There are plenty of collaborative consumption startups for sharing homes and apartments, AirBnB and Couchsurfing being the most visible. But sharing venues has proven trickier. Event planning can be a Herculean task, requiring vendors, promotion, and even insurance in some cases. Yet the first step — finding an often-overpriced venue for your event — can be the hardest, requiring cold-calling or word of mouth before haggling over the date and price to secure the perfect location.

As featured in a recent Atlantic post, two venue sharing startups are aiming to change that. LeadingSpaces is the newest, connecting venue owners with event planners. The service is launching in a limited beta in New York City, with plans to expand in the near future. For folks in the Bay Area, Venuetastic is a promising alternative service focusing on San Francisco and the East Bay. Venuetastic caters to a wide range of event planners, with venues listed for meetings, talks, meetups, religious events, holiday parties, and more. 

The inefficiences that these services aim to solve — the difficulty of finding an affording space in a desirable location on a specific day — are considerable. While the locations they serve are limited at this point, these venue sharing startups present a welcome service for time-strapped event planners, and fill a gap in the collaborative consumption space.