If you've ever wondered how Airbnb investors protect their properties from wild parties and damage while boosting their profits — Episode 119 of the Host Coach Airbnb Investing Podcast is for you!
Today we're diving into how smart hosts are using technology to save time, prevent losses, and scale their portfolios — without sacrificing guest experience or peace of mind.
You'll hear from a former Apple engineer, who founded Minut, a company that's helping over 50,000 Airbnb hosts in 100 countries prevent parties, protect their assets, and even automate guest comfort — all with one small, easy-to-install device.
From noise monitoring and smoke detection to leak prevention and motion sensing, this conversation will teach you how to safeguard your Airbnb, keep your neighbors happy, and even increase your cash flow — so you can focus on what really matters: living the life you love through Airbnb investing!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- How to stop parties in your Airbnb before they start
- How to safeguard your STR from smoke, leaks, and frozen pipes
- Why balancing property protection and guest comfort is critical for success
- Where to get data you need to win Air Cover insurance claims
- The benefits of leveraging motion tracking to upsell early check ins
- The smart way to automate the tech - but keep the human touch
Host Coach Airbnb Podcast Episode 119 Show Notes:
Can you share a real example where Minut helped a host prevent a party or a bad situation before it turned into a nightmare?
This is what we do day in and day out, and this is happening hundreds of times every month. So that's the typical case that someone is starting to throw a party and we contact the guest and then they go out to a bar. They take it to the town instead. But we've had some more amusing stories as well.
We had a customer in Canada, they got an alert that the temperature was dropping in their property, so they went out thinking that the guests had probably left a window open, which apparently happened before. And they did find the window open, but they also found a bear inside. So that was the visitor. It was not actually the previous guest.
Oh my gosh! Bear detection. We might actually need that at a few of our cabins.
Nils, what inspired you to leave Apple and start minute? Was it a personal experience?
That was actually the startup itch. I grew up in Sweden and then I moved to California, worked for Apple in my early twenties, and a lot of people around me eventually started start up. And I was really inspired to see the success of my friends. I loved Apple, but after having been there for seven, eight years, I wanted to try being at a smaller company.
The idea actually came from a chance encounter with one of the first employees at Airbnb. We met at the bar in San Francisco and he was telling me how they had these issues with people putting up cameras from a guest perspective. That's something that's quite appalling, but you could also have a bit of empathy with the host who was inviting someone new into their home.I saw that as a quite interesting problem because I had been doing a lot of work with how you can use machine learning while still preserving privacy. And so I saw these two things coming together and figured maybe this is my startup. That's amazing. So you were like, there's an issue.
How to Stop Parties in Your Airbnb Before They Start
People hate having cameras because it makes them feel exposed, but hosts want to have cameras because without having them they feel exposed. So you're like, "wait a second, this is a problem that I can solve with machine learning?"
Yeah, exactly. We saw the problem and figured you can of course monitor space without intruding on the privacy of people there. For example, just measuring noise levels rather than actual audio or video. You can know that something is going on, but you don't have to know exactly what it is. And so finding that balance between hosts and guests I thought was a quite interesting and rich problem.
And of course now we do privacy conscious monitoring for Airbnb hosts with large portfolios to small portfolios. We also do work in student housing and apartment hotels, multifamily. There's a lot of places where you have this landlord with an interest to protect their property, but also the guest experience that you have to take into account. So this has become our niche, if you will.
How would you explain Minut not in tech terms, but in terms of peace of mind and cash flow protection?
You can see it as an insurance policy if something were to go wrong in your property. For example, a guests throw a big party, which obviously hurts your neighbor relations. It can in many cases cause you to risk your license to operate. It can be a quite existential threat... in like the damages.
What Minut does is detect the signs that, for example, like crowd is forming or loud noise levels, and then we close the loop. So we detect these things and then, uh, the first thing we do is we contact the guests and let them know that they're now out of bounds. And what we see is that actually solves more than 80% of issues right away. Most of the times these things happen It's not because people are bad. People are just on holiday and they're in a good mood and they might go a little bit overboard. So that's the core case and what people think about most when they hear minutes.
Protect Your Airbnb from Smoke, Leaks & Frozen Pipes
And let's just break it down a little bit. You monitor for noise, smoke, right? So tobacco or marijuana, can you differentiate between the two or is it just smoke?
For legal reasons, we don't actually because there are some states where it's not legal and where if you know that a crime is happening, you have an obligation to report. And we are all about making our hosts life easier, so therefore we actually don't differentiate, even though from a technology perspective, you could probably do it. So we've got noise level, smoke and you monitor for the number of people.
Do you do that via cell phones?
Yes. We count the number of devices that come into a property. So it's not that perfect gauge for exactly how many people, but it gives you an idea there's a crowd forming. For example we do indoor climate monitoring. So if you have a property in either a very hot climate or a very cold climate, you know how important it is to make sure that both the guests have the right comfort that are working, but also to prevent pipes, freezing and leaks, etcetera.
