3 Things We Wish We Knew Before Hosting on Airbnb

Tara and I recently renovated our basement to add an apartment with the hope that we could rent it out to allow us more financial freedom. We had hoped that we would be done with the renovations and have it ready to rent by January first, but things ended up taking a little longer than we had hoped and pushed us back into the first few days of January. We decided that we would give Airbnb a shot in the meantime so that we could still make money. Airbnb has been an awesome solution for us as we ended up making more money than we would have if we just rented it to one tenant. It has been a good experience so far and gone smoothly for the most part, but not everything has been perfect and we have definitely learned a few things through this experience. These are 3 things we wish we knew before hosting on Airbnb:

Limit the discount to the first 3 tenants to 5-10 nights

Airbnb gives you the option to give your first 3 guests a 25% discount on their stay in the hopes that you can get them to review your place so others have a good idea of what your listing is about. This allows people to rent your place for cheap without earlier reviews to give them a good idea of what the place is like. This also let’s you as the host get a feel for what it’s like to have people rent your place out. It’s a great option for starting out, but we didn’t realize we should have put a limit on the number of nights someone can stay.

Our 2nd booking was a guy wanting to stay a month, which was great to have the security of having someone, but we had a monthly stay discount of 20%, so this renter had a combined discount of 45% on our place. It was a bummer to see what the potential was for us to earn that month compared to what we actually earned.

I would suggest changing your maximum allowed nights to anywhere from 5-10 for your first three stays. That way, you can still reap the benefits of the discount, but you also won’t be losing out on a lot of money.

Find out as much information as you can about your renters

Airbnb gives you the option to have “required questions” when someone books your place. One of those questions is why they are staying at your place. We did not ask our first few guests this and it came back to bite us. Airbnb also has them put in the amount of guests that will be in their trip, but you can ask them to put it in the required question as well. Our 2nd guest booked it for only one person, but ended up bringing 5 people (for a tiny 1 bedroom, 1 bed place). This is against Aribnb rules, but also was a big inconvenience for us. They were also up really late at night and made a lot of noise. If we had screened a little bit better, we may have avoided this.

Airbnb reviews both travelers and hosts on their app/ website which gives both the ability to see if there are any concerns from others before you rent a place. Be wary of people who don’t have any reviews and be sure to ask a lot of questions. When travelers have lots of reviews, they know the drill with Airbnb and are more likely to be respectful of your place. If you aren’t comfortable with certain aspects of the person renting your place, it’s okay to turn down their request for a reservation.

Be overly specific in your instructions

When we started we thought we would just meet the new renters and walk them through everything before they checked in. We quickly realized that there was too much to go over and we would often forget to tell them certain things. We compiled everything we wanted them to know into a binder that was placed in the apartment. Since then, we’ve added more info almost every time and plan on redoing everything in the binder here soon. Not only is being overly specific helpful to your renters, it also makes it so there is less confusion on expectations from you, thus helping your chances of having better tenants.

These are the 3 things we wish we knew before hosting on Airbnb. If you are wanting to be a host on Airbnb, follow this link and shoot us an email if you have questions!