Geoff Marlow spent 34 years teaching history in Ipswich and planned a quiet retirement. Instead the 68 year old runs three Airbnb cottages in Southwold, one of the most contested holiday let markets in England, where second-home premiums and local resentment run high.
Marlow says his holiday let investment now out-earns his pension, but the era of easy staycation money is over. He talks overpaying at the 2021 peak, losing his favourite tax break, and why he keeps his lights on all winter.
A retired history teacher is not the typical Airbnb host. How did this happen?
My wife and I bought a bolthole in Southwold in 2011 for £280,000, mostly with an inheritance. We let it out the weeks we were not there, purely to cover the bills.
Then I retired in 2018, looked at the booking calendar and realised the cottage earned more in August than I did in a term. We remortgaged, bought the second cottage in 2019 and the third in 2021.
What do the numbers look like?
The three cottages gross around £110,000 a year in bookings at roughly 65 per cent occupancy, he says. After cleaning, maintenance, insurance, utilities and platform fees I keep a little over half of that.
It comfortably out-earns my teachers’ pension, which after 34 years of marking feels faintly ridiculous. I do feel slightly guilty about it.
What is the biggest mistake you have made?
Buying the third cottage in June 2021, at the absolute top of the staycation frenzy. I paid £640,000 for a two-bed I would struggle to sell for £560,000 today, he claims.
I underwrote it on 2021 bookings, when the whole country was barred from Spain. Never buy on a freak year’s figures. A historian should have known better. Every boom looks permanent from the inside.
The tax landscape for holiday lets has changed sharply. How has that hit you?
Losing the furnished holiday lettings regime hurt. Full mortgage interest relief and the capital allowances were a big part of my sums, and they went.
I own everything personally, which made sense a decade ago. I am now paying an accountant to tell me whether it still does, and anyone in my position should read up on the sole trader versus limited company question before assuming the old answer holds.
Southwold has led the backlash against second homes. Do you feel unwelcome?
Sometimes, and I understand it. The double council tax premium costs me thousands and I pay it without complaint.
But there is a difference between a locked-up second home and a working holiday let. My cottages are lit and occupied most of the winter, my cleaners, gardener and window cleaner are all local, and my guests fill the pubs in November. Southwold does not need another ghost house. Mine are not.
Refurbishment costs must bite on period cottages.
Constantly. Salt air eats everything, and guests are harder on a house than any tenant. I rebudget every January, and I watch anything that moves trade prices, including what the Howdens deal means for refurbishment costs, because a kitchen in a holiday let lasts five years, not fifteen.
What is next?
Not a fourth cottage. Prices here still make no sense against the new tax rules. Instead I am chasing winter occupancy, pushing direct bookings to cut platform fees, and adding a hot tub to the 2021 cottage to rescue its returns.
The goal is the same income from the same three houses with fewer empty nights.
What would you tell another retiree tempted by holiday lets?
Treat it as a small hospitality business, not a pension top-up. Someone will message you about a broken boiler on Christmas morning.
And do your sums on a bad year, not a good one. If the numbers only work at 2021 occupancy, they do not work.
