Thinking about putting up your first listing up on Airbnb? Here are 10 things you need to think about BEFORE you start.
Do you have a lonely couch that you’d like to make a few extra bucks from? Have an extra bedroom you could rent? Or maybe you’ve heard about how much your friend is making from hosting on Airbnb and it made you want to get a dedicated unit to rent out? Regardless of what your situation or motivation, here are some important things to think about first.
1) Goal vs Expectation
Yes, we all know you want to make some money from hosting on Airbnb but what is your goal exactly? Just the occasional extra income? A reliable and consistent secondary income? Income replacement? Or build a short term rental empire? Depending on your goals, the amount of capital, time, and risk involved in hosting on Airbnb will be quite different.
A good way to evaluate your goals is to first determine what type of host you want to be.
2) Inviting Strangers to Your Home
When you are hosting on Airbnb, you are literally inviting complete strangers into your home. And if you’re only renting part of your unit and you’ll be staying there, you are going to be spending nights with complete strangers under the same roof in your home!
If the idea of that alone makes you feel uneasy, you’ll need to think long and hard about hosting on Airbnb. If having strangers staying with you is not an option, your only Airbnb route is to find and acquire a dedicated rental unit.
Are you able to comfortably and reliably communicate with and host complete strangers?
3) Time Commitment
Listing and running a successful Airbnb listing could take MUCH more time and effort than you expected, especially in the beginning. Even when you’ve got your procedures down and you’re not spending as much time handling all the bookings, you could still expect to be on call for emergencies whenever you have a guest staying with you. Do you have the time and the flexibility to do what it takes to succeed?
4) Listing Positioning
What makes your unit special or different? Why would a potential guest want to look at your listing and book with you rather than the growing list of other good alternatives? You’ll need a compelling offer that positions your unit favorably among competition. This could include everything from the photos and descriptions on what you choose to highlight to how you go about pricing the unit. Getting the right positioning could take constant adjustments as your market and competition changes. Are you willing to put the time and energy to get your positioning right?
5) Landlord Relations
Unless you own your home, you’ll need to think carefully about how you want to approach and communicate with your landlord to host on Airbnb. Yes, some folks host on Airbnb without their landlord’s knowledge but we strongly urge you to NOT do that. Nothing kills an otherwise good Airbnb deal faster than an angry landlord. Are you ready to speak to them candidly about your short term rental intentions and to demonstrate how you will continue to be one of their best tenants?
6) Neighbor Relations
Whether you own or rent, chances are you will have neighbors. How do you think they will react when (not if) they find out your hosting on Airbnb? This will vary greatly by city and neighborhood.
If your city already has many angry neighbors petitioning the council to ban or restrict Airbnb, you’ll want to extra careful before listing your unit or you could face hefty fines. Ultimately, you’ll need to decide if the potential headaches from your neighbors are worth the effort to host on Airbnb.
How would you respond to angry neighbors?
7) Risk & Liability
Outside of personal safety, you are exposing yourself to a host of other risks by hosting on Airbnb. You’re putting your property at risk of theft. You’re at risk of renting to a squatter. You’ll also risk potential liability risk if your guests get injured or if they damage other property or injure neighbors. With the proper Airbnb liability insurance coverage, you could minimize much of these risks.
8) Optimal Pricing
Pricing is NOT just setting your weekday and weekend rates and then never revisiting again. Unless you are okay with leaving profits on the table, optimal pricing takes time to get right initially and to keep it right as you continue to host on Airbnb. Are you up for the task of constantly monitoring competitive rates and special events in order to keep your pricing optimized for profits? Or better yet, finding a trusted 3rd party pricing partner to help you? Learn more about Airbnb Pricing Strategies.
9) Keeping Up with News & Market
As you can already tell, if you want success as a host on Airbnb, you’ll need to be constantly learning and adapting your listing to the changing market conditions, guest tastes, or even local law. You may have very different kinds of travelers during different seasons that require completely different positioning. Your city may be evaluating a ballot measure that could significantly affect your Airbnb listing (or shut it down). Ready to keep up?
10) Life Interruptions
With all these considerations, you can expect that hosting on Airbnb will interrupt your life in one way or another. Especially if you’re hosting just one unit and not hiring 3rd party listing manager to handle hosting for you, you’ll need to be ready to check guests in and out, do all the cleaning, restocking, and responding to guest inquires, lock outs, neighbor complaints, etc…
Being a successful host on Airbnb can and will interrupt your life, especially if you’re building a portfolio of units. Are you ready for that interruption? Are your spouse, kids, or pets ready for that?
