Building an optimal AirBnB house/structure?

[Peter Knepper]

My wife and I are just getting started and excited about real estate and trying to plan out what our first move is. We live in Grand Junction, Colorado and housing prices are very high, so buying a profitable rental here at the moment is going extremely difficult. We live on 3 acres in "wine and peach country", so we came up with the idea of building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on the property to use as an AirBNB. Running the, numbers, it appears like it will cash flow well.

My question is, since we are building it from scratch for this purpose, how would you go about designing it for maximum profitability? 

[Jake Cohen]

@Peter Knepper great question! Building an ADU is a great use of your property and it sounds like you are in a fantastic area for it. My biggest suggestion would be to keep things simple.

If your guests are going to be staying for 2-7 days they don’t need a huge kitchen, bathroom, storage etc. You want to make sure you have all the amenities people expect but simple and functional. The biggest difference in amount of money you make will be the number of beds and total people you can accommodate. You could decide to offer 2 bedrooms or a bedroom plus a pullout couch or a loft space to accommodate additional guests.

The website listed in my profile has some videos on appliance selection, best practices, etc which may be helpful and we host a monthly webinar to discuss an in depth topic of Airbnb. Feel free to reach out with additional questions!