How to Make Money on Airbnb (Even With $0)

We hit $200,000 45 days out from launch, and then we hit $300,000 just 3 months out from launch. We pumped in, I think, $500 into one Instagram ad on a reel that we made.

Hmm.

It wasn't even video. It was just like static images.

For $500 one time, how many bookings per day were you getting for that first period?

Our average booking size is somewhere between $4,000 to $5,000 a booking. And there were some days we were getting 5 to 6 bookings a day. And then at that point I was like, this deserves my full time and attention. This is something that deserves to be scaled. Like there's clearly a gap in the market. We had 10 to 15 people people a day reaching out why they couldn't book the dates they wanted because there was already— we had a waitlist of hundreds of people that were waiting for the second one. I would say the better option for no money down to get into like managing an Airbnb would be through co-hosting. And you can co-host someone else's property. And I know a lot of people that have had major success in growing their co-host business and then, you know, taking their cash flow and then starting to invest in properties and buying their own.

So co-hosting is like being a property manager on steroids, like you're more involved but you're making more money, right?

I know some people that have gotten, you know, 10, 20 host clients in as short as 6 months. Co-hosting is a great way to get into the industry. Once I figured that out, the entire strategy of the company changed.

Meet Kyle. Kyle spent a decade grinding away at corporate jobs at Coca-Cola and Nestlé, and then he blew it all up—his savings, lines of credit, 401. He went all in on a beat-up dairy farm from the 1800s. And this wasn't just any barn. This barn was down the road from his grandparents' place in Wisconsin, where he used to spend summers with his 21 cousins Now, his dream was to give that same experience to other families and make a profit while doing so. So he bought a barn that nobody wanted in a town that nobody had ever heard of. And then the craziest part about all this, he spent $500 promoting one Instagram reel with zero followers and made $80,000 before he ever opened. Yes, $500 to Instagram with no experience with content or Instagram or anything. And he turned that $500 into $80,000 before opening. Now he's got 15 of these unique Airbnbs. So if you don't have the money to buy an Airbnb, fear not, because we talk about co-hosting at the end, which is a way to do what he does without having to buy your own Airbnb. And no, it's not that scammy Airbnb arbitrage that you see those course gurus talk about. You're gonna love it. So Kyle, are you confident that by the end of this episode, people will have enough information to get started in short-term rentals? Absolutely. Okay. Even if they don't have a ton of money? Absolutely. If you had like 3 sentences to describe what makes your Airbnbs, your short-term rentals different, what are they?

I think we create some of the most immersive, experiential hospitality destinations in the country. And I think what we do differently is we're not just opening up another Airbnb or a place to sleep. We're creating experiences because people don't just want to travel for a place to sleep. They want to travel for an experience and to create memories. So once I figured that out, the entire strategy of the company changed, that we wanted to create experiences and memorable things that people wanted to share with people. They're not going to send you a picture of a cool couch they sat on at an Airbnb or where they slept in a bedroom. They'll send you a picture of the indoor petting zoo or the helipad that they got picked up on in their backyard for a sky tour, or an indoor pool that has a swim-up bar and a rock climb wall. Um, so we started focusing very heavily on the guest experience and heavily investing in amenities in, in the properties that we were building, um, that we knew were going to A, go viral on social media, but also B, create these things that, um, we're inventing and innovating in the space instead of just copycatting another operator out there. Because you go to the— a place like the Smokies, you'll see thousands of cabins, they all use the same amenities and they do the same thing. So we wanted to be different, we wanted to create new things that people were going to stop their scroll and travel across the country to stay at.

Okay, so of all the different types of Airbnbs, you know, Barnominiums, treehouses, whatever. Like, what are yours?

What, what do they look like? I specialize in acquiring overlooked commercial structures and turning them into places that people actually want to travel for. So things like barns primarily, and also warehouses now, you know, that you drive by every day throughout rural America, and it's just another barn, another warehouse. It might look dilapidated or might be 100 years old. A couple of our properties are dairy barns from the 1800s. And you know, we found that people really enjoy the history of the property and the structure and what it used to be and what we've turned it into. So I personally don't use the MLS much. I use commercial platforms like CREXi and LoopNet and LAND.com to acquire the properties and basically overlook buildings that everyone else thinks they have no life and there's no redevelopment and there's no adaptive reuse. We come in and we turn them into destinations.

Okay. And how many properties do you have today? 15. Okay. And if you were to break up all 15 with regards to like category, airplane hangars, barns, whatever, how would they break out?

14 of the 15 are under the brand Big Sky Barnhouse. So they're all either renovated old barn, barns from the 1800s that used to be active dairy barns. One of them, which is our newest brand we just launched, is Wild Wild Warehouse, and it is a rural Iowa warehouse outside of Des Moines, Iowa that we took, and it was just an abandoned warehouse in the cornfields of Iowa, known to be somewhat of a boring state, and we turned it into one of the best, most most exciting vacation rentals in Iowa.

Okay, so your first one ever, walk me through that. Like, how did you find the property? How did you look at it, etc.?

Yeah, it was, it was a great story. I was still working my data software job, slinging data, and had a break. I was on lunch, and I was at the time planning to build a barn, and I wanted it to look rustic on the outside and resemble my grandparents' barn when I was growing up.

Were you wanting to build this for an Airbnb or for your own personal use?

For a vacation destination for my family, but also to welcome other families. I actually found the pro— the first one that we ever did on a realtor.com article. They post every single— the most organic viral homes on their platform that got the most organic clicks that week. And number one on that list was our flagship location. Number two was like this $50 million Tennessee estate. And I was like, how is this dilapidated dairy barn in Arena, Wisconsin, like a no-name town in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, number 1 on this list. And I was going through every single week's list just to look for consistencies of like what types of homes were going the most viral on Realtor.com when they became for sale. And I was just curious. I wanted to know what that home sold for. I thought that it got gobbled up. So through doing public search records on that property, I found that it was actually taken off market a few months ago. And I went directly to the White Pages and started a White Page account and found every single number affiliated with that last name and made 50 phone calls in the next 30 minutes until I found someone that was the owner of that property with that name. And then I was out there 3 hours later touring it and had a handshake deal before I left the property. So that's how I found it.

