Sure it’s easy to figure out how many dollars you’re pulling in for your Airbnb unit but what you should really pay attention to is your hourly earnings as a host.
Here’s how you can figure it out.
Pick a Time Period
Before you start looking at the numbers, you need to choose a time period you’re looking at. If you have a year’s worth of time, then use that. Otherwise, use as much data as you have available.
One thing to note with timing is that you may want to do two versions of your analysis–one since the start of your unit and one starting from the first month you achieved “stable” occupancy.
Leaving out essentially your learning or ramp up period can give you a more accurate assessment of what to expect in the future.
Get Your Net Airbnb Rents
Gather the net rents from your Airbnb pay statement, which is the total rents collected minus all refunds.
This tells you how much you rent you actually earned from the unit.
This is your net rents.
Get Your Expenses
Next, is to calculate all of the expenses you incurred while hosting on Airbnb.
For single unit, this should be relatively easy if you’ve kept receipts or charged all of your expenses on the same credit card. Linens, towels, toiletries, etc…all fall in this category. If you kept track of your mileage as well, even better.
Once you add the all up, you have the total expenses.
Get Your Hours
You probably didn’t keep a time log each time you interacted with a guest, checked them in, check them out, made supply runs, etc…
Basically, anytime you were doing anything directly related to you hosting on Airbnb, is time spent hosting.
So how can you get a good estimate? For one week, track all the time you spent doing anything related to being a host. Track it by the minute.
Then reflect on how it compares to a typical week for you–if you’ve hosted long enough, you’ll know right away whether it was a lighter or heavier week.
Adjust the minutes accordingly to get an estimate of your average week hosting.
Multiply that by the number of weeks you’re looking at and you have your total hosting hours.
Calculate Your Hourly Rate
Finally, with all of these figures, you can calculate your hourly rate hosting on Airbnb.
average hourly rate = (net rents – total expenses ) / total hosting hours
So subtract total expenses from your net rents and then divide that figure by the total hosting hours figure you estimated.
This is your estimated hourly earnings by being a host.
What If I Have Multiple Units?
If you have multiple units, then aggregate the net rents from all the units as well as the total expenses. Calculate your total time spent hosting on Airbnb managing all these units. Then you can make the same calculation.
With more units, you may find that you’re making less $ profits per unit by having rely more on 3rd party service providers but that your hourly rate will be much higher. You will have economies of scale with more units as adding each additional unit requires less time than the first unit (e.g. you can make one supply run for all your units).
So what is your hourly rate? Share below!
