Even before I put my house on AirBnB, I had some niggles which I turned away from and refused to look at. I had decided to go ahead, and that’s what I did. In the year since, those niggles haven’t gone away – in fact they’ve been joined by new ones. They aren’t concerns about my allowing others to live in my home for a few days – I was never too concerned about people not respecting my space, or stealing things, or trashing my home, and in fact none of those things have happened. I’ve used AirBnB for my own trips for more than 10 years, and have always had good interactions with hosts, so I expected the same when I became a host. I made sure always to have a bit of back-and-forth chat with a person who had requested to book my home, and turned down anyone I got a bad vibe from. My house isn’t city centre, so doesn’t really attract party lovers, it’s often been people who are visiting family in the area, or who come to visit the beach and the Antony Gormley iron men, or want to visit Liverpool but stay away from the bustle, in a more community-type area.

One of the immediate benefits of putting my house on the AirBnB site was that I fell back in love with the place where I live. I moved here in 2011, and chose the area almost at random. I was moving back to the north-west from Edinburgh and had been nomadic and ungrounded for so long, I had no reason to live anywhere in particular. I didn’t want to be too far from my parents, so I’d be around if they needed me as they got older (14 years later, I’m still not needed ….) but that still left a big area within the region I’d grown up in and spent most of my life in until I was 35. I chose Waterloo because it was close to the sea, close to Liverpool, where I felt as at home as I did anywhere, and had great public transport links so I didn’t need to get a car.

Until the pandemic, I hardly spent any time at home, it was just a base for me to keep my stuff while I jetted off to wherever my work took me. When I was grounded by the pandemic, I grew to love my home. I was so grateful for the little back yard, the friendly neighbours, the local shops that kept things going, and, most of all, the beach and the sea that never stopped doing what it was made to do.

As time went on, the pandemic ended and life returned to a different sort of normal for me, with hardly any travel, I started to feel a bit differently about my home. The friendly connections of lockdown faded away, everyone went back into their own lives and I got new neighbours on one side who were much less friendly. I started to feel an edginess about the area where I live. I knew the edgy side existed, but it never really impinged on me before. Now I started to feel it, and to feel less comfortable, even though nothing had actually changed.

So when I started to write about my home and the area for my AirBnB page, it made me think about what was good. I created a ‘guestbook’ for my home, and listed all the wonderful independent pubs, cafes, shops, restaurants within a 15-minute walk of my house. I told potential visitors about the wonderful park at the end of my road, about the amazing beach with its public art. I took photos of my house from different perspectives, and it looked great. I started to feel proud of my house and my area, and happy to be able to offer it to people looking for somewhere to stay. It felt like a privilege, in fact. Lucky me.

I tested out my house with a friend who stayed while I had to travel for work. I asked her to tell me what was good about staying in the house and what I needed to change. There were just a few things she suggested, and once I’d addressed them I had confidence that the house was ready for visitors. This didn’t stop me being terrified when I had the first people to stay for the weekend – my phone was off mute and right next to me until they left. They left me a very lovely note, but it turned out that one set of keys wasn’t enough. One guest had locked herself out and had to get my neighbour to shout over the fence to ask her husband, who was relaxing with a coffee in the back yard with his phone on silent, to open the front door and let her in. So two sets of keys from now on. And it turned out my house wasn’t as pet-friendly as I thought, since their little dog ate my heather. So no pets from now on. Lessons learned.

As I had more people staying it got easier, and I felt more confident that I’d thought of everything and nothing was likely to go wrong. I had some wonderful reviews on the AirBnB site, as well as lovely interactions with people when I met them to hand over the keys. I’d bought a key-safe but decided against using it. Since it’s my own home, I like to meet the people who stay here, and feel that if they meet me, they’re more likely to be respectful of my home.  Many guests are surprised to discover when they arrive that it is my own home. Most assume that it’s a business, which I think says a lot about what AirBnB has become. I can say that everyone I’ve had staying in my house has been lovely. Several have left me plants or little presents, which was totally unexpected, given that they’re paying to stay in my house, but feels good because it makes the whole thing feel a little bit more than purely transactional. I’ve been invited to visit some of the people in their own homes, if I’m ever passing through Nashville or southern Germany or some other wonderful-sounding place.

