Interview with Lauren Keen reviewed - 1804

Jae Seok An13min

Delia

00:01

Welcome back to another episode of Into The Airbnb, where we talk with Airbnb hosts about their short-term rental experience. Today's guest is Lauren Keen, based in the West Coast of Florida, who manages eight listings in three different units. Join us to hear about her journey from acquiring all properties, how she manages them and also some useful insights from her area. This episode is sponsored by Airbtics, it's the only one analytics dashboard for short-term rental investors and managers, where you can find precise Airbnb data such as occupancy rate, right revenue, average daily rate and so on. So, without further ado, let's get into it! So can you tell us how did you get started on Airbnb?

Lauren Keen

00:51

My husband and I were looking to house hack, which is when you buy a property where you can live in part of it and rent the rest of it out. So a very obvious example of this would be if you bought a duplex, lived in one side and rented the other side out and the reason for doing this is to basically cut down on your living expenses, right? Have a property where it pays some of its own mortgage. And we found a Bed and Breakfast, a true Bed and Breakfast where a woman owned it and she lived there and she had guests and she would cook and clean and things like that. It was for sale and it had two cottages in the back and a mobile home. So we decided to buy it and live in the house and because it had already been a Bed and Breakfast, it had favourable zoning. Also the cottages didn't have like, one of them didn't have a kitchen at all and neither one of them had washers and dryers. So because of that we felt like they would make better short-term rentals than long-term rentals. It's also in a tourist town here in Florida. So we bought this Bed and Breakfast to renovate it, we lived in the cottages. Then after six months and everything was renovated, we moved into the house and started renting the cottages. So we started out to just have a rental on our property, it just kind of one thing led to another and it ended up being short-term rentals instead of long-term rentals.

Delia

02:17

Oh, and how was your experience renting, you know, a place where you live really near to?

Lauren Keen

02:24

It's been good, it was really helpful, especially the first few months while we were learning. So I could talk to the cleaners during the day when they were there cleaning, we could keep a really quick close eye on supplies and order things and restock things before we got things up to speed. So it was actually really helpful.

Delia

02:44

And you told me you, right now, own about eight listings and also manage them. How was the process to acquire all the other seven listings?

Lauren Keen

02:55

Yeah, so we traded out that mobile home that I mentioned earlier for a camper. Also now we rent out the main house when we're gone. So there's four of the eight listings right there. We bought another property about six months after we started. It's a duplex and we made half of it a short-term rental and half of it a long-term rental. So sometimes we stay there if our house rents out. So that was listing number five. Then a few months later than that, so late 2021, December 2021, we bought a six unit apartment building and use three of those units for short-term rentals and left three of those as long-term rentals. So those are the other three.

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