You said this, it had already sold or it had not sold yet.

It was for sale when it hit realtor.com's organic home. And then I went to go do public search records on if it sold, what price it was for, who's the new owner., but I saw that it was taken off the market a couple months ago.

Oh, okay. Okay. So it was, it was listed on realtor.com. It got a ton of organic virality just because of how unique it was. And you're like, whatever happened to this? You do some digging and it was taken off market.

Correct. It was taken off market. And that was really intriguing to me. So I was planning to build a barn at that time from scratch, but, um, through doing research and, you know, I was like, where's Arena, Wisconsin? And it ended up being 45 minutes from my grandparents' barn in Wisconsin in the same part of the state. And that was even more appealing to me from, from my experience growing up at my grandparents' barn. So yeah, it's kind of how I came across it and just started cold calling. Is this the one? That's the flagship location.

This is the first one ever. First one ever. Okay. Okay. All right. So did he ever tell you why he took it off the market?

It was when the, the golden era of post-COVID interest rates started skyrocketing in 2023.

Okay. So the market just softened and he didn't get as much interest as he'd hoped.

It started shifting from a major buyer market to a, from a major seller market to, you know, interest rates going up and converting, you know, the pendulum shifts. And he was listed a little bit too high because of all the work that he put into it. And he just took it off market because they were just using it for their family and they owned it outright. And it never looked anything like this. We did the conversion, obviously, but the actual bone conversion from a dairy barn to a base home was already done before we bought it.

Hey, please subscribe to the channel. Whether you're on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, doesn't matter. It would mean a ton. I'm almost surprised, like, it went so viral, got so many clicks, and he didn't just like stick it out. Because if I'm him, I'm thinking, I knew my— I knew my barn was special, but holy crap, number 1 on this list. Like, someone's got to buy this, you know?

Yeah, he actually wasn't even aware that it was number 1 on Realtor.com.

Oh wow, okay, well that changes things.

Very old school concrete guy, you know. His realtor got some good features and press for him, but that market, if you remember, in early '23, it started shifting very rapidly, um, from early '23, yeah, 2023. So that changed buyer sentiment and, uh, seller sentiment as well. And that's kind of why they weren't able to sell.

Well, it was a double whammy because people weren't like staying in Airbnbs as much as they were during COVID either. So it was, it was a double whammy, right, for the Airbnb market.

Yeah, yeah, the middle got crushed in Airbnb for a while, um, and it kind of shifted what it's looking towards in the future right now.

Okay, so you're like 30 minutes west of Madison, is that right? 30, 40 minutes west of Madison. Yep. Okay. So you reached this guy off market. It was no longer listed. And what do you say? Like, because this is the hardest property that, you know, most people will ever buy because you don't really have a track record. It's hard to sell them on a vision. You're just selling them on your— you being a dreamer. What was that conversation like?

I'm very open and transparent. You know, I'm big on networking and, you know, introducing myself to people. That might be good business partners or people that I want to buy or sell from. And I just asked him if he still was interested in selling and he said maybe. And I just asked if I could come take a look at it and he said, I'll meet you there in 3 hours. And I closed my laptop, blocked my calendar and got right in my truck and started driving there from Chicago. So this is smart.

I love it. For those listening, like if you want to do a deal like this, like potentially a life-changing deal, you got to get in front of the person in person, right? Whereas if you're like trying to scale this and like you know, you're adding, you're going from 14 to 15, and your time is much more limited. That might not always be possible. But I think it was really smart of you to get in front of him in person, belly to belly, as they say, because this is kind of unique ask, right? Absolutely. Okay, so I think I found the original article that you saw on Realtor. $945,000. Was that what it was originally listed for? Is this it? Yep.

It was originally listed for $945,000 when it hit market.

Okay. And then he took it off. You know, he doesn't have as much leverage anymore. How does that pricing conversation go?

We ended up acquiring it for $775,000. Awesome. Okay. We got it commercially reappraised last year for $2.1 million. Wow. Okay.

$775,000. What was financing like?

Most of our properties, they're all commercial financing with small local community banks. And so 20%, 20% down, 25-year amortization, 3 to 5-year balloon. Mhm.

What about financing the, like, the buildout?

How'd you pay for that? We took out a business line of credit on a property that I had down in Tennessee and maxed out our equity on a cabin that we had in the Smoky Mountains. And then I also took out a home equity line of credit on my home that my family lived in, and then also used a portion of savings, man.

All right, so you just went, you just went all in on this. Had you Had you seen any signals from the market like that, or any— have you done any tests with ads or landing pages to where like, man, all I got to do is get this open and I know it's going to be hot? Or were you just like, it was the number one on Realtor.com, I know this is very viral-able, it's just going to work, it just has to?

I started seeing trends in unique type of structures and unique types of experiences combined with large group stays for family reunions. And those three, combined with my experience growing up in my grandparents' barn, um, you know, you have to trust your gut at some extent because you're— you say trust your gut, but really your gut is an accumulation of millions and millions of experiences that you have and knowledge you have that you can make in a couple seconds. But when you really break it down, it was those three things.

Yeah. So it's interesting because that gut that you're talking about can go one of two ways. Luckily it went one way where you're like, I know this market inside and out. I know what a good value is. I'm tracking Airbnb, you know, demand. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm like in this world. So I have a unique insight, an unfair advantage, if you will, into knowing that this is a killer deal and I'm going to make it even better. Right? So that's one side of your gut. The other side can be total like proximity bias and confirmation bias. And you're just like, like you have all this nostalgia for the area and for your grandparents' barn down the road. So like you're over-indexing on how much other people will love it. Right? And so people can, you know, use those same life experiences or data points to make bad decisions because they, you know, they're extrapolating their thoughts, nostalgia, experiences on everyone else. And it doesn't always work out that way. But I think in this case, I mean, hindsight 20/20, of course you made the right decision. But I love to say everyone has an unfair advantage, right? Everyone does unique insight, perspective, whatever, like a 4-year-old does about dinosaurs. He probably knows more about dinosaurs than I do. That's an unfair advantage I do about other things. So. You were smart in that you leveraged what you knew into something profitable.

