AirBnB Rental as part of Primary Residence

[Shauna Adair]

So, my husband and I have a long term goal of accumulating rental properties.  We are looking to move this year because we need more space for our family.  We initially wanted to keep our current house as a rental and then find somewhere else.  But, the bank won't qualify us for two mortgages and they won't accept a rental contract as income.  We'd have to have two years of rental history.  I've tried to brainstorm ways around this but haven't come up with any that would work well for us.  Moving on...we have found a property that we'd like to live in long term.  It has the space and the acreage that we'd like.  We qualify for the loan, but can't really afford to pay the monthly mortgage amount.  However, the property has a separate building that could be rented out for AirBnb.  Half of it has already been updated and is pretty well ready to go. There is one other room that would need some new carpet and paint, and it needs a shower. It has enough room to sleep a family. I think we could probably sleep between 6 & 8 depending on what furniture we put in. It would also have a kitchenette. These are updates that my husband (who does is a self-employed contractor) can easily make.  By putting 5% down and with the profit from our current house, we'd be left with about $16k after closing to make renovations to the building and the unfinished basement which is sufficient. Based on my research, the average occupancy rate for AirBnb is 44%, which is about 13 days out of the month. If we rented for $95 a night we'd only need to rent 7 or 8 nights of the month to make up enough of the mortgage amount to be comparable to other properties that we can afford. Obviously, the potential is there for more income than that especially if we market it well. I don't think it's too far out of the way to make a bad short term rental. It's less than 10 minutes from the nearest state highway junction just outside a major city area.  Expert opinions wanted: is this a good way to get our foot in the door with some income property that's also our primary residence?  Would you say it's too risky of an investment to bank on being able to consistently occupy 7 or 8 nights a month?

[Michael Vialpando]

Hi Shauna! Good luck with your goals! I am sure you will get there soon and this step seems like it could be a step in the right direction. My wife and I bought a house and cottage in Colorado Springs. We live in the house and rent the 1bed/1bath cottage on Airbnb. Similar to Robin, we have experienced very high occupancy rates. In 2019 so far, we have been booked 62 out of 66 nights. In 2018, we started our listing halfway through May. We were booked 206 nights out of the 231 we had available. But we also pay about twenty bucks a month for an app that varies our pricing every day to make sure we stay as booked as possible and get as much as possible during high demand times. We learned it all from a book on Amazon called Optimize Your Airbnb, I wouldn't even try the short term rental game without reading that book first.

If you are seriously interested in Airbnb, I would pay $20 on AirDNA dot com and pay for the Airbnb data for YOUR zip code. It will show you the top 10 grossing airbnbs in your zip code. This is huge for figuring out what you can generate from it vs guessing occupancy and nightly rates. Our nightly rate varies from $52 a night during certain parts of the winter to as high as $225 a night during peak season and graduations and what not. AirDNA can show you all that since they mine the data from Airbnb and then show it in pretty graphs. You can even filter the top 10 properties to only show the top 10 listings that are only 1 bedroom or only hold a certain amount of people. I highly recommend it.

Let us know what you find out! But also know Airbnb is much more like a business and not nearly as passive as a long term tenant. 

Good luck!