“Working from home”, Pt 2

Following on from my last ramblings about “working from home”, I was thinking that it’s strange there’s not more of a trend of working from someone else’s home.  Or having someone else work from your home.

My aunt works from home, and she could probably do with a bit of extra income.  Her son has the front down stairs room, which is a perfect space for an office.  You can get to it from the street without entering the house or yard.  You can cut it off from the rest of the house and there’s a kitchenette and toilet that can be easily accessed...  If she kicked him out to the granny flat, she could convert that room and rent it out as office space.  Parking would be awkward, but I’m sure they’d work something out.

There are probably a lot of houses that could have a section converted to office space.  You hear about people converting part of their homes into a separate living space so they can rent it out, but it doesn’t seem to be a common thing for people to convert a space into an office to let.

From the home owner’s point of view it would be less intrusive than having someone actually living in your house, but still a source of income.  And if you were running a small business and needed an office it would probably be cheaper than renting a space in a commercial complex, and possibly a more pleasant environment.

This way, even if you lived in a one bedroom flat and you wouldn’t particularly want to work there, you could still “work from home”.  Just not your home.

And it would potentially be a much safer investment on the part of the home owner.  People are odd, and treat the place where they live in a way they would never treat the place where they work.  A professional working in an office is likely to do much less damage (I would expect) than someone living in a rented room.  And it would be so much easier to evict someone who’s mistreating the place if they don’t actually live there.

This could be a thing.  How do we make this a thing?