Just a reminder that where one lives makes a huge difference. Here in El Paso there are lots of homes that are by no means dives that are $75 to $85 a night depending on season and day of week. Here’s one
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House is completely updated, and beautiful. Here is my listing.
We wanted to get to superhost - so we went to $75/night. Now at $85/night with $95 cleaning fee. This is a suburb of Minneapolis - about 30 minutes away from the city
I looked at the price of your listing and also at the other homes rates in your area. How did you set or choose your rate?
Initially we went with smart pricing - but raised it about $10/night from there. Then we started getting the messages that people were renting near us for “$6 per night cheaper”. It seems like when we raise the rates the reservations stop coming in
I think the ones renting near you are renting rooms and not houses. I dont know much about “smart” pricing but I would not use it. I hope maybe others will look at your listing, and your area competition and chime in.
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At the risk of starting something crazy, I LOVE smart pricing.
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You asked! 
Simply:
Smart pricing updates every day. So it means that there’s one job I don’t have to do daily to help towards maintaining search presence.
Smart Pricing never offers our rentals at prices below the minimum we set.
This said, it sometimes shows prices that are pretty high that I’d never dare charge - but they get booked.
And if I disagree with what Smart Pricing tells me, I can manually override it.
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@jaquo, does Smart Pricing give the same prices as the pricing suggestions? I’ve noticed the pricing suggestions are simply a discount off my rate. I’ve tested them, and put in $500 for a Friday and $1500 for the next day, and Air suggested $400 for the Friday and $1200 for the Saturday.
No, the pricing suggestions are completely daft! With Smart Pricing, you set the minimum and maximum price. It will never set your price at below or over what you set. So you have full control.
If you disagree with a price for a particular night, then manually override it. For example, Smart Pricing might set a price of $120 per night for a certain week but you know (Smart Pricing doesn’t) that there’s a fabulous event in your area that week and you know that you can charge $200 per night. So you can change it to the price you want.
Also Smart pricing ‘learns’ over time. When I first started using it, it assumed that July. for example, would be a higher price than February. This is the case in most places. But here in South Florida, February is high season and July is off-season. After a few weeks of correcting Smart Pricing it managed to ‘learn’.
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But it is possible then that the parameters for Rusty could be set awfully low for the minimum price. Will they compare a 3 br whole house to rooms in a house? Pricing should be apples to apples, I would think.
Hosts set their own parameters. I’ve set ours to $110 minimum and $320 max with, I think, $150 for weekend nights. Of course, Airbnb doesn’t know about local events - it only puts prices way up at times such as Christmas - but when I know there’s going to be a higher local demand, I raise prices manually. Although I’ve never done so, I could also lower prices manually if I wanted to offer a discounted week.
Do you know the name of the monitoring device one?
@lisavanahn It’s called Party Squasher. It counts the number of mobile devices and alerts you if the number is higher than your threshold. $149 to buy it and $99 per year monitoring fee after the first year.
I have no idea if it works - I just heard about it at a HomeAway forum a year or two ago.
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https://www.partysquasher.com/airbnbopen/
I was intrigued. Here is their website. They are offering Airbnb free shipping.
I would highly recommend Arlo caneras. The only thing is you need to change the batteries once a month or so.
Would you be willing to share, either privately or publicly? I have the same thing and it has not really helped reduce instances. In fact, lately, it has actually increased…
There are ways to “hardwire” them to a plug in cable of sorts. That is what I did with my nest Hello video doorbell. They make them compatible for Ring as well.
And as I have had with my last guest that checked out of my whole house listing…he stood in front of the doorbell camera while his unauthorized guests left the house. Stupid of him though, was the audio of him talking to his friend about how he couldnt get charged for all the extra people he got in to the house for free because he was standing with his back against the doorbell camera. Also stupid though is that they are very easily seen coming in the night before, and on the non-doorbell outdoor cameras. I am still waiting for the 72 hours for guest to respond to the Resolution Center claim so I can get Airbnb involved. to pay the additional guest fees and unauthorized guest fees.
If you didn’t receive it then they didn’t charge it to the guest. If you did receive it they still might not have charged it to the guest and may have paid it from AIrbnb, especially if it was $200 or less.
KKC can you remind me some more about this?
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What is the exact delay? 14 days after check out or 13 days 10 hours? After your specified checkout time?
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Why do you think it matters waiting till the last day, they can’t see your review anyway until they have already left their review. So what can happen if you leave a bad review?
Thanks for that!
How do these things work out?
Once you’ve made the complaint, called the guest out on their behaviour, and gotten airbnb involved, surely a bad guest review is almost 100 certain?
Does airbnb mitigate this at all or allow your superhost status to be taken away, in addition to the stress trauma and physical damage to your property?
I have mine hardwired. But that makes the installation harder. My newer gen Ring is a big improvement too.