All Forum Posts by: Jon Martin

Quote from @Toni Escuder:

 I actually read somewhere recently that hosts should aim for a review average between of 4.6 and 4.8 ( or something like that) because only 5 star reviews means you are leaving money on the table and giving in to guests demands too often. 

Most places I see in this range don't look so great and a quick scan through the reviews makes it easy to find what they are doing wrong. I would also disagree with the "demands", I can't think of any situation where I have given into a demand or unreasonable request and my rating is 4.99 with 70+ reviews. 

That said I do agree that perfect ratings set off alarms for most, there have been studies with Amazon reviews about this. I would also agree that you probably don't want a 5.0 in the "Value" section on Airbnb, because if the guests think they are getting a deal then you are probably leaving money on the table. 

As for the OP, apologize if it is a legitimate grievance and you are at fault, then explain how you will remedy the issue for future guests. If it's absurd, point out what was good about the place like the Pool Maintenance comment above. Keep it short and sweet. As time goes on, the bad reviews will sink further and further back and your service will improve. 

Also- helps to check-in/follow up and humanize yourself with the guest throughout the process from post-booking through their stay. Especially important to send a message shortly after they check in to ask if there's anything I can do to make their stay better. 

I think some of you are reading this wrong because it is worded vaguely. It is not required to be disclosed to guests but IIRC it is to buyers. Lots of states have similar laws. 

Market is so constrained that it would have to be some horror movie type stuff to justify that kind of discount, and even then someone would still take it for 1/3 of that discount (at worst) nowadays

Quote from @Wilson Hunter:

Where are all the Short Term Shop people? Are they still active on Bigger Pockets?

I always cringed at the knee-jerk "only STR invest in vacation markets" advice. I think we are seeing how that played out.

Because on the surface it looks cheaper. They want you to fall in love with the place and visualize yourself there, so that by the time you get hit with the final price you have FOMO if you back out. 

I did an ABNB search compared to a hotel for a Big Island trip and initially it looked cheaper than a hotel by several hundred dollars for 4 nights. Once all the fees were added, it was a wash. 

Agreed with all of the above. I will add that oftentimes the fixed costs with installing any kind of pool (fence, pump, permits, excavation etc) are so high that the marginal cost of a plunge pool vs something more standard is relatively small. Therefore, if you are already spending $30K all in for something not much bigger than a hot tub, why not spend another $10-20K for something that a family or group can enjoy and actually play in together? 

The above are made up numbers that will vary based on your market and local regulations but you get the idea. 

I wouldn't bother with condiments. Those jars/bottles can still get gross, and it ends up another item in a long list that you have to keep up with. For coffee I have 2.5 oz packets of ground coffee, sugar packets and creamer pods. Food wise I just do olive oil, spice rack, table salt, black peppercorns with grinder, baking soda & powder, and microwave popcorn. 

Think about the basic items you need to make a few meals that you wouldn't want to buy for a short stay because you would never finish them. I don't do large containers of flour or sugar because I know that someone will make a cake and wipe it out, leaving me with yet another item to worry about. Someone used a ton of creamer pods a few weeks ago and my only explanation was that they used it for Alfredo sauce or something. If they want it that bad they have to earn it!

You need some kind of point person. No way around it. If you can't fly out there yourself, maybe you have a younger cousin, niece/nephew or family friend's kid that can post up and take deliveries. By the time you have 1 STR running you should have a handyman or cleaner that you can trust, but in the early stages you have to put a lot of trust in a stranger if you can't do it yourself.

Optimize for assembly and consolidate your vendors/shipments as much as possible. That $50-100 nightstand will cost 2-3X+ more once you factor in the labor for someone to assemble it, multiplied by 2 for every bedroom. I cringe when I hear people talk about ordering stuff from Ikea and then complaining about how long it takes to assemble, plus that stuff is prone to break sooner on top of that. Look at the instruction manual- some of those things have 50-60+ hardware pieces. Plus you lose that time that could be spent getting the rest of the house put together. You can use Wayfair to filter for assembly- use it! With pre-assembled you could have all the furniture place in a single day. Cleaners should be able to wash dishes, make beds and other misc soft set up work. 

Another pro tip- right click on the photo in Chrome and do a reverse image search to see where the item comes from, it is usually way cheaper, and that's probably who Wayfair drop ships it from anyway. 

Quote from @Nathan M kiefer:

Could be. I had to clear my cookies to see the trophy but now it shows! Question is that I still don't see a way to filter for these homes? As of right now I can only filter by Guest Favorite, although that could certainly change. 

At the moment it is not clear how much it greases the algorithm, if at all, because when I zoomed in on the extent of my market's city limits and clicked the Top 15 listed only a third had the trophy, with 1 top 55 and 4 top 10%s.

I'm in the 5% club with 67 reviews at 4.99 and still buried many pages back until you filter for pets, then I pop up midway down page 1. I'll take it, I guess?  😂

Not sure how much of an impact this can realistically have. ABNB needs to book a lot more than their top 1-10% of properties to stay as profitable. Those properties are likely to book up fast, and probably do already, leaving the other 90% for the rest of the guests who don't plan ahead that much. 

Seems like a passive aggressive way to get owners to up their game and differentiate, similar to the categories. Or maybe it's to help highly optimized properties justify a higher ADR and therefore higher fees? Would be interesting to know how much of their revenue is do to a small percentage of high performers. 

Quote from @Tanner Lewis:

No DSCR loans do not look at your DTI at all. This means DSCR lenders would not look at your W2 income or the income of other properties in your portfolio.

 Sorry I meant property income . . .Don't they want to see at least a year if not 2?