Airbnb Cheap vs. Expensive Furniture: Where to Splurge and Where to Save

Your design and your furnishings can make or break your success as a short-term rental investor or owner or operator. And the reality is that a lot of hosts overspend. A lot of investors overspend and a lot of them also dangerously underspend. And so today, we're going to break down all the things you need to know about furnishing your next short-term rental property. We're going to break down some realworld examples from a property that I personally just acquired and furnished and it is up and operating and

doing well. So, I want to share all those tips with you today on the Short-Term Real Riches Podcast. Welcome back to the Short-Term Real Riches podcast. I'm happy you're here again. I've been traveling a lot. Actually, I haven't really been home home where I am here today in Brazil for months. And I've been to a lot of places. One place that I've spent a little over a month is in Orlando, Florida, where I recently acquired a new property and renovated it and furnished it completely. So,

let's go ahead and get into the details. The reality today, just as it's always been, is that your design is everything when it comes to your short-term rental returns. You can have the best property on the block, but if it doesn't look nice and it doesn't attract guests, well, then it's not going to perform well. This doesn't mean, however, that you have to spend a ton of money on your furniture to have a good return and to have really good guest experiences. Both underfernishing your property

and overfernishing your property hurts you financially, just in different ways. Most hosts assume just naturally that if they spend more money on their furniture that they're going to have a better design, they're going to have a better experience. But that is definitely not the case. And so today, we're going to break down all the details with the property I just furnished in Orlando, Florida. Just to give you one really quick example, Orlando is a place where a lot of people theme their rooms, right? It's a

very familyfriendly vacation rental market because of Disney and all the theme parks. And so, a lot of people create entire themes for their room. And so, we did this with our property. We didn't get carried away, but we did have a girls room and we did have a boy's room. And each one of those rooms has wallpaper. One of the wallpaper sets we ordered off Amazon. I think it was $150. This is for a 8 by12 wall. nothing huge. And the other wall, we couldn't really

find something that we really wanted for the girls. So, we had a custom wallpaper made. And that wallpaper, instead of being around $150, was around $750. We didn't put the wallpaper on myself. I've never done that, and I know you got to do it right. And so, we had a couple options when it came to that. We worked with a really good handyman that's done a lot of these things, including putting on wallpaper. He charged us about $250 per wall to put this up. But we

also got quotes from professional wallpaper installers that charged us $750 or would have charged us. So just in that one example, you can see the Amazon wallpaper with the $250 installation. We're looking at $4 $400 roughly versus a custom wallpaper and someone else installing the same thing and basically the same way would have been what? Three times the cost just for one specific thing. So imagine if that happens to you over the course of furnishing a whole property. So you can see how your property budget

could go up two, three, four times just based off your approach and some quick research. A lot of times hosts also forget some of the hidden costs with furnishing a property. Talking about linens and consumables. The larger your property is, the more you need of both of those things. I'll get into a few details in just a second, but before we do, I just want to break down the furnishing process from start to finish. the steps you need to take to end up with a good

design and to end up on time. The very first step, you need to know your avatar, right? So, in Orlando, Florida, we're not furnishing for working professionals staying at a property. We're furnishing for families because they're coming to visit the parks. That's primarily what they do. In fact, 75 million people a year come to Orlando to visit the parks. It is the number one tourist destination in the US. So that's the first thing you need to make sure you understand who you're furnishing the property for.

Remember, as an investment property, you're not furnishing this for yourself, right? So your personal likes should not be part of the equation. So step number one, you need a plan. And the plan when it comes to furnishing a property is creating a floor plan. Luckily, that is way easier to do than it ever has been. And no, you don't need to go out and pay thousands of dollars for an interior designer. There are lots of affordable options. You can sign up with Wayfair Professional, for example,

which is a free program. They have lots of furniture there, and they will help you create a design specifically for your property. Today, with AI, you can simply take images of your spaces, go on Chat GBT or go on Gemini or Claude and ask for professional interior design assistant and have the AI put in photos of actual furniture in your space so you can visualize it. Of course, you do want to know the dimensions. You don't want to put a really large couch in a small

space, for example. You don't want a really tiny rug in a really large space. And so, all those things are important, but today with AI and all of our resources, coming up with that plan should not take you more really than a couple hours. After you have your plan together, you'll need to decide if you want to make any renovations. We don't want to be renovating the property after we have the furniture in, right? I'll talk about a few of the renovations I made with this

property, but just a couple quick tips. Remember, we're looking for durable wear and tear friendly items, right? So, if you're changing the flooring, make sure you don't go with some sort of soft hardwood or carpet or anything like that. Vinyl plank or tile, those are going to be your best friends to withstand the test of time. You want to use stronger paints like satin finishes or semig gloss. And you want to make sure that you allocate enough time. A lot of times when we do renovations,