And that's the thing, like I started seeing that the, the middle portion of the Airbnb market was getting crushed, you know, 2, 3 bedrooms and just a place to lay your head and being very market dependent, like people going to Nashville or the Smokies or urban city centers, like even pre-COVID that was already shrinking. But post-COVID, the middle of the entire market, like 90% of what the middle was, was getting crushed. So I wanted to dive into that and find out who was still excelling and why, and where were the fastest growing parts of the vacation rental industry. And it was 5, 6 bedroom plus unique structures and unique experiences.

Yeah. I mean, with some exceptions, like the worst place you could be is a generic 3-bedroom home in Orlando, right? Right. Or a generic 3-bedroom cabin in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, because that's everything. You either need to be— it's got to be a barbell strategy. You need the cheapest, smallest place that anyone can afford. That will be booked no matter what, or the biggest place that's 16+ people where 4 families can split that $2,000 a night charge and it's not very painful for any of them, right? But the messy middle is where, like, people succeeded during the peak but are getting crushed today.

Absolutely. And, you know, a lot of operators compete on price, and one of the biggest pivotal moves that we made as a strategy from a company perspective was competing on experience instead of price. Compete on experience instead of price and not have to slash prices to try to get people to book your place. But you're competing on the experience that, you know, you're going to deliver for people in groups. I think that's where you want to be and you want to be original and inventing new amenities and creating experiences that don't exist is really what we do.

Yeah. Now, I mean, I, I had a 16-person Airbnb, uh, a little before this in 2022, and that's kind of where I had my lightbulb moment. I started using AirDNA and all these other third-party sites to start researching other markets. And that was my big unlock is Airbnb is really good if you have a really big place, a really unique and really big. And I almost like tripled down and bought a bunch more units, but I didn't. And I'm glad I didn't just because I've done other things since that was a good use, that were a good use of my time. But I'm tracking. So $775,000 on this, you put in like $150,000 and change just for the note, just to buy the thing. And then you leveraged yourself to the hilt basically as much as you're able. How much did you end up having to spend on renovations for this?

Post-closing CapEx was about $100,000 to $125,000, and that was to add all the— it's not bad at all. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It was the, the structure itself was really unique already. It just needed improvements to the indoor pool, the outdoor pool. We love doing slides off of decks, building indoor jungle gyms. We built an indoor like jungle gym commercial playground. Renovated the party shed area, which is a different structure separate from the barn. And we put a 9-hole commercial mini golf course where the cows used to be milked on the first floor with an arcade. So we added a lot of those things to it. And in addition to furnishing it and amenitizing it and home decor and whatnot.

How did you do all that for $125,000? It was— was there sweat equity? Like, were you getting creative there?

Yeah. I mean, the most recent ones, obviously we have a crew of carpenters that work for us, mostly, you know, full-time. But for the first one, it was my wife and I and our kids and, you know, grandma and grandpa and brothers and sisters, cousins coming by and helping us do the setup. So we didn't have too much of a labor expense. You know, it was kind of like a family setup and we got it done in 30 days. We bought it September 1st and we were out of there by the end of the month.

Wow. Okay. Sorry, 30 days you said? 30, 30 days. Yeah.

We, we bought it on September 1st, 2023 and We launched the page September 30th, uh, 2023, and we were up and running.

Did you do anything to promote the property other than launching it on Airbnb?

We didn't want to rely on Airbnb solely as the only place where we're marketed. So we started an Instagram page. We did a little case study on what we should call the brand. It should have been Barn something, Barn House. Um, and we landed on Big Sky Barn House and we started the Instagram page, Big Sky Barn House. We pumped in, I think, $500 into one Instagram ad on a reel that we made. Wasn't even— it wasn't even video, it was just like static images of the actual place, and we were just calling out the amenities. And that one reel, I think, got over 500,000 views and started generating from that one reel 4 to 5 bookings a day from the time we launched the page.

Oh my gosh. All right, so you launched— you said September 30th, the Airbnb? Yep. And when did you launch this first Instagram Reel? I think it was September 3rd or 4th. Okay, so before you opened?

It was way before we opened. Oh, while we were there in construction. Yeah, it was, it was a couple days after we bought the property.

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We used a lot of the existing images, and then we actually rendered in some of the amenities that we were installing into the images. And then we caveat it, caveat it on the listing page. Some of these images are renderings, but the base home is what it is. Check back on at the end of the month for the, you know, post-construction images. And we just caveat that on the page.

Yeah. And if for some reason some person sees the real images after already booking, like, you're not going to hold them hostage, right? Like, who cares? It's worth the risk. So you started a brand new Instagram page for this with zero followers? Yep. Okay. Did you post this video organically, let it play out for a while, and then put paid money behind it?

Or did you start posting it organically for the first week and then I started the Meta advertising account and then put about $500 into push— into pushing the reel into, you know, you can select your market and demographic and whatnot.

I think this is like, I don't know what we're about to talk about, but this has been the biggest alpha, the biggest takeaway for me so far. And results not typical, results not guaranteed, whatever. For $500, you were getting how much in bookings every day? For $500 one time, how many in bookings per day were you getting for that first period?

Our average booking size is somewhere between $4,000 to $5,000 a booking. And there were some days we were getting 5 to 6 bookings a day.

Oh my gosh. What would you say the total ROI was, not including repeat guests, but just for the first guest? For all those bookings that came directly attributable to that $500 campaign, how many bookings?

That, that's a great question. I believe when we, when we were fully done and we left and the page was up and running, I'm sorry, the page was up and running when we fully finished the construction and we were, you know, gone and we're just like, okay, now we need to figure out our full marketing plan because we're done with construction. I think we had around $80,000 in bookings during the setup. Um, so $500 and then we had, you know, around $75,000, $80,000 in bookings before we left.

I mean, by the time you open, you've paid back half of your down payment basically, or three-quarters of your build-out costs, however you want to look at it. Yeah. Are you just like bouncing off the walls? You're just like, this is a home run. We did it. Like we've made it.