So there's two things there to unpack, right? It's both leak detection and freeze detection.
Yes. But different sensors. So we have a water leak sensor that you can place in places where there a risk for leaks but then we also have the sensor that goes in the ceiling that measures the humidity in the property line. It can detect if there is suddenly the humidity spike. I just had someone reach out to me the other day saying that they had a high humidity alert, which turned out to be a pretty catastrophic leak from the neighbor above, and so that was one of the things where I think we paid for the product about a hundred times over.
Simple Airbnb Protection
Help me understand, how big is your product? It sounds complicated and I have to wire it in, but I'm sure you've made it simple.
We've worked hard to make it simple. The device itself, it's about the size of the palm of your hand. You install it into the ceiling on a magnetic plate that comes with a double-sided tape, so you just pull that off. You put the magnetic plate in the ceiling and then you're up and running within minutes.
It's about the size of a smoke detector and I would say actually easier to install than a smoke detector. So if you can do that, then you can definitely do ours, and then it connects to the wifi you already have, which is of course also useful because that means it can monitor the wifi network.
How much does Minut cost?
The hardware unit is about a $100 and then the subscription is another $10 per month. We believe you can pretty quickly get good ROI on that... just in terms of the damage that you can prevent or the extra cleaning fees that come with someone throwing a larger party at your house. That would be instantaneously covered! Or cigarette smoke. It's another one, right? You might have to rent an ozone machine.
Balancing Airbnb Guest Comfort & Property Protection
I had a real life example about a week ago an Airbnb coaching client's housekeeper showed up and the house wreaked of smoke. The host contacted the guests to say, "Hey, you broke the house rules. You smoked, we need to charge you." And the guest's response was, "How can you prove it, Where's your evidence?" They didn't deny it just straight off said: You can't prove it.
And I said, I've got a solution for you going forward: you need to invest in Minut and you can avoid these things, and have some documentation to provide to Airbnb in case one of these situations occurs.
I think that's unfortunately the case as host, whenever there is a word against word type of dispute. We see Airbnbs and the other OTAs, they're almost always siding with the guests, right? So having a bit of documentation, having a bit of data can help in many situations. Also in cases like, did the guest actually show up? Did they spend time there? This is meta data that can be quite helpful to have whenever there are these type of conflicts.
Get the Data to Win Airbnb Air Cover Claims as a Host
Have you found that Airbnb has been supportive of your data to say that there was 10 people there, not two, or the noise level was high or that smoke was present in the Airbnb?
I'm very proud of our relationship with Airbnb. Actually, it is really easy from within the Minut platform to create a report that you can then take to Airbnb for Air Cover, and that tends to work really, really well. We're also working directly with Airbnb to make sure that their staff is trained for it. It's not always that this works out of course, but having a little bit of data in what would otherwise be a complete "he said, she said scenario" is very helpful.
Let's go back to the noise monitoring. So I have a device installed, it's starting to get noisy. Do I set a decibel threshold? And what happens when that threshold gets passed?
Every property is different and your Airbnb might have a higher threshold for what you deem acceptable or not, right? So we don't impose a one-size-fits-all. You install it. It can be helpful to see what the noise is for a few days and decide where to set it, but then we'll make it easier for you to set it up the way you want it.
What we see as the most effective is that you then connect it to either your PMS or to Airbnb. So that Minut when we detect noise that goes above the thresholds that you've set, then we contact the guest directly. You as a host don't necessarily need to be in the loop because that allows the guest to self-regulate, and the earlier you would do this, less likely you are to have any issues down the line.
Then of course there are escalation mechanisms, so like if a guest isn't responding. We can place a phone call if they're not responding to that eventually, you as the host, might have to get involved, but you have that record about what messages has been sent when and what the guest has responded. And most of the time, as I said, most people are good people, they are responding, "We're so sorry we didn't realize it. Tell the neighbors we're sorry." And that's the end of it.
So if that noise threshold gets crossed, minute is attached to say, my Hospitable or my PMS account. And a message then goes out from your platform directly to that guest. What's that message sound like?
]That's up to you. You can of course, adapt it to your tone of voice and you can decide whether you want to do it through text messages or the Airbnb platform, or if you use Hospitable, it's a great platform. You can also set up communications there. You can set it up in a way where it behaves like you would in that situation, but you can be completely hands off.
That's wonderful because you can be empathetic and not like, "you're doing something wrong," but more like: "hey, we heard from our neighbors that it's a little bit loud over there. Could you please turn down the music?" And I could see, like you said, getting ahead of that instead of waiting until perhaps guests have had a few more cocktails or a few more people come over, but at the very beginning being like, "oops, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize that I was: A. Making a mistake or B that you know that I'm making a mistake in your Airbnb." I think that's brilliant!
