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Newbie here.
I have a 4 bedroom 2.5 bath single family home I’m about to host on AirBnB.
Does anyone have any idea if there are any advantages to hosting the whole home as one unit or hosting each room separately?
Secondly,
What drives cleaning costs? Is there an average hosts use?
Please any info will be very appreciated.
Hi, I have a house that I rent as a whole to groups and each separate room as well, so I have a listing for each bedroom and a listing for the whole hose with calendar links so they dont get double booked.
Renting the whole house will bring you more money obviously, but renting the bedrooms as well is a nice mix, at least for me. In my case what happens is that from Thu-mon say, I have groups and during the week I rent individual bedrooms.
Cleaning costs: see what a cleaning lady charges per hour, multiply by the number of hours needed to clean the whole house and bingo! Same for individual bedrooms, but keep in mind that for bedrooms you also have to clean the common areas. See what other people charge for cleaning 1 bd in your area. be investigative and such.
Thanks a lot @adrienne12.
I’ll explore linking calendars and have both options available.
And yes I’ll be investigative and see what other hosts in my area charge for cleaning. That should help. Thanks again
You would be much better to think about cleaning your require @BlaQMarbleHost , put together a checklist and then contact local cleaners and cleaning companies for a quote rather than looking at what other hosts charge (some subsidise cleaning and each home has different requirements).
Is there a healthy market for single rooms in your area compared to whole home listings for 8-10 people? Will you be able to handle the extra work of 4 listings instead of 1? Do you have parking space for 4 guest groups? How will you deal with the occasional behavioral clashes that will occur with up to 4 guest groups interacting with each other?
The actual cost to clean the listing and prepare it for the next guest. If you have someone clean it for you, then it’s easy. If you clean it yourself, you have to put a price on your time and calculate the cost of cleaning supplies.
4 times the amount of turnovers will quickly make your decision.
Quite true @Helsi as regards different homes and different requirements.
I’m currently getting together with two local cleaning companies to see what can be worked out. I see a wide range of charges by hosts from $6 to $30 so I guess I need to go this route.
The “cleaning fee” often has nothing to do with the reality of cleaning costs.
I don’t even charge a cleaning fee (rolled into my nightly rate), but cleaning costs $50-70 for my 440sf, 2BR (3beds), 1BA place.
I’d strongly suggest cleaning the place yourself a few times so you establish your own standards/checklist.
One of the biggest struggles with hiring outside cleaners is finding one with flexible scheduling. Their regular house-cleaning clients are like “Every other Tuesday”. Reliable. As a client STR are more variable, like Tuesday and Friday this week, but Wednesday & Saturday next. And some can’t guarantee service within a window many hosts use (generally 11am-3pm). This is a good thing to ask early on.
As for your original question - are you living in the house also, or remotely hosting?
If you’re not on-site, that might push you to whole-house rentals. With overlapping guests on separate reservations, SOMEONE will be a bath or kitchen slob. In-home hosts do a lot of damage control so one guest doesn’t negatively impact another’s stay. Expect to deal with lower cleanliness ratings if you’re not around.
Agree, what I found is to use the on demand cleaning apps / websites. Such is errund or handy. You may get hit or miss cleaners. Usually I have been able to pick off the good ones and start booking with them directly. They get paid more as the company isn’t taking a cut. So they are usually motivated to work with you and do a good job.
If you rent out the 4 single rooms I would avoid having more than two groups renting at the same time. This way each group as their own bathroom and you don’t have to deal with the headache of shared bathrooms.
Let me answer this: when I first started I thought I would rent just each individual rooms, not the whole house because I was afraid groups would throw parties and damage my house. Depends how your house is set up. In mine the bathrooms are shared. And let me tell you: totally strangers don;t like to share bathrooms. Especially if they are men and women! Even if each bedroom has its own key! Once I got 3* rating from a woman who claims another lady guest took the hair dryer in her room and left the house. This guest couldn’t dry her hair.
So I quickly changed my mind to rent to groups and the whole hose because they dont mind sharing bathrooms and hair dryers.
When I rent individually, I never rent more than 2 rooms at the time and either 2 men or two women. People can instant book the whole house but have to ask for approval to book individual rooms. this way I can control who is coming so I dont overcrowd and dont mix the genders up.
It works for me. You’ll figure out what works for you too.
Is this a house that could give affordable accommodation to a family? If yes, please reconsider.
If you want to go down the quick and dirty route of renting out rooms in a full house/apartment on Airbnb, you’ll make a quick buck but you’ll get bad reviews, guaranteed, no matter how much you try to keep on top of it. And then you’re finished. Or you can keep going and just be a slum landlord.
Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of people taking accommodation off the market to line their own pockets. Yeah, I’m a socialist.
My assumption is that I’ll be hosting adults. Do adults fight each other in a hotel? If they do then I’m sure it would pop up in their ratings and I would see that and have to make a decision if I want to pass on one group as a result of that. I doubt their possible conflict would be a huge issue to be honest. But then again, that’s just me thinking.
Best response since Samuel Jackson’s
Thanks for this.
Adults that don’t know each other rarely share a kitchen or bathroom. I think behavioral clashes will happen a LOT more often than you think, and even more often if the host is not always onsite. Think about it: A loud guest, a messy guest, a guest takes too long to shower, a racist guest, a thief, a klutz, a guest that pushes religion, a guest that pushes politics, the list is endless. Nothing is the host’s fault, but at the end of the stay, only the host gets reviewed.
As a guest, I will stay in an Airbnb that is shared with other guests only if the host also lives there. Otherwise I would not feel safe.
@BlaQMarbleHost I think the consensus so far is that the only way to host separate rooms in a house is to be on site at all times and go down the ancient boarding house landlady route…
Hahaha @Magwitch. I love this illustration. And yea. Concensus seems to be just that.
What if I lived right across the street? Would that help?
Not necessarily. If you rent out all the rooms you can often rent them each for a higher amount in total than you can rent the whole house out by itself.
Here’s how I have done it for my budget listings in the house with 2 BR / 1 BA available (the master suite is unavailable as it is used for storage and needs some flooring repair to be safe for guests):
2 BR: $65/night $50 cleaning (max 11)
Front BR: $44/night $40 cleaning (max 5)
Back BR: $45/night $40 cleaning (max 2)
$20/additional person over 1 for all listings
I could end up with a person in each BR separately and have $89 + $80 or if they are in the 2 BR it would only be $85 + $50.
