Interior Designer Starts Boutique Airbnb Alternative

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If Airbnb is the hotel alternative, what's the alternative to Airbnb? The house rental home sharing platform has experienced incredible growth. Maybe in some ways to the point where some travelers are once again looking for something different. Welcome to Sidusill School, my name is Chris Guillebeau. In today's story, after a lackluster rental experience, a marketer turned designer invents a third act as she seeks to build a series of boutique, well-designed homes for short-term rental.

So far she's got three properties, it's all self-funded and more are on the way. We'll look at some of the logistics of how she did it. And this story also reminded me of a long-term dream of mine to open a small guest house or hotel. I've had that on my list for a long time. I'm not sure it's the best thing I could be doing at the moment, but after working on this story, my inspiration has been rekindled.

So I'm gonna put it back on my someday list. All right, stay tuned for Interior Designer Starts Boutique Airbnb Alternative, right after this message. [Music]

Though formerly trained in advertising and marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Alison Crawford's real passion was somewhere else in the world of interior design. Even as she sold radio advertising in Austin, moved to sell copiers on Wall Street for a while, and then moved back to Texas to direct the marketing efforts of a car company, she was always learning about design. While in New York, she took night classes at NYU.

But rather than shifting to work for an interior design company, Alison created her own gigs on the side. Once she moved back to Dallas, she started flipping houses. It was grueling work, finding a house, bidding for it, renovating the property, designing the interior, and then finally selling it, hoping to profit. It was all a bit less thrilling than she'd hoped. And when one deal went sour and Alison ended up losing a lot of money, she decided the house flipping game wasn't where she belonged.

She did, however, really liked the part where she handled the interior design. So when a handful of friends offered to pay Alison for her skill, a light bulb went off. She should try starting her own home design service. Just a few months later, in 2015, Alison Crawford design debuted. She built a portfolio of happy clients in a matter of months and took her hard earned cash to Los Angeles for the annual Design Week Festival.

Still, this wasn't the final answer either. In Los Angeles, she learned a lot, made some valuable connections, but the festival itself wasn't where the most dramatic change happened. That happened in her Airbnb. Let's just say Alison's first short term rental experience on the platform was less than ideal. It all made her wonder, why isn't there a group of properties that fills the void between common home rentals and boutique hotels?

She went home at the end of the week, curious and eager. And what she found was intriguing. No other company owned, designed and marketed boutique short term rentals all under one umbrella. Lots of companies do one, maybe two of those things, but never all three. And Alison believed she could do it.

She had bought and sold homes. She was an interior designer and she was an experienced marketer. She had this trio of skills nobody else seemed to be using altogether. So she jumped in. After dozens of hours setting up a plan of action, researching lots of different housing markets, Alison landed on Nashville as a perfect city to open her first boutique short term rental home.

Her first hotelette, as she called it. The city has a lot of tourists and it looked like the market was about to take off. So she found a home that was ripe for being renovated thanks to its 1930s craftsman built. It took six whole months and nearly $70,000 to confirm her plan with city regulators, got the space, completely renovate both bathrooms in the kitchen and designed the interior. But by summer 2017, hotelette had its first property.

Now it was time to drive traffic and guests. Alison built her own website, but also listed the property on rental platforms like Airbnb, HomeAway and VRBO. Within a couple of weeks, she had her first booking from Airbnb. Once she had that first review, bookings were fairly steady. The home can host up to 12 people.

So most of her customers have been bachelorette parties, families on vacation or similar. Once this property was underway, Alison moved back to Austin, ready for a new location. This time it only took a couple of months to find, renovate and design a property near downtown. And her second hotelette opened its doors that fall. Let's talk about a couple of challenges at this point.

Her beautiful aesthetic designs and high rental prices didn't mean everything stayed nice and clean. Alison's house managers were contractors in both cities, noticed dishes and wall decor going missing every now and then whenever they would take inventory. It also seemed like a few of the bachelorette parties had gotten a bit wild. Alison had to learn to distance herself from those moments. They're just part of running a home rental business.

And then tax season came around, introducing a whole new set of challenges. Alison had to file taxes, not only for herself personally and for her business, but also for the cities of each short-term rental. Learning the right regulations, tax rates and deductions was complicated. But once tax season was over, Alison had the energy to get creative again. And she was excited to open up a new side of the business she'd been dreaming about from the very beginning.

An online hotelette store, where she would sell handmade items and decor from women makers, the same kinds of things she featured in her hotelettes. She'd been making connections for over two years, and now it was time to finally build out that shop. So that November, alongside the launch of her third hotelette in Dallas, Alison opened up her online store. She has self-founded everything with this project so far, and it's starting to pay off. When we spoke with her, she was completely booked up in all three locations, three months out, a major feat, and she's not slowing down yet.

She's now looking at a fourth location, a furniture line, and maybe even a reality TV show. Now Alison's not wanting to take all the credit for herself. She says she has an incredible team behind her that she's put together over the last three years. Three city property managers, a digital shop manager, an assistant, a bookkeeper and marketer. Drawing others into the dream of hotelette, from customers to contractors, has been a lot more rewarding than selling copiers or flipping houses.

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So it takes a long-term vision to start this kind of project. And that's definitely not the kind of thing that's going to be profitable right away. It'll require some investment, it'll require some time. And it also benefits from having more than one property. So I think she was wise to think from the beginning, okay, I'm gonna start in Nashville, but I'm not gonna end there.

I'm gonna take what I've learned and then apply it, you know, in Austin, in Dallas, et cetera, wherever I can go. I also think the story kind of illustrates really well, you know, the gap between X and Y. Okay, so X is like something that's been around for a while, Y is something that's new. In this case, Airbnb is tremendous in lots of ways for lots of people, but inevitably it's not for everyone. So whenever something like that takes off, the world of home sharing, home rentals, et cetera, it often creates additional opportunities in the margins for people like Alison to flourish.

So even though she's trying to do her own thing, you know, she's using the platforms of Airbnb and others, the other ones that I mentioned, VRBO, Home Away, et cetera, and arguably you could say that they have enabled her to pursue this alternative vision. A lot of people might not be comfortable booking in a boutique hotel like this, were it not for the fact that Airbnb and similar platforms have kind of normalized that process. So pay attention, what margins do you notice? What is the gap between X and Y? Could be some other industry, could be something you're familiar with in your own work or career or industry, or something entirely new, who knows, but there are always gonna be lots of opportunities.

That's what this show is all about, highlighting opportunities, giving you ideas, and perhaps giving you a bit of a gentle nudge to move forward. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to Alison's properties, all the different platforms I mentioned, anything else, are at sidehustleschool.com/833. That's for episode 833. We'll be back again tomorrow with the weekly recap, much more coming up next week.

Thanks so much, I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.