No I Don’t Mind Living With Strangers

Perhaps I should start by saying that I come from a big family (I am the oldest of six children) and Collin is an extrovert who lived with lots of people throughout college. We are both used to living with people. While there have been some things that have been difficult for us about living with people, overall this has been a great experience and we think that more people should do it!

In our last rental, we had an extra bedroom and we started all of this by renting out that bedroom to a friend one summer. (It was against the terms of our lease but oh well) After that friend moved out, Collin and I were like “wow, it was pretty easy to rent that room out and it was nice to have the extra money, maybe we should look into Airbnb.” And that’s how it started. We Airbnb’ed that room out pretty consistently on the weekends, which made $100-300 extra a month for us. The issue with short term rentals on Airbnb in our city though is that there is definitely a “season.” We were booked solid April through September, and did not have hardly any guests the rest of the year. That’s something to keep in mind with all of this.

The following November we were traveling to Des Moines to visit and friend, and we stayed in an Airbnb. This Airbnb was giant house, and the host was renting out nearly all of the rooms. That was our epiphany moment: when we buy a house, this is what we want to do.

So then this past summer we bought a five bedroom house and began renting out two of the rooms short-term on Airbnb, but then we got a bunch of requests to stay long term (2-4 months). We realized that we had uncovered an untapped market of graduate students moving to the city for three month internships that needed a furnished place to stay. They couldn’t sign a lease or furnish an apartment, so they had turned to Airbnb. We currently have four individuals living with us, and three of them had found our place through Airbnb.

It has been a great experience. We haven’t had any “creepy” people stay with us– most of them are in their twenties and needing a cheap place to stay. I would say 80% of all of the people we have hosted have been grad students. Check out my post here about how much we charge, how much it costs, and how much we make through renting out our spaces.

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