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I have been a host since 2015 and I hosted over 2000 guests since I first started. I have a town house with two bedrooms in California. This year I am going back to Europe for about 6 months.
I have guests every single day in both of the bedrooms I am renting. It’s mostly a place to sleep and get ready to explore the town as there is no access to kitchen/living room/tv etc…
I required ID, reviews, previous recommendations from other hosts. Also when I see a red flag I decline the reservation ahead of time to avoid issues.
Overall, I rarely have issues but when I do it’s annoying but I am on site to fix it.
However, I want to keep doing it while in Europe. I can a cleaning lady who will take care of the cleaning/preparing bedroom but nobody will welcome the guests and live on site.
Is anyone doing this? What is your experience? What problems have you encountered?
I have more or less automatize the process already as there is a keyless code and the guests check-in without me. I leave the house sometimes on the weekend but I never went away longer than this. I also have two cameras, one in the living room and another recording the front door.
Do you live in the townhouse? If not, maybe if you can find a good co-host. If you do live there, I would advise against it unless you moved all your personal possessions and anything else you cared about out of the place for the entire time you’re gone.
Have you disclosed the living room camera in your listing? Many folks won’t book a place that has cameras anywhere inside the house. Exterior cameras (which must also be disclosed) are different.
If you are going to be away in another time zone I definitely wouldn’t rely on a cleaner however much you automate the process.
With you away you don’t know how your various guests will be looking after your place and will have no-one on hand to deal with unruly guests, manage issues around late night noise etc.
I would suggest you ask on a local host group and see if there is a local superhost or highly experienced co-host who can be on hand to help co-host for local issues and respond to urgent guest queries when you are on the other side of the world.
Sounds lovely to have six month off in Europe - enjoy
My co-host (husband) and I were away for a week when guests were there last month, first time we’d ever done that together, and as you are going to be, we were on another continent. During that week there were THREE unforseeable incidents that the guests had to contact us about. We managed to solve the problems but the guests (who had been welcomed by my husband, who’d been there for the first 3 days of their stays) were NOT amused and wrote us a stinking message on their last day, at which I took fright and gave them a 50% discount (yes, I know …)
For your own peace of mind and to be able to enjoy your travelling I would definitely suggest following Helsi’s idea of a local co-host if you can find someone. Second-best could be house-sitters (most organisations will have references for their sitters) who you can brief before you go.
I also tried to have a co-host help me while I went on a road trip 2.5 years ago. I just had two or three guests during the time I would be gone. My gave my co-host, who was also my house sitter for my pets a payment for each turn over and while she was listed as my co-host, I handled all the messaging, calendar and so on. One of the nights I was awakened by my guest saying the power had gone out and asking if there was a breaker box she could check. I said no, my co-host replied that she was on the way (from her night job) and by the time she got there, power had been restored. When I considered all the little things that can go wrong, TV or internet service going out, plumbing problems, etc I decided it’s not worth risking my 98% 5 star record for a few extra dollars.
However for you the risk/reward could be different.
We both were out of the house for 2.5 months last summer . To be honest I don’t want to do this anymore …
Unless you have very reliable housecleaner which at that time I didn’t , and co-host who is super reliable and also can make a decision about minor things , it can be challenging to host from distance .
Some people are very successful with hosting from far. I would be interested to know how they do it.
Once I had to relocate a guest and I booked one night for him at near by hosts house who didn’t live in same house . The house was rented by room and the host was super host with more than 250 5* reviews . I received a bunch of automated messages with precise instructions .
When my guest came back to my house he commented how beautiful and superclean that house was and how everything went smooth though he never met the host.
On how quiet it was and how clean the shared bathroom always was kept.
That made me wonder .
About 2-3 months a year I am renting my pool house by room, the rest of the year it’s rented as entire house .
There is ALWAYS something goes off with " by room" arrangement and mind you I only do it while I am in town . But the fact itself that I am not present there brings all kind of troublesome situations .
So I can’t even imagine renting it by room and be across the ocean without having a co-host.
I had things happening when we were absent and I rented it to company the whole place …and I had a super co-host who took care of situations immediately
I’ve never done it, so ignore me if you like, but I don’t think I’d ever host remotely for all the tea in China. You’d need an absolutely stunningly good co-host.
In addition to the meet & greet and the house tour, the co-host will have to co-ordinate cleaners AND specialists such as plumbers, electricians, general handy-persons, glaziers, decorators, upholstery cleaners, window cleaners, carpet cleaners. TV repair-persons, fridge repair-persons, internet specialists and more.
You’ll have to supply them with a float of cash or a credit card with which to pay these people and they’ll all have to be approved and tested by you in advance. You will also need to make sure that they are fully licensed and insured. (I have photocopies of all their licences and insurances but maybe that’s overkill.)
Your co-host will need to be very local to your rental and be prepared to deal with guests who are sick or injured during their stay, the possibility of fire and flood, guests having parties, guests having a noisy domestic, power outages, internet going down, neighbours complaining, plumbing / electrical emergencies … and a lot more. Yes, I know that these things are unlikely to happen but they do.
