All Forum Posts by: Nathan Speary

In Colorado you can manage short term rentals without a real estate license tho I dint know the regs regarding money. 

I'm actually interested in being organized.  

I am starting a small management company and am wondering what the best practices are for cashflow for my properties.

Should I set up routing rules so the owners get a direct payout from AirBnB and I get a direct portion of their fee?

Or would it be better to have their payout come entirely to a bank account I have set up for them so I can deduct small expenses each month from their fees (ie, handyman visits?)

Or would it be best to have all their payouts go straight to their account and then invoice them or everything at the end of the month?

Then of course there are direct bookings and VRBO/BDC reservations that are processed through Stripe... So I could do a mix of ABB direct routing and then other platforms get invoiced. But that seems like a hassle...

Also a Colorado STR investor... I want to follow this.

Yes I actually use Smartbnb but trying to do it manually to not need her another subscription. 

Does anyone have a google sheet or excel template they’d be willing to share that crunches AirBnB’s exported data to quickly reveal booking lead times and adr and average nightly rates? Looking to use all my data to fine tune my pricelabs rules 

If the difference is a night a month where the expectation is 52% occupancy, I would personally spring for it. I own 8 homes near a national park and the ones with the best views book the most. If you’re in a condo keep in mind that the things that will set you apart are decor, views and price. You don’t want to be forced to compete on price; which you’ll have to do if you can’t compete on views. At the end of the day it’s sort of hard to decorate a condo and make it look wildly different than everyone else

@Ken Latchers Herein lies the rub: if you're on every platform, you're diluting your reach to a degree. In my simple example (where I'm on ABB and VRBO) my properties occupy 10 of the first 15 listings in my area on AirBnB. That's why my places have 80% booking rates in the low season (and 100% in the high season) where the market averages are 25% and 70%. But if something goes haywire with AirBnB I am totally and completely screwed. 

I could take it a little further and join ABB+, and dominate my market in the off season even more... but then again, what if something happens with ABB? Just last month the entire web site crashed for about six hours! 

The other side of the coin is that my properties completely and totally outperform all the other ones in the area, so... I am clearly benefitting from that.

I've gots ground STR business. A few years ago I had about 40% of my bookings coming from VRBO but airBnB gained significant traction, and soon 95% of my bookings were from AirBnB with a 90% occupancy rate. Sounds good... until something with Airbnb burns to the ground and then I'm reliant on only VRBO guests. The thing is, since so many bookings now come from ABB, my Vrbo listings have dropped off the first page and onto page 15-20 so they don't get any traffic any more. I hate reliance on ABB. In the last year I have had two huge issues, 1 because my channel manager had an api issue that got my account deactivated for a few days (!!!!) until it as reactivated by the trust and safety team. AirBnB confirmed it was a problem with the channel manager that was triggering some sort of internal security flag. The second problem was last year there was some problem with the site itself and I was unable to receive instant bookings for about a month. As you can imagine, bookings tanked. What do you all think about investing in one channel and absolitely dominating it versus spreading out over multiple channels?