How to make big bucks from your home these holidays

As the cost of living crunch hits hard there is one easy thing Aussies can do to make some extra cash.

Jessica Milgrom has seven properties on the one Austinville lot, all rented out for holiday stays. Picture: Nigel Hallett

Aussies are turning to holiday home letting to bring in extra income among the cost of living crisis, with some raking in tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Data from accommodation platform Airbnb found one in five Australian hosts were renting their house or a room to make ends meet, while almost three-quarters were doing it to cover rising living costs.

“Hosting is an economic lifeline for many amid a cost of living crisis, with 45 per cent of Aussie hosts saying the money they earn from Airbnb has helped them stay in their homes,” said Airbnb’s Susan Wheeldon, revealing the current run of public holidays was the perfect time to let your property.

Subletting spare rooms has become particularly popular for those in need of extra cash, with banking group ING estimating people can bring in $156.45 a day.

Tim Rosolio from holiday accommodation provider Stayz said homeowners looking to rent their properties year-round could find it incredibly lucrative, but revealed most hosts were simply doing it to cover part of their mortgage, insurance and/or rates.

A Gold Coast hinterland property that is rented out for holiday accommodation. Picture: Nigel Hallett

“It’s a great opportunity to monetise an asset that you already have,” he said.

“For somebody that travels for work a lot, while they are gone, they monetise their primary home and that can be a nice supplemental income … but many of them just do it because they’ve always dreamed of having a second home and they want a little bit of [financial] support.”

Mr Rosolio said holiday letting could make more money than renting to a long-term tenant if the homeowner had the numbers right, revealing the most reliable income generators were large family homes in good locations.

“You’re really getting travellers that tend to book earlier, that tend to stay longer, that tend to spend more and they really respect your home,” he said.

Mother-of-two Jessica Milgrom, 40, built seven vacation homes on a 21ha former banana plantation in the Gold Coast hinterland suburb of Austinville and said renting them out to holiday-makers enabled her to pay her bills after her husband passed away from a brain tumour.

“It really works for me and it allows me to relax a little bit and to build my family solo otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said.

She said she made close to $300,000 last financial year before tax.

However, she said the money did not come without serious effort, with the rural properties, that are not connected to town water or sewerage, requiring constant maintenance, cleaning and gardening that would not be possible if she did not live on site.

“The way I can make it work is I do a lot of the work myself,” she said.

“If I walked away from the property and outsourced everything, it would be a slim [margin] because of the size of the property.”

Originally published as How to make big bucks from your home these holidays