My Airbnb business makes £109,000 a year – it’s triple what I earned as a nurse

Being a children’s nurse was what Melissa Clee always aspired to be when she was growing up.

Qualifying in 2010, she built up her nursing career specialising in neonatal care at University College Hospital London (UCLH).

“I always loved being on a busy unit, and being there at the most vulnerable time in people’s lives. You play a really special role for people, and it was a privilege to do that for so many years,” says Melissa, 38, who is now based in Lincoln, Lincolnshire.

Melissa’s desire to support families took her to Uganda, where she worked at a partner hospital of UCLH, helping educate new parents on the benefits of kangaroo care, or skin to skin contact between new and premature babies and either parent. She also worked in respiratory support.

But the birth of her first daughter in 2019 prompted her to re-evaluate whether she could juggle parenthood with the long hours and night shifts that are all part of being a nurse.

“One of the lows of being a nurse is that you are so busy, and it’s really difficult to incorporate family life into that,” she says.

“Even if you go into something a bit more community-based, if you factor in your travel, you’re looking at being out from eight until six, and it just doesn’t fit in with being able to drop off and pick up the kids, and coordinate things around them. People do make it work, but I wanted to do something where I could work for myself,” she adds.

A friend and fellow nurse in London planned to change careers into property, and invited Melissa to join her on a training course. She then moved back from London to Lincoln where she grew up, and with a £5,000 loan from her mother, she set up her own property rentals, focusing on serviced accommodation.

By chance at a networking event in 2022, she met the previous local franchisees of Pass the Keys, an Airbnb management agency which takes care of all aspects of renting out a property through Airbnb and other sites.

A franchisee is a person that purchases the right – or a franchise – to operate a branch of an existing company.

They were looking for someone to take over the Lincoln franchise – and with what she had made in her previous business, Melissa was able to afford the £12,000 startup and training cost.

She started her Pass the Keys Lincoln franchise with nine properties, which has since grown to 35.

The corporate side of her portfolio includes 14 properties owned by a large Lincoln property developer, which is a mix of three three-bedroom houses plus an apartment block.

Designed to look modern and neutral, these are popular with corporate travellers and she also has a series of holiday lets too.

Acting as a property manager and guest liaison for the owners, Melissa oversees everything from marketing to bookings and guest queries, to cleaning and maintenance.

She’s slowly been building a part-time team – an operations coordinator to schedule cleaners, and a guest support team of four people who are based in Kenya, but answer queries remotely.

The former Lincoln franchise owner also helps with sales, and a new part-time person is starting in July, to help Clee focus on growing her property portfolio.

“The main thing is that it’s flexible around me and the girls,” she says.

After spending the past three years learning and developing the business, Melissa now feels she’s reached a turning point where everything is looking up.

Financially, things are looking promising for Clee. She’s finally paid off the £20,000 loan she took out to be able to acquire more properties and market them effectively, and also to give her some financial security to stop doing casual nursing shifts, and go all in on her business.

After all her business expenses are paid, Clee estimates she can take home around half of the £109,000 revenue her franchise brought in last year.

Those expenses include staff wages, plus a 3.5 percent yearly franchise fee she must pay to Pass the Keys, and a £1,400 compulsory monthly marketing spend. She uses this on social media advertising, letterbox marketing, and a sponsorship with Lincoln City Football Club.

“There’s so much more room for growth. We have so many more properties that we could take on – I think we could easily kind of get to 60-plus properties in the next couple of years. There’s such a big market for it in Lincoln, so I think financially, it could be much more profitable,” she says.

It’s also her ambition to embed social purpose within her business. She is running a networking event to support the YMCA in Lincoln, and her long-term goal is to develop sustainable holiday lets in Uganda to create local business and employment opportunities.

“In Uganda, it felt like it was really saturated there with aid, and I felt like the thing that was missing was people wanted to help themselves to build something they could put their own work into and sustain – so that is an ambition of mine,” she says.

“I’d like to find more ways of giving back so the business feels more purposeful.”