Episode 141: Are you charging the correct cleaning fee?

How to build an Airbnb Business: Are you charging the correct cleaning fee?

We are currently doing hundreds of reservations a month, and something just dawned on me after looking at our cleaning fee and realizing it was likely too low…We may be losing thousands of dollars! And not just in lost potential revenue but because our cleaning expense is actually higher than our fee. So that brings up a good question, how much should you charge your guests?

How do you calculate the right cleaning fee for your property?

Should you look at the cleaning fee as a way to earn additional revenue, or should you charge just enough to cover your costs? What happens if your cleaning fee is too low or too high? There are a lot of things to consider when you set your cleaning fee for your listing, so this week, we’ll uncover a few of them, including:

  • Finding the average
  • Lower fees vs. higher fees
  • Housekeeping perceptions
  • Is it fair?
  • How often do we need to adjust our prices

 

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Welcome to short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale in your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast all of our list teens have the ability to charge a housekeeping fee now we don’t necessarily have to charge it but I definitely would because it’s common in the industry everyone charges a housekeeping fee for the most part but what price is too low and what price is too high and how do we calculate that I want to give you just a couple details things to consider about your housekeeping V. and how you can go about charging the right one I think the first thing to note here is that this is something we can change all the time right so if you change your housekeeping fee monitor how many views you’re getting and how many people are booking your property see if you notice a difference now you can get some really good inside if you go to Airbnb and you go to your listings and you click on the button that says insights you can see how many views are coming to your listing so check that out if you’re making some these changes but also consider if you’re in a place that seasonal right because if you’re changing lesson you’ve got seasonality going on the same time that could affect it overall you know there’s a few ways to do our housekeeping we can charge $200 a night and we can pass that feed directly over to our professional housekeepers or whoever we’re working with so that it’s not costing us anything we’re not making anything on it so that’s one way to do it another way to do it is we have our own team so for a lot of my properties I’ve got properties in 3 different cities a lot of we’ve got our own teams that were working with and so we buy all the supplies in bulk and we pay them a per unit cleaning fee that’s another way to do it I would tell you that with the way prices are right now inflation kind has shooting everything through the roof we don’t really make much money on our housekeeping fees I should say. It’s not that much of a profit center for us although they can be this is just my personal experience but let’s say you have full time housekeepers working by the hour that is a scenario it’s much more likely to generate a little more revenue for you but the way we’re doing it right now it’s working well for us but it’s not a giant profit center so up to you how you want to do that I think you can get by definitely charging what it cost you so you don’t want to go too low because gas are used to paying a housekeeping fee now going to high this has some impacts how fair a person perceives your listing to be especially for the short term stays let’s say someone booking your property for 2 nights and it’s $200 a night and your cleaning fee is $300 a night they’re not gonna think that’s too fair right so we’re gonna talk about some things to consider here just a quick second how you can come up with your own fee and one that is fair but just keep that in mind the higher your prices the more it’s gonna discourage short term stays and short term stays can be really good so again something you want to play around with so how how how do we calculate our own housekeeping fee well there’s no one in the perfect way to do this but I would say one of the safest ways to do it and what I do and what I have done is just to take an average of let’s say at least 10 to 20 properties in your area that are compare of all take an average of those in charge somewhere around there now we want to consider things like are these comparable properties compatible do they have an outdoor spaces do they have jacuzzis their barbecues or big kitchen areas things that may require more cleaning than others and do they allow pets allowing pets can create a lot more house. Even work for your team right you’ve got hair and all types of things you know and also the longer the states you want to keep in mind is your average stay longer is lower and you want to try to figure out what your competition you can use their DNA of talk about that a bunch of times in the past to check out some more competition to see what the average stay is in your area but as a general rule if you take an average of 10 to 20 properties you’re going to come up with the rate that people are gonna be seen other properties that’s not going to scare him off it’s not going to scare a jam and it’s very likely and cover all your costs or even allow you to make a little bit of money on top so at the end of the day really comes down to just having a fair price a fair price isn’t going to discourage a lot of people from our property it’s not gonna really hurt our occupancy quick intermission I’m super excited to announce the dates for next live event live and in person in Memphis Tennessee August 19 to 20 first this is our fourth live event and they just keep getting better and better and there’s not a ton a room so I hope you can make it will go through my whole process from start to finish what I look for properties how I find them how I set them up how I manage them how I manage them remotely with my teams and how we can scale the whole operations to retake it from start to finish perhaps one of the most exciting parts we’re gonna get on tour bus and we’re going to visit some of my actual properties in action in the operation really hope you can join us you can check out tickets at rest methods.com and again it’s gonna be a live in person I’ll be flying back from Colombia August 19 through the 20 first I hope to see you there if you don’t want to go through the work of finding 10 compare bowls are up to 20 on Airbnb remember you can just go on Airbnb and you can look at listings near property into the house community is put in a little excel chart and then hit the average for. Unction and see what it is make sure of course you’ve got to better versus 2 bedroom but if you don’t want to do that a quick rule of thumb is just take your daily rate and divided by 2 that’s gonna be pretty reasonable right if you get a $200 nightly rate divided by 2 and you can charge $100 housekeeping fee and that’s gonna be pretty good pretty in line and have a good view to charge but I highly recommend just taking the time to come up with the averages and also do this continuously right this episode just dawned on me because I hadn’t changed my housekeeping rates in a while and we’re doing hundreds of reservations every month and I’m like 0 my gosh I’m quite a bit under charging these housekeeping fees because costs for everything I’ve gone up so if you take that little difference for each reservation you multiply by 23 400 reservations a month how it starts that up right so you want to make sure that you’re monitoring this I’d say at least every 3 to 6 months make sure you just take a glance if anything’s changed drastically in your market now there’s 1 other piece to housekeeping fees and this depends on our set up right for working with professional housekeepers or if we have our own team for working with professional housekeepers this piece doesn’t come into play that much and that’s our housekeepers perception of what we’re charging of course they know what we’re charging our properties most the time they’ve seen our listings and for charging $200 and we’re trying to pay them $50 and that doesn’t really seem to fare right so you want to make sure that your strategy and your fee is in line with the option you choose to use for housekeeping whether that’s hiring your own by the hour whether that’s hiring your own as a per unit rate or whether you’re working with professional housekeepers so at the end of the day we just wanna make sure that it’s fair but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use our housekeeping as a profit center right the better our operations are the better efficiencies are. The more economical we can buy our supplies doesn’t mean the cheapest supplies but if we can get them in Baulkham we can cut costs there then we can generate a little bit of extra money so if you haven’t looked at your housekeeping field lately prices have gone up on just about everything right so take a good look at it take a good look at your competition make sure coming up with an average and come up with the number that’s fair for your gas you don’t discourage reservations but also is fair your housekeeping team if you’ve got your own team so hopefully that provide a little bit of insight and this is a really important piece and all over look at and until next time I hope you’ve been enjoying the podcast and talk to sin. I want to get on the fast track to financial freedom for short term rentals what all searching the properties you choir you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my you doctor will show you how to do just that there is no charge to my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that’s R E S T methods.com.

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