Interview with Laura Ancheta OFC

Jae Seok An21min

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 Laura Ancheta based in Medford, Oregon, who manages 30 listings, including one in Alaska. In this episode, she will tell us about her particular story of how she got started as host, her journey on Airbnb and some useful tips and insights of her areas. This episode is sponsored by Airbtics, the only one analytics dashboard for short-term rental investors and managers, where you can find precise Airbnb data such as occupancy rate, 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?

Laura Ancheta

00:56

Yeah. Funny enough, I was on an airplane flight and I I've had regular renters for about 10 years. And I was on a flight going somewhere and a lady was just showing me VRBO and Airbnb and telling me about the business. I gotten a lawsuit with a tenant in California and it was just really ridiculous and unfair. I mean, I won in the end. But it was so difficult that I decided to list one of my properties on Airbnb, I listed my own home actually on that flight home. I'm like, "sure, let's do this!". I listed my own home and within a day, I had like six bookings on my own home. So I had to go home and tell my husband "oh, by the way, I rented our house out" and that was the beginning. I ended up selling all of my, I had about five regular rentals, and I decided to sell all the rentals and move all of my property up to Oregon and start buying houses up here.

Delia

01:59

Oh my! And how did you husband react to that sudden change?

Laura Ancheta

02:04

He was good. He is used to me doing things like that. We had one child and we ended up moving into our RV for a little while. We had three houses at the time and we were jumping between houses and the RV. We ended up having 13 puppies. So the 13 puppies, two cats and my son and my husband and I just moved around a lot the first year. We sacrificed a lot the first year so that we could get what we wanted, you know, get to where we wanted.

Delia

02:35

Oh my! And how was like the first month experiencing the short-term rentals?

Laura Ancheta

02:43

It was actually really hard. What I know now in hindsight is when you first start, you don't necessarily get the best renters because you don't have that history of reviews. So we found that as we grew and as we grew in our reviews, we were able to get better renters. But that first month was pretty tough actually. We live in a town that has a lot of weed, marijuana sales, so there's a lot of guys that come up here for the business and we were dealing with our house getting kind of beat up a lot. So it was tough, but I loved it.

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