This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Vanessa Banh, 28, a former accountant turned entrepreneur who bought a four-bedroom house with a garage in Modesto, California, and turned it into four separate Airbnb properties. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I feel like my generation is half and half on whether they want to own a home.
Personally, I think it’s really expensive now compared to our parents’ generation. The cost of living and our wages compared to the cost of housing is just outrageous.
For me, I was always looking for different ways to get more money. I listened to a lot of real estate people and gurus, and thought owning a house was the way to go to build assets and real wealth long-term. So why not start now if I can?
I bought a house for $347,000 in 2022 as a fixer-upper and took my time.
It was actually a cash or hard-money loan-only sale. I had a friend who’s a hard money lender, and he looked at the property, and he was like, “I can lend this for you.” So we purchased it through him through hard money.
Then we were able to refinance it back out to a conventional loan within a month because it wasn’t bad; it was just really old and needed some updating.
I knew later on I was going to turn it into a rental.
Courtesy of Vanessa Banh
If you want to buy a house through the conventional route, you have to live in it for at least a year before you turn it into a rental.
The renovations took a year and a half, so that met the criteria already.
We closed in May 2022, but we didn’t really start working on the renovations until August. My dad and I handled the renovations, took our time, and finished in July 2023.
I was just thinking about a long-term rental, but during the renovation process, my dad had different subcontractors walk through and give us some ideas.
I was also listening to a lot of podcasts — “Biggerpockets” and all that stuff — so I was like, “This could be an Airbnb.”
Maybe six or eight months into the process, I thought, “Let’s try to Airbnb this thing and see how it goes.”
My first two Airbnbs were successes, so I turned my garage into two more
Renovations cost about $60,000. We had to replace the roof and add a whole new AC, so those were the biggest costs.
Everything else was just standard flooring, a new bathroom, new tile, and all that stuff.
When we were renovating the house, one of the subcontractors who my dad had brought up to help with one part of the rental said, “In this section of the house, you could literally make this its own little unit right here.”
The layout was really perfect for it because there’s already a door there, so all we had to do was just add a little stove and a little sink, and add a double lock on the door so it functioned as a separate unit.
So now there are two units in the house.
One of the units was rented out mostly for traveling professionals, which I didn’t anticipate. Traveling nurses would come and stay for three months at a time — there was basically no vacancy. I didn’t realize there was something called mid-term rentals. So I was like, “Wow, this is actually quite amazing.”
I averaged about $3,500 to $4,500 in revenue. Cash flow was about $1,000 to $1,500 because my mortgage was about $2,000 and utilities and all that stuff was about $500.
Courtesy of Vanessa Banh.
I had a garage on the property that was just collecting dust.
When I bought this house, I was already imagining how we could turn that garage into an ADU. But it was more like, “How do I get enough money to build this out?”
I feel like the little unit in the back was working really well for me, and it seemed like there was a lot of demand for traveling nurses and traveling professionals.
My one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit was already going for $1,800, so I thought, if I can squeeze in two studios in the garage, I can get almost more than $1,800 times two.
It took me a few years of stacking cash.
After the renovation for the first two units was done, I started learning how to wholesale and flip homes. I was learning and actively doing that, and then I got enough cash to finally be able to start the next renovation process.
Once my plans were all done and final, I got three bids from contractors and started the renovation in November 2025. I always hoped that I would finish the garage conversion by the end of 2026. We finished in January 2026 — my contractor moved really fast.
The contractor’s bid was about $100,000. After it was completely done, I paid another $8,500 because of miscellaneous costs, the city fees, and the architect’s design.
The construction debt will be paid off in a few years, but it felt like the right move
I finished construction for the garage units in January, then I finished furnishing everything and getting it all ready for Airbnb by late February. In March, I started getting my first bookings.
For the first few months, I had a new-listing discount because if you have no reviews on Airbnb, it’s harder for guests to book it. So to make it a little more competitive, I had a lower rate. I was bringing in about $1,600 to $1,800 per unit for the first few months.
But essentially, right now I’m getting about $2,000 each for the units, so I doubled the revenue I could make.
Of course, it also cost almost double for the construction because of the permits — I had to pay for two permits and all that because it’s two ADUs.
I’m kind of paying myself off right now. I think it’s going to take about two years to just pay that whole debt off, and then after that, it’ll be fully cash-flowed.
Courtesy of Vanessa Banh.
I view real estate as a way to get ahead. I can absolutely live in one of my units, but if I can make money off of it — another $2,000 a month — I would rather do that right now. That’s where my head’s at right now.
I was like, “How do I optimize the current home that I have to make me more money?” Because I don’t have a W-2, what can I do to help myself get into a better financial position?
I knew the first step was to own a home.
