WTF Happened to the Winners of Airbnb’s $10M OMG! Fund?

In June 2022, when Airbnb announced that it would give away $10 million to help bring "100 of the world’s craziest listing ideas" to fruition, the global design contest stirred up a whirlwind of online attention. It was the kind of flashy marketing moment the short-term rental company has since honed in on; the platform had only just launched its Categories feature about a month earlier. When the 100 winning submissions were announced that October, Airbnb advertised that the recipients would each get $100,000 to make their OMG! category rentals guest-ready by summer 2023.

As of yet, however, only a handful are available to rent, and while some OMG! Fund winners, like the couple behind the "Squatch Watch" cabin in Washington State, have posted about their project-delaying hurdles, others have seemingly disappeared into the internet ether. That’s not to say they’ll never be available: They could pop up on Airbnb tomorrow, fully formed like this Arkansas Candy Cottage or Dragon Egg tree house in Argentina. It’s just that the contest’s original timeline, which asked typically novice builders to take on what were arguably some pretty varsity-level builds, might’ve been a little lofty.

Take, for instance, the pig-shaped guesthouse Central Texas Pig Rescue founders Dan Illescas and Tracey Stabile are building on their animal sanctuary outside Austin. Illescas and Stabile—who also both work full-time in addition to running the pig rescue—say Airbnb has been extremely sympathetic to their lengthier build timeline, especially considering they didn’t get the final portion of their winnings until December 2022. The pair say they underestimated the technical aspects of building in a field, off the grid, and under the Texas sun. Last summer, for instance, Illescas was working on putting together a cedar lattice meant to look like a reclined pig’s head when he started getting overheated. Realizing it was 110 degrees out, he says, "I just looked at what I was doing and said, yeah, I’m gonna stop. If we’re going to go to Airbnb jail, then so be it."

While Illescas and Stabile say their Earth Pig, which is built around a Z-shaped shipping container configuration that’s been covered in tons of trucked-in dirt, is starting to look beautiful on the exterior, they haven’t really started work on the interior. They’ve made some decisions and purchases, such as rock-like spray foam walls, Texas limestone pieces for the floor, and a recycled bottle wall in the bathroom, but they don’t think the guesthouse will be fully operational until the spring of 2025.

They also say that while they’re used to savvy budgeting and, as a nonprofit, get some breaks on taxes and building materials, they’ve spent way more than their $100,000 OMG! Fund winnings. Simply installing a septic system for the structure was a huge expense, as was procuring battery storage to make it entirely off-grid. They say that without Airbnb’s money they never would have pursued building something like this, though they don’t regret it. "One hundred percent of what we’ll bring in will go toward the animals and helping us sustain our operation," says Stabile. "The pig house will give people a really creative and clever way to spend time with pigs, and that’s really our mission."

Thousands of miles away on a kangaroo habitat in Daylesford, Australia, modular building company Elsewhere Pods owner Matt Decarne is also still working on his OMG! Fund–winning design for a cantilevered glass structure he’s calling "the Kangaroom." (Kangaroos, he asserts, are also cantilevered given that "their tails are a massive counterbalance.") Even with the leg up of having his company, figuring out how to take the structure entirely off-grid has been a bit of a process, Decarne says. His team also ran up against Australia’s strict building regulations, and it took months to get their planning approvals. "We’re hoping to start installing in February or March," Decarne says, adding that while a typical Elsewhere Pod could go up in a few days, the Kangaroom will likely take anywhere from two to three weeks to complete. He estimates his team will probably spend about $450,000 Australian (or about $303,000 USD) before they’re finished—about three times what they got from Airbnb.

OMG! Fund winner Whitney Hansen’s giant Flower Pot rental in Burley, Idaho, went up on Airbnb last December, only a few months behind schedule. Hansen already operated an off-grid geodome Airbnb in the mountains of Idaho when she learned about the OMG! Fund contest and had the idea to build a massive terra-cotta pot structure on the same plot where her mom cultivated a flower garden. Though Hansen had a rendering artist and a draftsperson work on her plans before the design was actually selected as one of the winners, she says she still wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be to build it. Finding a framer for the flared-out walls of the structure was particularly difficult. "It took us almost three months of calling probably 20 to 50 people a week just trying to find someone that was both qualified and interested," Hansen says.

Once she and her mom finally found a framer for the project, the complex job of framing the 400-square-foot structure took about two weeks to finish. "They essentially had to do two sheets of quarter-inch drywall everywhere to get the taper we needed, and that’s in addition to the round walls," says Hansen. "There were so many different drywall seams that even making sure it was all mudded well enough and that it looked good was a challenge." 

Hansen has continued to build out the Flower Pot’s offerings since it opened, even adding a rooftop patio. She says that all in, she’ll probably have spent around $160,000.

In Arkansas, OMG! Fund winner Natalie Jones and her husband, Mark, took out a home equity loan against their own property to pay for the remainder of the roughly $330,000 they estimate it cost to build their Stargazing Planetarium Tree House. Their main expenses included an expensive retaining wall and the cost of pouring a foundation, as well as a geodesic dome that came in a kit, which they used to build out the living space, and a massive polycarbonate dome that caps off the planetarium, which they ordered directly from China, and, the couple says, was hung up in shipping limbo for months. "I don’t see how you lose something that big," Natalie says. The couple live in an unincorporated part of their county, so they never had to seek out city permits beyond "connecting to the water," she adds.

