50-year-old's backyard side hustle brings in up to $8,400 a month: 'There's definitely room for everyone to do this' (2024)

Twice a week, Elizabeth Morosani gets up before 7 a.m., puts on her sun sleeves and spends the next three hours atop a John Deere lawn mower.

Her side hustle requires it: She's converted 11 acres of her land, split between three properties around Asheville, North Carolina, into private dog parks. She rents out the spaces to local pet owners on an Airbnb-style platform called Sniffspot.

Many Sniffspot hosts rent out their backyards. Morosani rents out parts of her 108-acre farm, where she lives and makes a majority of her personal income boarding horses. She has four dogs, and initially launched her side hustle just to connect with other nearby pet owners in November 2020, she says.

Then, the side hustle started bringing in money: a monthly average of $7,100 in revenue for the first half of 2024, including $8,400 in May alone. Roughly half of those earnings are profit, Morosani says. Sniffspot takes nearly a quarter in commissions and fees, and the remainder goes toward maintaining her dog parks.

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Morosani, who dedicates six to eight hours per week to the platform, has used her profits to hire an assistant, buy her $6,500 lawn mower and pay for supplies for additional dogs she fosters — up to 14 at a time, she says.

"I didn't think it'd be this popular, this successful," Morosani, 50, tells CNBC Make It. "It's allowed me to bank some money, [and to] be more aggressive with helping my local humane societies ... If you have space and the ability to give a private experience to individual dog owners, there's definitely room for everyone to do this."

Here's how she built and maintains her side hustle, and how she wants to grow it next.

Morosani's professional life largely revolves around her farm, where she boards horses and occasionally sells goats. She's also a dressage technical delegate — essentially a horse show referee, she says — for the United States Equestrian Federation.

She and her husband, a dentist, bought 40 acres of the farm in 2014, and the remaining 68 in 2019. They didn't use most of their land, and Morosani wanted to change that. An Asheville native, she knew the city's growing number of apartment complexes was outpacing its dog parks.

She learned about Sniffspot from a segment on ABC News' "Good Morning America" in 2020, she says. Today, her most popular rental location is a four-acre plot in Fletcher, North Carolina, that her father leased to her in late 2022. It's an old airstrip that Morosani and her husband built a fence around, and it had its first reservation within 30 minutes of opening, she says.

The plot is near a highway, which makes it accessible to people visiting Asheville from out of town, says Morosani. It's private, flat and has a small creek running through it.

The asphalt, formerly a landing pad for farming and model planes, is now almost entirely covered with grass. You won't find any umbrellas or mini pools there, but you'll probably see a doggy teeter-totter and some weave poles, Morosani says.

Morosani has two rules for anyone looking to rent out their own backyards as private dog parks.

First: Skip the expensive dog toys and amenities. "I put [out] Adirondack chairs from Lowe's, thinking people could use them to sit in the shade," she says. Many of them ended up in ditches and a nearby creek, she says.

Second: Don't greet the guests. "Most clients are grateful their dogs can be dogs without pressure from people or other dogs ... This allows them to get out and be in nature," she says.

Instead, Morosani checks in with her guests by messaging them on Sniffspot. She inspects her dog parks with Ring cameras after every visit, making sure guests don't leave behind too much debris.

More dog parks mean more revenue, so Morosani is leasing three more acres of land from her father in nearby Hendersonville for a fourth space, she says. It's funded largely by her past Sniffspot earnings, costing $18,000 and taking nearly three months to level the ground, build a fence hydroseed it, she says.

The costs and extra labor are part of her goal to help local dogs and their owners, she adds.

"When I read [positive] reviews, I almost cry," says Morosani. "Not long ago, someone told me that [their visit would be on] their dog's last day on Earth. [Owners] have held birthday parties and invited all their friends. Things like that just make you go, 'Oh my god, I'm helping. I'm doing it.'"

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