It's crazy because I remember like two days before closing, I was like, what am I doing? I'm like betting my life on this. Like I'm pulling out Home Equity lines of credit, taking out savings. I'm leveraging another property I have if it doesn't work. Like I could have gone bankrupt if it didn't work out, but I went all in because I believed that it was going to work. And even though there were people around me, you know, being like, what are you doing? That's crazy. It's something that I felt really passionate about. And I just had a gut feeling that I knew it was going to work. And right after we set it up and we got the professional pictures done of the setup, the bookings soared from there. I think we hit $200,000 45 days out from launch, and then we hit $300,000 in bookings, um, just 3 months out from launch. And then at that point I was like, this deserves my full time and attention. This is something that deserves to be scaled. Like there's clearly a gap in the market. We had 10 to 15 people a day reaching out why they couldn't book the dates they wanted because there was already people that booked it. And then we were like, we need more barns, baby. We had a waitlist of hundreds of people that were waiting for the second one that we said we were going to open up soon. And then we ran into the issue of how, where are we going to find the next one and how are we going to do it again?. And at that point it was when I put in my notice at my corporate job and then just went full-time into building this.

Did you start coming up on your prices as your waitlist grew?

Uh, yeah, we, we, we made a big mistake in pricing. We, we, we were not set up on dynamic pricing for the first few months, so we had flat rates for weekends and weeknights before we got set up on PriceLabs, which is our dynamic pricing software where you can set baselines so it doesn't— but like the pricing is very elastic. I mean, the average lead time for our bookings is 6 to 8 months. There's a date that starts getting 5, 4, 3, 2 months out, it'll drop from $1,500 to $1,000 to $700 a night. But on the flip side, if it's something that people are clicking, just like airline ticketing works, and you have 500, you know, people click a date for a group at one property, it'll go up to $4,000 or $5,000 a night. So we've seen as high as, in the 4s, high 4s, low 5s for a night, but as low as, you know, $700, $800 a night. Um, so the software, once we unlocked that for our operations, it unlocked much more profitability for our, our pricing strategy.

You charge between $700 and $5,000 a night based on demand, correct? Seasonality, et cetera. That's insane. What is your occupancy on this first unit average?

At this unit, because it's still our flagship, none of the other properties have beat it yet, which is one of my personal goals, is to open up a location that will beat this one, is portfolio occupancy floats between 45 and 48%. And okay, this location is at around 65%.

Wow. And for some context, like if you owned an apartment complex, you'd be broke. Yeah, right. Like you just can't. But for Airbnb, that's very good from what I understand.

Absolutely right. As a portfolio, I don't think I'd ever want to be above 50% occupancy. The property needs time to breathe for maintenance and improvements and people just like wear and tear.

Well, the same principle is true in other asset types as well, like with an RV park. You never want to be at 100% occupancy because it means you're too cheap. 93%, 95% is perfect because it means you're, you know, you've got equilibrium for what that market will bear. Looking back in hindsight, it's been 3 years plus. What about that property made it so successful that you realize now that you didn't back then? That's a great question.

I think it's the, the history that comes with the property. There's signage that we have up in the property that salutes back to, you know, this was an 1800s dairy barn that was in operation in the area and like fed the region. And there's history behind it. It's not a new build. There's original owners and, you know, they used to own the 500 acres behind us that you still have beautiful views to. You know, there's a lot to it. I think we are along a US highway, which is similar to like a hotel strategy versus traditional Airbnb. We have a lot of traffic that comes down US Highway 14. So I think being along a US highway in conjunction with being a building that was an old dairy barn that was dilapidated, that was converted to something crazy unique and special, but also having the, the mass amount of square footage that we just have with an indoor pool and an outdoor pool. None of the other properties have indoor-outdoor pools with the historical components of being a building like this. And it's just a great area that it's not just Madison Metro, which is one of the fastest growing metros in the Midwest., but we also have all of the Frank Lloyd Wright tourism down in Spring Green that people have to take Route 14 past our property to go to.

Okay. Do you have any bearing on what percentage of your sales come from your location? Just drive-by?

We did put up a 100-foot mural on our structure facing the highway recently, and I think we've, we've gotten a lot more through organic search from that. But I would say, you know, it's, it's hard to give an exact number to that, but I would say it's somewhere between like 10 and 20% through organic. Wow.

Now, if I got these numbers straight, your first 3 months, you, you made all of your money back, right? Give or take $150K on your down payment, give or take $125K on your build-out, and you made $300K in bookings the first 3 months.

Is that right? In bookings. But they were paid out over the next 12 months.

Sure. They, they haven't been all fulfilled yet, but that's crazy. Okay, so 2025. For this unit alone, what was your revenue and profit?

Revenue was around $330,000 and profit was in the low 40 percentile.

40, okay, so like $140,000, is that right? $130,000 profit? Around there, yeah.

We did do a refinance too, so we were compressed a little bit to pull out equity, but it was between, I believe, $130,000, $140,000 net profit after OpEx.

Wild. Okay, so you make back your down payment every year. Basically. And your payments on this, are you still have a note on it? Yes. Payments are what, through, you know, $4,000 a month? They were before we refinanced.

So we refinanced at the new value, $2.1 million. So we got the new note. We still left 30— we still left 30% equity and we did a 70% LTV. Um, so our new note is, you know, $1.2 something. So I think it went from $4,000 or $5,000 a month, um, in principal interest payments up to, I believe it's $9,000 a month now.

Okay. And it was— you got an appraisal at 2.1, you said? Correct. Okay. So just to get our listeners or viewers up to speed, pays $775,000, puts 20% down. He puts $125,000 into it. So you're all in $900,000, give or take cash out of pocket. You're all in almost $300,000. It performs very well. You say, hey, let's get an appraisal in here. Like, and you had it appraised as a short-term rental, which is a big difference than as a piece of real estate that's going to be listed on Zillow, right? So you get it appraised. Someone who knows what they're doing with short-term rentals, they say $2.1 million. You say, awesome, bank, let me pull some money out. They say, we'll lend you 70% of that $2.1 million. So you refinance it and you pull some cash out and presumably put that cash into another property, correct?

Right. That funded our next 3 properties through the cash out.

Wow. Okay. What did your Like we don't have time to go through number 2 through 15, but what were some highlights from properties number 2 through 15, especially number 2? Like I'm curious how the second one looked compared to the first one.

