Making ends meet is getting harder and harder every year, but there are many people exploring unconventional paths that allow them to go towards financial independence. This is one of such stories, a couple, Darrel and Patrice Maxam who managed to go from scraping by to building a small empire thanks to Airbnb.
When the Maxams moved from Connecticut to Georgia they did what everyone does, bought a place. It was not a lavish home, a small 1956 bungalow for $249,400 with $1,400 monthly mortgage payments that they could barely afford to pay on top of all other financial obligations. As Darrel explains, “When we moved to Atlanta, we were really broke. We literally spent all of our money on a down payment — we had $1,000 in our bank accounts.”
And so they did what many in this economy are doing, they rented out one of their rooms. Then, they figured out they could make a lot more money renting out the entire house. But the process was not smooth or comfortable for the couple
How the Maxams went from broke to financially secure thanks to Airbnb
Their first attempt at renting was successful bringing in about $1,000 a month in profit, but considering they were barely scraping by and had no savings, this was not enough, and they knew renting out the whole house would bring double the money, but they ran into the obvious problem of where to go when they could not access their home. The Maxams took a creative solution to the problem, they would take 10% from Darrel’s weekly paycheck and 10% from Patrice’s weekly paycheck plus 10% of the amount they were making from Airbnb and use it to find a hotel within 300 miles that worked within that budget.
As Darrel explains “If we only had $400, we were going to plan a trip for $400. We would go as far south as Destin, Florida, as far east as Mississippi, and as far north as the Carolinas and Tennessee area.”
But they knew they could do more, and looked into ways that they could bring in more money doing the same thing. They partnered up with HGTV show “Tiny House, Big Living” and built a tiny house on the property, which was available year round and not just weekends and holidays, which earned them an extra $2,500 a month in profit. But they did not stop there, they transformed their property into a rental paradise, with a tiny home, a barn, a triplex with three rentable units, and three treehouses on the property plus the main house all in the Airbnb market.
“I was hooked at that point,” Maxam said. “We had a barn in the backyard. I converted that barn to another livable space. Then, another year after that, I ended up building three more units. After the fifth unit on the property, we were generating roughly $15,000 a month.”
Their venture was so successful he resigned from his full-time job working for the Department of Aviation and made hospitality his career. To do this he and his wife moved to upstate New York, where they began creating Finger Lakes Treehouses in Sodus, New York.
They began building five A-frame cabins, each one with a kitchenette, a bathroom, air conditioning, and a private wood-fired hot tub. But the way they are doing it is finaiclaly smar and successful. As Darrel explains “We don’t touch a project unless we can be cash-flow positive within 18 months.”
At $250 per night, they bring in between $30,000 to $60,000 a month and are planning on expanding five more cabins this year. The special thing about them is that since they are prefabricated they take about three days to put together, saving time and money in the process.
But their dreams are even bigger, as Maxam announces “We have three Airstreams on the property right now, so by the start of the season, we’ll have 13 units total. Next year, we’re going to go into phase three. We have these really luxury-style safari tents, and we’ll build a bathhouse for them, also.” The plan is to have 19 total units in Sodus by next year, he added.