Top 5 Strategies to Increase Your Airbnb’s Profitability

Looking for insight into increasing your Airbnb’s profitability? Search no further - here are 5 strategies that can help you achieve your financial goals. These ideas are also outlined in Sean’s profitability video, as an episode in his investor series.

Concept & Design

The Airbnb market is rightfully booming; this means that consumers have a lot of options and choices when it comes to booking a getaway or short term rental property. For this reason, it’s imperative that you make your property more appealing than its competition. What does that mean? There’s no room for a basic space, it doesn’t work anymore. You need to put money behind making your place pop so that it stands out online amongst the ever-increasing size of competition. Whether you focus on unique interior design elements, colorful accent pieces, expanding upon a cool concept that was already adapted within the confines of the property, remember that being different gets you noticed. Distinctive factors and elements will only improve your occupancy rates in this type of housing market and environment. 

Marketing & Online Presence

When it comes to standing out in the short term rental market, it’s critical that you’re spending time building an online presence and investing in worthwhile marketing efforts. This means incorporating professional photography into your budget. By providing potential guests with visual angles of every facet of your property from the exterior through the interior and even drone photos to help show its proximity to other local attractions, marketing is a necessary component to positively impact your profitability strategy. You’ll also want to take the time to include floor plans and to enhance your space (see point above), and then make sure that you’re showing off these particulars and highlights on social media so that they can help to differentiate your property from its competition. Lastly, reviews. Guest reviews are the social proof that you’re doing what you’ve set out to do. It’s true, they will help increase traffic and bookings, while simultaneously making guests feel more confident about their decision to stay at your property. They increase customer loyalty through connection and give your guests a voice. Make the effort to follow up with your guests so that your signature personal touch and effort at maintaining direct contact help to foster a longstanding relationship - it’ll pay dividends.

Pricing

Let’s face it, pricing can make or break your investment. Do not live or die by stagnant and static pricing. In fact, try to avoid year-round prices locked in at $400/night or $4000/week; instead, focus on being strategic and using a dynamic pricing strategy to help drive your bottom line. Your pricing should be influenced by factors like the season, or whether you’re trying to increase bookings during the week versus weekends versus holidays. We use a tool called PriceLabs, which leverages market data to ensure your property is attractively priced while focusing on the overall goals of increasing income and decreasing vacancies.

Cleanliness

Whether this seems obvious or hasn’t actually been a priority to this point, cleanliness is key. We highly recommend investing in a reliable, communicative cleaning team. You want to ensure that every angle of your property is primed and polished after one guest checks out and before another checks in - this means tackling floors and surfaces, bathrooms, restocking supplies, and doing laundry to ensure clean linens and towels are readily available. In fact, we even request that our cleaning teams take pictures before they begin the process as well as upon completion, so we know that the property is in top shape for the next guest.

Guest Capacity

How many people can your property comfortably sleep? Simply put, the more you can sleep, the more you can charge. However, you don’t want to over-occupy your properties. Focus on  maximizing the space of your property while keeping maximum profitability in mind. Our properties feature everything from king beds and queen beds to bunk beds and sleeper sofas, depending on what type of furnishing set-up makes the most sense. 

There you have it - that’s a quick look at our short list of 5 strategies to help increase your property’s profitability. Have other ideas? Leave a comment & let us know! We’re always eager to learn what’s working for certain types of properties in specific markets.

To view our complete portfolio of properties, check out our Seacoast STRs!

Top 5 Strategies to Increase Your Airbnb’s Profitability - Sean Bakhtiari