So you want to run an Airbnb business, get your FIRs property.
Well, you're in luck because today I'm gonna teach you ow to do it.
I'm going to show you everything that you
need to know to start your first Airbnb property.
I have over 100 of them.
I've been doing this for six years.
I don't own a single one of my properties, and we can always talk about that.
But I've made 10 million on Airbnb platform to date, and I'm here to help you
get started with your first Airbnb property.
Please. Like the video subscribe.
If you're new and let's jump in, get ready for a ride.
I
welcome back. Airbnb family always happy to help.
And we've been doing a lot of videos for newbies.
I think it's important there's a lot of new people jumping into the Airbnb
space because hosts are just making more money than ever.
It's been a really fun year.
I guess it's been a really wild here, but it's been fun lately because people
are traveling just like they've never traveled before, which is good for us.
So in this video, what I'm going to give
you is more than just what I promised you in the beginning.
Actually, I'm not only going to tell you everything that you need to know to start
your Airbnb business and get your first property up, but I'm going to tell you
about some topics that you will eventually learn about.
That you will eventually want to know
about, but you don't need to know them yet.
That way, this will help prevent you from getting overwhelmed,
thinking you need to know everything because you don't.
You just need to know some things.
So without further Ado, like I said, let's jump into number one.
All right, let's start with the Gimme. The obvious stuff.
You absolutely need to know how to use
the Airbnb platform, but there's a lot of reasons why you not
only need to create your own account and create a listing all the cliche stuff,
but you also need to one add your taxpayer information.
I just had a friend of mine who's been
hosting for over a year, found out that Airbnb was keeping 25%
of his money cause he never went through the proper tax process with Airbnb.
So five minutes on the computer and we just made them an extra 25% per year.
That's an example of something else that you might miss.
But more importantly, is you need to understand how to use the travel side.
Like Airbnb is a traveler side to be able
to do what we call market research and competitor research.
This is super important because when you
go and look at other competition, you can find out what they're charging,
what quality listings that they have, and you can help define one with market
research whether or not a place is worth airbnbin.
And then two, if you're putting up a property
in that area, how to differentiate against competitors, but also how to price your
listing based on which competitors are getting booked.
So you need to be able to use the map view on Airbnb to go find properties that are
very similar to ones that you would put on Airbnb and start looking at how many
guests they can hold, what their daily rates on the weekdays are?
What are their daily rates
on the weekends? Do they have any discounts for three days?
Seven days like month long discounts? How booked are they? How are their photos? How
are their review? How's your description written?
All of it.
This is your competitor research one competitor at a time.
You will find so much information from looking at your
competitors, things that you can copy and things you can avoid that way.
When you jump in with your first property, you'll be ready because there's really no
better way to learn to Airbnb than to Airbnb.
And in this case,
you're learning from people who've been doing it by looking at their real live
listings and whether or not they're getting booked.
That's good too.
You're going to need to have some sales, some soft people skills.
If you do rental Arbitrage like me,
rental arbitrage is the easiest way to get into this industry.
You don't have to buy a property, put a down payment, get a mortgage,
avoid HOAs stuff like that, and you don't need the reputation required
to get into Cohosting, which is where you use an own property.
But you're not even attendant you're a professional at this,
and Cohosting requires experience to get into the game, in my opinion.
So rental arbitrage is like the best of both worlds.
You don't have to own the property, but you can start from scratch and nobody
needs to think that you're the best at it because you're just signing a lease.
It's very cool.
But in order to talk a landlord
into giving you a property to Airbnb, you need to understand that you're trying
to get them to do something that's against their original plan.
And all leases in this planet.
Most all leases on the planet has some language that says you cannot sublet.
You cannot collect money for other people
to use the place you cannot list on lodging websites such as Airbnb.
You can't collect money for any use
of the property or exchange anything of value for use of the property.
Stuff like that.
You can't run a business out of the property.
There's all sorts of different lease
language that prevents your Airbnb business.
And this is just because landlords have
a plan for what they expect their landlord tenant relationship to go like,
and they expect to give it to a regular tenant, and they want the scope
of that relationship to be narrow and controllable.
So these restrictions are there for a good
reason based on what a landlord thinks he want.
