When Wendy Chen sent her youngest daughter off to Stanford in September 2023, the three-bedroom craftsman she'd raised her family in on a quiet street near Pasadena City College started feeling too big.
Selling was hard. The house was the last space her husband had touched before he passed in 2018. The built-in bookcases they'd installed together. The kitchen tile he'd chosen himself from a salvage yard in Monrovia. Every room held a reason not to list it.
What she wanted was harder than selling. She wanted the house to live on as a home — just not hers full-time. She wanted to travel more. She wanted to visit her daughter in Palo Alto without worrying about mail piling up on the porch.
The plan we built kept most of the house intact. Primary bedroom stayed as Wendy's own, with a locked closet for clothes she'd return to. The two kids' rooms and the main living spaces opened up to guests. We installed a lockbox for her personal belongings, rewrote the listing to emphasize the craftsman character instead of hiding it, and built a booking policy that guaranteed Wendy could block her own weeks 45 days out, no questions asked.
The first review her property earned, in March 2024, said: "This feels like staying in someone's actual home, not an Airbnb. In the best way."
In 2024, the house earned $82,300 in gross rental revenue while Wendy spent six months traveling between Palo Alto, Taiwan, and Sedona. She came home in November and slept in her own bed. The house held.
