A Successful Airbnb Launch Strategy; Fully booked

I know there's a lot of Doom and Gloom out there right now a lot of people talking about Airbnb bust but the reality is is that a lot of you are still launching new properties you're starting new short-term rentals and you are having a lot of success with it of course this depends on the market right but there's things that we can do to ensure that success and that's what we're going to talk about today first things first when we start with a new property it

does get a visibility boost you could say and so we're launching new properties all the time and from what we see from the patterns that we see you can typically expect maybe between three to five bookings really within the first few weeks because you're getting more visibility on the platforms like Airbnb they want you to be successful right if you're not successful you take your property off their platform and then no one makes any money so we see that to be the case generally between 3

to five bookings although there are a few things that might prohibit you from getting those bookings and we'll jump into those in just a second another feature that we have available to us on Airbnb is to offer a new listing discount so this is 20% and it goes for your first three reservations the upside to this is that you get more visibility again remember this is just on Airbnb we're going to talk about the strategy for other OTAs here in a second so if you decide

to apply apply this discount it is optional and you don't always need to apply it but it does give you more visibility you may even want to consider raising your prices on Airbnb and then offering the 20% discount over the top that way you're not missing out on a lot of Revenue but you're still getting some extra visibility one other thing we want to take into consideration when we're launching a new property when we're just listing it for the first time is what sort of reservation

l L we are accepting so let's say you launch your property it's a brand new one and you get a thre Monon stay well then that means for the next 3 months you're going to have no reviews coming in which means you have zero reviews during that whole time you don't have the ability to rent it on other platforms you can't get reviews on other platforms and essentially this could delay your success with your property quite a bit so one thing you might want to consider

is accepting shorter stays even down to one night so that you can have more guests coming in you can earn more reviews faster and you can build that base up so a couple quick things there you have the option to allow the 20% discount with Airbnb you get a extra boost on all of the platforms when you first launch a property but many times your properties are just getting booked on Airbnb maybe because that's where you started and so we got to take that into consideration

we're going to talk about other channels here in just a second but the next thing I want to dive into is when you're actually launching your property or when you're listing your property for rent for the first time so let's imagine that you are in a summer vacation rental destination and you go to start your property to make it live in the winter well obviously you're past the peak season right so there's going to be less demand and you will need to factor that into your

pricing and you need to be even more aggressive because you have no reviews so if you see that the average nightly rate in your Market in the low season is $500 a night but you have zero reviews well people are going to have less confidence to book your property right so if you're not getting booked you need to monitor your prices very closely and very often in the beginning to make sure that you don't miss out on some of that extra opportunity and that you pick

up momentum you start getting some reservations and you start building that review base now let's imagine that your property is almost ready and you're getting ready to launch it and it happens to be peak season this would be ideal and actually if you could even hold off a little bit we don't want to just leave money on the table right so you don't want to hold off for a long period of time but if you plan things out maybe you're doing a renovation and your plan

is to launch your property during the peak season it's going to be really good for you because there's way more demand coming in so you're going to get those reservations coming in quicker but we have to keep our book windows in mind so let's let's take the same summer vacation rental destination and say that the average booking window is 90 days in other words people are making reservations there in the summer 90 days in advance well if you launch your property the day summer starts you're

90 days late right people have already been making their reservations and so you're going to have to Discount your price to catch up so ideally you launch your property in the peak season within the booking window when people are still making those reservations if this fits well into your timeline well then you're going to ensure that you're getting bookings faster you're getting more of them and you're going to build that review base quicker than ever now let's talk a little bit about the different channels because

we know that we need to list our property on multiple channels different channels have different demand in different markets so Airbnb is global as we all know but there are some markets where arbo traditionally outperforms Airbnb there are some markets or types of properties where booking.com or Expedia are going to work better maybe uh small boutique hotels or Urban Properties or properties competing with hotels for example and so we need to build our review bases on these other channels as well because if someone goes to

book your property and there's zero reviews there again they don't have a lot of confidence to reserve your property from what we see it generally takes three to five reviews and good reviews for someone to not have that concern and just to go ahead and reserve your property so one of the things that a lot of you run into trouble with is getting all of your bookings on one channel usually that channel is Airbnb and so what does this look like you launch your property you're

getting lots of reservations they're rolling in on Airbnb but what happens on the other side of that you're not leaving your calendar open for vbo or for booking.com and so you're building a lot of momentum with Airbnb which is fantastic you've got money rolling in but you're making it harder and harder for you to pick up that momentum on other channels so one thing you might consider doing and again this is just a suggestion but maybe in the beginning after you've picked up a few reviews