So that way he can go get more properties.
But when it's hard to get properties or hard to get tenants.
When a landlord picks the properties and has a hard time finding tenants,
then he'll be more open minded to using someone like us.
So they also will say yes to you if you're
extremely charming and well prepared with your pitch.
So that's where the sales skills and the soft people skills comes in is you
need to be able to respond to a landlord, understand what their needs are,
understand how to make a presentation to them.
That sounds like this is good for them and get them to say yes to your deal.
It's not that it's illegal.
It's just against a contract that they
have prewritten out and they're willing to change that contract.
Contracts are negotiable.
You just need to get the landlord
in lockstep with you enough to talk about changing the lease.
That's it. It's actually not that hard.
Once you understand that you can be a positive force in the landlord community.
This is just something they haven't considered yet.
Most likely. So go at it.
But you need the sales skills to do it. And I teach.
Of course, this one of the biggest things that I teach is how to pitch apartments
and how to pitch single family homeowners and stuff.
And I've got a link in the description
for my course that talks about that, if that's what you're interested in.
But let's get to the next one.
Now, this isn't something that you need to be really, really good at.
You could hire a designer.
So put that there.
You can hire a professional designer to help make your space look good.
But now more than ever,
because there's plenty of hosts with experience on the platform.
When you get your hands on a property, you need to furnish it and furnish it.
Well, you should have good colors, should make sure it has everything that it
needs, like things for the kitchen and stuff like that.
It needs to have a design theme that makes people go, wow, this is cool.
I want to stay here because somebody else
with the same exact property that you just got your hands on.
If they do a good job with photos
and design and furnishing, they'll make more money than you.
That's just the way it works, because you need to make this place
attractive in order to market it as an attractive property.
When I first got started in 2014, this is one of the biggest mistakes I made.
First, I picked up a couple properties without the intention of marketing them
on Airbnb, so there's nobody for me to learn from.
By the way, there's no gurus,
there's no YouTube channel, there's no courses, nothing.
I just did it on my own, and I had to bump through all of these problems.
And my first two Airbnbs look like Bachelor pads.
There's like a couch, there's a TV,
there's a bed, there wasn't any art on the walls.
They're posing as but barely any cups. You know what I mean?
I did a real just lackluster job because I actually just had to force fit a couple
of properties on Airbnb to keep from losing money on rent.
So long story short,
but I learned eventually how to make my places more attractive.
And with that said, now that people have six years,
ten years experience in Airbnb, you need to make sure you catch up on that fast.
You can't have this little quaint Bachelor pad without any real decor or any design
idea and expect it to be big time profitable like we do on Airbnb.
You might make a little bit of money, but the profit really comes from making
people want to stay for your place and have people clamoring for your listing.
You want to outperform your competition and design is one of the big ones,
but we just alluded to number four, which is photos.
That's another thing that you don't have to be good at.
So don't overwhelm yourself.
You don't have to be an all star marketer.
You can hire a designer and you can hire
a photographer and the photographer when it's cheap enough.
I teach my students how to do bracket photos, using a camera to do HDR and take
professional photos on their own to save themselves money at scale.
Because some of my students have more than 100 properties and doing your own
professional photography saves a ton of money eventually.
But most of my students still don't take advantage of this knowledge because it's
still just cheaper to pay a photographer 100 or $150.
Come in and take photos that come from years of experience behind the camera.
Right? So even you knowing what a bracketed photo
or an HDR photo is, it's still hard to beat a really good photographer.
That's just the way that you don't need to know how to take photos,
but you need to know that you need really good professional photos of your place.
So also look at your competitors and what types of photos they take.
Also, look back on this channel.
We talk about what types of photos you need for your listing.
It's there. So do your research.
Now that leads to when you're about to have your first guest.
Here's the cool thing.
You also don't need any special knowledge of hospitality.
Really to get started.
You're on social media right now.
You know how to use the text box.
So what happens is you get a booking, somebody might send you a message.
You have a question, stuff like that.
You just respond text in the app like, hey, thanks for booking.
You can check in at 03:00 p.m.
If you like, cool, nice to meet you buy.
You can even text with emojis.
In shorthand, if you want to, you don't need any special communication
skills, but you do need one surprising piece of skill set.