After my first guests, I hosted one or two groups of visitors a month, until August when I hosted three groups. This was too much. What had begun as a nice, easy way of earning some extra cash that would be set aside for me and my boyfriend, D, to go on holiday or have little trips away, had become a relentless process of cleaning and hardly living in my own home. It became difficult to relax and enjoy being at home because I didn’t want to mess it up. I was aware that I’d only have to clean and tidy everything for the next group, so better just to sit still and not touch anything. After August, once the schools had gone back, there were fewer visitors, but the joy had still gone out of it for me, so when someone tried to book for over the Christmas period I considered it but decided I wanted my home back, so declined that request and blocked out my AirBnB calendar entirely for December and January.

During that time, I took stock. I have a job and earn enough not to need to also rent out my house. This was intended to be extra money, for extras. It was a source of joint money for me and D, since I stayed with him while guests were in my house, and we could use it to do nice things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. The cleaning for each set of visitors can be exhausting, if I try to fit it around everything else I need to do. But if I’m able to dedicate a day to it, and do it slowly whilst listening to a podcast or the radio, I actually enjoy it. And I have the pleasure of living in a clean house once the visitors have left – much cleaner than it would be if I didn’t have paying guests arriving. I love the pleasure that people take in my house, and their appreciation for the things I’ve done to try to make sure they’re comfortable and happy staying here. So I decided I didn’t want to stop entirely, but just to manage the number of visitors I have. About once a month felt right.

I also realised that I need to take a bit more control over the booking process. Previously, I kept my calendar open and if people asked to stay then I would consider whether it was possible, and sometimes would have to decline because it clashed with another commitment of some kind. I hated declining a request, I found it incredibly hard, so sometimes said yes and then regretted it. If someone asks me for something, I want to say yes. This has been an interesting observation for me, and is something I’ll think about more, but in relation to AirBnB I managed it by blocking out my calendar for any period when a visitor would be inconvenient for me. Also, once I had a booking, I would block out the whole of the rest of that month, so that I wouldn’t have more guests than I felt comfortable with.

I had a third learning experience, more recently. Liverpool is a city where events happen, and this brings visitors. I had three young women staying in my house who had, amazingly, come from the US to see Taylor Swift at Anfield. I had people working at Aintree races staying over the Grand National weekend. I’ve had three young people who had created a wedding planning app staying here while they were promoting it at a big wedding fair in the city centre, and four young people from Darlington who were here for a ComicCon event. All were a delight! But once it became clear that Liverpool FC were likely to win the league, and the victory parade would take place on 26 May, I was contacted by a stream of people who wanted to book my house and were less than delightful. I like to have a bit of a chat with people before I accept their booking, and I steer clear of people with no reviews, because I need to feel comfortable with whoever I allow to stay in my home, and the people who were trying to book for this particular weekend were often really unpleasant about this, with one being exceptionally abusive and subsequently banned by AirBnB. This all came as a shock to me, because I hadn’t experienced it before – this was a very different population to those who usually want to book my place. Once I realised what was going on, I blocked out that whole period on my calendar, so nobody could request to book, but it did leave me feeling shaken up.

Which brings me back, I suppose, to my more fundamental niggles with AirBnB. One is that the model has so clearly caused problems in some places. Whilst I’m renting out my own home, and I’ve stayed in other AirBnBs which have been the host’s main residence, the majority seem to be business investments. When good rented housing is so difficult to come by, AirBnB is exacerbating the problem, and creating areas where there is no community at all, just a transient population of visitors. Secondly, AirBnB rent out homes which are illegally located on Palestinian land in the West Bank. There is clearly no moral compass underpinning the company’s activities – it’s a purely money-making initiative, even if it didn’t start out that way. The moment when I couldn’t look away from this any more was when I saw the AirBnB co-founder amongst the acolytes at Trump’s inauguration. Now I learn he’s part of the team that have devastated humanitarian aid budgets, amongst other disasters. This really makes me question what I’m doing, and whether I want to contribute to this business, even if the flexibility and convenience of it suits me.

I began AirBnBing my house with enthusiasm, and the experience has gifted me in many ways. It’s made me very much appreciate my home and the area I live in, and I do love sharing it with others who also get pleasure from it. A year into my AirBnB experience, though, I’m not so sure it’s the best way for me to share the delights of my home. I think the time might have come to explore house-exchange sites instead.