Would appreciate any input (pros and cons) on setting a minimum stay of 30 days. Thanks, Randal
The majority of our rental-nights in any given year are 30+ days (minimum has been one week). We’ve had no problems with duration – we leave cleaning/sheet-washing during stay entirely to the guests… no prpblems on that front.
New municipal regulations are about to force us to make ALL stays 30 days, and that creates a problem filing in the gap between 30-day stays, which (allowing time for a thorough cleaning between guests) may not be long enough for a full 30-day stay.
I prefer short stays for the following reasons but these might not apply to other hosts.
- I’ve experienced before that guests staying for longer periods aren’t as careful with the home as short-term guests.
- With long-term guests, I’ve found it’s necessary to go into the property to clean/change linen and towels, every week otherwise the clean-up job after the stay can take much longer.
- I live in an adjacent apartment and therefore come across my guests often. If they are bad guests, or simply surly people I have the advantage with short terms that they’ll be gone soon and I won’t have to put up with them for long.
- Locally, guests can claim tenants’ rights if they stay more than 28 days.
- If this happens, I need to go to court to remove them. (This can take six or more months).
- My neighbours have had problems with long term guests who have refused to pay and refused to leave. Again, the law needs to then be involved.
- My STR insurance is cheaper for short-term guests.
- I make more money with short term.
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Another thing to consider is that if one is a new or relatively new host, long term bookings means you will get fewer reviews. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that listings that have pages full of reviews (good ones, of course) get booked more often than those with only a handful.
And I read on hosting forums of guests who book long term, let’s say 2 or 3 months, then want to cancel after a month or less and demand refunds. If Airbnb was respectful of hosts’ cancellation policies that wouldn’t be a problem, but they aren’t. And often the refund-seeking guest fabricates some “issue” to convince Airbnb that they should be refunded.
The type of guests who feel entitled to a refund outside the cancellation policy and are denied, are also likely to leave a bad review in retaliation.
Short term bookings mean a bad review will quickly be buried by good reviews, whereas if the next bookings are also long term, that bad review will sit there at the top of your review page and their 2 star rating will take forever to be balanced out.
As long as you get non-problematic long-termers like @Spark does, long term bookings aren’t an issue, but some areas and listings seem to attract more problem guests.
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I had a 16 month tenancy at $2500 a week. They refused cleaning and I could not insist because of a vulnerable person.
It took a full week for the clean after they left …… I think they only vacuumed the middle of the rooms and never cleaned the bathrooms….
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I’ve told this story before but I might as well tell it again…
A neighbour of mine had a tenant on, I think, a three month rental.
The tenant painted the bedroom walls a very sludgy, unpleasant green color, and the nice, clean-looking white chest of drawers and bedhead was painted a particularly 
shade of brown.
After a couple of weeks, it seems that some tenants think the place belongs to them and they can do whatever they like.
16 months and didn’t clean the bathroom, I can’t quite imagine.
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So they paid $10,000/month for almost a year and a half and never cleaned the bathrooms? That gives new meaning to “filthy rich”.
What do you mean by not being able to insist on cleaning “because of a vulnerable person”?
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Government booking for a child at risk.
I still don’t understand what scheduling regular cleaning has to do with a child at risk.
Police clearance for anyone in contact with the child. Child could only have male carers, child had multiple behavioural issues involved with privacy…i dont think i can make it clearer
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I know that anyone involved with the care of govt. wards has to pass a police check, and can understand not having others around who might trigger emotional issues, it just seems rather odd for that to extend to someone coming in to clean for a few hours every couple of weeks, unless the child is never taken out of the house- seems like the care workers could take the child on some excursion when a cleaning would have been scheduled.
But then, govt. regs don’t always make sense.
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A week of cleaning after a $160,000 booking? I’d take that deal!
(Edited cause I can’t do math today)
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Yeah, as long as there were no major damages, I think I’d consider cleaning costs of 1% of a $160,000 booking (figuring $30/hr. for 8hrs/day for 7 days) to be financially okay.
But I think Deb’s point may have been just to highlight how dirty it can get with long term bookings, rather than a complaint about the cleaning time involved in that booking.
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The clean was $1200……….had to replace linens and towels as well as a number of items the were either broken or went with them on the check out
And I billed them with photos!
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I rented out my house in Canada, where I had lived for 18 years, on one year leases, for 4 years in a row.
1st tenant:
Her boyfriend installed a marijuana grow show in the master bedroom, drilled holes in the floor to run wiring through, and messed with the electrical panel.
After she split up with him, months later, she had some friend move in whose dog dug up all my flower beds. I had told her she could have her own dog there on a trial basis, as long as it didn’t cause any damages in the house or yard.
In spite of keeping the small grassy areas mowed as a part of the lease agreement, with a lawnmower provided, I returned to find the grass a foot high, which had reseeded in all my garden beds. When I asked her why she hadn’t kept the yard up, she told me she liked the grass long.