let's say from Airbnb and nothing has come in from vbo consider raising your prices on airb andb but just Airbnb and leaving your normal prices on vbo to leave some of those dates open maybe a little bit longer and to try to get some bookings coming in remember you need to account for the difference in commission you're paying on these websites so for us we pay 3% at Airbnb this can differ depending on your settings we pay 5% with vbo and so we charge more on

vbo and in fact for us in a lot of the markets where we operate and own proper properties we earn more per reservation with vbo because those reservations are often booked further in advance than they are with Airbnb and if someone's booking our properties further in advance depends on the booking windows they're usually going to be charged more so consider that as a strategy if you've got No Reservations coming out on your other channels just remember if all of your popular dates are already reserved on

Airbnb then there's no chance for someone to book on these other platform forms and now once you have that 3 to five review base on each of these channels you have enough for someone scrolling through the listings to feel confident booking your property and so if you prefer to get reservations through Airbnb then by all means make your pricing a little more competitive there but the idea here is that we have a good base on all of these platforms so that we can spread our risk

so we can fill up our calendar a little bit more and so we really we just have more options okay so just to recap real quickly we talked about some of the benefits from launching a brand new property we get more visibility we have special options available to us like airbnb's 20% discount we talked about when during the year you're actually starting your property or making it live that's very important so if it's happening during the high season that would be ideal if it's during the

low season you need to be extra aggressive with your prices and we talked about ensuring that we get reviews on different ch channels and that if we're dominated by one channel it doesn't leave a lot of opportunity for the other ones the next thing I want to just chat about here briefly is that this really is a journey with your short-term rental and so when you start your short-term rental it's very unlikely that you're going to make more money in the first year than you will

in the second year again we're building up this base of reviews you're building up a clientele people that love your property and you're building up the ability to have repeat guests to have direct bookings where you're going to be making more per reservation and you're really figuring out your Revenue management strategy because when you start yes we can use these great tools like price labs and airdna and wheelhouse and that gives us a really good starting place but our pricing strategy is something we have to

consistently Monitor and it changes all of the time and so generally speaking the first year we launch our property is not going to have the most net revenue and I say net revenue because remember these direct bookings can have a much higher profit margin than a booking through Airbnb for example and the other reason we really have to look at our short-term rental as more of an investment Journey than just a standalone investment maybe like a long-term rental where we put it up for rent rents

for $2,000 a month then next year we do the same thing is because we have this base of reviews we have this history and we're learning as we receive guests and we're learning more and more as we get more and more data coming in from our property the more reviews you have and the higher that review score is generally speaking the more reservations you will have compared to your competition now I didn't say the more money you will have compared to your competition because we know

you might be getting 90% occupancy and your neighbors getting 70% occupancy but they're getting those nights booked at a much higher rate so again that goes back to your Revenue management strategy we've talked about that a lot on this channel in fact we've talked about pretty much everything on this channel I can't believe it's been nearly 5 years if you're just joining us for the first time well welcome to the show I'm glad you're here and you'll find all of our past episodes at strr riches.com

we even have a handy dandy little bot where you can ask it questions like what episodes do you have on boosting my SEO uh which we do have an episode on that it's 1:30 so we've pretty much talked about everything if you're new welcome and if you're an existing listener but you haven't yet left us a review or subscribed to our YouTube channel I'd really really appreciate it if you wouldn't mind heading over there and hitting the like button hitting the Subscribe and subscribing to us

on Spotify or apple or wherever you prefer to listen and leaving us a review it would mean a lot to me okay so just to wrap things up here there's one last thing that I want to talk talk about and again this speaks to our our Str Str our short- terminal journey and that's that after we've developed some of these reviews we have the opportunity to have these different statuses right we can have Premier host status on vbo we can have super host status on Airbnb

we can be listed as a guest favorite on Airbnb which is also very powerful to the success for your short-term rental so there's a lot that goes into this and it really starts with the day we launch our property right and this is assuming that your property is in good shape that you've stayed at your property that you know all of the little things that might arise and you have excellent excellent communication with your guest we are in the hospitality industry so if your guests don't

have a good stay well then you're not going to have good reviews and then we know what happens you won't make as much money so I hope this episode gave you a little bit insight and congrats to you if you're launching your first property or you're launching your next property if you didn't know our team is also helping manage properties around the world we're in nearly 20 cities now we've managed over 40,000 guests including a lot of those are in my personal portfolio so if you're

interested in chatting with us you can head to Str strr riches.com there's a little Property Management button there and I'd love to chat with you until next time I hope you have a fabulous day want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals well it all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge

it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers