On our property are two little "tiny houses".
When we moved out here and built our cabin, our friend Joe (in his 70's) moved here, too, had a prefab yard shed with a porch hauled in and he had it finished out. Rustic. Camo curtains and bedspread. Plywood kitchen counters and wire racks for dishes and whatnot. No range and a small fridge. No door on the bathroom. Basically a "deer camp cabin" for anyone who knows what that means. He loved it since it also housed his gigantic recliner, a 48" tv, and his 6' tall gun safe. His life was complete.
A year later, Joe's mom (in her 90's) fell in her little senior apartment in Oklahoma City. She said it was time to go into the nursing home since she shouldn't live alone anymore. I asked her if that's what she wanted and she said, "Of course not." So, we gave her another option. She visited us here in Texas, we took a tour of the "little house building place" and she bought one. It's yellow outside and blue inside and just a perfect little grandma's house. It was the first time in her life she had been able to make all the decisions regarding where she lived. She had a big vegetable garden every year and rose bushes outside her house and lived there happily till she passed away just shy of her 95th birthday.
Joe moved into his mom's house because it was bigger and had a full kitchen and washer/dryer. He closed in its lovely porch (badly) to house the exercise bike he bought and never used and turned his old house into a reloading shed.
After a while, he decided that there was too much stigma attached to "living in his mom's house" (sorry- did I say he was in his 70's? I guess he was really about 7) and he "fixed up" his reloading shed and moved back in. By fixing up, I mean he closed off the front porch to give himself 4 extra feet of living space (while making it look like shit from the outside) and using cement blocks for porch steps. He did allow his electrician friend to put in a proper kitchen and washer/dryer since he'd gotten used to those luxuries.
I told him I needed enough money to do a complete cleaning and painting of his mom's house, totally refurnish it, and remove the hideous front porch enclosure, because I was going to use it as an Air BnB. He laughed at me and said, "Sugar, ain't no one gonna rent a little house way out here in the middle of nowhere" and he said our neighbors were offering to "take it off of our hands" for about $10,000. I said, "NO. I'm turning into an Air BnB. If nothing else, it should book on Canton weekends" so he reluctantly handed me the money to clean up what had been a spotless little house before he moved into it. Old guys can be...messy.
Well. We opened it in May and were booked the first weekend. And the next. And then it got busier. June, July and August that first year, every single day we either had a guest here, one was checking in, or one was checking out. By the end of that first year, it had made more than the $10,000 the neighbor would have paid for it.
Then, my husband Ward's health deteriorated, and Joe took a fall and he decided that he would move to Ohio to live with other friends since, "Two old men is too much for you to handle." Truer words, man. Truer words.
I told him I wanted enough money to do the same thing with HIS house so I could try to compensate for the rent he'd been paying that we were now losing. Again- after totally cleaning inside and out, removing the horrible porch enclosure putting the original porch back, painting the outside (which had never been done) and fully re-furnishing it, I waited a little nervously. I had no idea if "the middle of nowhere" would support two places on the same property.
I needn't have worried. They both stay full almost all of the time- certainly every weekend.
Is it fun? 99% of the time.
Is it hard work? I do my own cleaning, so yeah, when they both have 2 sets of guests on a weekend, that's cleaning x 4 in two days, but I have it down to a routine. And I have to be available by text to answer questions or help 24/7/365.
I know Air BnB gets a bad rap over people/businesses buying up all the prime real estate in tourist areas and being literally absentee landlords who do a shit job making their listings comfortable and appealing. I agree with that. When we looked for a listing in downtown Chicago that we could afford, I found one that was an apartment in a high-rise building with "gorgeous views of downtown and Lake Michigan!" and it did have that. The furnishings consisted of air mattresses in the bedrooms and a card table and 4 chairs in the living room. I shit you not.
But. There are many more people like me, who live right on the property and take pride in what we do. We do it because we love meeting people, and we need the money. We stayed in almost 100 different Air BnB's all over the US before opening ours, so we had a "feel" for what was expected...and then we did more.
We take one-night stays, where many require at least two nights, because most of the time we've stayed places we were on our way to somewhere else and just needed one night. Our one-night guests love that there is a washer and dryer in each guest house because sometimes you just need to do a load of laundry and don't want to sit in a laundromat for 2 hours when you can sit out on the porch and read a book instead. To cater to our here-to-there travelers, Monday-Thursday nights are cheaper than the weekends.
We take late and last-minute check-ins, because we've been the travelers who just couldn't make it to where we thought we could and needed to stop...now. At 10pm. I always keep the guest houses clean for just such cases. Then, it's no problem to flashlight over and turn on the lights to welcome midnight guests.
We are one of the few places within 50 miles that offer full kitchens and washer/dryers, so we are popular with traveling nurses, or guys who get a contract for a few months working the refinery or electrical linemen, or construction crews. We give a 25% discount for over 7 nights and a 40% discount for over 30 nights, and if they get called to another job without warning (the refinery is great about that) I refund them for unused nights.
Even without the discounts, we are the most affordable option in our area for stand-alone lodging. I get told all the time that I need to charge double my rate, but I won't.
Once hotel tax (required) and my cleaning fee (good cleaning supplies and name-brand snacks ain't cheap) and *Air BnB fees get added in, they are still between $75-$100 a night for one night.
*About Air BnB fees. It isn't much. And it pays for the platform to advertise. We've hosted guests from Germany, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, and all over the US who NEVER would have found us on a personal website. Never. Their fees also pay for liability insurance for us AND the guests- us if a guest takes or breaks something (rare) and for guests if something is bad wrong or dangerous with the listing.
And here's the thing.
Everyone deserves something nice.
We've been the local honeymoon weekend for young couples who can't just fly off to Hawaii.
Girls' weekends for friends going to Canton and not wanting to stay at Motel 6.
People here in East Texas looking for homes or needing somewhere to stay after their home sold and their new home hasn't closed yet and not having a lot of money because of that awful in-between time.
We are close enough for people in DFW, Waco, Austin, Houston, San Antonio who have had a crap week at work and say, "I wish we could go somewhere reasonably close and pretty and just get away for the weekend and not spend too much money. Oh. Look!"
Guys going fishing on one of the big lakes around here like that there's plenty of room for their boat. And their buddy's boat. And *his* buddy's boat.
Two friends who work on a gambling boat in Shreveport finally got a weekend off together, and they were so excited to see the llamas, they stopped in Longview on their way here and each got a llama tattoo.
Oh, yeah. There are also llamas to feed cookies to and take selfies with.
So let me amend that.
Everyone deserves something nice. And llamas.
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