After finding love on national television three years ago, JoJo Fletcher and Jordan Rodgers are returning to the big screen to star in their own home renovation show.
Fletcher, 28, and Rodgers, 30, first gained fame as the winning couple from season fourteen of the Bachelorette, where around 30 men compete to propose to one woman during an eight week whirlwind romance. Now, the still-engaged pair will host Cash Pad on CNBC, which follows their adventures to renovate underutilized and sometimes strange spaces into charming short-term rentals all over Texas.
“Over the past year, we really started to think about this new trend of Airbnbs and short term rentals,” Rodgers said. “Every time we traveled, we enjoyed staying in them, and we saw a niche market we wanted to capture.”
Short term rentals are now a hundred billion dollar industry and, according to Fletcher, they are a particularly great boon for those with underused, detached spaces in their homes looking to make a little extra cash. On Cash Pad, Fletcher and Rodgers partner with eight homeowners in Texas to transform their properties in under a week. They tackle everything from an old shipping container to a backyard Airstream, all in hopes of creating a lucrative short term rental in up-and-coming tourist areas.
“On this show, we assume all the risk,” Fletcher said. “We paid for the renovations, and we’re the ones renovating it. Our homeowners don’t have to deal with anything. We just have to make sure the risk pays off in the end, and that we’re not in a huge hole.”
Their money-making deal is to provide the homeowners with a free renovation and a fixed amount of property income per month, while Fletcher and Rodgers take the rest of the rental profit. After four years, the short term rental is returned back to the homeowners. In a preview of Cash Pad’s first episode, Fletcher and Rodgers help a couple in Stonewall, Texas renovate a small cottage for what Rodgers estimates will cost $35,000 to $50,000. The homeowners are promised $700 a month in passive income.
Because they were working with short term rentals, Rodgers said, they could renovate three or four places for the same price as a long term rental. The couple is hoping to make the money back in “a year to two years at the most, so we can actually see a profit at the other side of it.”