How to Airbnb: getting started
When I started Airbnb, I didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars. I just had my rental apartment. It wasn’t even a great apartment. The carpet was thin and worn, the blinds had gaping holes, there was no dishwasher or washing machine. It was your typical no-frills starter apartment.
The apartment’s one redeeming feature was its location right smack-dab in the center of downtown Ann Arbor, across the street from my favorite pizza place (the main reason I got it) and a three-minute walk from the University of Michigan’s campus. While it was three-hundred dollars over my initial budget of $1,000 per month, I had an inkling that I might try listing it on Airbnb; I knew if I did, the location couldn’t hurt.
I was planning an internship out of town that summer, so I decided to give Airbnb a shot. The worst case was that I might make a bit of rent money and learn something new.
A week before I left town, I cleaned up the place, took some crappy phone pictures, did some light price research, and submitted the listing to Airbnb. By the time I woke up in the morning, my listing had been approved, and I had my first guest. Woohoo!
My internship hadn’t started yet, so I stayed at my girlfriend’s place during my first guest’s trip, Chelsea from the prologue. After checking out, she left a nice review but only four stars. Crap — this might be harder than I expected! Apparently, my version of “clean” was not the same as everyone else’s. I watched some YouTube videos on how to make the place sparkle, dropped my price even lower, and waited for my next booking.
The next day, I got my second booking, a couple this time. My internship was still almost a week away, so it was the same drill as before . . . only this time they gave me an ok review and three-stars. Ugh. This was not going well — even though my prices were super low. This guest didn’t like my towels, my bedding, or even my mattress. I ordered brand-new expensive-ish linens and enlisted a friend to help run the place while I was gone.
I left for my internship before the next guest arrived. This one was staying for a whole month and paying me more than a months rent…assuming nothing went wrong. Everything being out of my control I hounded my friend with reminders to watch cleaning youtube videos and clean really well. I reminded him at least five times to meet with the guest. Needless to say I was pretty nervous. This was a lot of money for me. A little more than $1600 from what at that point was still a three-week long experiment. Luckily everything went off without a hitch. My friend met the guest, handed over the keys, gave the tour, and gave his contact info should anything come up.
Silence for a whole month. No complaints. No communication except to ask for a good bar in the area. When he finally checked out he left a stellar review and 5 stars! Finally! And that’s not all — the guest, a Superhost himself, left that invaluable list of twenty ways to improve the place which became the basis of this book and the about face from a failing Airbnb host to Superhost and then later multi-Airbnb Superhost. My friend and I dutifully implemented each of his suggestions, as well as adding our own. From that point on, we transformed my three-star apartment into a five-star Airbnb, and I went on to set up five more Airbnbs in town to form a mini Airbnb empire.
This book is designed to teach you the formula I created to repeatedly set up successful Airbnbs and run them remotely. In fact, I have a one-hundred-percent, two-time-return-on-investment success rate. (If this sounds impressive, that’s because it is: it means that every one of my five Airbnbs, along with the more than thirty Airbnbs that my students have set up, have returned twice the amount of money we put into them. Not bad, huh?)
I started with limited risk — just my own apartment while I was away to get my feet wet — and I highly recommend that you start this way too. Sure, you could go out and find a great place in a great location where you don’t live, sign a six- or even twelve-month lease, plop down $4,000 for the deposit and furnishings . . . but then you’ve spent a bunch of time and money on something you haven’t tested for yourself and may not work out the way you expect. If it doesn’t work out and the listing gets bad initial reviews it’s really difficult to recover without taking a loss. My first summer with Airbnb paid my rent and gave me confidence, but I made a third of what I made the subsequent summers largely due to the time it took to recover from those first bad reviews.
Airbnb your own place, implement the formula I’ll teach you in this book, and see how much you can earn. Test different days, weekends, holidays, and events. Some holiday-weekend Airbnb stays can even help pay for your own weekend trip. Once you get comfortable with the revenue and gain confidence in your hosting skills, then feel free to go out and get a dedicated Airbnb place.
During this testing phase, you may find that your Airbnb is just not profitable, no matter what you do. This is due to either seasonality or location. I’ll go much more into depth on both later on, but here are the basics: If the lack of interest is seasonal, you’ll need to try during the travel season. If it’s based on location, you may need to research a better place for your Airbnb property.
Pick up the book to learn how to start your own Airbnb: https://amzn.to/3gUwjh5
