From the founder

Managing My Real Estate Investment Made Me $5K/hr

Compared to my 65-hour-a-week tech job.

Bola Akinsanya · Founder, Unlevered· July 8, 2026

My second property was my last hurrah, and I timed it that way on purpose.

I had just been asked to come help build the Services business at Airbnb, the things you actually need when you travel, like grocery delivery or an airport pickup. I knew it would be sixty and seventy hour weeks. I also knew there was a sabbatical waiting on the other side, and I had a plan for the gap.

The refund from my first study, Timber Ridge, had just come through. And when it landed, something clicked. I should do this again, sell all my early, high tax long term gain Airbnb shares and use a second property to do it. Second time around, I knew how to structure my days and manage the project while managing a two kid household, high pressure from my job, and a lovingly crazy project manager on East Coast time.

People hear “material participation” and they panic. A hundred hours a year, on top of a high stress job, with two kids. It sounds impossible. A friend of mine had been told by her advisor or CPA that she couldn’t do this at all, that she would need five hundred hours and real estate professional status for any of it to count. A short term rental has its own path, one that opens access to deductions for about a hundred hours a year, not five hundred. Spread across a normal work week, a hundred hours a year is about twenty minutes a day. You could also do the whole thing on a weekend. It is relatively simple once someone shows you the shape of it.

Maybe this isn’t advice, but here is how I actually thought about it.

You can always turn your salary into an hourly rate. That is the first move. I was working sixty to seventy hour weeks and making around a million dollars a year, so even with the math, my hour was worth a few hundred dollars. High, by any measure.

Then I ran the same math on the house. A five hundred thousand dollar deduction against my income, earned across roughly a hundred hours of real work. That is five thousand dollars an hour. At any given moment, the hour on the house was the most valuable hour I had. So it went first.

My alarm went off at five. The first hour I spent with my project manager on the East Coast houses. The second hour was procurement and sourcing, which I ran entirely myself, the same playbook I had used the first time. Get the house ready, host it, then run the remodel. By seven I switched to my Airbnb job and ran that until five or six, answering the manager between meetings. Five to eight belonged to my kids. Then, after family, I went back to the corporate work for most of the evening, with maybe one more hour on the property to close the day. Two hours in the morning, one at night. That was the whole footprint.

I put the house first every time. Loving it had nothing to do with it. That hour was simply worth more.

I have been talking to a lot of CPAs lately, and the honest thing they say is, well, not everyone is like you. I understand it, but I don’t think that is the real reason. I think it is that no one breaks it down simply. This is a specialty gap. Most preparers are trained to file what you hand them, and correctly. Identifying and structuring this is a different skill, and it is not the one they were hired for.

Because here is the reassuring part. You can do more work on your business than anyone else and still not have to physically be there. I do all of it. Inventory, the Costco runs, ordering, coordinating my cleaner, and when something breaks that day, connecting the guest to my handyman, paying him, talking through what he wants to do next. Add it up and it is about two hours a week. Export your cleaning schedule, send it to your cleaner, answer your people, move on. That is twenty minutes a day, if you spread it out.

And you only have to be the primary host that first year. After that you can hand it to a property manager, take the twenty percent cut, and keep the expenses and the ongoing depreciation. The hours have to be real, and you have to write them down. Year two is a smaller deduction, state treatment varies, and there is recapture when you sell. But you do not need real estate professional status, and it is not the scary thing people make it into.

So my second move was really a way of thinking, and the property was just where I put it to work. I timed the purchase to the exact moment I was leaving, priced my hours honestly, and let the more valuable hour win. That is the whole strategy. Know what your time is worth, and then spend it like you mean it.

If you are a CPA, work with us to surface these opportunities for your clients. If you are an individual, contact us with questions or support. We are happy to help connect you.

This is a personal story, not tax advice. The figures are illustrative, from the author’s own second study; a deduction lowers taxable income and is not a refund. Whether any of this applies to your household depends on facts a blog post cannot know, including qualification under the passive activity rules and how your state treats it. Talk to your own tax professional. See our full disclaimer.