Are you getting ready to launch your first Airbnb and wonder what you need to know? Are you anxious that you’ll do too many or too few improvements? Do you feel like your property will never be ready and you need a timeline?
If so, this Episode 84 of the Host Coach Airbnb Investing Podcast is for you! Today we’re reflecting on the lessons learned from launching our 12th Airbnb so you can move forward more confidently with launching yours!
After listening to this episode, you will have the wisdom you need to create accurate Airbnb launch expectations, forecast your carrying costs, and ensure your Airbnb is guest-ready when you go live!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- How your season of life and the actual season impacts your launch timeline
- Understanding Airbnb carrying costs pre-launch
- Setting timeline expectations
- Which Airbnb amenities to prioritize
- How to find whatever you need/overcome the problem blocking you
- Why photo ready does not mean guest ready
What It Really Takes to Launch Your Airbnb
First, consider the season for your investment. This includes the weather and your season of life. This plays into your investment expectations, your work life situation, and into your carrying costs. So when Merric was little, we used to take him with us as we redid cabins. During COVID, there was remote school so he could just stay and play in the bunk bed and zoom into school while we worked. Now he's a sophomore in high school and we really can't leave him alone. Our 12th cabin was actually the longest turnaround in our entire portfolio, and we've absolutely conquered much crispier.
Another example is we had clients in Ohio with three children under the age of six. They're both full-time employed. And that season of their life meant that they used every nap and worked until 3:00 AM every weekend after bedtime to get their Airbnb ready for launch. If you have small children, think about how much spare time you actually have and be realistic about your timeline. It's not always easy, but it's worth it. And that family in Ohio is absolutely killing it on Airbnb now. And as Danielle said that launch was our longest. It actually took about seven months, and that played into the carrying costs.
So the carrying costs include your mortgage payment, including principal and interest, and property taxes and insurance. Also your utilities, your electric, your water, your internet all of those services you're paying for monthly. And the decorating expenses. My Amex gets a workout during these renovations - I design on a dime but when you're completely outfitting an empty house with everything from big furniture down to silverware that's not a small amount of money. But when that credit card bill comes due and you are counting on having the property generating revenue and it's taking a couple extra months, the credit card bill still do. Yeah. That's an important thing to keep in mind in timing.
In that whole concept of timing plan on everything taking longer than you think, and that isn't just to give yourself an excuse, but this is just the reality. 12 times doing this, it always takes longer than we think it's going to, even though this is what we do for a living.
So give yourself grace, but also don't give into project creep that could put you in financial jeopardy. Again, thinking about those carrying costs. This particular cabin we were hit with everything. We had ice storms, Christmas holidays with family, personal injury, and a death in the family. And so as we said, this resulted in an incredibly delayed launch. We carried this place for seven months. It was okay because we paid cash for this cabin, so we weren't eating the mortgage payment but every day it wasn't launched is a day we lost the income from that and it just mentally weighed on me and took over the majority of the school year going back and forth to work at the cabin not together. So we would just ships passing in the nights switch places and work on projects independently.
Prioritize Airbnb Amenities
Number four is to prioritize amenities that offset any property quirks or issues. So in this property, we did not have room for a dishwasher. We also had a really small subsized refrigerator, and we were getting the vibe that was maybe gonna cause issues, for guests. We also had a beautiful screened porch that was really large and very well enclosed, and so we built a kitchenette out on the screened porch where people would probably already be spending time snacking, having cheese plates, drinking wine.
So we put a really nice wine fridge out there. And installed the dishwasher in the screen porch. We're able to winterize the pipe so it's not gonna freeze. But that was now an amenity that came out of an issue in the house. My favorite quirk resolution in this particular cabin was, the well pump has to be kept warm so we're like we have to keep this rag-infested shed to keep the well pump warm. And what can we do with this pretty large structure. And so I like to say that we went from rags to riches and we turned it into a bougie wine barn. We did flooring, cleaned everything out, shoveled rat poop out with snow shovels. This is for real, very unglamorous. And now there's a game table and a tuffet on top of the concrete enclosure of the well cover, and it's somewhere where you would love to spend time with your friends, play games, do puzzles, drink wine, listen to music, and it's such an amenity out of a complete atrocity and it's extra space to be.
