Oh, sorry. I was trying to reply to all as I thought it might be useful for folks in other places to make sure they were legal. But I’m rubbish at using the site.
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You’ll be an expert in no time. Just keep posting 
I accept long term stays once someone has already had a short term stay with me. That way I get to meet them in person, find out what their story is, and decide if it’s a good fit.
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I have both LTRs and STRs now and have had midterm (60 days plus) furnished rentals in the past. My LTRs are much less day to day hassle if you get a good tenant.
If you are interested in a LT stay, you need to do your homework and run background checks, get a decent damage deposit and first/last month’s rent. I use Rentprep for all of my LT rentals and require a written application w/ the tenant to paying the fees for the search https://www.rentprep.com
They run a 50 state criminal background check and credit check, including that all important and often overlooked legal research of “Have you ever had an eviction filed against you.” Note that even if they weren’t evicted, you will know if a landlord ever filed court papers to start eviction - huge red flag and normally instant show stopper for me.
You will need to research your local laws as to requirements on holding the deposit and then get a lease w/ a detailed inventory list for your property. Determine who is paying utilities, cable, trash pick up, etc. BTW - I always pay for trash pick up - if a tenant is in a financial bind, this is the first thing they drop and it will be a huge headache for you, i.e. rodents. Take tons of photos and save them in a drop box. On average we have 300 photos for each of our LT rentals - every wall, every door and window, every nook and corner, every appliance of the home - inside and out.
As a new host, this won’t hurt you from an Airbnb perspective. If you were an established host I would be concerned w/ your reviews phasing out and having to begin all over again.
As to the rental amounts, if they inquired at your daily rate, try to get that on a monthly basis. If they want to negotiate you should be getting 3-5 x rents for a comparable traditional rental home in your area.
Good luck!
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Hi, I have not started advertising on airbnb yet as we are still in the process of setting up our business. But we have a large property and have been using Workaway volunteers to help with the gardening, landscaping and other tasks. All the people we have had have been brilliant but on the whole they don’t stay more than a couple of weeks.
We do get requests for long term (2-3 months) volunteering from people who want to use the address as a base for applying for immigration papers. We don’t accept these requests because it could complicate our own situation. Some people are straight up about what they want but quite a few are not.
Not sure if this has come up with airbnb properties but it certainly happens a lot with us.
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KarenWV is absolutely correct in her advise. I’ve managed both LTR and STR rentals for 30 plus years, and FULL background and credit checks are a must for LTR ‘s. Even then I’ve managed to end up with a couple of undesirable tenants. Legally they can be really hard to get rid of with a lease in place. I’ve learned it’s better to have an empty unit for a while than a “ bad news” tenant. Proceed with caution !
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Thanks everyone for the feedback!
Blockquote If they want to negotiate you should be getting 3-5 x rents for a comparable traditional rental home in your area.
That brings up a separate question. I’m considering going the LTR route with this home instead of Airbnb, because it looks like it might be hard to keep it fully booked (we are in a busy metroplex but a little far from urban centers).
I did an analysis in Excel based on lots of rental and airbnb comps. It seems our house would go for about $150 a night ($4500 a month if fully booked), and we would get about $1850 for monthly long-term rent. Assuming 10% vacancy, that’s about $20k a year for LTR. For Airbnb, it’s very hard to know what vacancy to assume. Most comps are booked about 75% in December and 20% in January as of right now. We have promos with our price closer to $90 a night until we get a few reviews.
If our house is only booked 20% of the time all year, STR could be as little as $10k a year. If our house does well and gets booked 75% of the time, we’d be looking at $30k!
I’ll continue to research this on the forums, but what’s your method for predicting vacancy with a new rental if comps only show their booking being remotely full for the next 6-8 weeks?
For us, December, January, and February are the slowest months. This year, we have chosen to rent to a travel nurse for three months, starting in mid-December. We are not doing that through Airbnb.
We have two Airbnb rooms. We are using only one of them for the travel nurse. The other one will continue to be available on Airbnb. We have quite a few regulars who come for a night or a few nights.
