567. We Made $5 Million From Airbnb Hosting (Here's What We've Learned)

0:00Real quick before we get into it, our Get More Bookings bootcamp is open right now. Early bird is just $39 and that price is gone after September 8. Head to Thanks for visiting dot com Ford slash bookings to grab your seat now. That's thanks for visiting dot com Ford slash bookings to grab your seat now. We're listening to the Thanks for visiting podcast. We believe hosting with heart is at the core of every short term rental with a net's background in business operation. And Sarah's extensive hospitality management and interior design experience. We have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries earning us over a million dollars and garnering us thousands of five star reviews. We love sharing creative ways for your listing to stand out, serve your guests and be profitable. In each episode, we will have knowledgeable guests who bring value to the short term rental

1:01industry or we will share our stories of our own experiences so you can implement actual improvements to your rentals. Whether you're experienced new or nervous to start your own short term rental, we promise you'll feel right at home. Welcome back to another great episode. My name is Sarah Caracan. I'm an at grant and together we are thanks for visiting and I don't have generated $5 million hosting on Airbnb, but it's not from one property and it definitely hasn't been overnight over a decade of building, making mistakes, fixing them and figuring out what moves the needle and from working with hundreds of students inside of our private coaching program, strategic host. And the things that move the needle the most are almost never what hosts expect. The biggest lessons from $5 million in hosting are not about the properties. They're about how you run the business around them.

2:05So in this video, we're going to share with you seven lessons that will save you a lot of time, money and headaches. One of them might even save your business in a week when everything feels like it's falling apart. One, track your finances correctly from day one. If there is one thing that we would go back and do from the very, very, actually before the very first booking, it is this separate break account for the business, separate credit card for all property expenses, clean books from day one, not when things calm down or you get your first reservation day one. Because when your business income is mixed into your personal finances, you cannot see your business clearly. You don't know what you're making. You don't know what you're spending and come tax time. You are untangling months of transactions that should have been cleaned the whole entire time. A bookkeeper, a CPA who understands short-term rentals, a structured profit and loss statement

3:08otherwise known as a PNL. These are not expenses you add when the business gets bigger. They are the foundation that tells you whether the business is working or not. This structure reduces your liability, making sure that what happens at your business belongs in your business and does not touch your personal life and can protect you from being audited or being sued. We have worked with so many hosts who are fully booked, calendar packed with reservations and they have absolutely no idea if they are profitable because they have never run the numbers correctly. Do not be that host. Structure your finances the way you would structure any business because that's what hosting is. Alright, lesson number two, you have to spend money to make money. Host will invest six, seven figures into a property and then hesitate to spend a few hundred bucks a month on a bookkeeper, let's say. That gap in thinking has cost more host, more money than almost anything else we've seen.

4:09A team around your business that is not overhead, it's the thing that lets your business function and attorney who sets up your structure correctly from the start. Your CPA who finds deductions that you didn't even know existed. A bookkeeper who keeps your numbers current. An excellent cleaner you trust completely with your property, an inspector who protects that property and a coach who helps you see what you can't see yourself when you're trying to scale. We are not saying hire all of these at once, we are saying plan for them and stop treating each one as an expense you'll add later when you can afford it. Al Titus, desperate hiring is the most expensive kind of hiring. When you are at your wits end and you need someone like yesterday, you don't have time to look for the right person to sit in that right seat. You don't have time to train them properly. You don't have bandwidth to onboard them well and give them that experience coming into your business that you want them to have and you end up with someone in a critical role

5:12who was never set up to succeed in the first place. So I want you to hire before you fully need that person. The onboarding will be better, the relationship will be better and the results are going to show that. And we need you to have a mindset shift here. Your team is not an expense, they are an investment and they might show up as an expense on your P&L, but truly they are the best investment in your business. Lesson number three, backup everything. We believe in having backups for our backups. And here's what we need by that. Backups from anything from your spare keys all the way to some of your appliances. Backup key so a guest is never locked out waiting on you. Backup cleaners so that when your primary cleaner calls up on a Saturday morning before check out your not scrambling. You need to have backup coffee makers, backup small appliances and for your bigger ticket items like an AC unit refrigerator, you might not have a spare, but at minimum you need

6:16to have a plan in place for when they go down. So you don't have a guest crisis that turns into potentially a bad review or a refund. Or both. Ooh, you got them. It's the moment that you don't have a backup is the moment you need one. I guess arrives and the AC is down on a hot weekend, you don't have a backup unit, you don't have a technician available on a Saturday or they cost so much money to come to you on a Saturday. And you're now in a crisis that is going to cost you money, a bad review or both. The cost of having that backup sitting somewhere in your operation is nothing compared to what one failed stay can cost you. So we want you to go through your property right now and ask. If this failed during a guest day, what is my plan? And if you don't have an answer, that is your either next purchase or your next plan. By the way, helping you build out your operations, thinking ahead, building out your standard operating procedures. This is the exact work that we do with our private clients inside of our coaching program

7:19strategic host. I want you to join us live and see if it's a right fit for you. The link is in the description to save your seat. All right, lesson number four, build a brand identity. The riches are in the niches. When you have a clear brand identity and a set of brand standards, every decision is going to get easier. What properties you buy, how you set them up, what kinds of guests that you want to attract, what co-hosting clients you take on. If you're a co-host, the brand becomes your filter and you stop spending time wondering whether something is the right move because the standard already is going to tell you. And listen, brand identity, it is not just a logo or your color palette. It is a scorecard. Does this property meet our standards? Does this client align with how we operate? Does this amenity fit the experience we promise guests? When you can answer those questions off a very clear set of standards, you're not making

