Eveswell Studios: ten studios, £688k in bookings and a near-£1m sale

In January 2021, in the middle of a lockdown, we welcomed the first guest to Eveswell Studios on Chepstow Road in Newport. Three and a half years later the ten studios had taken £688,000 in bookings. The owners then sold the building for close to £1m, more than three times what they had put in.

This is how it worked, and what it says about a property run as a hospitality business.

A building with no comparables

The owners, two private investors, had bought and refurbished a late-Victorian house for about £300,000 and turned it into ten self-contained studios.

Local agents put each studio at £650–700 a month as a long let: roughly £80,000 a year for the whole building. That was the number to beat.

Start with the numbers, not the furniture

Before a single night went on sale, we studied the market by hand: what similar stays were charging, who was booking them and for how long. We built a pricing model for each grade of studio, Premium, Comfort and Standard, so every unit had its own rate.

That is the work pricing software does today. We did it ourselves, and kept doing it every night the studios were open.

Design for the guest who is actually coming

Newport's demand isn't weekend tourism. It's NHS staff on placement at the Grange Hospital, contractors on long projects and people visiting family. So we designed Eveswell as a smart hotel for longer stays:

• contactless entry

• a kitchen, en-suite, washing machine and desk in every studio

• bills included

• a guest guidebook and an online concierge

The average stay was 12.5 nights, and stays of 28 nights or more filled 59% of all nights sold.

Launching in lockdown

We opened on 31 January 2021, when most of hospitality was closed. Key workers and contractors still needed somewhere to stay, and medium-stay lets gave the building income from its first month. In its first eleven months, Eveswell took £124,848 at 81% occupancy.

Direct demand keeps more for the owner

Six in ten nights were booked directly rather than through a booking platform, which kept commission low. Airbnb and Booking.com filled most of the rest, and 49 guests came back for repeat stays.

The results

Year	Bookings	Occupancy
2021 (from 31 Jan)	£124,848	81%
2022	£212,459	88%
2023	£201,985	84%
2024 (to 30 Aug)	£149,083	90%

That is around £200,000 a year in bookings, against about £80,000 as long lets, before management fees and the bills a serviced building carries. In the final 23 months alone the owners received £270,600, and they put the last full year's profit at around £100,000. Guests rated the studios 4.77 out of 5 across 198 Airbnb reviews.

When the owners decided to sell in 2024, the building had a proven record of income behind it. It sold for close to £1m.

What it shows

A property's value isn't only in its bricks. Studied, priced and looked after every day to hotel-level standards, a building can take more than twice its long-let rent in bookings and carry that record into a sale.

Read the full Eveswell Studios case study. If you own a property in South Wales and want to know what it could earn, request a management proposal.

Pedro Reis, Founder, Guesture