Do you wonder successful Airbnb investors have tools and systems in place that you don't know about? Are you looking for solutions to time consuming tasks you may experience as a host? Would you like to work smarter and not harder on your investment?
If so, this episode is for you today, you need to listen to Episode 30 of the Host Coach Airbnb Investing Podcast we're pulling back the curtain and sharing the exact tools that we use to streamline our processes for managing our 10 Airbnb properties, as well as the different softwares that help automate maximizing our occupancy and profits across the portfolio, so you know specifically how to save time and make more money on your Airbnb investments.
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Why tech stacks are essential to investor success
- The 8 tools in our Airbnb tech stack & how they benefit our business
- How a tech stack can save you thousands of dollars in co-host or management fees
Why You Need a Tech Stack as an Airbnb Investor?
Recently we were on a wealth building webinar and asked what our tech stack was. Tech stacks combine technology products and services that work together to build or complete a project or task.
So in layman's terms, a tech stack is the combination of tools you use to be successful in your business. This can be highly technical. Like the tech stack that supports Airbnb's platform. On the front end, HTML CSS and JavaScript combined to deliver responsive and intuitive web and mobile applications while Python runs the backend.
The good news is a tech stack can also be simple, like how we found a few software tools over the years to help streamline our management processes to help us succeed as Airbnb investors. Today we're going to share our complete Airbnb tech stack so you know what tools are available to help you fast track your Airbnb journey to financial freedom.
8 tools in our Airbnb Tech Stack
We begin with AirDNA, which is an online software that tracks the performance data of over 10 million vacation rentals to analyze occupancy rates, revenue and pricing. We can use AirDNA to begin to evaluate markets that we might be interested in investing. Is this a good market?
Is it highly regulated? What are the average daily rates like? How many properties are in that market? It allows us to begin analyzing, is this a good market for you to invest or not? And AirDNA is not an expensive software. They have a free version. There's a $15 and a $25 a month version.
Airbnb Property Search Alerts
From there, once we've established our market that we're interested in. I use one of the free online real estate search engines. I use Redfin to set up a search area. I usually just draw a zip code or use lasso and draw a circle around an area. Then that platform will send me daily emails of properties that become available for sale in that geography. I get that daily email and I can quickly flip through it and see which properties might meet our criteria.
A townhouse may not meet our criteria where something that looks like a cabin does. I love getting emails from Redfin. It's sort of like daily Christmas, because I'm like, "Oh, this could be the next one!" From there, once we've established our property, we need to list it somewhere.
Listing Airbnb Platform – (OTA)
We call these OTAs or online travel agencies. If you've listened any other episodes, we're big proponents of Airbnb, but it doesn't have to be Airbnb. We're mainly proponents of sole sourcing - listing on a single platform to maximize your benefit and reviews and search placement on that one platform, and Airbnb is free to list.
Airbnb Dynamic Pricing
Next, once we have the listing up, we need to think about pricing. We use PriceLabs, which is a third party dynamic pricing model. PriceLabs is connected directly to Airbnb and it knows specifically how many people are searching in a given neighborhood in a given geography for any given day. When those searches are up 200%, if there's a concert or event coming in town, Pricelabs may not know what that event is, but they're gonna know that the demand for search is up X percent and automatically adjust your pricing upwards accordingly.
We create a base price, say $200. If there's a holiday weekend coming up, Pricelabs will increase that base price maybe to $300 a night, and it actually doesn't just recommend that number to you. It plugs it back into your Airbnb listing automatically, so your calendar is changing daily - meeting price demands and fluctuations.
Conversely on the other side, if we're static pricing at say, $200 a night. That might be too much for next Tuesday and Wednesday night. So if that demand is down, searches are down. PriceLabs will automatically adjust your price downward for you to book that night and keep your occupancy high. There are other third party pricing tools available.
We tend to recommend PriceLabs. We don't recommend using Airbnb's smart pricing tool. PriceLabs is $20 a month for your first property, and that rate decreases with each additional property. So at our 10 property level, we're ending up paying about $14 per property, which is incredibly reasonable.
Automated Guest Messaging
The next thing that we have in our tech stack is an automated messaging tool. We personally love Hospitable. It's a software that centralizes and automates our guest messaging through Airbnb's platform, so this saves us tons of time and giving our guests near immediate communication, which leads to higher booking rates and five star reviews. It's $30 a month for the first property and it decreases to $15 per property after this.
