CarsIreland.ie has announced a tie-in with Fleet, a new car-sharing app sweeping the Irish rental industry.

Car dealers using the site can add idle vehicles to the Fleet marketplace for free. Fleet, which lets users rent directly from local owners, has rapidly grown its user base since June. The app has been downloaded over 25,000 times and now boasts over 11,000 users seeking to rent cars in Ireland.

CarsIreland.ie's partnership brings potentially hundreds of extra small businesses into the peer-to-peer rental market. The car commerce  site, which features over 1,200 dealers and 50,000 cars each month, now offers its members a tool to add cars directly to the Fleet app or   jointhefleet.com website and taking the app into virtually ever rural and urban area in Ireland.

Fleet's peer-to-peer approach to car rental is the first of its kind in Ireland. Until now, traditional car rental has been dominated by a few major franchises; dealerships and small garages had little ability to market or attract car rentals. With the Fleet app, people can skip the middleman and the queues by renting directly from local owners and garages.

The Fleet and CarsIreland.ie partnership will provide a much-needed extra revenue stream for struggling car dealers. With disruption and new technologies taking hold in the industry, as well as rising running costs, many consumers are choosing to forgo car ownership entirely.

Sharing economy apps like Uber and Airbnb have played havoc with traditional commerce, but some industry experts now predict that tech disruption will create opportunities for small businesses and consumers alike.

Owners can add cars based in any location to the Fleet app with a few taps of a button. A live-updating map allows users to browse all currently available cars across the country. Cars can be rotated into or out of Fleet's marketplace as and when dealers decide to sell them or private owners need to use them.

The partnership comes at a time when sales are down and many garages are  struggling in an increasingly competitive market. New car purchases in Ireland have dropped by 10.2 per cent in the first nine months of 2017, based on figures from the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI). Amidst Brexit uncertainty and the weakness of sterling, Irish used car values have also been slashed by as much as 15% according to Brian Cooke, the deputy director general of SIMI.

To date, Fleet has pursued a mobile-first approach. Google's latest Consumer Barometer report shows that 85% of the Irish population now goes online on a daily basis. This follows recent studies showing that Irish consumers have some of the highest rates in the world for internet use and purchases made via smartphone.

As of November, nearly 300 listings have appeared on Fleet's marketplace, most of them from private owners. Fleet is hoping to target a number of segments of the rental market including inbound tourists, wedding cars and business trips.