They will also have to be very good at dealing with guests who are unhappy for whatever reason with the accommodation and / or the service they receive. They’ll know all about how Airbnb works. They’ll inspect the place after every turnover.
Oh, you know that I could go on and on. One wrong move or one badly handled situation and your reputation is shot.
While I am not really in the same situation I am currently for the first time ever leaving my farm for a week with an Airbnb Guest living in the private bedroom and bathroom. I have to leave to turn over my long term rental to new 3 year tenants in NY tomorrow. I did not know I would need to do this when I got a one month booking at the farm. Luckily she has been here about a week and a half already and has been superb and is a new lieutenant army nurse signing in to her first duty station here in NC and has her cat with her.
As luck would have it because she is in the room my farm sitter won’t make trips back and forth without staying over. My backup Sitter is booked and pregnant and we have been experiencing higher than normal temps so she can’t make the trips. I had a lead on two others but got no responses from either of them.
Soooo…I asked my guest if she would be interested in me paying her what I pay my professional farm sitters to take care of 2 horses, 3 dogs and a barn cat for about 5-7 days. Luckily she was happy to do so and so far it is going very well. It is not something I would ever CHOOSE to do however.
Luckily, my other whole house listing just got a 15 night Airbnb Guest family that is between military trainings and duty stations, coming from UK to NC. They checked in the day before yesterday and I was able to follow up on their second day as is my usual to sort out any questions and needs that they determined during their first 24 hours. So, they should be good to go for the week I am gone as well.
Again, I still would NOT CHOOSE to host remotely. I think I am very lucky (check back with me this time next week to see if I am/was too optimistic).
I have cameras, I have automatic nest thermostats and smoke detectors, I also have whole home energy monitors and about a dozen or so smart switches and outlets. I have remote access to the house door locks with smart locks. I have solved the plumbing and A/C issues I had at the farm during the last few weeks while living at home. I believe I have done about as much as I can for now. I do have my mom and step dad that live a few miles away if worse came to worse and all my neighbors at both places are great and support my FULLY as a neighbor and as a host, but again, I would NOT CHOOSE to be a remote host like that.
Good luck and God bless all those that do. I am just way too control oriented and get too many one night last minute same day IB and long termers (each with very distinct but real issues that could arise) to be comfortable hosting remotely at this time.
Hi Oby, do you think it would work to get one tenant for the 6-month period? Do your guests have to go through your part of the house? Would you consider renting the whole thing, including the part you live in? Obviously I don’t know the layout, so these suggestions may not make sense.
We have a different situation but there is still some overlap to the question of remote operations.
We have been renting our Maui condo for almost three years and have had 125 different bookings; some for as little as two nights, some for two-three weeks but most for five to seven nights. In 2018 we booked 320 and took 21 for our selves. 2019 is on track to be the same. And yet, we have never met even one of our guests.
At the start we found a very good manager. Not a co-host but a self-employed, motivated, hard-working, Maui resident, family-supporting, honest manager. She handles any issues locally, since we are a six hour flight away. We handle all the bookings and correspondence with the guests and are always available but have been called directly maybe five times. (Once when the unit above us had a leak in the toilet. Uhhh…)
My point is that we trust our VERY expensive piece of property to this manager and to all these strangers. Maybe we are just lucky but they don’t steal things, smash things, stain things or break the rules in general. We don’t have security cameras although we do have a smart lock and can let people in if they forget their code. (That has never happened.) We have never had a complaint from the next door neighbor (whom we know well and who lives there full time) or the office or security.
We make a LOT on this property. Of course, everyone has to decide what their comfort level is, but I know this; if we were afraid to hand it off to someone else, we would be paying a very high price for our paranoia.
Whatever title you give the person who manages your property locally i.e. ‘manager’ they are a co-host, as they help you to co-host the property by managing things on the ground locally.
We’ve come across several folks that co-host for other hosts here, and have actively considered using them for when we want to take a break. But that’s as far as it went. I’ve seen the reviews for one (consistently marked down for check in and comms) and just not sure the other would keep things to our standards.
Bottom line is we now block off dates if we’re going away. Is it costing us bookings? Undoubtedly, but at least we’re not leaving ourselves open to a stinker of a review because of someone else’s actions, or in-actions!
@Oby - Many, many people host remotely - it’s the basis of the entire “vacation rental business”. However, they rent out their entire property, not just bedrooms. They have a cleaning person/company, and have a list of people to contact in case of emergency (plumber, electrician, etc.). They do not greet their guests - they either mail them a key (not common anymore), or use a coded lock and have the guests let themselves in. Then the guest contact the owner if there is an issue, and the owner sends someone out to manage it.
These homes are not full-time residences for the owners. They don’t have a lot of personal items there (such as financial information), so they just lock their personal items away from guests and hope the guests don’t break into the locked areas.
There are other owners that use a management company (Vacasa is a big name) that manages the cleaning and maintenance for them (maybe even the bookings, but I’m not sure on that).
Then there are owners like @mdornari and me - we have trusted local people that manage everything about the “stay” for us.
But if you are planning to rent out the bedrooms only when you are not there - that’s not common.
If you really want to rent it out when you are gone, have you considered turning it into a “whole home” rental for those six months?
