How to make £8,000 by going on holiday

This Easter, will you be turning your home into a hotel? Thanks to a growing breed of London home-rental agencies, your house no longer needs to sit empty and attract burglars when you go on holiday. Instead, it can be hard at work, posing as a boutique getaway, earning you a nice contribution to your travels.

A week’s rental can pay for a family to fly to Europe and back. It’s money for old rope.

But what happens when it all goes wrong? Last Christmas, my friend swanned off to Zanzibar, leaving paying guests in situ, only to get an emergency call when her ceiling collapsed onto the dining table in the middle of the tourists’ roast turkey. Others I know have had carpets splattered and new kitchen worktops streaked with bleach. The adage “Don’t be gentle, it’s a rental” applies as readily to homes as to hire cars, it seems.

Despite this, we decided to get in on the act and registered our home with an agency for the Christmas holidays. There was just time to cut keys before we flew off. As we left the country, the agency mentioned a French family that might be interested in staying but we heard nothing more.

Ten days later, we returned, three children, one dog and nine enormous suitcases in tow. It was 9pm on the New Year’s Eve weekend and the children were exhausted. As our taxi pulled up outside our house, we noticed light blazing from the living room. We turned the key in the lock to hear French conversation coming from the kitchen. Sitting at our table, forks poised over steaming lamb chops, were a family with four children. We felt like Goldilocks’ bears, only far less forgiving. My husband, already nervous of the whole home-rental concept, had a meltdown and threatened to call the police. The French father leapt to his feet. I could feel a duel in the offing and took my husband by the elbow, explaining in broken French that the agency had made a terrible cock-up and we had had no idea they were staying. Zut alors! I ran outside to ring the agency.

By the time I returned, my husband and the French man were drinking a glass of red wine, all seven of our collective children were watching David Attenborough, and the poor mother was frantically packing. Twenty minutes later, a cab pulled up with a very red-faced agency manager inside. He whisked the family off to The Hilton Hyde Park, where they were given a suite, with free food and drink for the rest of their five-day holiday.

This would never happen to you if you ran your own bookings, through agencies such as homeaway.co.uk or airbnb.com. These are popular options as you can vet your own guests, employ your own trusted cleaner and, best of all, keep most of the money. To list with homeaway.co.uk you pay from £249 a year. If you own a three-bedroom home in central London and are away for six weeks a year, you can easily clear £7,000 a year. With airbnb, bookings tend to be shorter but enquiries come thick and fast, and you needn’t live in a glamorous upscale location — homes in Harlesden and White City get booked too.

If your home is both chic and central, however, you’d qualify for a listing with Onefinestay, a home-rental firm that has seen its business explode since starting in 2010. Its clients are looking for a high-end travel destination so if you are even a little houseproud, the vetting process can be daunting; to have your furnishing taste deemed unfit for guests would be thoroughly mortifying.

But once you’re in, the agency makes home rentals a hassle-free experience. Bookings are done online. Your property is styled and photographed for the site. Our neighbour’s house — more shabby than chic — looks so good in the shots I’m tempted to stay there myself. As “host”, all you have to do is clear one wardrobe per bedroom and put your valuables in a taped-off room or cupboard. The agency then comes in shortly after you’ve left and gives the property a serious makeover. Beds are dressed in smart white linen and bathrooms given the hotel “fluffy white towel and toiletry” treatment. When you return, everything is just as you left it, except that it will be eerily clean; light switches polished and oven gleaming. It’s as though the cleaning fairies have been in.

For its troubles, the agency takes a chunky commission that varies according to the season. Hosts get a fixed rate. With Onefinestay, our four-bedroom north London house, for example, would bring in just £140 a night, whereas a design “temple” in Belgravia could earn £1,000 a night.

In tough times, we’ve got to make our assets work. And perhaps that’s why the business is seeing such huge growth. “It’s been a rollercoaster,” says founder Greg Marsh. “We’ve now got 800 London properties on our books; a 100-fold increase.”

However, Marsh doesn’t think this is just about the recession. “People aren’t choosing to stay in homes because it’s cheaper. Often it can cost just as much to holiday in a beautiful home as a top-end hotel.”