they always tend to take a little longer than we expect. All right, with your plan out of the way and those renovations out of the way, now it's time to start ordering some furniture. Of course, you could be ordering furniture and storing it in a place like the garage or if you have a place to store it while you're finishing those renovations cuz it does take some time for furniture to arrive. But the reality is today it arrives way faster than it ever has. And there's

lots of sites that can facilitate the whole process. If you go way back to episode 225, we did an interview with the founder of a company called Menoan, M I N O, which is a site to help you furnish your property. It goes out to all the biggest and best furniture providers, organizes it in one place, helps coordinate the shipping, just makes the whole process easier. If you're new to the show, well, thanks for joining. You can catch all of our prior episodes at strries.com. We

literally have hundreds. We've been doing this for a long time. And we also have a lot of free guides and ebooks to help you out along your short-term rental journey, including the one that we've set up just for today's episode, which is a complete furniture checklist, spreadsheet, and everything that you need to know about furnishing your short-term rental. If you want a copy, you can get it for free. You can grab it at our website or you can grab it in the link down below. So,

a company like Manowan's going to help. Of course, if you're handy with AI these days, you can also have AI help you. You could go on Perplexity, for example, give it a list of items that you want and have it do your shopping for you. But if you want to go the old school way, I guess you could say, well, jump on Amazon, jump on Wfair, jump online, and most furniture items are available pretty quickly these days. With your list of furniture all together, and your

items ordered, well, then you've got to put it together. That is the next step. Depending on the type of furniture you purchase, stuff that comes in a box is going to be a little cheaper than stuff that comes already built together. A lot of times the quality is going to be cheaper as well, but not always. There's lots of great products out there. A lot of people curse about IKEA, but I think they happen to have some really good products as long as they are put

together well in the first place. So, you need to make sure that you allocate enough time for this. Hiring a handyman or hiring someone that's put a lot of furniture together will save you a lot of time. But of course that'll increase your budget as well. Make sure that you leave some time for all the finishing touches like curtain rods and wall decor and all those types of things because the little details are often the things that take a lot of time. But regardless the size

of your property, if you have a plan in place and you have all of your furniture items ordered and all your renovations are out of the way, you can get basically any property furnished within a week. Yes, the larger it is, the more help you need. But the more time we give ourselves to accomplish a task is usually the time that it ends up taking, right? Of course, if you don't have all the furniture items in place or you're waiting on renovations, then this whole process

can go from what might be just a few weeks to a couple months or even longer. It depends on your renovations. One big tip, pro tip, things that people always forget about is you're going to have a lot of cardboard at your property. My recommendation, what we did for this property, we ordered a dumpster. Now, we happen to be doing renovations and so the contractor needed a dumpster already to get rid of all the old tile. But you'll see the pictures here. We filled this thing

with cardboard from all the furniture, all the consumable, all those linen packages, everything. There's way more stuff to dispose than you probably think of if you haven't done this before. Ordering a dumpster makes it really easy. You don't have to stuff into a trash can. You don't have to go find a place to dump it. You just put it all in the big dumpster. Someone comes and grabs it and hauls it away. All right, so that is the process in a nutshell. And yes, the time

it takes can vary greatly depending on the type of property, the renovations you're doing, all those things. But let's get into my actual property real world example that I just completed. It took about a month and this was not with me doing this full-time, right? This is basically doing this in the evening hours and on the weekend. I did of course have some help and I have of course done this lots and lots of times before. So real quick the details on the property. This is

a four bedroomedroom two bath. It's about 1625 square ft. Was built in 1992. This is actually in Davenport, Florida, which is an area where lots of tourists stay in short-term rentals because short-term rentals are permitted in this area where they're not permitted in most of greater Orlando. There's a lot of reasons why I purchased this property, but I don't want to get into all the investment side of it today. If you want to hear about all the reasons why I purchased the property and what's arguably

the most competitive short-term rental market in the US, well, I'd be happy to do another episode on that. Just leave a comment down below and let us know. So, as I've already mentioned, Orlando is a big market for families. Again, you got to remember and know who your guest avatar is, but there are literally thousands of properties in Orlando that are pretty much the same. And yeah, they all have theme rooms. So if you also have a theme room, are you standing out? Not so much.

So this particular property I was really attracted to because it is a little unique in the sense that it has some private lakefront access and it has a large lot, almost a half acre, which gives a lot of flexibility for creating an outdoor experience in a place where most of the homes are very cookie cutter. They look basically identical. Now, we didn't have time to really fully design the backyard while we were there, but it does leave a lot of opportunity in the future. I talked

about the couple little theme rooms that we did, one for the boys, one for the girls. So, how much did I actually spend on this property? How much does it cost to furnish a property in today's world with all the inflation and things that have been happening? Well, I'm going to read off my list here and then I'll break it out a little more in detail afterwards. So, in terms of furniture and decor, spent $18,93 on the property. If we break this out on a per

