A large part of our make ready for our gap year is getting our house ready to rent in Butte, Montana. We have lived in our house for 5 years with now three teenagers so, we just have a lot of stuff. There is also deferred maintenance that wouldn’t be tolerated by a renter. Like a glitchy light switch, a slow a drain, a lock that needs a battery, peeling trim paint and the dirt… the dirt.
6 months prior to our leave date I started a “get house ready” list. We use Trello for these kind of lists and a white board in the kitchen for daily goals to keep it in our face.
All of the small repairs, cleaning and decluttering got put on a list. I was a little panicked about how the list grew as we moved forward. That darn list did not start to shrink until recently, one month before our departure. And it wasn’t for lack of doing.
Most of the first work was purging. We made a goal of taking a truck of stuff away from the house weekly. In reality, we average about two truckloads a month. We held items and tried to imagine who actually needed them. We gave away bikes, clothes, furniture, art, and gear. I had fleeting ideas of getting organized enough to photograph and market items but found that “it did not give me joy”. Giving away stuff definitely did.
Luckily, one of our daughters needed to set up her first apartment and it felt great to get her established with the extra kitchen gear and furniture we had. How did we live with so much stuff?
And there is still more. I looked into heated storage in town and got an estimate for a 10×17 unit, $187/mo. Whoa, no. Plus my husband recently had hernia surgery. We would move all the stuff in a truck we don’t have only to repeat when we returned.
The question became “Do we really have to move all of our furniture?” Why not offer our place furnished to save on:
- moving our stuff,
2. wear and tear of renters moving their stuff into and out of our place
3. save close to $200/month on storage and
4. lock a couple of rooms up and the garage as off limits to store personal belongings.
We spoke with a property management company which manages our apartments in town. They didn’t think furnished would be a good fit for their market. The estimate for our place unfinished per month was $2000, with renters covering utilities. The income through AirBnb makes sense even with us paying utilities and offering long stays of greater than a month.
We have experience with month or longer rents through AirBnb with our bungalow in the back. So, we decided to do month or longer stays listed on that sight. Shorter stays would not be compliant with the city/county laws without a permit for short term. Plus, coordinating the clean out flips and maintenance of short stays sounds intimidating from afar.
Leaving our furniture in place doesn’t come without work. I mean, take a photo of your living room without decluttering, would you post it in an Airbnb listing and expect people to reserve? There is a lot of decorating and planning spaces for guests that goes into changing your living space to be a functional furnished rental.
For us, this has meant painting, touching up furniture, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. We’ve changed out family photos for some art that sat in closets for years waiting for a place on the wall.
We love that by not offering the whole house empty, we can lock two rooms downstairs with our personal stuff and not effect the value of the home as a rental. 5 bedroom homes on Airbnb do not rent higher than 3-4 bedrooms in our area.
Plus, we do not plan to empty the garage as we would have needed to do if offering the place for the year through a traditional property management company. We will ask our renters to park in front of the garage doors.
Creating the listing was easy because I had done it before for the bungalow. Marketing on short-term rental platforms is all about the photos. Because we are living in the space there was a lot of shuffling of boxes from one room to another as each room became ready for photos.
As of writing this article, I only have two of the bedrooms photographed and uploaded. This does not seem to have affected reservations as the house is already reserved for 2 months. Renters like that we are “superhosts” on Airbnb and trust that the rest of the house will be as nice as the photos of just a few of the rooms.
Want to see the 2 listings?
Warm and Cheerful 4 Bedroom Home
and Cozy Garden Bungalow:
Butte Family Abroad 