Yeah, the second one we went down to the Bourbon Trail. So we went to Kentucky and we opened up our first location down outside of Lexington in Lancaster, Kentucky. That one was a newer built barn dominium. So the strategy is, you know, not just old barn houses, but barn-like structures. Commercial-like structures and new barn dominiums. And this one was in the heart of the Bourbon Trail. So there was major horse tourism and major bourbon tourism that carries, carries that market. And it was an underserved market. There's a lot of demand 12 months of the year for bourbon tours on the Bourbon Trail. And obviously, you know, with Louisville and Lexington and all the hundreds of distilleries there, that was really appealing. Just really digging into the AirDNA and B&B Calc data, that market really popped out at me for there's a lot of barn-like structures in horse and bourbon country, and there's a lot of people that are willing to travel for that experience.

Were you concerned at all that you didn't know that market anywhere nearly as well as you did the first market?

I was, but I feel like if you have an emotional attachment to a certain city— because everyone always wants to invest in their backyard, they want to be able to have a 30-minute or 1-hour drive to somewhere they invest— and that's very limiting. So I, I just removed that entirely from our strategy. And started looking at it from a data perspective, like where does it make the most sense to deliver an experience where people are going to travel to? And it'll still be a part of the brand, but still be within the Midwest corridor where we're building our audience that is fast growing on social.

If I forced you to choose one thesis for this entire business model, is it make a product, a property so good, so viralable that people can't help but to share it? And whatever we share about it is much more likely to go viral than a generic property. And that is going to do are heavy lifting on the marketing side. Is that the thesis?

I, I'd say so. Um, I, I would also say that the thesis is to create a moat. If you don't have a moat around your vacation destination or your business, it's gonna be very easily replicable and people can just come in and copy it. And when you create a moat around your business, whether it's the market or your strategy or the amenities or the, or the, the property type, um, and the structure type, You create something that is very hard to copy. And I think that's what we try to focus on.

Yeah. Because like in, up in Wisconsin, like anyone could start an Airbnb that had a dairy farm theme, right? Cool. Whatever. But how many other people can buy a competing property within a 30-minute radius that literally used to be a 100-plus-year-old dairy farm that fed the region, that was still habitable. It was like, it had to check so many boxes that that was your moat. You couldn't copy and paste it.

Absolutely. Yeah. From property type to, you know, even just going to like rural markets, like rural markets are overlooked a lot too, in addition to the property types that we go after. And a lot of the towns that we go to, they're less than 1,000-person towns and they're in rural America, given an hour drive to a major metro, but they're in rural Midwestern America. That's also very hard to swallow for a lot of investors in the vacation rental space, going to a market that doesn't have major demand. Um, but sure, we've kind of gone against the grain in that realm and doubled down on rural destination stays.

Let me dive in on that because a 1,000-person town, you know, on an island sounds like a terrible idea, but many of these are within 30 minutes of a 100,000-person town or a 30,000-person town. So what metric do you look for to delineate between rural and too rural?

Yeah, I think it starts with the major metro, whatever it is, because all of our properties are no more than a 60-minute drive from a major metro in Midwest America. So then I'll break down of those major metro cities, which ones are fastest growing, have the best economic growth, which companies are moving there from the Fortune 500. What does population growth look like? What does crime look like? Just a bigger picture of that major metro. And then just look at a zoomed out picture of a 1-hour drive around that major metro and find something with more acreage, less neighbors, unique property type.

Okay. So like your Des Moines property, Lacona, that is what, an hour from Des Moines? 40 miles southeast of Des Moines. Okay. It's 52 minutes, Google Maps shows. Yeah. 39.6 miles. Was that your most recent property? We, we just set—

we acquired that on April 20th, 2026, and we just launched the page on June 4th. That is our most recent one.

And so you did 14 barns and then 1 warehouse most recently? Yeah.

That, that's our first warehouse that we've had.

How, how do you make that jump and why?

You know, we, we built the Big Sky Barnhouse brand from 1 to 14, and I built this brand a year ago and it's kind of has been sitting on the back burner. And Wild Wild Warehouse is kind of like the wild child born from Big Sky Barnhouse. It's more eclectic, it's more fun. And in my opinion, when you have warehouse space compared to like barndominium or barnhouse space, you have sometimes $5,000 to $10,000 of massive wide open square footage with 16 to 20 foot ceilings and like, you know, like 105 by 50 foot structure where you can stack.

It's just a blank slate.

Blank slate can, yeah, blank slate. It's like a dream for a designer builder to come in and put an indoor pool, full-court basketball, commercial playground, karaoke bar. Most properties just don't have that amount of space to stack something in one space and put it all in the same room, because that's going to really appeal to our guest avatar. So really breaking down what our guest avatar was looking for from the barns, we wanted more wide-open square footage to heavily monetize wide-open square footage spaces.

Okay. How many square feet is this warehouse?

It's 8,000 square feet now. It was about 7,000 when we bought it, and we added a second story to the warehouse with like a motel-style overlook with new bedrooms.

Okay. What— and then break down the numbers on this. What'd you pay for it? What'd you put into it, etc.?

Yeah, the new financing structure that we've been doing on the most recent deals is acquisition plus build-out with a commercial lender. So we bought it for $400,000 and our build-out— nothing— our build-out cost was $550,000. So total project was $950,000 and we put 20% down on the $950,000 price and then the bank funded the $550,000 build-out.

For everything that we did to convert it. Okay. So you put the $550K build-out plus $400K together and all you put in was 20% on the total.

On the $950K, correct. Yeah.

Okay. How long did that take to build out?

40 days to the, to the, to the tee.

How are you guys doing that so fast? That is so fast. I'm looking at pictures right now and you got— was that a bowling alley?

