Preparing The New House For Airbnb

AIRBNB Analysis Experiment 1.0 Day 3/8

The Airbnb Bible

Step 1 - Find Your Niche

• - What demographics rent in the area?
• - What are their interests?
• - What are their needs?
• - How can you cater to the audience?
• 
  

I am starting off by reading through the comments on the top listings to see what the visitors highlight as important. Based on reviews, large groups of visitors are mostly local where as individuals are mostly from out of province, but still Canadian. The age group is majority under 30 and none over 40 from the sample I reviewed. The prevailing interests outside of the ski season seem to be camp fires, hot tub and cabin atmosphere. In terms of needs, a fully stocked kitchen is by far the most cited with sufficient sleep space and extra linens being next in priority. The most obvious features of our property we can leverage are the log cabin style itself, the hot tub, the camp fire and the proximity to the tube park and ski hill.

Step 2 - Preparing Your Space

In this case we have a pretty lengthy list of improvements we would like to do to the place. The listing from the previous home owners was booking every weekend at $250 a night, so the plan is to setup the new listing immediately and schedule improvements during the week around the guests. I recognize that as a new host I'm not going to have the reputation and reviews that the previous host had and that will likely impact our bookings. Now that the financing is pretty well settled, it looks like were going to have $60k for improvements, but we will get into prioritizing improvements once the listing is up and running. To prepare the place, I will schedule a viewing and use checklists downloaded from bnbnomad.com as well as refer to my notes from Get Paid For Your Pad. Here are the links to the checklists- 
https://bnbnomad.com/bedroom-checklist/
https://bnbnomad.com/airbnb-kitchen-checklist/
https://bnbnomad.com/airbnb-living-room-checklist/
https://bnbnomad.com/bathroom-checklist/

Step 3 - Access and Management

Our long term intention is for the listing to run autonomously. This will allow for a repeatable system to be created and put in place and scaled up. I expect that a few key things we will need to incorporate will be key-less self check in, a management service for guest needs and a top quality cleaning service. Since the basement is in need of major improvements before it can become part of the listing, we will likely utilize it as our base of operations for greeting guests ourselves, providing access for cleaners and managing trades as improvements are made. Jerry works full time as a heavy duty mechanic so he won't be able to manage much, but I have a broken knee cap and mostly work electronically as a Realtor. So I will most likely be hiding out in the basement while we smooth out this operation.

Tomorrow's Promises

Tomorrow I will post the plan for setting up the Airbnb Listing