Then this is actually what spawned this video.
There's a woman in New Jersey who set up a property and she called me and said,
Sean, I set up a listing and I have no bookings.
What do I do?
And she shared with me her listing and I went through the whole thing.
I actually recorded me going through the whole thing.
So that way I could do a video on it later
because I just gave her a bunch of tips and she's probably changing it as we
speak, which means if I waited, the listing would be changed.
The main thing that she did not do is she did not watch a single video of pricing
strategy from this channel, and it's one of my favorite topics.
Her listing.
She had just the same price every single day into Infinity.
And the thing is, if you list a listing
today, your today price can not be the same as
your month from now price, unless all of those prices are rock bottom loan, right?
You want to make a good amount of money,
so you need to Mark up your listing, but you can't get the same premium price
today because you don't have any time to find a guest.
If your listing is open today or tomorrow,
you have, like, 24 hours to find guests and you need to lower the price for that.
There are very rare instances that you can
Jack up your price when you're the only one unbooked.
This is called dynamic pricing, where you raise your prices and lower your
prices and there's rules for it, and I teach it here on this channel.
Sometimes you might be one of the only listings unbooked ad.
Then next thing you know, there's nothing available.
All the hotels are booked, all the Airbnbs are booked,
so you're like the last one, which means you can charge a high price.
An somebody will need your place,
not want it, but need it and book your place at a premium.
That's an example of when you raise your prices.
I'm going to double back and say there is
some written skill that I recommend that you have when you create your listing.
Remember when we talked about competitor
research, you're going to see other people's descriptions.
You technically could take a good description, copy it,
paste it on your account, change some words around a little bit,
so it's not complete plagiarism and on and off as your own.
You could get away with that.
But if you want to be an original and you
want to show your personality and show the fact that you're cool to stay with,
you need to speak and write well, you need to write in good conversational
and persuasive English, because here's the cool thing.
Six out of ten.
Like guests who travel on Airbnb, they just swipe through photos so they
don't really care so much about your description.
Some people don't even care about your reviews, but you don't have any yet.
That's okay.
But what happens is people swipe through the photos and then they start reading
your description to kind of validate if they're not sure about you yet.
And that's an opportunity for you to show who you are because unlike booking.
Com or TripAdvisor or hotels, Google.
Com, these places you're booking with a business entity you're expected.
But on Airbnb people still do expect to be booked with a human like an actual person.
In this case, you should show that you're human, you're a cool person and that you
will be an enjoyable host to stay at their place.
So that written communication is going to help you out.
There one surprising one that you think
you might need to know, but you don't need to know it.
Let's put in the don't fuck it is you
don't need to know how to do housekeeping yet, okay?
Because here's my argument.
You need to know pricing strategy before
your listing goes live so you can adjust your prices right on the fly.
If you don't adjust your pricing, then you won't get a booking today.
And if you don't get a booking today, then you don't make any money.
But the cool thing is Airbnb has a setting where you can block the listing today.
The guest checks out and have a one day bumper between guests.
You can do that while you're learning housekeeping so you can get everything set
up and then learn to do housekeeping later because it's not time sensitive.
It's not going to cost you money.
But after a guest checks out and you block it for a day, if you want to to really
spend your time figuring out how to do housekeeping, watching my housekeeping
videos here on YouTube and then kind of going in and cleaning it on your own.
You can learn as you go later, right?
One thing you can do here's a fun hack is
you can hire a housekeeping company that specializes in short term rentals.
They're out there. Like I said, I started in 2014.
I've been at this a long time.
I hired a housekeeping company when I was new.
And so if there's people who've been
cleaning housekeeping for STR shortterm rentals since 2014, there are now find out
companies that have developed a short term rental first approach to housekeeping.
They're out there.
There's tons of providers so you can get somebody to come in.
But what I recommend you do is if you're going to pay somebody markup,
you're going to pay somebody a bunch of money to clean your place.
You should show up and watch them and take notes of what they do.
What makes them good at their job. What do they do?
But you didn't think that you would need
to do and take notes and learn from them by shadowing them, steal their information
so you can copy from them later because I fun.
Fact, I have all housekeepers in house.
We pay twelve to $14 an hour.