square foot basis, then it was roughly $12 a square foot. Now, this didn't include linens. And remember, you need quite a lot of linens. You need to have extra sets. So, in our case, we have three sets, and this is what we recommend everyone. You have the set that's there in the furnished property, the towels in the bathroom, the sheets, and the linens on the bed. Then you have a backup in case something gets stained. And then you have the set that the housekeeper can use

to change the moment they get there. So if it takes a long time to wash all the linens, they don't have to hang around waiting for the washer and dryer to finish. Worst case scenario, they could take it with them and all the beds are ready to go for the next guest. So we have three sets of everything. And we actually went a little further and bought lots of extra towels and hand towels because those are things that are going to get stained. For lens, we

spent $2,374. This was about 6% of the total cost. And then for startup cleaning and consumable items, we actually spent quite a lot there as well. $1,676. Now, this did include some supplies for the housekeeper. And so it depends on your housekeeping setup. If they're providing all the supplies, then this part could be lower for you. This also included steam cleaner, vacuum, things like that that we want at the property to make sure if something comes up, we've got some quick and easy ways to make

it clean. All right, so all in with furniture, linens, consumables, startup materials, about $23,000. Now, this didn't include the renovations, which were about another $18,000. We didn't go wild on the property, but we did change a lot of flooring out to tile. We added some new baseboards and we added some new paint to the living areas. Before we even got started on this, we asked for referrals and our realer gave us a really good referral for a Brazilian contractor that's living there in Orlando. Side note,

there are tons and tons of Brazilians in Orlando and so it helps to be able to speak Portuguese. I think we were able to get some pretty good prices on all of our renovations, the light renovations that we did do. So, grand total out the door, $40,983. Now, that also included $500 that we spent on photos. We got drone photos, we got evening photos, and that costs a little bit more money, but remember, we need to make sure that we're standing out. This also included the

home automation devices like a slage lock and real link cameras. We installed a Sensei thermostat so the AC and heat can be controlled wirelessly. Then we also installed a Wi-Fi power switch for the pool heater so that the heat on the pool can be turned on and off when there are no guests there. The renovations and improvements budget also included about $2500 that we paid to a handyman to help us basically just buy the hour. Again, this is a good way to build a relationship with

people there on the ground that you're going to need going forward as well. So, I highly suggest even if you want to put everything together yourself that you hire some handymen around town that preferably live nearby to help you with just a few tasks so you can build that relationship and you have someone to call on when you need them. So, those are the numbers on my recent renovation and furniture budget. I will say that you could easily have spent twice as much as I spent.

Twice as much time or three times as much time if you didn't have a plan in place and of course if you weren't getting help from other people. And so there is a big range here. I was at a conference recently and there was some designers there that fly out and furnish other short-term rentals. They handle the whole process, but their quote was about $20 per square foot. So imagine 4,000 square ft. The bigger your home gets, the more of those costs go up. I spent

about half that. And the proof is in the pudding, right? The property's up. It's renting well. Based on my projections, it's right where I thought it would be. And one of the most important pieces, the guests are loving it. So, a couple quick notes just on furniture and then we're going to talk about how to track the financial side of furnishing or renovating a new property because there's a lot to track there. Make sure that you don't cheap out on your beds. I've already mentioned this,

but this is where people are spending an incredible amount of time. And if they don't get a good night's sleep, well, they're not going to leave you good reviews either. If you can, see if you can spend a little bit more on the master bedroom or master bedrooms because the person that made the reservation is very likely staying in that room. Save on decor and those art pieces. That's one place where you can spend a ton of money, but it doesn't really have a big impact.

When it comes to linens, make sure you use all white linens. Make sure you have some backups. Okay, let's get into how you can easily track all your finances now today and actually not even just your furnishing finances. What is the tip? Well, it's to use AI. Specifically, Claude has some really awesome tools for tracking finances and it can do a really good job at it. You can literally just give it all of your credit card transactions, all of your purchases, all of your bank statements.

Give it some notes, let it know that you are furnishing a property. ask it to categorize all of that. And then it will break it down just like I broke it down for you today. You want to make sure that you're saving receipts for all these, right? These are tax write-offs. And if you have some receipts that don't show up on your credit card statements, well, you can easily scan them with your phone. Now, you can give all those PDFs to an AI tool like Chat

GPT or Claude, and they can read and take all the information off the receipts for you. This is also helpful because when items start to break, and they definitely will, then you have an easy reference to go back and find them. You can just search through what AI has already categorized and cleaned up for you. So, that is a wrap on the whole process. I hope you found this helpful. Again, if you want to see the investment reasons for this property, then let me know in

the comments below. I'd be happy to do a separate episode on that. Furniture isn't just a cost. It is literally a direct revenue driver. No matter what type of short-term rental you're furnishing, having a budget, having a plan, those things will all greatly impact the amount that you spend, the amount of time that it takes, and the ultimate design, which is going to impact your occupancy, your guest reviews, and your overall revenue. So, make sure that you are spending with intention. I hope this episode gave

you some good insights for your next project. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.