailer Hire has built multiple features on top of the Sharetribe platform to serve a large market around Australia. Now, they are focused on scaling to the next level and increasing the number of trailers listed on the platform. However, there is no simple way to find and contact trailer owners directly. “The only way to identify all the trailers in Australia would be to get vehicle registration information, and that’s not information official bodies will share,” Duncan explains. “And fair enough. I don’t want my private information shared either. So, we initially put a lot of manual effort into getting supply on board.” 

In the beginning, Duncan seeded the market by encouraging friends to buy a trailer and list it. Then, he and his cofounder reached out to trailer renters through Facebook and asked them to check out Local Trailer Hire’s dedicated market. 

![A pickup truck with a mount carrying six bicycles](https://images.prismic.io/sharetribe/pvJoe6iiNZGx7CRx_61aea86b-879b-4217-9658-f45f778408dd.avif?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&w=3840)

Now, Duncan has taken this scaling approach to a new level by building another marketplace for trailer sales (also powered by Sharetribe) appropriately named [Local Trailer Sales](http://www.localtrailersales.com.au). “The aim is to get trailer stores and private trailer owners to list there,” he explains, “and then, identifying the buyer and picking up the rental conversation with them.” Duncan sees the relationship between trailer sales and trailer rental as a key entry point to scale further: “Trailer sales will become the catalyst for international expansion of this business. We’ll launch next in New Zealand and then look at other geographic expansions to continue the growth of Local Trailer Hire.”

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