The Story of Our Award Winning Airbnb, Hayes Beach House
Like many others we fell in love with the sleepy seaside town of Callala Beach when we visited the Jervis Bay area on holiday. All the variables seemed right: under three hours from our home in Sydney (not too long a drive for a weekend), a beach as beautiful as a tropical island and an untouched charm that reminded us of the seaside holidays of our childhoods. In short, it was love at first sight.
We spent some time visiting Callala Beach and talking to a few real estate agents before deciding that we wanted to take the plunge and buy a property. As new parents of twin boys we felt it would be more convenient enjoying holidays close to home as opposed to getting on a plane with two babies. Making the decision was the easy part. Over the next two years we went through the Global Financial Crisis, stopped looking for a while then realising that the property market had plateaued, summoned up the courage to buy. We spent several months looking at different properties before we found one that had the right beach house charm. We bought it the day it came on the market and we settled on the property in April 2009. We called it Hayes Beach House after Hayes Cottage in the Shetland Islands in Scotland where my mother and grandmother were born.
There was a lot of work to be done and we found an excellent builder and renovated the property inside and out just in time for the busy summer season. In November 2009 we listed the property on a single website with minimal expectations as to how many bookings we would receive (after all, a local real estate agent had told us optimistically that we might get 4–6 weeks of rentals per year). Within the first few days we were inundated with enquiries for the Christmas and January holiday period.
Looking back we have to laugh at how we handled those first enquiries. We honestly thought that if someone sent in an enquiry it meant that they wanted to book. We spent about a day plotting a large number of enquiries against a calendar then sending out responses – fully expecting them to slot in neatly like a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, most of them decided not to book and we learned our first lesson: if they want to book, take the booking. The calendar will work itself out.
In that first year we were delighted simply to be paying our mortgage and we did that within our first six months of renting the property. We were bitten by the bug at that point and started to look at the many websites we could list the property on. We also put processes in place to streamline the amount of effort required to manage the enquiry and booking process. Over the next three years we experimented with listing on a range of websites – some good, some bad, some incredibly ugly (in terms of return on investment). We also started to enter the local tourism awards and were happy to be listed as a finalist in 2011. We started to build up a huge number of positive reviews and this was a big factor in us winning the Stayz.com.au award for best pet-friendly NSW in 2013. We then followed this by winning Silver at the South Coast Tourism Awards in 2014.
In 2016 we bought our second property Sunbaker Beach House at Culburra Beach, a 15-minute drive from our first property. It was summer and we got Sunbaker up for rental quickly. We didn’t renovate but did a few touch ups to get it shipshape, added new furniture and had it on the market for the last two months of summer which brought in some much needed cash. In winter 2016 we renovated the property throughout.
