The Most Amazing And Absurd Places For Rent

Morgan Brennan, Forbes Staff

From: http://www.forbes.com/

I cover real estate, writing about everything from trends in the housing markets to ultra high-end luxury property listings to quantitative lists of the best and worst cities across America. Real estate is in my blood thanks to a broker for a mom and a property developer/landlord for a dad. I have had a front row seat for the real estate market's inflation and subsequent crash over the past decade, these days watching my dad struggle to find tenants and my mom struggle to sell underwater homes. I have been both a homeowner and a renter in the New York area and can't decide which one I prefer. You can also catch me debating economic topics and throwing out stock picks as a regular guest on the 'Forbes on Fox' show on Fox News every Saturday morning. Before taking on the real estate beat, I worked as an Anchor/Reporter in Forbes Video, interviewing everyone from the Jonas Brothers to new IMF chief Christine Lagarde to eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. These days I shoot videos of crazy homes. I graduated from New York University in 2009 with a BA in Anthropology and prior to that I worked in the other end of media as a recording artist with Sony. If you have tips, story ideas or listings to submit for consideration, email me at mbrennan@forbes.com.

You could shack up in a dank apartment or chain hotel room when your job or your family vacation beckons you abroad. But if money is no object, you might consider a more adventurous choice of lodging like, say, an old Boeing 727. In Manuel Antonio, Cost Rica you can rent one for $400 per night or $11,872 per month through Airbnb.com, a San Francisco, CA-based online vacation home rental site.

What does a two bedroom suite carved out of a commercial jetliner entail? For starters an ocean view from a plane balanced on a 50 foot pedestal that’s accessible by a case of spiraling rock staircase. Interiors are paneled in teak wood and both air-conditioned bedrooms boast private baths. A wood deck sits on top of the plane’s right wing, offering views of the local birds and the monkeys.

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Manuel Antonio’s Boeing-turned-apartment is one of many amazing, unusual and strange abodes for rent right now. Airbnb.com, known for its assortment of daily and weekly travel rentals, recently added a “sublet” section to their smorgasbord of listings, which represent vacation housing options in 19,000 cities across 190 countries. The sublet section represents rooms, apartments and homes available for 30–day or longer stays. We asked the company to round up the funkiest, quirkiest places for rent on their site.

Europe has a smattering of centuries-old citadels up for grabs, including a 14-bedroom medieval castle nestled in the hills of Umbria in Italy. The stone stronghold with its vaulted ceilings and hand-painted frescoes, could be your knightly domain for $2,057 (after Airbnb tacks on its processing fees) and up to $61,058 – roughly the price of a posh three bedroom condo rental in New York City – per month.

“People have gotten really creative with what they post…we’re seeing tree houses, castles, water villas in Malaysia” says Joe Gebbia, the co-founder and chief product officer of Airbnb.com, comparing the site’s real estate-centered open marketplace model to that of goods-centered eBay’s. “We actually have so many igloos on the site right now that we had to create an ‘igloos’ category and there are so many boats on the site that we had to create a category for that too.”

One such igloo complex tunnels under the grounds of a ski resort in Krvavec, Slovenia. The Igloo Village Krvavec is built and rebuilt from snow every year. Furniture is adorned in cushy animal furs, which are needed given the chilly 32 degrees to 40 degrees Fahrenheit range inside the icy digs. A night here will cost up to $189 and if you feel so inclined to tough out a month of without heat, $5,610.

Airbnb enables property owners to freely post their listings on the site, extracting a fee when that listing successfully rents out. Renters book properties online with a credit card. If it’s a sublet, that rental payment is extracted and held by the tech startup until the tenant officially moves in. The credit card is automatically charged on the first of every month for the duration of a sublet agreement. It’s strictly up to the landlord and the prospective renter to decide whether they trust each other enough to do business together. Gebbia says Airbnb is trying to make that vetting process easier with user profiles, a reference section (like eBay’s “feedback” reviews section), and new around-the-clock concierge service, tools newly beefed up after the online rental company came under fire for its handling of a user whose home was ransacked this summer by a renter found through the website.

Despite the recent negative attention, Airbnb, founded in 2008, is valued at over $1 billion thanks to hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and Gebbia says the company grew over 800% in 2010. He expects sublets to become an even bigger piece of the company, noting that rapidly growing organic demand on the site for monthly rentals was the catalyst for launching the new sublet section. Igloos and airplanes are just a few of the different types of properties fueling the growth. So far the longest rental through Airbnb is scheduled for 10 months and the most expensive is a Paris, France home fetching $46,000 a month.

Airbnb is not the only company peddling properties for short-term rent. Homeaway, a publicly traded company based in Austin, TX, boasts more than 260,000 vacation rentals on its website, available for one night stays, weeks and in some cases monthly sublets. The company proffers some zany homes for rent as well, like a conch seashell-shaped house in Isla Mujeres, Mexico and a converted railway car in Montana.

Even fashion e-commerce site Gilt Group created a spinoff travel site called Jetsetter. Jetsetter predominantly offers hotel deals but recently it launched a “homes” section to the site. The section offers Groupon-esque flash sales for vacation home rentals. It also presents celebrity homes available for short-term rent like the $2,600 per night Palm Springs, CA home custom built for Frank Sinatra in 1947.