I hear you. Better to watch and wait from the wings and see how this plays out. Stay safe!
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No its not. We pay 15% for our UK LTR properties and itās literally pay and forget, unless thereās a serious issue of course.
Would never consider using an OTA for LTR, it just doesnāt make financial sense, certainly for us.
JF
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You donāt even need to relist for one day. I was able to snooze our other listing (where we currently live full time) for 6 months, and then 2 months or so into that Iām able to set it out another 6 months. Basically, at any given time you can only snooze for 6 months, but you have to remember to keep going in and extending the end date.
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So does anyone have a definitive answer, from their own experience or knowledge, as to whether itās better, as far as search ranking when you open back up again, to snooze, or to block dates? It seems like when I block out a month or two because Iām taking my own holiday, that my search ranking plummets. Iāve never tried snoozing before so I havenāt been able to compare.
Snoozing is a temporary delisting, so you donāt show up at all in searches. Blocking dates, in theory, should only affect your search volume for those specific dates but I donāt have any data to back that up.
Hereās a screen shot of out property that Iāve had snoozed since late January - this is what the āViewā tab looks like for the month of March.
This is what it looked like when I just had a really long date block on it - during this time, through a combination of booking settings and our calendar it wasnāt possible for people to book given my calendar and booking settings, but we must have still showed up somehow.
I blocked off ~8 weeks last summer from Jun 17-Aug 9, 2019. I did incognito searches every week both with and without dates while it was blocked and afterward. Having dates blocked did not affect my search ranking at all and views also appeared normal. Bookings were really slow both during and afterward, but it was the slow season.
@MelissaMH @Brian_R170 Thanks for the replies. I know that snoozing makes you not appear at all, therefore no views. Thatās one reason I always figured it was better to block, as guests could still see the listing and book dates that fell outside the blocked dates if they wished. But then I also wondered if Airbnb sees blocked dates as being ābadā- not being available to host and that the algorithms somehow punish that.
Nice to know that you didnāt see a drop in search ranking for blocking, Brian. It seemed like I did, but it could have been due to other factors.
I imagine most blocked dates on Airbnb calendars are actually due to the hosts accepting reservations through other platforms. I can see why hosts would think that Airbnb would somehow punish a host for giving business to competitors even more than simply not being available to host, but I also think such behavior would be categorized as antitrust and Airbnbās competitors would be all over it.
Okay guys and gals, this is really weird. My search ranking keeps rising, even though I havenāt hosted since early March. Last week the Porter app showed that I was #68 out of 178 listings āin my categoryā, now itās at #53.
I sure wish it was that high when I was actually open to host.
Lots of Conversions to LTR, snoozing, closed?
30 day bookings?
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We live in the Bay Area too. Why would you look for a long term rental on ABB, wouldnāt you have to pay them 8% plus 14% hotel Fees?
Thatās what I said, I would never rent my house out as a long term rental on Airbnb because of all the fees they charge, I would list it on Zillow or Craigslist.
I have been able to renew my snooze listing no problem as I only air bnb in the summer months. The problem with de listing is that you will lose all your reviews . If you donāt ever want to use air bnb again thatās not a problem . But if you itās like starting from scratch all over again .
Thatās not true, @1129. If you use the Airbnb process called Unlist, you donāt lose your reviews. I had our two rooms unlisted for two months and just listed them again. All the reviews are intact.
Instead of unlisting, Iāve now blocked our entire calendars.
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You would only lose your reviews if you deleted your account entirely. There are hosts who sell one property (therefore they delist it) and buy another, creating a new listing under their account. All the reviews they have earned from the first property still appear under their profile.
I was about to list my empty apartment online when I lucked into finding a guy (friend of a friend) who needed housing for 4 months! And he paid the entire rent up front! Iām giving him a terrific deal, but itās great for me to have the income, and besides, summer months are always slow for bookings here in New Orleans. When he moves out, Iām going to try to get a long-term tenant, and if I need to sell off the furnishings, so be it. As for finding tenants, I like the HotPads website. Nextdoor.com and Facebook are also good resources. You can even create a Facebook page for your Airbnb/rental space, which can be shared to your Facebook page, shared with friends, shared on Nextdoor, shared on Facebook Marketplace, etc. If this were a shared space and not a separate apartment, Iād have felt safer just leaving it empty. But since itās entirely separate, I felt comfortable renting it out.
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Has anyone come across a midterm to long term rental portal theyād recommend?
Are you in the US? If so, Zillow and Craigslist. Zillow makes it easy to do the application/background/credit checks. I have my folks that respond from Craigslist do the application process through Zillow as well.
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Thats a great idea actually! Iām in Atlanta, and we have a Zillow account so Iāll try this, never considered it could be used for a furnished unit though.
Yes you can actually tick off a box for āFurnishedā as an amenity. And renters can search by āfurnishedā as well.