Kyle Miklasz had one main goal for his Airbnb property: It had to go viral.
Although, following close behind that objective was his desire to have a home his family could use as a vacation spot to create memories—and his most vivid memories were of summers at his grandparents’ barn in Wisconsin.
Miklasz, 34, loved that barn so much that he knew that’s what he wanted. He spent early 2023 working on plans to build one when he realized it might be easier to simply renovate an existing barn.
That led him down the research rabbit hole, hunting the keywords “renovated barn” and “Midwest barn.”
That’s how he found the backlog of popular listings on Realtor.com®, including a link to a page from May 2022. The No. 1 property for that week? It was a 9,000-square-foot, eight-bedroom, six-bathroom barn in Arena, WI. It had been listed for $945,000.
So then the question became—is it still available?
Taking a risk
When he saw that this barn was only 45 minutes from his grandparents’ barn, he became “fixated.”
But the listing for the house was no longer active. Miklasz assumed it had sold, and searched on public tax records to find what price it had traded at.
Only, he found no such record.
He jumped on the white pages and, armed with the name of the seller, he “found every phone number associated with that name, and made 50 phone calls in the next 30 minutes.”
When he finally reached the seller, it turned out they were interested in selling and so Miklasz made plans to meet them in three hours at the property—the soonest he could get there from his home in Chicago.
He jumped right away because the property “seemed too ironic and too good to be true.” At the very least, he would get inspiration for building his own barn.
When he saw it, he knew he had to have it. Twenty minutes of negotiating led the men to agree on a handshake deal for a sale price of $775,000.
Building not just a home, but a destination
Miklasz secured commercial lending for the home, with a plan to put 20% down for the Sept. 1, 2023, closing.
The weeks leading up to the closing proved to be the most challenging of the entire project.
“A lot of people—my parents, my brother, my wife—told me I was crazy,” he says. But he insisted he knew “it was going to work.”
It had to. He had depleted his life savings from his career in data sales. He had also taken out a HELOC loan on his primary home as well as a commercial line of credit on a building he owned in Tennessee.
All the while, his wife was skeptical.
“You’ve heard of the husbands with the Power Point presentations? That was me. I went through three rounds of pitching before she got on board,” he explained.
When she finally did, together as a couple, along with additional family members, they maximized the $125,000 renovation budget.
He spent $20,000 on murals by artist Eric Harold, who has since joined Miklasz’ company as creative director.
They spent another $12,000 to install uplighting on 800 feet of fencing “so when you drive by at night you can’t miss this property—it screams ‘venue.’”
They added a nine-hole mini-golf course for $20,000, installed by Adventure Golf and Sports.
The barn property came with indoor and outdoor pools, both of which needed a lot of work. A heater was installed to the outdoor pool, which required digging under concrete to put in a gas line.
The home itself was already updated. The previous owner, who worked in construction, had made it a passion project to renovate it. The walls aren’t drywall, but reclaimed 6-by-6 rough-sawn lumber. The home features custom rock molding.
A “magical” stay
Perhaps what appealed most to Miklasz—and to guests since then—is the barn’s history. It dates to the 1800s and was formerly a working dairy farm. The most distinctive feature might be the rounded, gambrel roof. The home’s lower level, where cows were once milked, is now the space claimed by the mini-golf course.
The history of the barn and that distinctive look helped when Miklasz announced the property on social media as Big Sky Barnhouse.
“I became obsessed with using social media as the OTA,” he says. They launched using renderings, and waited.
The property was completed on September 30, 2023. The couple “left from renovations straight to Mexico” to celebrate their five-year anniversary.
Right away, they were getting five, six, eight bookings a day.
“The calendar filled up so fast,” he says. “People were messaging us so quickly to ask why certain dates were not available.”
In the first 12 months, the property grossed $312,000.
The barn was striking a chord with big groups of people. “There are tens of thousands of Airbnbs in Wisconsin, and right away, we cracked the top 10,” he says, which he was able to determine by using software such as AirDNA and BnbCalc to see how every Airbnb in the state was and is performing.
In the nearly three years since he launched the Arena barn, he has gone on to launch 14 additional properties through the parent company, Big Sky Barnhouse. He has added a wild list of amenities, from an indoor petting zoo in Spring Green, WI, to a helicopter pad to a home in Duluth, MN, where guests can start a helitour from the Airbnb.
The Arena barn, however, remains the No. 1 performing property in his portfolio. The unique architecture combined with the one-of-a-kind amenities is proving to be a secret sauce that he can’t quite duplicate entirely with any other property.
“There’s just something magical about it,” says Miklasz.
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