We’re a professional couple living and working in the Northeast and over the last few years, we’ve built up a portfolio of properties in cities around the U.S. that we run as short-term rentals on Airbnb. It’s been an amazing experience and we’re on track to host 10,000 guests per year, while doing it entirely remotely - living hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from our cities.
Moreover, it’s enabled us to things that we’ve always dreamed about - such as being able to take 7 months to do a 20,000 mile overland journey from Boston to Argentina in a ‘99 Land Cruiser - while managing our little hospitality business and other commitments on the road.
This experience has been transformative because it showed us an opportunity to create financial independence in the long run. It’s not easy or quick necessarily - but once you get the first property set up and running and can see the path to add more over the coming years, it certainly becomes very exciting.
6 years ago, we met at a travel workshop that Boris hosted. We started getting to know each other due to the common passion towards travelling, and started dating. Both of us were working full time at the time and we were managing to squeeze time out of our 18 vacation days every year to travel to places like France, Netherlands, Uganda, Cambodia, China and more.
The more we traveled, the more we knew that we wanted to find an alternative to the traditional 9 to 5. We’re both workaholics, but we wanted to have the flexibility of deciding how and when we’re going to work and be able to control our own schedules.
We decided we wanted to take whole year trip together travelling across Central America and South America by car. It was a dream trip for both of us and we probably spent about 3 years thinking and planning for it. Of course, one of the most important factors was how can we support the trip financially. (The picture below is when we were traveling through Huascaran National Park in Peru, it was most amazing experience in our life. Check out our website for the trip at www.turnrightattheamazon.com).
We had been staying at numerous of Airbnb at that time and always had great experiences. We stayed at a very cozy boat house in Seattle, a cool treehouse in Latvia, and a colonial house filled with history in the center of Shanghai. Sometimes we shared space with hosts and learned so many great stories from them, sometimes we had the whole space by ourselves and experienced amazing time in another city like a local.
In 2017, we’ve bought our house and started hosting guests on Airbnb. We learned everything from scratch, from how to best decorate and furnish the rooms to how to hire a reliable housekeeper and streamline those processes. There were a million little things from taking photos to setting up the listings to figuring out how to deal with guests and issues that would come up. There were a lot of work involved but we really enjoyed the process.
To our surprise, after only a couple of months running the house on Airbnb, the house generated more than $10,000 revenue per month already was more than enough to support our daily expenses for our overlanding trip.
With that, we were able to embark on our dream trip to Argentina in January 2018, while still having the Airbnb running and managing it remotely. There were many challenges in the beginning, as we needed to figure out how to respond to guests in a timely fashion when we would lack a stable internet connection, how to communicate efficiently with our housekeeper and how to deal with unexpected situations.
Although challenging in the beginning, we were able to handle nearly everything during our trip without any issues, while continuously working on optimizing the process and automating many of the routine tasks.
When we finished our trip at the end of 2018, we have already hosted more than 800 guests at our house, with almost 99% occupancy rate, and 95% 5 start reviews, ended up in a total of $60,000 in pure profit.
After we came back, we began to expand to other cities across the U.S. Although every market is different and requires a bit of a learning curve, most of the principles applied. We would always focus on how to create a comfortable and inviting experience for the guests, how to hire and train a reliable ground team, and how we can automate and streamline as many of the routine and repetitive tasks as we can. We’re still learning, but we’re on track to host about 10,000+ guests per year and we’d love to share this with you.
We also buy and renovate houses in Massachusetts area, so we have quite a bit of experience and expertise that we can offer both in the short-term rental space, as well as investment properties and renovations area.
It’s not hard nor are there any secrets that only a select few know about, but it’s all about taking the first step, executing well, and taking advantage of the many resources and tools that are available to you.
- If you are new to Airbnb and would like to get started by renting rooms or properties on Airbnb to generate income
- If you are hosting on Airbnb already, but would like to learn how to optimize and automate your listings
- If you are a real estate investor, who would like to find out where to invest next and how to build a profitable Airbnb business
… we’d love to help. Just get in touch and we can go from there.
Where we have been mentioned:
Business Insider - Here are the 3 biggest mistakes to avoid if you want to be a successful Airbnb host
physicianonfire.com - How to Generate Over $5,000 Per Month With One Airbnb Property
physicianonfire.com - How to Thrive with Airbnb Rentals Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
making sense of cents - How We Reached Financial Independence Using Airbnb & Real Estate – Plus Strategies During The Pandemic
Think Save Retire - How to Airbnb your way to financial freedom