Preventing Airnb Issues Before A Guest Arrives
I like how you said getting ahead of it. I had another situation with a client last week. They're in a town that's kind of a college town. And they've had a couple problems already where college kids had rented their Airbnb and caused problems for the neighbors. So it was like not only putting in this device to be able to respond, if something happens, you can put it in your messaging ahead of time to say, "We employ these technologies to monitor for guest count for smoke for volume." So this isn't the place for you, right? If you're here to have a party, we're gonna monitor these things. We're gonna know, our neighbors are gonna know, and so you can get that far in front of it, even in your booking messaging.
Depending on your market - If you're in a college type town where that's at risk, this disclosure solves a lot of issues. It can also be quite comforting for a guest, right? Like when you are new in a neighborhood, you might not know what sort of the social norms are, what hours there are. And getting the information that if you are out bounds, we will tell you - that can actually be quite comforting and, and give people a better experience as well.
So we like this balance, right? We'd really like to achieve that win-win scenario. Where the product is actually making life better - not just for the host, but for the guests and the wider community as well. So that's something that we put a lot of work into to make sure we get this balance right.
Automate Hosting Without Losing the Human Touch
Could you give us an example of how Minut has helped improve guest experience?
We leverage data from the climate monitoring, and we work with Google Nest to make sure that the indoor climate is perfect for guests when they arrive, but then when the property empty, that it goes into an energy saving mode, both saving money for the host, but also providing a better experience for the guest.
I also think your example around the cigarette smoke. We've all had the time when we checked into a hotel room or an Airbnb and someone has smoked there before, and it's a pretty bad experience as a guest, but if you can detect that and make sure that you've cleaned it up properly before the next one arrives, it's helping you combat bad reviews and making sure that you provide a consistently high standard for your guests.
With your detection devices and people in this space, can you tell a guest that they can have early check-in because you know your housekeeper has left because of the, there are no devices in the Airbnb?
When you want to detect whether a property is vacant, we usually use the motion detection and you can set it up so that it. Essentially triggers a notification when it notices that a guest has checked out on the checkout day. And that can be a trigger for you to get the cleaners there early, and then maybe you can actually sell an early check-in.
Okay. I'm sold. I love this! Yeah, there's going to be an order for 14 coming in directly after this interview.
You work with hosts from all over the world, what has surprised you the most about the short-term rental industry as it's matured?
What I find so good about this industry is that it's full of small entrepreneurs who are not necessarily competing that much with one another. I will speak to a host of America and someone on a Caribbean island, and they will never compete, so that means that they are very collaborative and friendly. I've worked in other industries in the past, which had a very, very different sort of atmosphere, and I really appreciate this about the short term rental and maybe hospitality in a wider sense that people are very generous and welcoming. If you are in this industry, don't take it for granted.
It's really fantastic that people are so open to sharing their experiences and sharing their advice, and we're sort of learning together. What a great observation, and you're right. No one gets into Airbnb investing and hosting because they hate working with people and are difficult in nature. Most people have some place that they love and want to share it with other people and also make a profit. We are in the hospitality business, so we're hospital able to one another. 100%.
Future Airbnb Trends
All right, Nils, if you had a crystal ball. What changes do you see coming that hosts need to prepare for now if they want to keep growing?
So obviously AI is reshaping a lot of the things that we do, and there has been a lot of discussion and conversation about what's changing. I think it's important to look at the flip side of it as well, what is not changing, and perhaps double down on a few of those things where we know for a fact that they will always be true. So, great guest experience: when we're starting to automate and automate more, we mustn't forget that this is why our customers are coming and that's why they're coming back.
It's really hard to look lmany years ahead now. If you think about it going back just two years ago chat, GPT and these bots, like you might have tried something like it, but it didn't really work. Now, Minut messaging is able to respond to over 80% of the incoming messages that that we see. And of course, that's due to the advancements that we've seen on the underlying models just in a few short years. So I think that is going to become really uncanny and I think you just have to be early on that, adopt it, try it, see what works for you, and then use the time that you free to invest in the things that isn't changing as quickly.
That's exactly what I was thinking as you were giving that answer. AI, technologies, and Minut allows us to be more human right? So the things that we can automate and data we can gather allows us to be better hosts and more human and more hospitable. Outsource the things that you don't like to do that are just monotonous, and then focus in on the guest experience and really connecting with your guests and the things that make us human and hard to replicate.
If you have one Airbnb, if you have 20 Airbnbs, if you worry at all about your property safety, your guest safety, if you'd like to be able to upsell early check-ins and let your housekeeper know when people have left early. This is such a fantastic product and we would love to hear your thoughts on it.
How to Connect with Minut
Check out www.minut.com, or reach out to any of their salespeople.
Should you need an Airbnb coach to help you find the right market, property, and help you set yourself up for success - feel free to book a free 30 minute coaching call with us. We LOVE helping new investors avoid pitfalls and find financial freedom through Airbnb investing!
