Think Of The Money I Could Make By Simply Ruining My Life With Airbnb

My sister is in town, staying at an Airbnb in the neighborhood. Or the neighborhood-ish. The intolerable and overpriced part of the neighborhood, that is. PEAK WILLIAMSBURG.

Anyway. Her private room is $62/night, though it is not a room so much as a windowless corner of the living room that the tenants turned into a bedroom by throwing up some drywall. A move I guess I respect? I’d have to see it in person. My sister says it’s small but comfortable. There’s enough room for a bed and an Ikea wardrobe with a mirror on it where she can do her makeup. (Important.)

Her host told her the rent for the apartment is $4,000/month. He has one actual roommate, and they have the windowless room and an actual bedroom they rent out on Airbnb almost every night. He says most months he and his roommate pay about $250/month each in rent.

WHAT.

The idea of hosting strangers in my home every single night sounds exhausting beyond measure, but her host says he loves it. The only context I have for him is that he is 37 years old, works in real estate, and was “ripping shots” with a 19-year-old he once dated when my sister got back to their apartment last night. I feel like that’s all I need to know?

Hearing about people making all this bank by renting out a room makes me feel like I am truly not entrepreneurial in spirit. What am I doing with my life if not generating passive income? UGH. I have a perfectly good apartment in semi-peak Williamsburg-ish that is $1,450/month. We could rent out the whole thing for $150/night, easy. That’s $4500/month! All we would have to do is roam the streets at night and spend our days handing off keys and chatting about how great the nearest coffeeshop is.

Aside from you know, taxes, the fact that it’s kind of illegal, and the fact that my landlord would tar and feather us if he found out we were making that kind of money without giving him, The Owner, all of it.

I was lying in bed this morning thinking about how much money we are missing out on making, as I am wont to do, when I thought about how much my apartment is per night. I know this is possibly an inaccurate way to think about things but STILL. My apartment is $1456.33 a month — and YES my landlord did in fact call me on the phone to ask me why we hadn’t been adding 33 cents to our checks — which means it is $46.97 a night.

$46.97 A NIGHT! I feel like we could live in a Days Inn for cheaper? Of course then we would have no belongings and no home but…maid service? NO BELONGINGS AND NO HOME! Freedom?

While I was lying in bed feeding the baby thinking about passive income, I got a text from my sister. It was 6 a.m. so I was a little taken aback. “God I’d take trying to sleep with a newborn over this any day. They have been blasting techno all night and are drunk and on Molly.”

Apparently the French girls staying in the other room and the 37-year-old Airbnb host spent the evening breaking plates and running into the walls on purpose. And now my sister will spend the day complaining about how tired she is to two people with a newborn whose apartment costs $46.97 a night.

All I can do is laugh.

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