The Joneses tried really hard to meet Airbnb’s original August 2023 deadline, though they missed it by a few months, launching their OMG! rental listing in November. They’ve had quick success thanks to Natalie’s job as a motion graphics designer, which gives her some familiarity with the best way to do social media posts. "I was trying to ramp up as much attention as possible through Instagram," she says, "so we ended up partnering with a few local travel influencers. One of the videos went very viral and [all of the sudden] we were getting bookings coming in every hour. We were booked out solid for a few months almost immediately."

Social media has played a big part in Vivian Chan and Olivia Su’s winning OMG! Fund rental design, too—even though it’s not yet finished. The Greenville, South Carolina, Tiny Dice House is pretty much what it sounds like: Two dice, stacked on top of each other, paying tribute to the pair’s love of board games. Though the 288-square-foot house has already become the de facto home of the Tiny Dice Buddies, an animated series Chan and Su created during the construction process, which has gathered thousands of online followers. The pair have taken care to pay attention to tiny details, like the way the "dots" of the die, which form the home’s windows, add up to seven. They also devised a Tetris-themed shower and a spiral staircase inspired by Jenga blocks. The project website says it’ll be completed in 2024.

Down in Costa Rica, Rainforest Beehive owner Esteban Arguedas Chacon sees his build as not just an investment in his own future, but in the region it occupies. Though he won his chunk of the OMG! Fund for a design meant to hold just four people, he ultimately decided to scale his plan to a multi-cell structure that can house anywhere between 12 and 14. He worked with an architect friend to get everything together for the project before he even had the Airbnb prize money, contracting her family—who conveniently own a boutique construction company—to build it. Chacon says because the crew was willing to commit to the build on a handshake basis, they were able to be ready to roll when the $100,000 came in from Airbnb in January 2023. Three days later, they were breaking ground, and about a week later they were on-site putting up structures. "They’d done their homework," he says, "and they were ready for everything."

The company’s owner, his friend’s dad, lived on-site throughout the entire build, something that ended up being pretty essential considering the home’s location on a mountain and in the rainforest. "The weather was a huge challenge," Chacon says. "We were supposed to have a dry season but it was raining all the time and the trucks kept getting stuck in the mud. It became a challenge to even get materials."

Now that it’s up and running, though, Chacon says he’s seen not just a steady stream of visitors to the house, but also a corresponding uptick in local tourism. "We're not in a touristy area," he says. "We’re in the forest and people have to come all the way out there to have this experience, so it’s been amazing. But it’s also created a ripple effect, because now more people are building little cabins to put on Airbnb, and we even have a neighbor that got ATVs to give eco-tours. It fills my heart to think of that kind of success not just for us, but for the community."

As part of the terms for the contest, OMG! Fund winners are contractually obligated to list their properties solely on Airbnb for one year following completion, after which they can branch out to other short- or long-term rental sites. Katie Grant, whose acorn-shaped Nut House outside Denton, Texas, is among the OMG! Fund projects now listed on the platform, says one of the competition winners somehow managed to track a bunch of others down, creating a WhatsApp group for them to share questions, concerns, and even frustrations about the process. There are about 60 winners in there now, she estimates, all at various stages in building. "We message about all kinds of stuff," Grant says.

Winners have shared horror stories about weather, equipment, and material delays, as well as how they’re spending their money. "I don’t think in the U.S. anyone would be able to complete their build for $100,000," Grant says, "but there are people in the chat that say they’ve had no problem because they’re in a different country." They’ve also been able to reassure each other about the timeline, since Grant says the agreement the OMG! Fund winners signed didn’t stipulate any sort of penalties for opening their rentals after August 2023. "We kept saying, ‘What’s going to happen if someone doesn’t finish? Are they going to ask for the money back?’ There’s nothing in the contract, so we just don’t know."

It’s entirely possible that Airbnb doesn’t know either. When Dwell reached out to the short-term rental platform in April about the status of the delayed OMG! Fund projects, as well as whether there would be an announcement when all 100 winning designs were active listings, a representative from DKC, a PR firm that represents Airbnb, said there would be "a much more comprehensive update on the OMG! recipients and their builds closer to June." In early October, however, Airbnb’s communication lead Natalie Shalk responded to our follow-up about the still-unfinished projects and plans for a comprehensive "reveal" of the outcomes, saying: "At this time, we are not planning a formal launch of the OMG! listings," also pointing to seven projects from the competition that are now active Airbnb rentals, among them the Nut House, Flower Pot, and Rainforest Beehive.

"It’s sort of like they almost forgot about the contest," says Jones, of the Stargazing Planetarium Tree House in Arkansas. "I don’t think anyone in the contest has really heard from Airbnb directly, though we’re all hoping they’ll try and promote our houses. It’s hard. So many people haven’t finished, so we just keep getting put off." 

One can only hope that when the company does decide it’s reached an OMG! inflection point, the rollout will be worthy of that $10 million spend.

Top photo of the Rainforest Beehive in Costa Rica by Wilberth Gutierrez

Related Reading:

Airbnb Is Trying to Breathe New Life Into the Party House

What It’s Actually Like to Stay in One of Those Movie-Home Replicas on Airbnb