All Forum Posts by: Taylor Smith

Hi Greg, I spend a lot of time listening to STR podcasts and YouTubers and the consistent assessment is that quality design is pretty much a must.

With that said, it’s important for you to first establish a vision of the guest profile that you are trying to attract to your property before you dive in any deeper. Once you have that, you can look at what similar properties in your market are doing for design. You’ll want to differentiate the good ones from the not so good, and that should give you a much better idea of what your options are. You can do this research on the OTA sites, AirDNA, Pricelabs, and other similar sites. 

John Bianchi’s free course, which is about 30 hours long, is super helpful for anyone that’s trying to figure out what property to buy and how to design the property in a way that will allow it to be highly competitive in its market. He has a professional designer join him in a handful of the sessions and she provides some actionable recommendations  that may give you some confidence to do the design yourself.

Another quick thing to look into is a subscription with a company like Minoan. Your subscription will get you discounts on furniture along with some other cool benefits.

Last thing, cheap furniture, particularly furniture that gets sat on, ends up being really expensive furniture because it has a limited lifespan. It can be worth it to spend a little bit more on those items to limit recurring replacement costs.

I hope that’s a helpful starting point. Post any questions you have and I’ll see what if I can provide any more specific guidance or thoughts.