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Hi
I am planning to rent an apartment in Copenhagen (Next to Meat Packing District) with an intention to Host on AirBnB. However, I have two questions:
The important thing to know first is whether your landlord knows and agrees.
Jaquo, yes they allow as long as it’s not disturbing the neighbors. Other tenants are also doing in our building, but I am not sure about:
Hej!
We rent our apartment in Kbh K out full time via airbnb and our occupancy rate has been in excess of 85% for the last two years. Demand is high for us all year round with June being our busiest month. Not sure about your area exactly but water views are desirable, we have a view of the lakes and guests tell us it a key factor in choosing our place.
If other people in your building are renting via Air, can you ask them about their occupancy?
Income is taxed at your personal rate - but only the profit you’re making after expenses have been deducted.
Hej
Thanks for the valuable feedback. It’s good to know about the high demand in K and your Occupancy is very good! I am sure you are a SuperHost with InstantBooking 
Unfortunately, our building is fairly new and not many people are doing AirBnB, so it does not show up on the map in the first glance unless you zoom the map to the specific location. And just looking at the number of reviews in our area it was a little scary as most people had 12-20 reviews over 1-2 years with a rate of 700DKK+.
But looking at their calendar, almost all had lots of availability looking at couple of months forward. So not sure if it’s normal that people don’t leave reviews or that most bookings are in short window.
Long story short, not sure if the Hosts in this area are doing well. I wish there was some more analysis on this to encourage more hosts to join, right now it seems hit or miss. I might message some hosts in the same building and check with them.
Tak!
Do you own the K apartment or lease it? Normally, is it ok in Copenhagen to AirBnb in big apartment complexes? From both landlord and neighbors point of view.
Tak
We own our apartment so don’t have a landlord to worry about.
We haven’t had any issues with the tenants association but then our guests have never caused us or our neighbours any problems. We are in a 1970’s block with good construction, neighbour noise is not a problem except on balconies.
I would say about 60% of our guests leave reviews so this isn’t necessarily indicative of occupancy rates.
We have instant book turned on - but we are just short of being super hosts.
What sort of price point are you looking to start at? What is your target audience?
Thanks for clarifying that reviews are not an accurate way of judging occupancy. And good to know that your guests have been very nice and respectful
We are planning to get the apartment next door for AirBnB, so similar to you, it will be exclusively for renting on AirBnB. Since we will be next door, so it will be easy to manage the unit without the guests interfering our private space. The apartment is brand new (1 year old building) 3-room 90kvm directly overlooking the canal with 2 huge terraces of 20kvm and 15kvm each.
Location is quite decent, it’s 4-5 minutes walking distance to Vesterbro and S-Train. And 20 mins walking to the city center and 5 mins walking to the Islands Brygge via the bridge.
Since we have the full apartment available for Airbnb all-year, we were thinking we might have to lower our rate to 400-450 DKK for each room and average occupancy of 40%. It’s hard to figure this out as I have seen some really old apartments on 4th floor without elevator getting 600-700DKK rate and having 100+ reviews, whereas some of the really nice apartments in the same neighborhood have 400-500DKK rate and still their calendar has no booking and very few reviews.
So it’s kind of confusing! Not sure what’s driving higher occupancy and rate Let me know if you have any insights or guidance based on your experience.
Ideal target audience is anyone respectful of our space. And price-point we are thinking is 450-500DKK per room or 1000 DKK for the full apartment 90+20+15 Kvm. Please let us know if it seems realistic or are we too off.
Tusind tak
First thing to consider is that you will most probably need to have somebody registered as living there permanently.
We manage this my having my address registered at our house outside the city and my husband registered at the city apartment.
The apartment we rent was my husband’s bachelor pad before we met. We used to rent it out long to single log term tenants but switched to airbnb for summer 2013 and pretty much trebled our income - but added a lot more hassle.
Your place sounds similar to ours, we only rent it as a whole apartment and in peak season, we make over 2000dkk per night, around 1500dkk over winter. Ours is 110sqm and has two large terraces, one over looking the city and one over looking the lakes. Our minimum stay is 4 nights as minimising hassle factor is key for us. I think the higher price point helps with guest calibre. We mainly attract middle aged and older tourists. We do have free parking available which is also a good USP, but then only about 10% of our guests utilise this. We only have one bedroom and a sofa bed in lounge, if you rent the whole apartment, think about adding a sofa bed so you can up your capacity to 6 people, but think about the additional wear and tear that number of people bring.
I think your price point is realistic, you may need to offer a bargain rate for the first few months to attract bookings and reviews which will boost your search ranking - plus guests like reviews. I think most tourists will search by Indre By and then move out if they can’t find anything at their price point. So you will need to highlight your great features, like the water view and terraces but be realistic that you probably won’t get the rates central apartments would.
Be aware than when renting by the room you may attract people that are looking to live in Copenhagen and are looking for temporary accomodation while they find a longer term place to stay. There is quite a lot of demand for this.
While living next door will help lower the hassle factor, don’t under estimate it. Cleaning an entire apartment is quite time consuming or costly if you get a cleaner. If you’re renting by the room, think about the frequency of cleaning of communal areas - especially if you have guests checking in on different days.
You are right City Center and 1970 Frederiksberg are prime location and command higher premium than other places. While our place Havneholmen is on the waterfront, it will be lower in price. Thanks for sharing your rates for summer and winter, it gives a good benchmark number to keep in mind. It’s also good to know that your guests are more mature and middle aged people.
Do you think first year occupancy of 45% is realistic as our listing will take time to feature on the top with good reviews and get SuperHost status.
Can you share how many reviews do you guys have? Also how much does a professional cleaning service cost for such service apartments. Does the AirBnB restrict your ability to go on long vacations as you need someone to manage the apartment or is the cleaning lady or some neighbor able to handle the key handover?
I can’t thank you enough! You have given me soo much valuable information to make an informed decision about getting on AirBnB. I really owe you a big one. You should be a Host Mentor 
Tak
I’d say a 45% occupancy rate is realistic but it all depends on pricing, occupancy isn’t always the best measure of success. You could probably get near 100% occupancy if you let the whole place for 500dkk per night for example.
My best advice would be to advertise at a cheap price for the first few months to attract bookings which hopefully convert into good reviews. This will boost your search rankings and the good reviews will attract other bookings. You might run at a loss to begin with but once your bookings start to roll in, you can ramp up the price.
Plus turn on instant book - this will really help with your search rankings too.
Our cleaner costs 659dkk for a full clean and linen change. We wash the bedding and towels ourselves. It take about 2 to 3 hours to fully clean the apartment after guest to the standards expected. Some guests leave the place spotless, others leave a lot of mess.
We meet about 50% of our guest ourselves, we both work full time, have a small child and live quite a bit north these days so it just isn’t possible for us to meet all our guests. We have a few friends that either work or live in the city that help us out when we can’t do it. I always check in with the guests by text or email when I know they have arrived and make sure they know I can be reached through out their stay.
Glad to have been on help - let me know if you have any other questions and good luck with it all.
Thanks a ton! I will keep you posted how things workout 
Hi! I’m wondering if this worked out for you in the end, CopenhagenHavn. We’re currently trying to rent a place for our family (just moved to Copenhagen) and are considering getting an apartment with an extra room and putting it on Airbnb to help pay for the expenses. Any insight would be valuable, thanks!