- Genesis Hinckley is a policy product specialist at Google who also runs an Airbnb in Colorado.
- She says that becoming an Airbnb host to make passive income is easy — and that anyone can do it.
- This is Genesis Hinckley’s story, as told to reporter Dorothy Cucci.
This an as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Genesis Hinckley, a Policy Product Specialist at Google and an Airbnb “Superhost.” It has been edited for length and clarity.
Having passive income has always been important to me and my husband. He’s a stay-at-home dad, and I’m a policy product specialist at Google, so we wanted an investment that would allow us to make money without putting in a lot of hours.
We started listening to podcasts and reading books related to personal finance, and decided to become Airbnb hosts a year ago. Now, we’ve made our investment back and more through househacking, which is renting out part of your primary home. Between cleaning and answering messages, we only put in about 10 hours of work a month and bring home $4,000 on a good month, or $35,000 a year.
A lot of people are intimidated by taking on a project like this, whether it’s investing in the stock market or real estate, simply because of a lack of knowledge. Once we started educating ourselves, we realized it was much easier than we anticipated.
If you’re looking to make side income on Airbnb, here’s what you should know.
Step one: Decide on a specific gameplan
Prep work is key. A mistake that a lot of people make when buying their first home is choosing something on the max end of how much they qualify for — yes, this is an investment, but you want to reduce overall expenses as much as possible.
Personally, I’m risk averse, so we spent about $300,000 less than what we qualified for. You don’t want to be tied down or worried about paying your mortgage without renters.
AirDNA is a great way to gauge what kinds of Airbnb properties are successful around your area. It provides data and insights like daily rate, occupancy, and potential revenue in any zip code. Of course, you won’t want to use it as your sole reference (it predicted that my husband and I would gross about half of what we do), but it’s a helpful starting point.
We made sure we got prequalified for a loan before actually pursuing anything, and when we were house hunting, we knew exactly what we were looking for. Having that criteria made it a lot easier to narrow down our search.
From the start, we wanted …….
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-start-airbnb-scared-easy-side-income-genesis-hinckley-2022-1