And in the Iowa location, we have an indoor party pool room. That has an indoor heated in-ground pool, uh, open year-round. Next to that, in the warehouse space, we have a full-court basketball and soccer arena that doubles as a toss-a-touchdown arena. Um, and then next to that, we have like a commercial-grade, like, nice kids' playground, like the ones that you'll find at like a church or a school. We're not competing with like everyone's backyard, like the wooden ones that rot and kind of show, you know, age over time. So like a huge commercial playground wrapped by a custom Infinity mini golf course. And then on the other side of that, we did a custom couch cowboy karaoke bar that has like a karaoke stage, a real karaoke machine, and just immersive artwork throughout the entire space. Uh, we work with, um, an artist, Eric Harold, who comes in and he's one of our partners, and he designs and does all the murals throughout to kind of make it this immersive environment. And then we put 300 hex lights on the ceiling that change the entire ambience of the place. And those lights on the ceiling also change to music. There's like a music sensing mode, which changes it to like a party warehouse, which is awesome for family reunions and groups coming in. And, um, in addition to that, the outdoor has like a fire pit and hot tub, and it's a really special place. It's been our most successful launch to date. We opened the booking page on June 4th. We're sitting here on June 29th, and we have roughly 190,000 in bookings in the last 25 days since we launched, which is by far head and shoulders the most successful launch we've had. Um, and I think it really comes down to like I remember like touring this place and I was like sitting here in this like empty shop that was like gravel floors and had nothing in it. And I'm like grinning ear to ear and the realtor's looking at me like, it's a shop with gravel floors. What, like, what do you see here? And gravel floors. And I was like, this is going to be amazing. Like, this is going to be the best place ever. And she's like, it's a shop. It's used for storage. And, um, really just the blank canvas square footage is what, um, was appealing to me. And, um, you know, we've, we've got, this place has gotten 15 million views in the last couple weeks since we launched the new niche and we started launching all the media and working with influencers and partners. People have really liked the new concept and the new brand that we've launched. So the plan is to build the Wild Wild Warehouse brand in conjunction with Big Sky Barnhouse and grow it the same way we did the barn brand moving forward, but kind of like sister companies.

I'm just like floored right now because this is about as rural as you get. Oh yeah. Okay. Like you're an hour from a metro. Aka Des Moines, Iowa, like an hour. And Lacona has 354 people in it. And is this a place that has like some random, like, like Hamilton, Missouri, people come from all over the world to go do quilting, right? Does it have a place like that? Or is it just, there's nothing in Lacona?

There's, there's, um, Lacona has a great community and I've got to meet like everyone in the community. Uh, probably most of the people in the town, like really sense of pride of like where they're from. And what they do. So like the community itself is awesome. There's nothing really in Lacona. There's one dive bar called Backroads, which is an awesome bar, and our crews were there eating dinner and playing billiards for most of the buildout. And there's really nothing to do in Lacona itself. Like, while, while Warehouse is the only attraction in town, if you go a little bit farther outside of Lacona, obviously you have like Des Moines Metro and everything that Des Moines has to offer, which is the fastest growing—

is this it right here?

No. If you go north of where City Center It should be one of those places right on the left there. Right there with that big—

okay. Because I know that I saw the picture of the football field.

Yeah, we're right across from the football field. That right there on the left side of the football field, across the street.

What was this warehouse used for before? Storage. Commercial storage. Oh my gosh. And how many acres was it on?

We have about 3 acres, I believe.

By the way, I have a new private YouTube community where I post exclusive interviews and videos that no one else in the world will see. All you gotta do is pay $5 a month. And you know what? YouTube takes 30% of that. So I'm hardly getting anything from that. In addition, you're gonna get every single 25+ page business plan that we make from every episode we publish. And we sell these for $19 and we do 15 episodes a month. So this is about $300 a month worth of value, plus extra interviews and videos that you'll never see anywhere else for $5 a month. And you can cancel anytime. You'll also get my previous backlog of every business plan I've ever published. So you can get the link right down below. It's all done right here on YouTube, and you'll even get little custom emojis or stars next to your name when you comment on videos so you can get priority replies from yours truly. Thanks a lot. A commercial storage warehouse with 8,000 square feet. There's thousands of those. Why, why did you pick this one?

Des Moines Metro is the fastest growing metro in the Midwest. If you go to downtown Des Moines, there's cranes everywhere. There's— there was a, I think, a $3 billion development plan that was announced a few years ago to Des Moines City Center. So there's new skyrises, apartment buildings, new subdivisions being built out more and more into the rural area every single week. And there's a lot of Fortune 500 companies coming and opening up their headquarters, and population is just booming in Des Moines Metro. So there's more and more of a base that we can draw from. But the economic data was astonishing when you look at it.. So we wanted to be just outside of that, you know, a 45, 50-minute drive away.

So is this going to be more successful than your first launch then when it's all said and done? I hope so.

It is definitely pacing to take the number one spot. I think in 2 to 3 months we'll know for sure if it does, but it has been the most successful launch in a 4-week period from any of the properties I've launched.

How much do paid Instagram Reels play into your strategy, or is organic the bigger needle mover?

Yeah, we don't do any paid ads on Meta anymore at all. Um, so everything, everything is organic. Um, we do work with a select travel influencers that will, you know, we'll give them a free night's stay and they'll come in with their friends and family and they'll feature the property and they'll collab post with us on social. But we do have an in-house media team that does all the content and editing, everything for the brand, and we just go all over.

Okay. Now, like, I'm totally with you on having an idea to do stuff like this. I'm, you know, I get it. But how do you get— where do you get ideas to put these hexagonal lights and the artwork and the carrier? Like, Where, where do you source all that inspiration from?

I think it comes down to, you know, creating a moat around your business. Like, I looked at the top 5 Airbnbs in Des Moines Metro before I bought this one, and I studied their pages for weeks, and I saw why they did so well and what they had and what they were missing. And more importantly, what— from our internal data at our portfolio, we can start to see, you know, consistencies between, okay, people want pools, whether they're indoor or outdoor. If our guest avatar is a family that has a little bit more disposable income and they have 20 to 40 people in their group, they want a nice playground, something they'd find at a church or a school. So we started investing heavily into pools and indoor commercial playgrounds that are heated and cooled year round and just other unique experiences like the helipads and the indoor petting zoos and things like that. But for this property specifically, I think it came down to that.