The next thing to think about is keeping your Airbnb design and color palette simple. This cabin we just launched is called Cabernet Chalet, and I was very inspired by the winery near us. So I pushed myself out of my design comfort zone of blues, grays, blacks, greens, and I included a deep burgundy as an accent color.
I quickly figured out that, burgundy is an exceptionally hard color to find. Not all burgundies are created equal. Yes, and it's very difficult to match. I legitimately carried our burgundy paint swatch in my purse everywhere to make sure art pillows and accents matched. I ordered and returned, I don't even know how many duvet sets that looked like the correct color online and were wrong in person.
So it turns out that my alternative color choice wasted a lot of time in mental cycles. While it did look nice, we could have probably done this faster if I had simplified. So the moral of the story, especially for your first Airbnb design, keep to simple, neutral colors and easy to match accent colors. They can be bright, just don't pick burgundy.
Figure Out What You Need & Start Talking About It
So for example, if you need a roofer, start asking about a roofer. For housekeepers we put out yard signs and we generally get lots of phone calls. It wasn't working quite as well here, so we just started talking to everybody that we encountered about what we needed. We talked to our builder. We talked to our painter. Danielle literally stopped a guy hauling stone up the road and we got cleaner recommendations from all of those people. Another client was doing property down in Myrtle Beach, and it was going to be in a condo building so she couldn't really put out yard signs. And so I said, "Just start asking everybody." And she ended up meeting a couple of people. I think she met somebody at a bar just talking about what she was doing and got a cleaner recommendation and not just a cleaner recommendation in this story. In a development market like that, the cleaning companies wanted $250 each to do cleanings and I was coaching her to try to find an individual, and she found a mother-daughter combination that's doing her cleaning for a hundred dollars. So whatever it is that you feel is stopping you or slowing you down, whatever your obstacle is on launching this Airbnb - maybe it's just getting started, finding the money - just start talking to people around you about what you're trying to accomplish, and you'll find the answers. God has an amazing way of showing up when you ask.
Getting Ready to Launch your Airbnb
The seventh thing to consider as you're getting ready to launch your Airbnb is that photo ready, while very exciting is different from guest ready. So prepare to have a lot of time and energy for both of those things we constantly say. It's done. And then it is not done. Here's the final punch list. That's not the final punch list. So, you can be photo ready. Everything can be beautiful, but you could have empty kitchen cabinets with no plates or silverware, or no extra towels or linens.
You need to have two times the sheets for each bed for quick turnovers, and two times the max number of guest towels. Again for quick turnovers and you also need to consider surprise and delight items for guests. We, at this particular cabin, leave out biscotti and burgundy bath salt. That one was actually easy to color match.
We just had a client go live at the beach and realized she didn't have shampoos for guests. She had great photos, everything was ready, but there weren't toiletries for guests. The same place again I didn't have our shower curtain up for photos of the claw foot bathtub because it was a little visually cluttered. Claw foot bathtubs have a different circumference than a regular, one wall bathtub. And we realized we didn't have the right number or the right length of shower curtains. So, Culin had to drive down a mountain and go secure shower liners right before. It was like down to the minute, right before guests arrived at three. So even though we've done 12 Airbnb investments, we still make mistakes. The best thing you can do is make a checklist for each room to track and cross off what's needed, so you are guest ready.
Truth About Launching an Airbnb
And finally, just understand that your Airbnb is never going to be 100% done. It can be guest ready. It is never gonna be all the way done all the time. Keep a list of the things that you can postpone and then start to prioritize amenities that you want to add over time. If you didn't have the time or money to put in that hot tub, put it on the list. There's always put improvements to be made, maintenance to be done, and always reorganizing that list for time and budget.
Absolutely. It's never done, which sounds a little bit scary, but it also means there's always opportunities to add new things, to make it more beautiful, to change out the flooring you couldn't afford. You can guest fund the next improvements, but if you're like, oh, I can't let anyone stay here until it's perfect, that's a great recipe for heartache and a really big credit card bill. So get it amazing, and get it out there so other people can start enjoying it and making you money.
So there you have it. You now know eight things to consider when you launch an Airbnb. How to align your investment expectations with your season of life and the real costs you need to carry before your Airbnb begins producing income.
If you love our advice and want some help on your Airbnb investing journey - we'd love to coach you! Set up a free 30-minute Airbnb coaching call here.
