All Forum Posts by: Boris Mordkovich

Hi @Tara Bergstrom,

I can share with you what we do on our end. We work with housekeepers in a couple of different cities and we typically do the following:

1. On top of their regular pay, we pay them a bonus of $100/mo if a) the review rating on Airbnb stays above 4.8 for the previous month and b) they help order the supplies from a specific Amazon account we setup for them (although we have recently started to centralize it). Basically, it's a good idea to do a small monthly bonus and tie it either to cleanliness or to them going a bit above and beyond (e.g. ordering supplies, checking mail, etc.)

2. We do an end-of-the-year bonus of around $500 to each one.

3. We send them a gift on their birthday and, oftentimes, March 8th. Typically, we'll send an Edible Arrangements gift basket. 

4. We also usually give a bonus if they have to deal with a particularly large mess / bad guest situation / etc.

All put together, this works out fairly well! Hope this helps!

Hey @Bruno Mauro,

There is not a ton that you can do in this case, but if I was in the same shoes and wanted to boost my income from a property with minimal additional effort, I'd do this.

If the tenant leaves, I would furnish the unit and then promote it as a furnished rental for 6-12+ month terms. It does depend on the market, but if you're in an urban environment, you can typically get a pretty good premium on a) furnished rentals and b) shorter lease terms (e.g. 6 months).

It's not necessarily going to make you rich, but it could be the difference between running it at a loss vs. making a small profit every month.

Hope this helps!

@Joe Prillaman

After trying out a ton of different tools and services, this is the software stack that works really well for us:

* Smartbnb - for automating 95% of guest communication

* Uplisting - for managing our listings across Airbnb, VRBO and Booking; for managing calendars for housekeeping; for preventing double bookings; and also for creating a direct booking website.

* Pricelabs - for automating price management

* Slack - for internal team communication 

* We also end up using Zapier a lot to automate various functions, parse various confirmation emails from Airbnb to create reports, and so on.

The nice part about all of the tools above is that they charge a small monthly fee per listing vs. some of the other tools out there that will charge a % of revenue.

Hope this helps!

Boris

Hey Julia,

So, there are two parts to your question and I wanted to address them both:

1. There's no escaping the fact that Airbnb is an enormous marketing engine that will drive the majority of your business. So while direct bookings are valuable and have a place, it's important to set the expectation that they are unlikely to truly replace Airbnb. That said, the best way to approach is would be through a combination of Airbnb, VRBO/HomeAway, Booking.com AND Direct Bookings. Airbnb will still likely drive 50-70% of your business, but at least you'll be more diversified.

2. We've tried a ton of different options over the years and the one we personally use (and like the most) is Uplisting. This tool is neat because not only it allows you to manage your listings across multiple channels (like VRBO and Booking.com), but it also automatically creates a really pretty direct booking website that will connect with Stripe and allow you to process direct bookings. 

I think it's probably one of the easiest ways to get going with direct bookings, looks great, doesn't cost much and works really well as far as managing all channels in a single calendar.

Hope it helps!

Boris

@Derek Miller

I think it’s pretty easy to ask guests to do this. There are a few ways you can automate and streamline it:

a. You can use a tool like Smartbnb to automatically send a message to the guests 24 hours after check in or 24 hours before check out with instructions on what to do.
b. You can just write, print and laminate an instruction sheet with check out instructions and include directions for this In 85% of the cases, guests will follow the check out instructions as you ask them, so this should be frequent enough to maintain the pool.

So there are a few things to consider:

-What makes for a good rental does not necessarily make for a good primary residence. For example, larger properties tend to do well as short-term rentals because they can acommodate more people and command a premium. But you may not want to necessarily have a 5-bedroom house as your primary residence. So I’d recommend to decide what the first objective is and going from there. 

- Most of these areas have a lot of management companies -- ranging from local to national (like Evolve Vacation Rentals). You’d have to decide for yourself if you want to manage the property remotely yourself (totally doable, but a bit more work) and make a higher return OR if you want to outsource the management altogether to a 3rd party and not have that hassle (you’d typically pay as much as 25%, which would likely eat up most of the profit). 

- Lastly, as far as the actual property goes, what I usually recommend is to setup an alert on Zillow or Redfin for the type of property you’re looking for and just monitor new listings as they come in. It’s rare that you can find the perfect property the first and only time you go to the destination. Rather, it’s much more efficient to monitor what comes up on the market, better finetune your own criteria, and then act quickly when a good property becomes available. 

If there are any other questions, happy to address them!

One company that has a national presence and charges a reasonable fee is called Evolve Vacation Rentals. They usually take a 10% cut. The main downside with them is that they keep your listing under their profile. So if you choose to stop using them, you’d have to recreate the listing and start all over.

Just doing a quick google search I did find "Easy Air Rentals" and while I can't speak to the results of the company it does look like they have a Palm Coast presence! Let me know if you have any more questions.

So we’ve done both -- we have had security deposits and also have done away with them. The good thing about Airbnb is that their “claims” system is actually fairly robust. If you have enough evidence, receipts, etc., you can usually file a claim for any stolen or damaged furnishing and get them to pay out. It will take a good amount of follow ups and back and forth, but they do pay. This system is available to all hosts, even without any security deposits. 

Now if you do take a security deposit, the way to file a claim against a guest still follows a similar approach. So, frankly, with or without a deposit, the amount of work is going to be roughly the same an the success rate will also be roughly the same. However, what the security deposit does do is that it self-selects some of the “bad apples” out.

If guests are planning to have a party or something similar, they are less likely to book a place with a deposit because they know that they are more likely to face consequences.

Airdna.co and AllTheRooms.com is what we suggest!

Like others have said your two most important and fundamental factors will be your handyman and a housekeeper. This can be a challenge though the most important task in pivoting your home to a STR. For one property I'd say you can probably handle the communication and day-to-day logistics on your own though if you continue to expand and add more properties to your portfolio I would definitely suggest a virtual assistant to handle the guest communication.

We always recommend Smartbnb as it helps automate the standard pre-check-in, in-stay, and post-checkout communication.

Every property needs to be re-supplied every 2 to 4 weeks. For that, our favorite method of online shopping is Amazon Prime Now. Different from the regular Amazon Prime, it ships products from the local warehouses and offer delivery in as soon as 1-2 hours

As a whole, a property can take anywhere from 10 to 30 days to properly set up and automate. In part that’s due to the unknown variables, such as how long it will take to find a reliable housekeeper and handyman.

Beyond that, running a property remotely really isn’t that difficult as long as you can find a good housekeeper. Everything else — such as maintenance, pool maintenance, etc. — can easily be arranged remotely. We have properties in 5 cities and do it all remotely this way.

Hope this helps!