How a homestay pays for itself between school holidays

Mostly, a homestay doesn't pay for itself between school holidays. On my made-up sums, the holidays make the profit and the weeks between only have to get close to the instalment, which is a less romantic business than the listing photos suggest.

The published income figures are old and thin. The Edge reported in 2018 that a typical Malaysian host earned about US$1,200 from Airbnb in 2017, and that this had been slipping. Hosts include people letting a spare room, so it tells you little about a whole unit with a loan on it.

So the next section is invented, and I'd rather you borrowed the method than the numbers.

One invented unit

Say a condo unit has an instalment of two thousand ringgit a month. Add three hundred and fifty for maintenance and sinking fund, which is where your share of the guard lives, and three hundred for power, water and internet.

That's two thousand six hundred and fifty ringgit before the first guest has opened the door.

Now say it sells at a hundred and eighty a night, and the platform keeps five ringgit in every hundred. The cleaner gets sixty a stay, and I'll call the average stay two nights, since that same report put it at 2.2 in 2017.⁴ So each night leaves about a hundred and forty.

The unit needs about nineteen nights a month to cover itself. That's most of a month, every month, and nobody's school holidays are that long.

Nights sold in a month, all made up

A holiday month at twenty-six nights clears about a thousand ringgit. A quiet month at ten falls about twelve hundred and forty short.

I may not be pessimistic about that quiet month. A rental tracker quoted by The Edge put whole-place listings in Malaysia at about 34% to 36% occupancy in the first quarter of 2017, which is ten or eleven nights a month. It's one old quarter, but it's the only such figure I found, and it's closer to my quiet month than to my nineteen.

Give it two holiday months, six ordinary ones and four quiet ones. That's a hundred and eighty-eight nights, and on these sums the year ends about five thousand three hundred ringgit short.

Two things are kind to this picture, and one is unkind. I've kept the rate flat and left out furniture and repairs. But part of any instalment repays the loan, so not all of that shortfall is gone.

What happens between the holidays

Look at what a booking costs, and the middle of the calendar makes more sense. On a one-night stay the cleaner takes a third of the rate, so some nights really do just pay the cleaner.

Move the average stay from two nights to four, at the same rate, and the unit needs about seventeen nights instead of nineteen. If I owned one, that's where I'd look first: a weekly rate for someone between houses, or on a long work trip, before I touched the weekend price. I've no data on how many such people there are, only the arithmetic.

The boring tenant

The real competitor isn't the hotel down the road. Say an ordinary tenant pays eighteen hundred ringgit a month and looks after their own bills.

The owner then tops up five hundred and fifty a month, or six thousand six hundred a year. So my homestay beats the tenant by about thirteen hundred ringgit a year, for a great deal more work.

More nights would widen that gap quickly, because each one adds about a hundred and forty. But the tenant isn't going to get voted out by the neighbours.

The vote you don't control

Here's the risk that isn't in the sums. In a 2022 opinion piece, The Edge's editor emeritus wrote that residents in strata properties can vote for or against short-term stays at an extraordinary general meeting.

If it's adopted, and only if it doesn't conflict with existing by-laws, the resolution goes to the local authority. The piece also points out that nobody had clearly defined a short-term stay, whether that means a day, a week or up to three months.

Then there's the wider politics. That same piece records Penang's state executive councillors in 2022 talking first of a ban and then of regulating, with no decision announced when it went to print.¹

In 2019, Airbnb itself proposed a national framework with online registration and a tourism tax.

In September 2025, The Vibes reported that the tourism ministry would study licensing operators and having them pay tax to local authorities, after some three years of lobbying by the hotel association. That's a proposal being studied, as reported, and I can't tell you where it lands.

What I'd add to the sums

If I were running these sums for real, I'd add a line for a licence and a tax I can't price yet. I'd also read the building's by-laws before the brochure. A vote can take the income to nothing, and the instalment doesn't care.

I've left tax out of the sums altogether, because I couldn't pin down from a source I could date what a small private host owes. That's one for an accountant, before the first guest.

Same word, different animal

One last thing, because the word itself misleads. The tourism ministry has its own Malaysia Homestay Experience programme, and a 2022 piece records a Penang state exco member calling it approved by the ministry together with the local councils.¹

Its visitors spent a peak of RM30.1 million in 2017, across 382,961 people.¹ My sum makes that about RM79 a visitor, a very different thing from a condo near the mall.¹

The exco member holding Penang's tourism portfolio said that year that kampung-style homestays wouldn't be affected by the ban on high-rise units.¹ So when someone tells you homestays are fine, I'd ask which kind they mean.