Okay. How many people are on average are staying at your properties? I'm sure there's, there's a broad range, but take for instance your, your newest one and your oldest one, how big are these group sizes? Because on Airbnb, you can only filter for 16 plus, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And we do have a direct booking website where we're 35% direct now. Um, so we're relying less and less on legacy OTAs like VRBO and Airbnb. The thesis from the start was 20 was the magic number. If you can sleep 20 people for a large group. Okay. So the first one in Arena, Wisconsin was 20 people that can sleep. We started moving more towards 30 and 40. Person group stays, you know, and higher bedroom counts. And this one in Iowa can sleep 30 people.

Okay. And then diminishing returns after 30, I imagine.

You start to get a lot more corporate retreats when you go bigger than that, and youth groups and things of that nature. Uh, but 40 is our biggest one that we have.

Now, one of the bigger risks with having, you know, big Airbnb properties like this are parties. That's what we struggled with. What do you do about that? Like, you know, obviously there's going to be parties, but like a destructive party or a teenage party, like How do you manage that?

Heavily guest vetting and making sure that your marketing is consistently directed towards your guest avatar. So we set them up to be family-friendly, and then all of our marketing is directed towards families. So we naturally draw that type of guest avatar because of that. Not to say that you don't get the occasional bachelor party here and there, but usually because of the price point that we're at, the groups that even come in to have a good time, whether it's a bachelor party or a mom's wine trip or whatever it might be, they're usually some of the more respectful groups because they're not trying to look for a place that's cheap that they can just throw a banger of a party at. Gotcha.

When I had my 16-person Airbnb, I got this booking, didn't think anything of it, and this stranger with an anonymous account DM'd me on Airbnb and said, hey, look at this screenshot. And it was a Snapchat screenshot of someone announcing my property as a party for like high schoolers. They were charging like $5 ahead. And I'm like, thank you so much, I owe you dinner at the very least. I canceled the booking. I'm sure I avoided some crazy, some craziness that night. But there were also some parties that slipped through that were major headaches.

Airbnb's done a great job on their platform to mitigate like fake accounts, because we've ran into that a few times where we've had to have law enforcement remove groups that had fake accounts that booked it for something similar. Wow. Um, but they've, they've increased their measures on making sure that, you know, there's no fake accounts doing anything like that.

What tools do you use for doing research? Like, what is your total tech stack for like pricing out,, you know, uh, competitive research, like finding new areas, new properties, et cetera?

Great question. We use Hospitable for our property management software. Um, so we link all of our properties from our direct sites and all the OTAs that we're on to Hospitable. And, you know, we obviously have all of our, um, automated guest messaging with high touchpoint across 10 messages from time of inquiry to post-checkout and everything in between. Um, it's one of the best softwares. We've actually built our direct website off of the Hospitable API as well. It integrates the best out of any other property management software that I've seen. So Hospitable, number one, it's like the, the glue of the ops of the business. For acquisition and pro forma analysis and just like researching markets and whether you want to get into co-hosting, B&B Calc is the, the, I'd say the, the best one that I've used. It's similar to AirDNA, but I think it's better than AirDNA. And it is a software tool that you can use. You can type in any address and you can get a general overview, but then you can go in and modify it and tweak it and make it completely customizable, even add in your own branding onto it. You can share it with, you know, realtors, bankers, investors. You can do your own pro forma analysis. And they have a new markets tool where you can like compare markets side by side and even like operators of property management companies side by side. So it's a phenomenal tool that I've, you know, it's probably one of the biggest components of like how I've been able to scale is effectively using B&B Calc. Okay.

Anything else of note? Any other tools?

We use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT quite a bit as well for the design and build-out phase and for inspiration on our renderings. You know, I'd say like a lot of these designs that we have, they're very immersive. They're very filled with, very much filled with like artwork. How do you render an indoor pool with a rock climb wall that has a swim-up bar? Or how do you change a warehouse from nothing to something? So for rendering design and coming up with inspiration for what we want something to look like, we use those three apps a lot for a lot of our renderings, which could be very costly. If in the past you had to get CAD drawings and work with an architect and it would've taken weeks on end to get something back that would've been a first version. Within minutes, you know, we can have first, second, third renderings within, you know, just a couple minutes. So we use that quite a bit for inspiration and developing.

When you first spent that $500 on your first property, did you like, um, geofence everyone who saw that ad to a certain area or not at all?

We, if I remember correctly, we went to we put in certain zip codes that we knew people were traveling to that area for. So it was very Madison, Wisconsin heavy and like metro Madison, but then it was very like other big major metros within a 3 to 5 hour drive from Madison as well. So obviously, you know, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Southwest Michigan, every other major metro in that area.

If that first campaign went so well, why not do more paid? I mean, obviously you're getting plenty of eyeballs, but even more eyeballs equal, you know, higher rates.

We've started to go viral organically on social and grow a big, a big following. Um, from that point, the organic views and like really honing in on that strategy, strategy was just a better use of our time and, uh, better dollar spent with like hiring an in-house content team.

Gotcha. 2026, this year, what do you think your total revenue and profit will be across all of your properties?

We're pacing towards $3 million gross across the portfolio, and there should be somewhere in the 40th percentile for gross profit.

Wow. Okay. What other like Airbnb niches do you think that are really hot right now, but you're too focused on to chase after?

Homes that have their own private pond or own private lake on the property that you don't have to share.

I'm under contract on one right now. So are you really? Sounds good. Yeah. Not for Airbnb, for my own use case, but it's nice to have that in my back pocket.

Yeah. And I would say like homes that just have like massive acreage that you can put things in, like ATV trails and like golf courses and things like that. Golf is a huge amenity, whether it's mini golf or a par 3 or a home green or bunkers or whatnot, or just golf carts on the property. Golf is a big amenity across different applications that I would say is pretty big.

Hmm. Yeah, I'm under contract on a 231-acre ranch right now. Really? We're at 50 minutes from downtown Dallas. That's awesome. It's for like me and my family, like to just hunt, fish. But there's like a 6-acre pond. There's a— it borders a small river. Like it's got everything. There's no— there's no home. There's a shop, but there's no home yet. But it's something I plan to own for the rest of my life.

That's awesome. Are you west of Dallas or what direction?

