What do we do with our house?

We own a house close to downtown Richmond.  We love it and don’t want to ever sell it. When we decided to travel, we had to decide what to do with our home.  We could sell it but then we would come home to no where to live and we love our house too much to let go of it.  We could rent it out for the whole time we were gone to someone.  Then we would  have to store all of our furniture somewhere and find someone who only wanted the house for a year.  We thought about letting our nanny stay in the house and have her flip rooms and rent them out room by room.  That seemed like too much work for her so we took advice from our friend who rents her whole house on Airbnb and decided to do it that way.

Airbnb is awesome and what we use for lodging when we travel.  I always look for superhosts, which means the host has rented to a certain number of people that year and has great reviews.  So how were we going to make sure our house got rented while we were gone and how much to ask for?  We decided to start renting our house out while we are still here.  We set up our account, asked for an amount higher than most in our area (so it is really worth it to us to vacate when someone wants to rent it) bought specific linens and towels for Airbnb that we only use for our guests, made an excel spreadsheet with a checklist of how to get our house ready, got rid of a TON  of stuff we don’t  really need, and cleaned our house like crazy.  We have now rented about 12 times.  It is wonderful because now we have a superhost status, we know what to expect, my mom knows how to flip the house and has offered to do that while we are gone (in exchange for the cleaning fee), and our house is super clean because we are always getting it ready for the next guest!  We do it about once a month and have made some extra money for our big trip!  We go to friends’ and family’s houses while we are away, the animals get boarded.

We plan on dropping the price a bit and offering long stay discounts while we are gone to keep it occupied as much as possible.  We will also clear out all of our personal items.  They currently stay there while the renters are there and we have never had a problem with rifling or theft but this will give us peace of mind.  AND make us get rid of more stuff we don’t really need!