This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Wendy Martin, 50, who chose to delist the Airbnb on her property near Dayton, Ohio, after bad experiences with guests. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We purchased our property from a family member who was already doing Airbnb.
The owners enjoyed it and were pretty successful at it. They made us quite a deal on the property, so we decided to go ahead and just keep it as an Airbnb.
It’s a small single-family home. It was built in 1910 as the original home on the property while the family was having the main house built.
It’s really close to the back of the main house. If I were in my home office and there were people in the living room of the Airbnb, I would be able to tell you what they looked like, so it’s a little bit awkward to be like a traditional rental.
So we thought Airbnb, with people who were here short-term coming and going, would be a really great way to give us a little bit of extra money.
It has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half bathrooms, and probably about 1,300 square feet. It has a full kitchen, washer, and dryer.
It’s located on our six-acre property, so people have full use of the trails and the woods, and we’ve got a little stream, and they can feed the fish in the koi pond.
We are within 20 minutes of four or five different colleges. We’re 15 minutes to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. We’re an hour to Columbus, Ohio, and an hour to Cincinnati — so the location is great.
We don’t get a whole lot of vacation rentals, but we get a lot of people coming to visit family or military PCSes, and a lot of college graduations and new student drop-offs and parent weekends — things like that.
From about March until the end of December every year, we’ve had almost no weekends open.
The previous owners had great success with it, and they met some great people, so we decided that we would continue doing that. We eventually re-listed it as our own after we bought the property and have been running it ever since. We’ve been hosting for about two-and-a-half years now.
Bad experiences with guests made us leave the platform
I’m taking the property off Airbnb for a few reasons.
Primarily, I was recently diagnosed with a mild form of leukemia. It’s not nearly as scary for me as it is for some people, but we don’t know when I might get sick, and at some point, I’m going to be too sick to actually run the Airbnb.
But in two-and-a-half years, we’ve had three really terrible experiences — and two of those were the same guests. This was probably the first time that it was frustrating for me to be a host.
Once, we had guests stay here for five days, and the two guys just hung out. They brought a couple of big, stinky dogs, because we allow pets with no pet fee, and they were basically just slobs. For some reason, they drove up the driveway all the way up into the yard on the grass.
They didn’t break anything or trash the house, but the house was pretty gross after they got out of there, so it took us a while to clean. A few months later, I didn’t realize the same guest who had booked before was booking the house again.
Three days before he showed up, I realized, “Oh my God, this guy again?” So that was frustrating.
Another time, a guy said he and his friends were coming to stay. They stayed for like 10 days, and they trashed our house. I mean, just filth. Food wrappers stuffed under mattresses and behind beds. They had dumped a pot of cooked food in the flower bed in the front yard. They melted a remote control.
Given the extra cleaning and the damage that they did, I filed a reimbursement request with Airbnb for $160. I sent all the documentation.
I wasn’t asking for an exorbitant amount. And then they just paid me $10 total for a remote control. I would’ve rather they sent me $0.
[Ed note: When reached for comment about Martin’s complaint, Airbnb said, “We thoroughly reviewed the photos submitted, as we do with all host damage claims, and partly reimbursed the host for the damage found. We value our hosts and do our best to support them throughout their hosting journey.”]
After that, my husband and I made the decision that maybe this isn’t going to be for us. My daughter and her girlfriend and their best friend live nice and close. They’re in their mid-20s, living in college apartments, so we agreed to let the girls come rent it.
We’ll make about half the money we would normally make, but I now no longer have to be a cleaner. I don’t have to replace all the snacks and water. I don’t have to worry about replacing linens or towels or providing shampoo or any of that other stuff.
Going forward, I’m going to rent to my daughter instead
We don’t use smart pricing — I just charged $125 a night and a $75 cleaning fee. If people stay for more than seven days or more than 15 days, then I’d give them a 10% or a 15% discount.
For a weekend stay, we’re usually clearing about $325 for a two-night stay — and that could be one person, or it could be six people because we allow up to six, and we don’t charge extra for anybody.
We’re not a tourist town, so for the people we’re serving, we’re fulfilling some kind of need for them. People do not come to Dayton, Ohio, to hang out and live their lives.
So, typically, the people that are coming here are the same people that we would have coming if it were our family, and it was important to me that we provided someplace nice that people could also afford, without it being so cheap that we were getting guests who just showed up and trashed the place.
We’ve hosted people who have unfortunately lost family members in tragic accidents, or we had one repeat guest who came because her dad was in assisted living, so she would come for the same long weekend at the beginning of every month for nine months, and she stayed with us every week or every month.
We had six bookings going into the new year already — mostly in March and April — so I reached out to each of them, explaining that I had to cancel their stays.
We’ve met some really cool people who have stayed with us multiple times, and it kind of sucks to take that option away from them.
Normally, we bring in about $2,300 a month on average. But we’re going to charge my daughter and her roommates about $1,300 a month — and that includes all utilities.
But they’re also going to be doing some yard work, which will save us some additional money. So I think it’ll all end up coming out in the wash because we don’t have to provide linens and snacks, and I don’t have to pay somebody to come clean.
Once I’m healthy again and they decide to move on, then likely we will go to something like Furnish Finder and do something a little more long-term where I can have a little more control over it.
Axel Springer, Insider Inc.’s parent company, is an investor in Airbnb.
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