It's northeast of Dallas. Okay, cool. And 45 minutes from my house. So very cool. That sounds awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna get a big excavator and dozer, and I'm just gonna have fun out there. That's the dream. Okay, so acreage, ponds, anything else? Any other type of random niche?

If you're not going to go big, I would say going small would be the move, but like avoid the middle, like 2-bedroom to 4-bedroom is where you're crushed. I would say avoid urban city centers just for zoning and neighbor purposes, but also like you're going to go small, like just go one-bedroom cottage or one-bedroom, uh, couple's getaway. Um, if you're not going to do like the large family reunion, I would say like the couple's getaway is definitely something I'd be interested in, but I would do it in a way where it was more of like a resort where you have like 10 or 20 like couple's getaway cabins on something that has a pond or a lot of outdoor amenities that could be shared, which I've seen a lot of developers kind of getting into. And there's— it's still within the unique experience buildout, but It's a, it can be a couple's getaway where you have, you know, maybe 20 or 30 Airbnb pages. If someone wants to book it for every single one and you have couples that want the whole place, great. But I think if you're not going to go really big, just go really small for like the property type.

What would the playbook be for someone that doesn't have a ton of cash that wants to like start dabbling in this? Like, is there a way in this industry to like test before you go all in or like use someone else's property? Like, I know that like Airbnb arbitrage, like house, house hacking is like not as sexy as gurus make it out to be, but what are you seeing?

Yeah, arbitrage was really big for years, um, from like 2010 to 2020. Um, it's, it's really hard to be successful in Airbnb arbitrage. There are some people that I know that do still very well with arbitrage, but it's immensely harder to be successful in arbitrage. Um, but arbitrage is a great, great way to start a lease, uh, a long-term lease, you know, and then spend $5,000 on furniture and then launch on Airbnb as long as your landlord is okay with it. There are some markets where you still can do that with low to no money down. If it comes furnished, I would say the better option for no money down to get into like managing an Airbnb and get experience in real estate investing in that space would be through co-hosting. And you can co-host someone else's property that is the owner that maybe they're not in Airbnb yet or they have potential to, and you can show them what they could be making if it's their second home or if they're planning to move. Or they could be upset with their current property manager. Manager, like effectively you'd be taking over property management and marketing of a property. I mean, I know a lot of people that have had major success in growing their co-host business and then, you know, taking their cash flow and then starting to invest in properties and buying their own.

Tell me like an example of when co-hosting has gone well based on what you know and what that structure looked like.

Yeah, I think if you're going to get into co-hosting, you have to be, you know, you have to come across as the expert in Airbnb management. And I'm going to go back to B&B Calc. Like, B&B Calc is the best tool you could use to get new co-hosting clients. And if you can go to a property owner that hasn't— has never been showed anything like a pro forma or a software tool that shows what they can make and you can confidently guarantee it as best as you can. I know some people that have gotten, you know, 10, 20 co-host clients in as short as 6 months. And now they have this portfolio of Airbnbs that they manage and great experience that they're getting. Sometimes 20 to upwards of 30% of all of gross revenue you make as a co-host. So it's a great way to get your foot in the door and start managing an Airbnb business by, you know, and you still have— it's not easy. You still need to be resilient and persistent and be a hunter. If you're passionate about it and it's something you really want to get in, co-hosting is a great way to get into the industry.

So co-hosting is like, you know, being a property manager on steroids. Like, you're more involved, but you're making more money. How does that look though, if like with this first barn that you bought and you need to make real investments, who makes those investments? Or Does that not really work for co-hosting?

There's different types of co-hosting, right? But like, there, there'll be some properties that aren't Airbnbs yet, and they're going to want the co-host's opinion on what the build-out should be. How do we set it up to be something that's going to be unique in the market? I think the more that you can get the comp set and really fine-tune and customize the B&B Calc report and bring that to them through your pitch on why you should be their co-host and their property manager and marketer, um, the more success you'll have. But I think if you just come in randomly and say, hey, I want to manage an Airbnb for you, you're not going to look like professional and you're not going to be someone that they can trust managing the property. So I think it really comes down to just like professionalism and having like customized reports and just really knowing the market and their business and who you're going to attract and what improvements or renovations you should do. And from a co-host perspective, you'd have to convince the owner to come up with the renovations themselves. So it's a little— okay, a little, a little more difficult if there's major renovation involved versus if it's a property that maybe has 5 or 6 bedrooms, it's in a great market and they use it as a second home or they're unhappy with their property manager. You can come in and kind of swoop under them and get a contract signed.

So is it safe to say that the playbook for co-hosting, if you have no experience or much money at all, would be to use some of these cheap tools to find like a high-demand area and a high-demand unit type in that area, and then just do cold outreach, look at the tax records, Zillow, Redfin, whatever, to find some properties that fit that criteria. Do cold outreach to them and say, hey, FYI, I'm pretty tapped into this market. Did you know that your property would rent for $1,200 a night and would stay you know, rented 50% of the time. I can manage all this for you. There's no risk to you. I'm going to take 30% of the gross revenues, but I will manage literally everything else. Is that kind of the pitch and the strategy until you get a yes?

1000%. But I think before you go do that, I think there's so much free knowledge on podcasts out there about co-hosting. You know, I've spent months on end learning about things in the Airbnb space on podcasts in different realms. Before really just attacking the market. So I think just like all the free knowledge that you can just gather out there first from John Bianchi, Jeremy Worden, Bill Faith, there's a lot of people out there that really taught— and Patrick Swiatek out in Joshua Tree. I was at his conference a couple of months ago. Awesome dude. He runs one of the biggest co-host companies out there at The Co-Host Company. I think like learning from like their podcast and everything that they put out there and potentially, you know, either working with them or just learning from their free knowledge that they drop, those avenues before you go out and just start putting the work in. I think having like a good base knowledge and understanding before just like attacking the market would be a great way to start.

Well, where can people find you or your properties?

Yeah, yeah. Um, on Instagram, um, you can find me at just @KyleMiklasz. That's K-Y-L-E-M-I-K-L-A-S-Z. And then our two Instagram pages, um, that have all of our properties and everything we do are just Big Sky Barn House and Wild, Wild Warehouse all across social.

Kyle, thank you so much.

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Chris.

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