I turned a chicken coop into a two-bedroom Airbnb. It makes over $2,000 a month and covers my mortgage payment.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Landon Wilkinson, an Airbnb host in Yakima, Washington, about two and a half hours southeast of Seattle. He and his wife have two rentals on the Washington property — a converted chicken coop, with rates from around $120 a night and up, and a shipping container —and a third in Montana. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been an Airbnb host for going on 10 years now.

Before Airbnb really became a thing, I did some couch-surfing. That was a bit of a precursor to Airbnb and a really fun experience.

From my own travels, I got a taste for what was possible when people opened up their own homes and did cool things. When I was younger, I had a construction company. We fixed up houses and started doing long-term rentals. Then, around 2016, we attempted Airbnb with a really small house.

The house might have rented for $900 or $1,100 a month as a long-term rental, but we were pretty routinely making $1,600 to $2,000 a month as an Airbnb.

I grew up flipping houses for my dad, but the chicken coop was more ambitious than a lot of my previous construction projects.

Trying to visualize something out of that building was a very organic process. It started with fixing up the roof a little bit, and putting in some nicer windows. I thought, “I’ll just make it a little shop. I’ll make it more insulated.”

Then, through that process, I realized, “Actually, I could make something really nice with this if I wanted.”

Then I went all in.

Demolishing it would have cost $20,000, and fixing it up was around $38,000

I bought the 55-acre property in 2018 from my parents, who had bought it and were basically using it as additional farmland for hay.

There had been a house on it at one point, but it had burned down. There was nothing really on the property besides the chicken coop walls with a sort-of roof on it.

We didn’t think we were going to do anything with the chicken coop. It was a 100-year-old, board-formed concrete structure. It was super dense and very difficult to demolish.

I thought, “We could either spend $20,000 trying to get rid of this structure, or we could see what we could make out of it.”

In 2019, we were trying to landscape the property near where we had built our primary home. Every morning, we’d look out the back porch and see this chicken coop that was a real eyesore.

We started chipping away in the winter of 2019. It started to become more of a project, and I brought in some of my guys from the construction company to help.

We put in $38,000 — and a lot of nights and weekends — to get it live and set up the first time. Then, over the last couple of years, we’ve updated things, like furniture. We got a nicer hot tub.

I found a new back window on Facebook Marketplace and paid just $40 for it. If you’re just a little bit creative on some things or willing to be flexible, those can be really big finds. That window new would’ve been a couple grand, probably.

I thought th coop wouldn’t appeal to Airbnb guests, but my wife saw potential

This is the part of the story where my wife will say, “Make sure you tell them how much you resisted,” because she was the one who felt confident about it being an Airbnb. I still had the image of a chicken coop in my head.

We argued about it a fair bit. She said, “Let me list the property photos of the landscape and describe what we can about the property and put a fairly low nightly rate on it, and we’ll set a date when it’s going to be available.”

We started the project in December 2019 as a shed for my storage. By January, we realized it could be more than that. We turned it into the rental by April of 2020.

We had a nurse who came in April of 2020 and stayed there for two months. Once we got that booking, I thought, “I guess we really have to do this well and get it done on schedule.”

When the nurse first moved in, we were still finishing up the landscaping, and we just barely got it done in time for her to be able to stay there. By the time she left, everything was really well done on the outside, and the landscaping had matured a little bit, so we were able to get updated pictures.

We have a nice branded sign on the door and on a pole outside the house that says “Ahtanum Cottage.”

Income from the Airbnb quickly covered our mortgage

The cottage went live in the spring of 2020 and started doing really well. The 12 or 24 months after were the highest volume.

In August of 2020, we made about $6,000 in one month from that house. That’s a peak outlier scenario. We usually average $2,000 to $3,000 a month in revenue. It averages around 65% to 70% occupancy.

I had a 40-foot, high-cube shipping container that I used when we stopped using the chicken coop for storage, to put our lawn and garden stuff. After the coop cottage was built, I started to envision what might work with the shipping container. So we embarked on building that in 2022.

The two Airbnb listings are more than covering our mortgage, which is around $1,100 a month. Our utilities in Washington, with three properties and two hot tubs, is somewhere between $400 to $500 a month.

It’s harder to start an Airbnb these days, but the potential for profit is bigger

It takes a little bit more work to get an Airbnb set up — especially now that the competition is stiffer. In the early days, it was pretty easy to make something work on Airbnb. Now, you have to be a little bit more competitive in adding amenities that really sell the property.

If you’re able to manage a property well, Airbnb is generally a much better return on investment than a long-term rental. In many cases, you can’t make long-term rentals work at the current mortgage rates anyway. So, unless you got in while rates were still low, you’re kind of forced to be somewhat creative.

The chicken coop started as, “How do we get rid of this thing?”

It was hard, when we were looking at it in its former state, to visualize it as anything else. But once you start to fix up a few little things, the vision becomes clearer.

We probably could’ve marketed it as a chicken coop, but it’s one of those things that, to me, seemed like it could backfire. We wanted it to be something that people perceived as what it is now instead of, “Oh man, it was a dump before.”

It probably would have been a great marketing move, but I was a little bit chicken, no pun intended.

At the time, we weren’t as confident that a unique stay, being a chicken coop, would’ve been a positive thing. Now, in hindsight, it probably would’ve been a good idea.