For further reading, check out 100+ Airbnb tips from our friends at BNB Inner Circle.
What are other things one should consider before hosting on Airbnb? Share your thoughts below!
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This free training is brought to you by James Svetec an Airbnb Expert who has managed over $1M in bookings & Symon He, the founder of LearnBNB, the #1 Airbnb hosting education blog.
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Thank you for the helpful info!
Good tips. Thank you. 🙂
I have been a host for more than 1 year and for anyone thinking of hosting I would advise you to think again. It’s definitely not worth it. These are some of the issues I had to face and I am still dealing with it being a host on Airbnb. I live in Suburbia and my neighbors are quite reserved so I’ve had the city inspectors show up three times because of neighbor complaints. It’s obvious your neighbors do not want to see many different people coming in and out of your house at different times of the day especially if they have kids. They have a valid concern that it is a safety issue. So why do people host?
Well i do it for the money. Nobody will really rent out their house to a complete stranger and share the privacy for fun . Like me most people probably do it for money . The other big issue you will have is that Airbnb takes no responsibility for their guests. Their insurance policy that they claim will protect the host and homeowners are a big joke. Try even claiming the smallest thing and they will try to pay you on depreciated cost or just completely wint payout. Another thing is that guest have become smart so they know that complaining to Airbnb for the smallest silliest things would entitle them to get a full refund. For the time that I’ve been doing Airbnb I’ve had nothing but headaches and Airbnb will not take any accountability in terms when something goes wrong. Probably the biggest reason not to do Airbnb is the fact that you can essentially be working or renting out your place for free because Airbnb will not pay you if guest decides to put in a complaint. I have decided to use other platforms that will work with me as a host and see both sides of the story when something goes wrong. I’ve also discovered that you don’t need Airbnb as it is just a lead generation system and hotels have being doing fine without it for many years. The other thing one can do is go to wix and build yourself a functional Hotel website which your guest can book your place and you control the money. Another bad thing is to give Airbnb control of the money because they will not pay you if a small complaint arises they will also not give you the damage deposit or security deposit if the guest damages the place so why would you want to give them that much control. There are better websites and platforms out there for you to get guest and my recommendation would be to have the guest sign a short-term rental agreement take their ID screen them properly keep Airbnb out of the equation they do not benefit you at all they will just give you headaches and dealing with the case managers is very stressful. I hope this was helpful again my experience as a host with Airbnb has been a horrific one and this is why I’m writing this to warn other potential host that if they’re going to use Airbnb as a platform be careful. Their system is completely flawed and it will give you lots of headaches.
Sorry to hear about your unpleasant experience as a host. We can tell you for a fact from talking to 1000s of hosts around the world that far more hosts have the exact opposite experience–being an Airbnb host has been rewarding on many fronts, even beyond financial. Airbnb draws more demand than any other platform–this is why so many listings traditionally on other vacation rental sites are migrating over to Airbnb. There isn’t even a close second at this point. Yes, there are challenges as well as ways to mitigate them. Maybe a different market and a fresh start could give you very different results.
I am a superhost in a smaller market but have had major success and have loved every minute of my Airbnb experience. I truly love hosting people and having almost 70 guests in over a year and a half I have not had one bad experience or comment so, this is not to say it doesn’t happen, but your right. There are far more great experiences in this business than bad ones and I have even helped three of my friends become hosts because I love this business so very much. I would have anyone who is considering it, not afraid of hosting strangers in their home and have the time to give it a shot. It has really enriched our “empty nester” lives after our kids moved out. Great job on this site and the weekly emails. I always look forward to them.
Is it common for Airbnb not to pay you simply because of a complaint? I am in the process of setting up my unit and know I will provide the best service. However, you are always going to get those people that complain no matter what.
You sound like a horrible host that should never have even been a host.
Hello fellow hostess, I am new at this. I live in Mesa Arizona. I have my condo ready but I don’t know what else to do. I really need help. I took pictures already and I am setting up an account but after that what is next?
