Our First Airbnb

We were playing with the idea of listing one of our houses on Airbnb, to increase our profits. However, we never expected what was going to happen. Be careful with what you wish for, the world can surprise you.

As we explained in the post Georgetown Duplex, one side of our duplex was a long-term rental. One night around 11 PM our tenant texted that she was going back to her town and that her boyfriend (who was not on the lease) kicked her out and she left. All her belongings and the boyfriend were still on my property. What nice news to receive in the middle of the night. My reaction was to sleep it through and work on it the next day, with a colder mind.

How to Turn an Unfortunate Event into a Better One.

The first thing I did was to research what people do in these cases. After I had a good idea of how to proceed, I went and highlighted all the steps I needed to follow. I learned about all the information and signatures I would need from her. She was cooperative and signed everything I sent. Then we just needed to take care of her boyfriend on our property. I personally just wanted to move on and get the property back on the market as soon as possible. I did not want to get involved in legal proceedings (this road may take too long and too many headaches). After having a conversation with her boyfriend, he agreed to leave after a week to have time to get all his stuff out of the house. There was a lot of information online on how to deal with this. Luckily after a week and after she signed several legal documents, I regained control of my property.

I was already checking the ins and outs of Airbnb and how much money it could make in our area. I used several tools and even Airbnb to check the prices other similar houses charge. The decision was easy. We will give it a try. The house had lots of abandoned property from our tenant, including good kitchenware. We donated most of the stuff the tenant left but kept the kitchenware to alleviate the furnishing part.

Setting things up

Furnishing and decorating the house was a bit difficult since it was our first time doing something like that. However, we had a great time being creative and trying to make the house as cozy and inviting as possible. We had to assemble furniture ourselves, so we became a great team of assemblers.

Another important part was setting up the listing online. Making sure to add all the needed automation to be able to provide a great experience for our guests. While making things easier on ourselves.

We will be adding a post soon where we will go over the different processes and steps we took to set things up.

The Listing was Live

You can check our listing by yourselves. Let us know if we did a good job. Airbnb gave us some promotions for being first-time hosts, which technically give the guests a discount. Yeah, for our first bookings, we agreed to get less than normal to be able to get guests as quickly as possible and start getting reviews. Reviews help to improve your listing by fixing any problem using customer feedback. In addition, it helps to get your listing on the top of the searches, as it is a prerequisite to be a superhost.

We got our first guest quicker than we expected and everything was smooth, the guest provided good feedback and left great reviews. The cleaning was done by us at the beginning, we wanted to learn what it takes to clean the house, so we could create a checklist.

In general, it is not as difficult as we thought, or as people make it sound.

Overall Numbers

If you have never had a BNB place, is good to know that the calculations here are different. Compared to a long-term rental, the occupancy can vary per month, per season, or per weekend. Is hard to get a monthly profit amount without looking at the data from a year, or at least some months.

For example in the Year 2022 from August to December:

• Airbnb: $11,688.73
• Vrbo: $2,984.68

Total earnings: $14,673
Monthly earnings: $2,934
Average Monthly Cleaning paid: $475
Monthly Utilities and Maintenance: $350
Total average monthly profit: $2,109

You can check our post Georgetown Duplex to get an idea of our mortgage payment.
Mortgage + Taxes + Insurance = Monthly Cost: $1866

Therefore, technically we had a profit of $243 (since we did the cleaning for some time before we found our cleaners we made some extra bucks) while living for free on the other side of the duplex.

* All values are approximations and averages based on the 5 months sample