How to mitigate party rentals

Question

We have a cabin in the North Carolina mountains. It’s renting extremely well. The cabin isn’t isolated so if a group is outside being loud or playing loud music our neighbors hear it very well. One of our neighbors in particular is upset by the loud music, loud profanity, and disruption of the quiet mountain nights.

How would you handle this? We do screen guests beforehand and our rules state there are no parties and no loud music. I’m thinking about increasing our rates and minimum stays to weed out people who want to rent the property for parties. We may also reduce our occupancy.

Any other suggestions?

Julia Bykhovskaia · Answer

You can add 25 or 27 age minimum to the listing, say there’s $1,000 fine if there’s a party and any of the neighbors complain, and say that you use noise monitoring device (NoiseAware or other). This will take care of most of them...

Luke Carl · Answer

@Steve Fitzgerald Min age requirement for sure. Or offer the neighbor money 😂

Brent Zande · Answer

Steve we have minimum age in our listing on AirBnb and that helps.  We have also discovered that the party people are almost always first timers.  We then discovered that they are not truly first timers.  They create new profiles when they get railed by a host or they get their party friend that has not been on AirBnb to create a profile.  These are generally your problem folks and we always ask questions about purpose for visit etc. and generally we can weed out the ones that will be trouble.  We are 3 for 77 bad ones thus far and that is pretty good but we feel the three that got through should have been avoided as well.

John Underwood · Answer

I have fairly high prices and minimum age requirements. I have mainly families on vacation.

I also have an exterior camera do I can see who is coming and going.

Anand S. · Answer

I get these now and again. My homes sleep up to 14 so we get large groups. We're in FLL close to the action. Folks stay here for the beach and the nightlife/activities so it's not a sleepy stay.

We clearly state in our listing that NO PARTIES OR EVENTS allowed but folks still do it. We require 3-nights minimum. I have a term in my house rules that state if there is a violation of the noise ordinance, I keep the entire deposit and the rest of the stay is forfeited. I'm currently trying to exercise this now, so wish me luck.

House parties have been a major issue here in FLL. The youth have no place to party since all the nightclubs and bars are closed, so the new gig is to rent a big home and throw a major bash. There have been over 1,000 reported cases here in Broward. The county is now shutting VR's down for a month in response.

Mark Futalan · Answer

Minimum stays can be helpful and also limiting your guest occupancy count can help too. More importantly, make your house rules clear and make sure guest know your expectations when it comes to your home.

Gerald Pitts · Answer

We put the age limit in the ABB listing anyway.  It has cut down on the number of under 25 people that book.  We also rarely allow one night stays (except for the occasional orphan day).  Nothing says party like One Night stay on a Friday-all occupants 18 -20 yo lol.

Mark Miles · Answer

You can do what I do, which is state a minimum age of 25 and have your offshore assistants check and verify all of their IDs.

Glen R. · Answer

We have a cabin in Ellijay, GA and receive all of our bookings through Vrbo and set our minimum age at 25. As @John Underwood said, we have higher prices and mostly get families or a couple of families. We also have outside cameras.

Steve Fitzgerald · Answer

@Julia Bykhovskaia Thank you. I’ve looked at noiseaware before, but it seems like it’s time to buy it. Since I use airbnb I don’t think I can set a minimum age limit, but I will look at adding some sort of fine for being too loud.

How to mitigate party rentals

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