If you haven’t figured it out already just search it up or look it up in the learn airbnb search place. I’m sure you’ll find some useful things there
Hi Im curious as to what were some of the complaints about? Where their repeated complaints? Do you have pictures of your place and was it clean. I was the cleaning person for a person who rented out his air bnb and I can see why his customers complained but he didnt. He had ants and bugs. He paid his other cleaning person very little to clean the place and so they didnt do a good job. Although i cleaned better than them i never cleaned for him again because it wasnt worth my time or the pay. I clean very well but with a mini mansion he didnt want to pay me that much which i thought was unfair and if i was anyone else i would have done a half done job too. If you have a cleaning person please pay them for their time and make it worth it and dont be cheap if this is you case. Most customers compain about the mantainace of the house or the cleaning of the house. Is this a fact in your case?
Here in Western Australia, I have had a great experience with Airbnb over the past 2 and a half years. Having been made redundant, converting part of my house to a one bedroom self contained unit, has allowed me enough income to pay my bills and some extra as well. Really, if you only have one unit, that is what is so good about Airbnb, if you can pay all your bills and even your mortgage, it works! I have been earning $15 to $20K per year, and have been able to ‘keep the wolves from the door’ and not lose my house because I couldn’t pay my bills. I take pride in providing a 5 star listing, and have only had one problem guest in 2.5 years, which I sorted out myself immediately. You must be proactive yourself and not rely on others to sort out your problems. Take responsibility for your own actions people! Airbnb has provided an avenue for people to do something for themselves – embrace it!
I would like more information about the taxes that have to paid by the hosts. The sales tax, the room tax, licenses, permits and any other costs affiliated with hosting an Airbnb.
Have been thinking of doing the Airbnb gig for some time now. I have to say I was a bit taken aback by the learnairbnb response to this “customer”. After all, this person IS an Airbnb customer…no? In every complaint there are always….ALWAYS grains of truth. If you look for those; if you sift through the snarkiness and resist the urge to immediately go on the defensive, you might learn something.
Good for you and “bravo” to the hosts who chimed in who’ve had great experiences and obviously enjoy hosting! You must be doing something right, but I also assume your situations, units, locations etc. are not identical to Jumaals’. Different experience + different people = different perspectives.
For me, the response from Learnairbnb lends (some) credibility to Jumaals complaints about them and makes me think twice. He is correct: there are other platforms. Glad neither of you have experienced similar issues. Just some Food for thought.
I completely agree, the company’s response was childish, and completely unprofessional. I think I will use a different platform to book my unit after seeing that.
Hey Sabrina & Tammy, so sorry if we came across unprofessional. That is not our intention. Quick note: We speak only for ourselves and not on behalf of Airbnb the company–we are only short term rental fans and host advocates. We’re not affiliated with Airbnb in any official manner as stated clearly across our website. We were trying to highlight the reality of short term rental platforms–none are perfect and there will be bad apples on both sides with guests and hosts. But those negative experiences are not the norm but the exception on both sides. Most guest and most hosts have mostly very positive experiences (as you can also see from comments by others here), else we wouldn’t see the growth that Airbnb has experienced. The reason we see more media coverage about these negative experiences for Airbnb is that Airbnb is much larger than the other platforms. But these issues are not unique to Airbnb and will exist on all short term rental platforms. By opting out of Airbnb, you don’t innoculate yourself from the potential of bad experiences, but you do reduce your income potential as a host.
Is there a standard lease or agreement that is required for each host or do we create our own
How can you sublet a rental if there are laws stating only property owners or real estate brokers, or the broker’s designated agent) can lease and collect rents? It appears that only 6 states don’t have this requirement. https://www.allpropertymanagement.com/propertylaw/
Great article: here are the other categories I would include is:
1.Are you comfortable with technology? Do you have a smartphone? Do you know how to download pictures, documents, apps?
2. What is your background in running a business? Customer service?
3. What do personality testing say about you? Whether it is the enneagram, myers-brigg, disc test this could be helpful in many ways to help you in your Airbnb business to determine boundaries, determine the type of host you want to be, and maybe discover you have some learning to do about non-violent communication (etcetera).
Wonderful suggestions Kym! Thank you for sharing!
Jamaal king thank you very helpful post!
Are there any photos of inside an existing airbnb so a person has an idea of how to present something that is appealing.
How about just browsing the AirBnB site itself and looking at other listings in your area?
Great tips!
Does location really matter?because my house is not close to downtown
It does matter a lot in determining your profit potential as that largely depends on the travel demand you get to tap into. Being far away from areas where people want to travel to means lower demand and fewer bookings. So you’ll need to adjust your expectations. However, some rural areas do well due to having local draws for travelers (e.g. weekend retreats and getaways for city folk). Also, if you have some unique proposition for your listing that creates a memorable draw to your listing by itself, that could help improve performance also.