03.
Are Airbnbs Successful In Cookeville, Tennessee?
How the short-term rental market came to thrive in the small town of Cookeville.
Love at first Airbnb
Hi, I’m Anna, owner of Home & Hill management. With so much buzz around Airbnb and short-term rentals, I thought it would be helpful to share my experience coming into the Airbnb market (as many people now reference it; kind of like how Google became the verb that explains a web search, now Airbnb has been co-opted to mean short-term rental, although VRBO is also a short-term rental website). So, here’s the deal: As I was working on a publication in 2013, I became friends with several Nashville influencers. Back then, the Instagram influencer trend was in its infancy and so was Airbnb. One super cool influencer, Ruthie Lindsey, kept mentioning her “Airbnb,” which was her actual home that she rented out nightly when she traveled (an incredibly precious Boho bungalow in East Nashville, the likes of which Taylor Swift had used for a music video!). I fell in love with the concept of sharing a beautiful space, the hospitality of it all, and the business smarts of the operation.
Who would want to come to Cookeville?
So, when my husband and his brother bought a farm with a dilapidated stone house on the property, I immediately thought about renting it out on a nightly basis. My sister-in-law thought I was completely crazy. “Who would want to come to Cookeville?” she asked. Well, plenty of people wanted to come, not just for the waterfalls and natural features (which have enjoyed a boom in interest within the last decade), but for travel and business stops along I40. Our stone house was the first of its kind in the area and garnered immediate success.
“Plenty of people wanted to come, not just for the waterfalls and natural features, but for the travel and business stops along I-40.”
Since then, the short-term rental business has taken off in the Cookeville area. I’ll share more about our area with more details in future posts but for now, here’s more information about the Airbnb trend as a whole. Incredible and historical growth of a company!
“Airbnb is widely popular and has been growing quickly for over a decade. Airbnb experienced a 62.5% increase in guest arrivals during 2018. Since 2009, the global compound growth rate of the company has risen to over 153%. In the U.S., there has been a 45% increase in bookings from year to year, showing more people are opting for Airbnbs when traveling. Airbnb is a tough competitor for hotels. Studies show that over 50% of Airbnb users in 2016 gladly used Airbnb to replace a traditional hotel stay. In Europe, Airbnb is anywhere from 8% to 17% cheaper than a regional hotel’s average daily rate, while in the top 25 markets in the U.S., Airbnb is 6% to 17% cheaper than hotels in those markets. Airbnb is likely to take over hotels’ revenue in the coming years, considering the hotel industry recently saw its second-lowest level of the nightly rate in 20 years. Airbnb has over 150 million users and over 700,000 companies use Airbnb for work.” Source