Selling a STR property

[Brad Johnson]

What's the best practice when you are planning to sell a STR property? Should you quit taking booking all together? Offer to manage existing bookings for the buyer? Sell the reservations with the property? Something else? We have a property we are considering divesting but it has some bookings all the way into August.

[Julie McCoy]

Thanks for the shout out, @Paul Sandhu!  @Brad Johnson AirBNB will not allow you to transfer reservations.  There are any number of ways to handle your scenario - it depends on you and your buyer.  Some buyers won't want your reservations, they'll want to get their own.  Some will be happy to take them on.  If you had direct bookings, I'd encourage you to sell them - however, since you cannot transfer the reservations (or the listing itself) on AirBNB, that makes it more complicated.

Personally, I'd continue to take reservations, and assuming the buyer is interested in taking them over, once the property is under contract I would begin notifying the impacted guests of the situation.  Assuming the buyer would agree to these terms, I'd tell them the buyer is willing to honor the dates and price they booked at, they'll just have to cancel with me and rebook with them (and I'd provide them a link to the buyer's listing).  

Now, that scenario would require a decent amount of effort from me, and some good record keeping so the buyer would know what prices to honor, etc.  In return for that effort, I would expect some compensation.  However, I wouldn't expect that to be as valuable as turning over reservations, since there is no guarantee those guests will re-book with the new owner.

If the buyer wasn't agreeable to those terms, or if I was too busy/not inclined to mess with all that, I'd do exactly what @Myka Artis suggested. I love the idea of selling an STR as a "business" with added value from bookings, but that's a tough sell and only possible when you have full control over those bookings.