8:19decisions by your gut every single time. You are running a business with a compass and with intention. I mean, another example, we have seen hosts take on co-hosting clients that were wrong for them from the first conversation because they didn't have the same standards that the co-host has and that wasn't defined well enough to know what a no looked like. Everyone of those relationships costs them time, energy, and in most cases, a lot of money. If you define your brand standards early, what do you stand for? What do you stand against? What are you excited to deal with? I.E. Are you pet friendly? Are you not pet friendly? Do you have to have all the properties that you manage or buy to beach? Do they all have to have a garage? Do you, I don't know what's another good brand standard? With your team, how do you all talk to each other? If someone talks in a way and it doesn't align with your brand standard, that you already

9:19set in place and decide it on, it's a lot easier for you to know that you already have to have a type conversation. I'm not saying that setting your brand standards makes everything necessarily easy, but it does keep you streamlined and it will save you a lot of extra headache and money. Quick break from the episode. If you're a host who constantly checks your competitors pricing and still doesn't know if you're charging enough, that's exactly what we fix in the get more bookings of boot camp. An early bird tickets are on sale for $39 right now, but that price goes up on September 9th. Head to thanks for visiting.com, board slash bookings, and grab your seat before the price increases. Lesson number five, guest feedback is a gift. It may not be the gift that you were anticipating. You're going to get a bad review. You're going to have a guest question something you did. You're going to have a co-hosting client push back on how you manage their property.

10:20How you handle those moments matter more than almost anything else and how you grow. Every piece of negative feedback it carries so much information. For every person who takes the time to tell you that something wasn't right, you better believe there were probably 10 guests who felt the same way and honestly just didn't say anything at all to you. When a guest mentions the same problem that was in a review from three months ago, that shows a pattern that you didn't address. Cat seed back those hard clients, they actually teach you the most. A client who pushes back on your management fee forces you to get clear on the value that you are delivering. A co-hosting relationship that goes sideways, it teaches you what your contract was missing in the first place. A guest complaint that leads to a whole policy change, that seems the next 50 guests from having the same experience.

11:22Listen, none of it feels good in the moment, but all of it makes you better. We say, I had a coach a long time ago, she said, the breakthroughs in the breakdown and that's what happens sometimes with your property and your business. The hosts who grow the fastest are not the ones who never have problems. They're actually the ones who treat every problem as a data point and then they actually act on it. Lesson is six, don't just be on Airbnb. Airbnb is a great platform, okay? And at night, the first to say it, it has done so much for our business, right? And I'm sure so much for yours. It is also someone else's platform. If Airbnb changes its algorithm, I mean, not if, when it changes its algorithm, changes its fee structure or decides to do something that doesn't work for your business or for the way that you like to operate, you have built everything on that one platform that you have no leverage and now no options. So you need to start collecting your guest emails from day one.

12:24Build that direct booking presence. Be on other OTAs. Make sure you're on Verbo, booking.com, whatever makes sense of the available for you in your market. But don't have foolish pride. Don't rule out a platform because you heard something negative about it. IAI. See what it does for your specific property in your specific market. The hosts who have weathered every algorithm change, every fee restructure, every platform update over the past decade are the ones who never put all of their bookings in one place. I want you to own your guest relationships, build your own audience. The platform gets you started, but your brand and your brand standards keep you booked. And lesson number seven. Money is not your why. Oh, explain. This one took us both time to really understand. And listen, you are doing this for money, of course you are.

13:26But money alone will not carry you through the difficult and impossible feeling weeks. The week where three things break at once, a guest leaves you a review that feels deeply unfair, maybe you have a co-hosting client that's calling you in the middle of the night with a problem that isn't really a problem, those weeks will happen. And they happen to every host. And the ones who make it through are the ones that have a why that goes beyond just the income and the money. Maybe it's freedom, time with your family, the ability to build something that is yours, building something to yourself. Whatever it is, you need to know it before you need it. Not when you're already in the middle of a hard stretch, trying to remember why you started this business in the first place. So it's important, you must do the mindset work. Sit with the question, what is my why, outside of money, write it down somewhere where you will actually see it, because there will be a day when your calendar is slow, when your

14:26expenses are high, and everything feels way harder than it should be. And on that day, that money isn't going to be enough, but your why will be. So there you have it, $5 million and seven lessons. Get your finances right from the beginning, friends, trust us, build a team before you need that team member desperately, back up all the things, define your brand standards. What do you stand for and what do you stand against? Even from every hard moment, own your audience beyond one platform and know why you're doing this before you need that answer. None of these are shortcuts and all of them compound. The hosts who are still doing this in 10 years are the ones who treated it like a business from day one and kept showing up even when it was hard. Inside of Strategic Coast, we help host get more nights booked, charge what their property is worth and stop leaving money on the table.

15:27In a slime to see if Strategic Coast is the right fit for you, the link will be in the description to save your seat. And with that, I am Sarah Caracan. I'm Annette Grant and together we are Thanks for Visiting. Thanks for listening to The Thanks for Visiting podcast. Head on over to the show notes for additional information about today's episode. And please hit that subscribe button and leave us a review. Awesome reviews help us bring you awesome content. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to hanging out with you next week. Before you go, Early Bird tickets for the Get More Bookings Boocan are still available for $39 through September 8th. But after that, the price goes up. So head to ThanksForVisiting.com for slash bookings to snag your spot at the Early Bird price. And wait to see you there.