When I went over 2 days before her lease was up, I saw she had not yet packed or cleaned anything, in a 4 bedroom, 2 story house she had lived in for a year. When I asked how she planned to be out in 2 days, she said no worries, she had lots of friends coming to help- friends I found sitting around in the back yard, smoking dope and drinking beer at 4pm on move-out day with piles of junk everywhere, nothing having been cleaned, who, when I asked where the tenant was, told me she was at her new place, sick in bed.
2nd tenant:
Moved in with truckload after truckload of stuff. Filled the shed to the rafters with cardboard boxes full of what looked like mostly hoarded junk.
Told me 2 months before the end of the tenancy that there were rats. When I told her to call pest control, send me the receipt and take the cost off the rent, she told me they didn’t want pest control because they were Buddists and didn’t condone killing anything. I suggested she get a cat- that was also kiboshed because of her beliefs, even though cats naturally kill rodents. When I asked her what she expected me to do about the problem, as none of my solutions were acceptable to her, she said she wanted a reduction in the rent. (How that solves a rat problem is beyond me)
3rd tenant:
Moved in with her boyfriend, which I knew was the plan, but I signed the lease with her, as she said it was their first try at co-habitating and might not work out.
Unbeknowst to me, they split up after a few months and she left and he stayed.
He drilled holes in all my walls to hang things up, including holes in beautiful, wide, antique cedar boards.
Let all my house plants die because he never watered them.
And although it was rented with the understanding that while renters could use the shed, I also had things stored there that weren’t to be messed with, when I asked what happened to all the dress-up clothes my 3 daughters had collected over the course of 2 decades, that were in a big trunk in the shed, he told me he had taken it all to the dump.
4th tenant:
Started off fine, he was sort of a friend of mine. Then 2 months before the end of his tenancy he wrote to ask if he could trade repainting the whole outside of the house for rent, as he was having a hard time finding work (he was a professional painter), I told him it wasn’t a bad offer, but the rent paid the mortgage, so that wouldn’t work for me.
That was met with a flurry of nasty emails about what a bad, compassionless person I was and he stopped paying the rent. I had to get a mutual friend to go put a non-payment-of-rent eviction notice on the door, which prompted another flurry of nasty emails.
I had to borrow $ from a friend to make the mortgage payments.
He left the house quite dirty.
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Your four tales of tenants confirms why I would never be a real land lord. That and the neighbor at my former residence that didn’t pay the landlady rent during and after covid and the landlady took the renter to court several times before she was able to get rid of her minus all the junk they left behind.
Short term rentals are a completely different thing.
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Oh, and that former friend who stopped paying the rent because he was supposedly unable to find work? When I got back, I found out from his aunt-in-law that the reason he can’t find work is that he thinks he’s God’s gift to the painting profession, and doesn’t get work because his quotes are twice what other painters charge.
I’ve done short term furnished, medium term furnished, and long-term furnished, and unfurnished.
No question in my mind that with long-term furnished you are going to have some damages. Most of mine have been minor. I had one tenant who was a long-term furnished tenant, who was such an OCD cleaner that she took a custom painted end table, that had been painted to match the upholstery pattern on the living room ottoman and armchair, and scrubbed the pattern off. I’ve had sheets that were ruined by not being changed, even though I brought clean sheets over every week. But I think those were probably the worst damages I had other than a burn mark on a sideboard.
I think the key with long-term furnished is to have it in the lease that you are going to be going in the residence every 7 to 10 days to change the linens and do any minor cleaning touchups (such as scrubbing the toilet, wiping down counters, or taking out trash that has accumulated and hasn’t been removed by the tenants). This gives you the ability to see if they are doing things that they shouldn’t and start taking steps to remove them from the property.
With long-term unfurnished houses, I have it in the lease that we do monthly inspections for maintenance issues and to accomplish routine maintenance to keep the house systems in good working order. There is no way I would rent out any property that I couldn’t keep eyes on.
It’s important to have a good detailed lease that spells out everything that you can possibly think of. Tenants and guests are going to do things that you can’t even imagine people would do. That’s where forums like this one and other landlord forums can be extremely helpful because you can get an idea of the things you might encounter and take steps to head them off.
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Had I been around and able to check on things, none of those tenant scenarios I had, except possibly the last one (as the eviction required adequate notice, even though he’d stopped paying rent), would have been allowed to continue as they did. But I was out of the country and naive enough to trust each tenant.
As long as I was in the vicinity, I would consider being a landlord, but I would accept only people who had great references, instead of them being acquaintances, friends of friends, and supposed friends, as all those tenants were. And schedule regular maintenance checks.
But I’d never want to do long-term tenancies again if I lived elsewhere, and I definitely wouldn’t consider doing them through Airbnb, who has control of the money.
I’m so over remote hosting and landlording long term tenants now that even though I go to Canada for 2 months every summer and could make good money renting out my home in Mexico while I’m away, I just find a trusted housesitter who wants to trade for a place to stay. I even cover all the utilities for them.
And while I had a couple of housesitters from hell years ago,I’m much more careful who I find to housesit now, and come back to a clean house and yard.
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