AirBnB????

[Nick Jacaruso]

Hello fellow BPs! As a new member this is my very first post on the forums; with many more to come I hope, I'd like to say hello!

With all that I have been learning about multi-family rentals, I came across AirBnB and got to thinking about it as a full time business as you would with any other real estate niche. Has anyone had success with it? I'd love to know what thoughts you guys might have on this subject. With all these P2P (peer to peer) business disrupting major industries, such as uber, I feel like it could open new doors to the investment world. However, scary and new at the same time.

[Maura Paler]

My business is vacation rentals, it's my full time job, produces decent income and the start of a nice RE portfolio. 

I use VRBO, HomeAway, TripAdvisor (Flipkey), VacationRentals, GlampingHub, Airbnb and even Craigslist for my rentals. 

WARNING about Airbnb - their cancellation policies are very lax, not good for the property owner, so if someone gets sick or has a death in the family (or any "extenuating circumstance" they can cancel at the last minute and you will not get paid for the rental. This is not good business for our investment properties, we cannot afford to lose a peak week of income due to this policy (and we have!). 

So - we use Airbnb ONLY for last minute reservations. It's more work updating the calendars on each of our listings, but we get quite a bit from Airbnb for dates that might otherwise not get booked. We lower rates for last minute availability, offer even lower rates for midweek dates, etc. Lots of strategy, but it's worth the efforts.