Airbnb hosted the Mangy Chicken Coop to Rent that covers the mortgage

This essay is based on interviews with Landon Wilkinson, a host of Airbnb, Washington about two and a half hours from Seattle. He and his wife have two rentals on the Washington property – a rebuilt chicken cope with prices about $ 120 at night and up, and a ship container – and third in Montana. Conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

I have been an Airbnb host who is now 10 years.

Before Airbnb really became a thing, I made surfing on the couch. It was a little predecessor for Airbnb and a really fun experience.

Based on my trips, I was able to taste what was possible when people opened their homes and did cool things. When I was younger, I had a construction company. We fixed the houses and started making long -term rentals. Then, around 2016, we tried Airbnb with a really small house.

The house could rent $ 900 or $ 1,100 a month as a long-term rent, but we earned $ 1,600-2000 a month as AirbnB.

I grew up houses for my father, but the chicken cover was more ambitious than many of my previous construction projects.

There was a very organic process from this building. It started with a bit of attachment of the roof and putting some nicer windows. I thought, “I just make it a small shop. I'll make it more isolated.”

Then I realized through this process: “In fact, I could do something very nice with it if I wanted it.”

Then I went in.

Its demolition would have cost $ 20,000 and its approval was about $ 38,000

I bought a 55 -acre property In 2018, my parents who had bought it and basically used it as an additional arable land.

At one point it had had a house, but it had burned down. The property also had nothing alongside the walls of Chicken Coop that had a kind of roof.

We didn't think we were going to do anything with Chicken Coop. It was a 100-year-old concrete structure formed on the table. It was super dense and very difficult to demolish.

I thought, “We could spend $ 20,000 to get rid of this structure or see what we could do.”

In 2019, we tried the landscape near the construction of our main home. Every morning we would look at the porch and see this chicken copy, which was a real eyesight.

We started chopping in the winter of 2019. It started to make a project more and I brought some of my boys to help from a construction company.

We put in $ 38,000 – and a lot of nights and weekends – to get it for the first time and set it up. Then we have updated things like furniture in the last few years. We got a nicer hot tub.

I found a new rear window on Facebook's marketplace and only paid $ 40 for it. If you are a little creative about some things or you are ready to be flexible, they can be really big findings. This window would probably have been a couple of spectacular.

Thought Coop doesn't like Airbnb guests but my wife saw the potential

This is part of the story where my wife says, “Make sure you tell them how much you got against” because she was the one who felt confident that it was Airbnb. I still had a picture of a chicken in my head.

We argued quite a lot about it. He said, “Let me list the real estate photos of the landscape and describe what we get about this real estate, and put on it at a fairly low night price and set the date on which it will be.”

We started the project in December 2019 for my storage. By January, we realized that it could be more. We made it a rent by April 2020.

We had a sister who came in April 2020 and stayed there for two months. When we got this booking, I thought, “I think we have to do it well and do it according to the schedule.”

When the sister first moved in, we still finished the landscaping and got it done on time so she could stay there. By the time he left, everything from the outside was really well done and the landscaping was a bit matured, so we could get updated pictures.

We have a nice branded label on the door and behind the house, which says “Ahtanum's cottage”.

Airbnb's income covered our mortgage quickly

The cottage went to the spring of 2020 and started doing very well. 12 or 24 months were the most volume.

In August 2020, we earned about $ 6,000 from this house in one month. This is a cutting -edge scenario. Usually an average of $ 2000-3000 per month. This is about 65-70%on average.

I had a 40-leg-high cube sending container that I used when we stopped using Chicken Coop to store, grass and garden stuff. After construction of Coop Cottage, I began to imagine what could work with a truck. So we started building it in 2022.

Two Airbnb lists are more than our mortgage covering about $ 1,100 a month. Our utilities in Washington, with three properties and two hot tubs, There are $ 400 to $ 500 a month.

Nowadays Airbnb is harder to start but the profit potential is greater

Setting up Airbnb takes a little more work – especially now that the competition is stiffer. In the early days, Airbnb had something to do something quite easy. Now you need to be a little more competitive when adding the amenities that real estate actually sells.

If you can manage real estate well, Airbnb is generally much better investment than a long -term rental. In many cases, you will not be able to do long -term rental at the price of current mortgage loans anyway. So, if you didn't get in, if prices were still low, you are forced to be somewhat creative.

Chicken Coop started as follows: “How do we get rid of it?”

When we looked at it in our former state, it was difficult to visualize it as something else. But once you have begun to improve some of the details, the vision becomes clearer.

We probably could have marketed it as a chicken cope, but this is one of the things that seemed to me to be derived. We wanted it to be something that people perceived, what it was now: “Oh man, it was before the dump.”

It probably would have been a great marketing course, but I was a bit chicken, no pun.

In our time, we were not so sure that being a unique stay, being a chicken cope would have been a positive thing. Now, afterwards, it would probably have been a good idea.