All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

- Reasonable STR Laws already established
- High revenue
- Don't cost an arm and a leg to get into

Choose 2.

Pre-2022 you could find markets that had all 3, but not now.

I think guests have definitely gotten worse as Airbnb has captured more of the hotel crowd. Now a lot of guests expect all of the conveniences and scalability of a hotel in their STR, while simultaneously expecting the personalized and custom support of an STR.

I've been staying in STRs since the 90's and back then you had to bag your trash and take it with you in your car when you left.  And you were happy to do it because you got to stay in a cool 4br secluded mountain cabin with a view rather than having to buy 4 separate hotel rooms in town with the crowds.

Now these whiners (and it's all over social media) ##### and moan for hours about having to do their own dishes or leave the towels on the bathroom floor.

Same thing with supplies. Every STR we've stayed in even the last 10 years the first thing we always plan to do when we arrive is go grocery shopping and pick up paper towels, etc. And we always pack detergent and shampoo. But now guests expect everything to be provided. Which is mostly fine because we've always provided them at our STRs, but more as a courtesy than a requirement. Now if there's not 3 months worth of supplies there people are whining about it. "Uh, there were only 14 Tide pods left when we arrived, how are we supposed to vacation like this?".

I'm just glad I have large properties where most of our guests are old school STR travelers who are actual reasonable people. I've got to imagine it's a nightmare with smaller condos in town where the competition is a lot more hotel specific.

I felt sorry for the owner of a place we stayed over spring break in Havasu city.  4br house with the coolest pool you've ever seen.  Swim-up bar with full outdoor kitchen, waterfall, diving platform, two fire pits, etc.  Looks like something at a 5-star Hawaiian resort, not a private home in Arizona.  All for like $253/nt.  Then the owner texts me and says something like "I'm really sorry to even ask this and don't want to inconvenience you, but would you mind taking the trash cans to the road on Wednesday morning.  We can send someone out to do it if it's too much of a hassle".

And I'm just thinking to myself "JFC, of course I'll spend the 10 seconds to wheel the trash cans 20 feet so you don't have to pay someone 40 bucks to come do it or drive an hour and a half roundtrip from your residence to come do it yourself."  But I know they're only asking in such an overly gentle manner because they've had stuck up brats before (and seen plenty on social media) whining about how if they stayed at a Hilton they wouldn't have to "pay a cleaning fee and then clean the property myself", where apparently spending 10 seconds wheeling a trashcan 20 feet is "cleaning the whole property" themselves.

Again, I'm just glad I have mostly larger (and some rural) properties where those kind of guests aren't frequent.  I see people whining about it on social media all the time and it just grinds my gears though.

In the current market, you get out what you put in. 

In the peak of the post covid market you could get away with 30-120 minutes a week and relax.  Just throw it up on Airbnb/VRBO with dynamic pricing software and places would rent themselves.

But with saturation and competition much higher now, if you want to maximize revenue, you've really got to put in more time.

Some people can still get away with a minimal time investment because they are on pre-covid mortgages and don't need to come anywhere close to maximizing revenue to cash flow nicely.  But if you're buying at current prices/rates it's unlikely you'll be able to just throw it up on the OTAs and watch the money pour in automatically.

On the Orlando home in my profile we did $185k during peak covid and should come close to that again this year.  But I'm spending A LOT more time on it this year to keep those numbers up.  And the people in that market still spending the same 30 minutes they spent during peak covid are seeing huge drops in revenue and blaming everyone but themselves for it.

Err, which category do you think a highly volatile 40 P/E growth stock that ran up 200% on its IPO day fits into?

The stock has already recovered a big chunk of the move.  It was just traders having fun with some short term volatility off a hit piece like we see a dozen times a week in the market.

The book direct movement is not new.  It's been going on for years.  It can make sense for the right person but a miniscule percentage of hosts follow through on it and a miniscule percentage of that miniscule percentage are able to do it successfully enough to leave Airbnb behind.

I don't like ABNB stock as an investment at all because there is WAY too much future growth baked in to a company that has already had captured the majority of the growth in their market but this silly report is about 100th down the list of bullet points to consider when investing in the company.

 The company wasn't public back then so if you wanted to own a piece of it you'd have had to find a way to invest privately.

More astute to do what?

The company's valuation is $70bn, up 35,000% in the last 10 years and 7,000% in the last 5 years.  I think they're pretty happy with the choices they've made.  It's one of the most successful and fastest growing companies in the entire world.

5 years ago VRBO/Expedia was 14x larger than Airbnb.  Today Airbnb is 5x larger than VRBO/Expedia.  I would imagine that qualifies as pretty business savvy.

Not to be intentionally snarky, but I always laugh when people try and make conclusions based on Airbnb's stock on this forum.

If anyone has been paying attention to the stock market the last 3 years, you'd know that a 4.5% daily move on a tech growth stock isn't even a sneeze in the current market.  We're in a market where trillion dollar companies sometimes move 20% in a day and 50% in a week, and there are a dozen "short reports" every day that traders latch onto and trade the short term volatility.  A 4.5% move on a 40 P/E growth stock that had run up 40% in the preceeding 3 months is barely a footnote these days.

Everyone just has such a desire to see failure out of the hand that feeds them they'll rush to the keyboard to make a mountain out of less than a mole hill.  We get it.  If you go to a host group everyone says that Airbnb overwhelmingly favors guests at the expensive of hosts.  If you go to a guest group everyone says Airbnb overwhelmingly favors hosts at the expense of guests.  No one has any objectivity, and rushes to draw ridiculous conclusions to try and make their point about how any small move in the stock must be because Airbnb personally wronged them, even as the stock remains extremely healthy (way too healthy, honestly) overall.

If you figure anything out let me know.  This has been a huge headache for me as well.  Most of my properties are 6-9 bedrooms and this thing blocks bookings all the time.  And according to Airbnb support their is no manual override.  Once the booking is flagged the algorithm is king and humans get no say in it.

I've heard people say you can change the bedroom count or even change your listing to a shared space (instead of whole home) temporarily which the algorithm is much looser on.  The problem is that once the algorithm has blocked a booking, it won't allow that particular booking no matter what you change.  So the guest would have to have a separate Airbnb account (maybe their spouse's or someone else in their group) to try again after you've changed it.

I suppose another alternative could be to create a second listing where you list it as a shared space, and then just keep the whole calendar blocked until a situation like this arises, and then when it does open up the guest's dates on the 2nd listing and have them book through there?  Not sure where this falls in Airbnb's ToS though and if you could get your account suspended for that.

Have you worked with any?  Sounds similar to what I'm looking for but worried about how good of a job they'd really do.