How to Rent Out Your Home on AirBNB
It’s easier (and harder) than you think.
Our family has rented out our home for the past two summers and we’ve learned a lot in the process. We’ve identified what the minimum amount of time we’d rent for (2 weeks) and how to streamline the preparation process (now at 3 days!).
Whether you’re interested in renting out your own home for the summer - or for a season - here are the tips, resources, and guidelines that have helped make it a successful and profitable venture for our family.
Our Top Five Tips to Get Your Home AirBNB Ready:
1. Stage Your Home
What would you need to do to stage your home for a photo shoot? Think: set aside or hide personal items you don’t plan to keep in your home while you’re away. Then go do that in preparation for its inaugural photo shoot. The earlier, the better.
2. Take Professional Photos
Hire a professional photographer to take photos of your staged home. If this person has done home photography before, they may also have ideas or suggestions on how to make it even more welcoming for guests.
3. Hire a Reliable House Cleaner(s) and Compensate Well
This is a critical role to outsource, and you don’t want someone dropping the ball. We pay generously because we want to communicate how valuable they are, how much we appreciate them, and the reality is: we need their services to make our AirBNB work. The same goes for landscaping services if you have an outside space that requires maintenance.
4. Stock-up on linens, toiletries, and little luxuries
Guests need to have toilet paper, toiletries, etc., but little luxuries (and those small touches, whether extra lotion, cold beverages waiting in the fridge) go a long way!
5. Give yourself 1-2 weeks to move out items
The first summer we rented our house it took two weeks of prep and felt like a part-time job getting ready. The 2nd summer, it took 3 days. Thankfully, it gets easier with time and the benefit is that you end up decluttering, repairing, and improving spaces you may not have otherwise.
Bonus Rules that Just Work
1. No pets. We don’t own pets and didn’t want there to be unnecessary damage or additional cleaning required. Plus, we didn’t want the potential noise or disturbance that would affect our neighbors.
2. One week minimum. This drastically reduces the amount of communication, cleaning, and time required to manage our property. We start with offering a one-month minimum, and then as the summer approaches we reduce to a 2-week minimum, and finally, 1-week to keep it as simplified as possible.
3. Surprise-and-Delight. We do this with gifts and flexibility. We leave a small basket of local gifts for each set of guests. This is a great way to establish rapport and start out on the right foot. We also cushion the check-in and check-out time so that we can ALWAYS offer early check-in and late check-out, an easy non-monetary way to close out their stay with generosity.
We also realized early on that there are certain personal items we’d rather not share, and we’d need to stock up on all of the basics. Here’s a brief overview of what we bought.
Items We Purchased:
Towels
Sheets
Pillows
Shampoo, Conditioner and Body Wash
Extra toilet paper, paper towels, and cleaning supplies
Coffee, Tea and Hot Chocolate
Pillow Protectors
House Manual (designed on Etsy and laminated locally)
Smart Door Lock ($$$)
To help us improve and continue to offer a wonderful experience for our guests, that first summer we asked for feedback and received it! Guests shared that we needed curtains in our dining room (even though we had been fine without them), additional lighting in one of the bedrooms (simple lamp purchase) and a hair dryer (we had stored ours in the garage).
There’s a lot more that I can share, but in closing I’ll say good communication is so important! We always had a back-up contact person just in case guests were unable to reach us.
If you’ve considered renting out your home, we’d love to hear from you! Have additional questions? Feel free to email hello@modernrefresh.com and we’ll share a follow-up article with additional tips!