Our crazy-busy Airbnb schedule heats up again in early April and stays that way through the fall.
Having the travel nurse here in the winter will be our first experience with that.
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Clay, it depends how much you’re prepared to work at it. I doubt (but don’t 100% know for sure) that it would be almost impossible to get a good occupancy rate if you rely on Airbnb alone. You only have to read posts here.
There are plenty of posts from people who do rely on Airbnb and say that they’ve NO bookings at all. Or that they’ve no bookings more than a few weeks in the future.
I know that this is easier for me to do because I’ve been doing this forever but with repeat business, referrals, social media and a bit of networking I keep two apartments at almost 100% occupancy. The ‘almost’ is because I have to block the occasional day here and there for maintenance and other work.
So you can get as much occupancy as you want from short term guests as long as you’re prepared to work a bit for it.
If you are prepared to do so, you have a great advantage over others in your area who are using Airbnb or other online advertisers. Many people like to rely on online services to bring them guests (and then complain when they don’t get them) but a host who takes a bit more charge of their business can way overtake them.
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As far as occupancy, if you’re seeing good, experienced Airbnbs at 75% occupancy, I would cut that by at least half as you start out (nothing remotely scientific about 50%, but it will take you time to build up your business.)
Don’t forget to add in all of your supporting fees for an Airbnb STR vs LTR:
Cleaning fees- up to several times per week
Replacement of sheets, bedding, towels due to staining - if everything is fresh when you tenant moves in, this won’t be an issue until they leave,
Marketing fees and cuts to Airbnb,
Product - For LTS I only provided the initial supply of TP, paper towels, garbage bags, etc. enough for someone to get by the first night or two before they can get to the market. I did provide cleaning supplies if there was something I wanted them to use.
Taxes and bookkeeping may be different depending on the length of the stay.
Your insurance costs may be lower w/ a LTR. My insurance doubled for a STR w/ higher deductibles and lower coverage.
The time you personally have to spend dealing w/ inquiries, updates, pricing, should also play a role in your decision - this is not a set it and forget it business. Most of us who are active on this site are personally involved and spend several hours on our businesses each week - if you’re cleaning your own place, then 90% occupancy may not be an ideal use of your time.
You may gobble up the $$ delta of ST vs LT very quickly.
Lastly, what is the tolerance for Airbnb in your area? If it’s getting hostile, like so many other cities, you may be ahead of the game going LTR out the chute.
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How are you determining this?
I searched for similar stays in my area in March/April for one night to see some comparable Airbnb listings in my area. Scrolling down on each of these you can view their availability calendars. On the availability calendars, almost every property I viewed was mostly booked in December, lightly booked in January, and had little to know bookings in February.
On the airbnb calendar you can’t tell if a listing is booked. It could be but it might also be blocked off and unavailable.
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That makes sense. Since these were marked completely available for the next 3-6 months I was assuming the blocked off dates in the next month or two are bookings. Thanks for pointing out that it’s not necessarily all bookings.
Regardless, it seems like I may be far from the recommended “3-5x LTR income” mentioned in this thread. If anything I might squeak out double LTR income with some marketing work to get more bookings than others in my area.
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Probably a safe assumption most the time.
You also don’t know if any of those bookings are regular guests like a business man who books once a month or a family that comes every christmas. There are services you can subscribe to that will provide analytics of your competition. I’m not promoting any of them, don’t even know their names as I don’t use them.
Depending on the listing you may have a hard time compared to other listings unless you have very nice features to compensate for being late to the game. When you first list Airbnb gives you a new host boost in the rankings. They also encourage the lower prices. So that boosts you in search, you get several bookings your first week or two. Then the boost ends (we don’t know how long it lasts), and you are staring into the teeth of winter wondering if summer will make enough to offset.
[quote=“KKC, post:37, topic:37598”]
Then the boost ends (we don’t know how long it lasts), and you are staring into the teeth of winter wondering if summer will make enough to offset.
This makes me think about holding off listing my new place until spring, maybe just put on VRBO first then Air in the spring…
January and February are the slowest months for most businesses where I am.
Just thinking out loud
RR
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