It costs us 23 or $25 per housekeeping on a one bedroom.
Where these companies charge $45 to $75 per housekeeping.
For a one bedroom, we're paying 50% 30% the price because we
know how to do everything in house and it saves money.
You don't need to do that yet higher.
The housekeeping company learn from them, shadow them, make a little playbook.
And then when you hire your own housekeeper, you can hand them your notes.
That's cool. So you don't have to get overwhelmed about
housekeeping yet because there's professionals that do it.
Same thing with accounting.
You don't need to know how to do accounting yet.
You should know how to budget a little bit and not overspend because you're buying
furniture for your Airbnb and you shouldn't go nuts and blow your money.
I'll say on a one bedroom property, cap it at five grand, two bedroom,
three bedroom property cap it at seven or ten grand.
Just give yourself like a ballpark cap and don't go over it.
That's your budgeting.
Just get a business bank account started. An LLC.
Put your Airbnb under that LLC.
Start a business bank account.
Put all the airbed money into that business bank account.
Then from there, you use your debit card
for all of your expenses and just buy all of your supplies, pay your electric bill,
pay your rent by check through that account.
So now that one account has incomes
and expenses, you can export that to QuickBooks,
and then you can months later, have an accountant go through it and start
to tell you how well you're doing profit and loss.
You can hire professional even down the road, because accounting it's
not really as important when you get started because it's not going
to dramatically affect your business and whether or not you're profitable.
It'll just tell you whether or not you're profitable over time and you need
that data and then you can start making adjustments to your business later.
Sure it matters, but it's not going to make or break you
when you get started, because as you get started.
And here's the thing.
The reason why I'm saying all this stuff
the way that I am is I know that a lot of you have been watching this channel
for a long time and you still don't have a property.
And what happens is it's because you guys think that's gonna be difficult and you
only think that it's difficult because it's taking you so long to get started
that you assume that there must be some sort of magic bullet that you need
to learn first before you're ready to go out there and get it.
And that's not true.
There's plenty of people who spent a weekend watching this channel,
and then they went out and they got a property from a landlord from one
weekend of watching my videos because they went out there and they got it.
They did not know everything.
I guarantee you they didn't learn
everything in a weekend, but they learned enough.
They went out there, they got their listing up,
and they started learning from experience after that.
And that's what I want you guys to do is
understand that there's more topics we haven't covered yet on this video.
But as you see those topics, you can decide.
Is this a time sensitive topic that will make me money today if I learn it,
or is this something I could delegate to someone else or plan to learn later
because it's one of the slow moving parts of the business.
For example, resolutions
asking Airbnb to pay for a guest, like doing damage to an item.
You just need to learn that when the time
comes, it's not something you shouldn't have a master's degree on collecting money
from a bad guest before you start your business.
There's just some things that are a waste of time until you need to know it,
and you can learn it plenty fast using this YouTube channel.
With that said, guys,
I have an Airbnb host group on Facebook of the hosts of Airbnb Automated.
It's open to all of you.
You just have to request to join.
There's about 18,000 people in there
and there's hosts all over the world, and some of you guys are crushing it.
I just had a consulting call with a guy from Dubai.
He like Nathan.
If you've ever remembered my story about
Nathan from Mexico City, this guy is ease in Dubai, just like Nathan.
What they both did is during COVID.
They listen to exactly what they told them to do through this YouTube channel.
Like, guys, COVID here, here's what we're going to do.
X-Y-Z.
And you're going to grow your business because of COVID and know what AZs went
from four properties like 40 Ish properties, and Nathan went from 25
properties to 125 properties because they listen to me on this YouTube channel.
They both told me on consulting calls.
That that's why they grew.
So they're also in that host group.
Like some of the biggest players
in the game are my students, and you can ask them questions in that host group.
And I'm actually there too.
You can ask me and maybe I'll see your question and get to you.
So, guys, thank you so much for watching this video.
I look forward to helping you all in the future.
Remember, subscribe if you're new.
If you're serious about real estate,
Airbnb is one of the biggest, coolest ways to make money in real estate.
It's technically not real estate. That's hospitality.
We rant about that, too,
but we're not going to split hairs in this video, but as always, thank you.
And I'll see you on the other side.