Airbnb Housekeeping Coordination
Next up is a cleaning schedule for our housekeepers. How do we communicate the endless changes that happen with bookings and cancellations? At our various Airbnbs, we use Google Sheets. These are online spreadsheets with the ability to be accessed and updated by multiple people in real time.
Best of all, they are free, and this is by far our least high-tech solution, but it's the best fit for our housekeepers, many of whom don't have a laptop so they can look on their phone. We simply put in the guest's name, number of guests, the check-in date, the checkout date, and the name of the property. Each month is a new sheet, and our housekeepers know to check it daily so we don't have to send one-off messages.
Payments to Airbnb Team
We also uses this Google sheet to run payroll for each of our housekeepers because it breaks out the number of jobs they did each week. At the beginning of each week, I'll use that Google sheet to figure out what is owed to each individual housekeeper. Instead of sending a check, we use Zelle. Zelle is like Venmo or PayPal, but it was created by the banks, so it's not something new that people have to sign up for. With a new housekeeper or vendor, we can just send a test payment to their phone number or email, and all the major banks are already associated with Zelle, so this is a really quick way that I can go through and make payments to the housekeepers or handy people or other vendors, and they get the funds in their account immediately.
I don't have to cut a check. We don't have to let it go through the mail system. It's there in their accounts every Monday morning. Which I feel is a real benefit. You want to get paid quickly. Everybody waits for the Friday paycheck. So this is a win-win. Our team's getting paid immediately and it's trackable. We know if we've missed a payment to somebody, there's this activity report and you know exactly that the payments have been received, which leads into to bookkeeping.
Bookkeeping and Accounting
We encourage all of our Airbnb investors to run their properties as a business. This includes doing business style bookkeeping.
We use QuickBooks, which is a accounting software. It manages invoices, expenses. We compare bills tracker cash flow. The online version is $15 per month. It helps me really think like a business if I'm accounting for every expense, and those should be business expenses, and they're all tracked into QuickBooks. Then I know I'm really separating my business affairs from my personal affairs.
QuickBooks also has the capability to interface directly with your bank, so I'm not keying in each of those transactions. I can import them in a bank transfer. Additionally, at the end of the financial year for tax purposes. I don't have to hand my accountant a shoebox full of invoices or an Excel spreadsheet. I'm simply able to give them a backup copy of my QuickBooks, and from there they have everything that they need to generate my Airbnb tax returns.
Search Rank Monitoring
Next is optimization. How do we know how well our property is doing? Well, there's bookings, there's revenue. Preceding bookings is views, which we can get out of Airbnb. What we don't know is where our listing is showing.
On the Airbnb platform, we use a tool called Rank Breeze to keep track of each of our listings and where they're showing in search results. For any given guest count and available date, we wanna be on page one, right?
It's like Google, if you're not on page one, you're really hard to find. So Rank Breeze tracks this for us. Plots it out on a nice graph, gives us individual data on where we're showing in search placement for any given dates of availability. And if we find that we're slipping down into the number 20, 30, 40 position, we don't have to wait until we're not getting the revenue we want.
We can see in Rank Breeze that we're not necessarily showing as high in search results as we want to be. From there, we can then start making some changes. We can adjust our prices. We can go and add some amenities. We can change some policies. We can also track when we make that change.
It really helps you gain maximum occupancy when you're on page one, more people see you, therefore more people book you. That 50% occupancy is pretty much the break even point for Airbnb investors. So all of the bookings that push you over 50% is where the money comes from.
The first 50% goes to your mortgage and expenses, and the next 50% are your gross margin. For $30 a month, you can have three properties on Rank Breeze that you're continuously monitoring, tweaking to make sure you stay on page one, and you stay fully booked and you're making the most profits possible.
Why Having an Airbnb Tech Stack Matters
So that's our complete tech stack for managing our 10 Airbnb properties with minimal stress and maximum cash flow. Using each of the tools we mentioned totals out at $110 per month for one property, and it would be an additional $50 on top of that for each extra property that you add to your portfolio compared to a co-host or a management company taking 20 to 40% of profits.
If your Airbnb is grossing $5,000 a month in revenue, you could pay $110 to use our tech stack tools or $1,000 to $2,000 to a management company to do the same thing. You get the benefits of offloading mundane tasks while keeping all of your profits. If you're a tech savvy person, congratulations!
So there you have it. You now know the eight tools that we use to streamline the management of our 10 Airbnb properties to maximize our profits. You also know what each tool in our Airbnb tech stack is used for, as well as how much they cost.
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!
