It’s easy to reap the rewards of renting out your property

Dream of paying off your mortgage several years early? Discover why renting out a spare room or even your entire house could pay dividends

Fancy making between £400 and £870 extra a month just for making sure you have clean sheets and are never out of coffee and cornflakes? Or around £1,500 while you’re away on your own holiday? If you have a spare bed or a temporarily vacant home, you can make it work for you by posting its availability on Airbnb.

It is just over a decade since cash-strapped roommates Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky blew up three airbeds in their San Francisco loft, hoping to make a few bucks renting them out to designers heading in for a big conference. They sweetened the deal with a morning meal and launched it as Air bed and breakfast.

Eleven years on and a few letters less, it has nearly 5 million lodgings listed across more than 191 countries and 81,000 cities. That’s a lot of beds, but Airbnb has clocked up 300 million+ guests. It is worth an estimated $31 billion.

Its genius is it gives anyone a chance to host so long as they have a space people are willing to rent. It doesn’t even have to be a bed (or airbed); couches and patches of lawn (for tents) are acceptable to those who are more about location and lack of funds than luxury.

How much you can make depends what you have to offer and where; but Airbnb has a tool that estimates likely monthly earnings, whether you’re letting a single bunk in a shared room in Manchester or a whole house for half a dozen in London. To become a host, you need to

create a listing, upload some flattering (but accurate) pictures of what you have to rent out and set a (realistic) price. You’ll have to supply essentials, like clean sheets, towels and toilet paper, and a secure way for guests to get into your home. Guests pay before they arrive and you get paid after they check in, minus a service fee.

For many, it is the way to make a little income from whatever spare space they have where someone could sleep. But the sheer variety of the accommodation on offer is impressive. You can live like a king (there are nearly 3,000 castles) or a caveman. Or perhaps you might prefer a yurt, a gypsy caravan, an underground bunker, a former abbey or church, a repurposed jet or one of 1,400 treehouses.

The model hasn’t been without its issues. Countries are cracking down on the short-term letting free-for-all, fearing it is depriving long-term renters of places to stay. And there are laws in some cities that may impact hosting paying guests. Then there are the horror stories – premises being used as brothels/drug dens or wild parties that trashed homes. Airbnb has a $1 million (£600,000 in the UK) host guarantee, which is what it’ll pay up to in repairs for a home. But the chances of anyone needing to claim are remote as the site bans ‘bad actors’ (we assume that’s miscreants, not hammy thespians), and last year had so few reports of damage amounting to more than $1,000, it says, ‘You could host every day for over 63 years without expecting to file a significant property damage claim.’