Do you want to buy an Airbnb and don’t even know where to begin? Do you wish there was a specific place to find short-term rentals for sale and compare them based on their potential earnings? Or are you an Airbnb owner or agent looking to attract short-term rental investors to a property you are selling?

If so, don’t miss Episode 52 of the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast, where Trent Hawthorn, the Chief Product Officer of Rabbu, shares how their free platform helps people find, calculate revenue, and buy Airbnbs that make their lives better, AND how you can grow your real estate business with their tools.

After listening to this episode you will know how much data is available for you to dig into to find your perfect investment property. As well as the value of using Rabbu to sell a property to investors that can calculate its potential cash flow and pay you accordingly!

Read on to learn how Rabbu can help you go from “a total newbie” to a completely informed, and confident, Airbnb buyer!

Topics discussed in this episode:

• How to use Rabbu to find a STR property for sale and calculate its revenue potential
• Why data-driven analysis and decision making are imperative for successful Airbnb investing
• How the new era of Airbnb benefits both investors and guests
• The future of the short term rental industry
• How to grow your real estate business with Airbnb investor clients and/or attract investors to a property that you are selling
  

 Host Coach Airbnb Podcast Episode 52 Show Notes:

 Trent, I'm a Rabbu user, have been for a number of years, we've talked about it here on the podcast several times, can you tell our listeners what exactly is Rabbu?

We simply describe ourselves as the Zillow for short term rentals. So just like Zillow has this estimate, a quick way of understanding how much your house is worth may not be perfect, but it's directionally correct. We have a revenue calculator, that helps you understand how much a property can make in revenue, whether it's property that you own or property you're looking at to buy. And we also have properties that you can browse to find a property to buy, just like Zillow does.

Are you looking at comparables? Are you getting data from the short term rental platforms?

One of the most difficult parts of the process is determining what comparables there are, right? It's, I think, the most challenging part of coming up with any kind of projections in short term rentals. So, what our product does is when you enter an address, we go grab all the relevant Airbnb listings, and we also have years worth of historical data from those Airbnb listings that are nearby, of the same bedroom count and basically looking at their historical data, but also their forward calendars we're able to come up with what their projected revenue is. And using that data, give you an idea of how a property or your property, can perform.

What we do is we give you all of that information, right? So you can go look at that information and you can exclude certain listings if they aren't a fit with what you're looking to do. You can choose different percentiles, 75th or 90th percentile, and really look at all the data, which we think is one of the big value adds of our platform is that we show it to you so you can play with the data.

Culin loves Airbnb data. I just have to ask because I've tried to make anagrams, I would love to know where did the name Rabu come from?

I love the pretend backstory that, that's a good one.

How to Find Airbnb Investments That Make Your Life Better

What would you say the overall goal of Rabbu is?

To help people to find investments that make their lives better. So whether they're looking to find an investment property that generates them a certain return that helps them live other goals in their life, or they want to buy a property that they may use occasionally that enriches their life and their family's life. That's our goal

That's very on point for this show, and the way we talk about finding financial freedom, whatever that looks like for you through short-term rental investing. I love the alignment there.

How Rabbu Helps New and Seasoned Airbnb Investors

Our listeners are a combination of newer individuals that are STR curious as well as seasoned ones. Can you talk a little bit about how Rabbu could help those two different segments of our audience?

Zillow if you're a buyer and you're just browsing properties It's completely free. In the past we had a subscription model. About a year and a half ago, we decided to move away from that. It's kind of part of our helping the industry have better transparency and just better access to data.Rabbu is completely free. So, you can use the site without having an account. The way we make money is that we generate leads for real estate agents and for lenders.

How Rabbu Can Help Real Estate Agents Grow Their Businesses

A lot of our listeners are real estate agents. How can Rabbu help them grow their business?

There's two primary ways. One, if you're looking for leads of buyers that are trying to buy short term rentals, we can absolutely help with that. We have a program to generate leads for you and we're on a pay per lead basis. So that's one big way to build your business. The second way is, we just recently launched a marketplace product for the ability to sell your short term rental on the platform, either as an owner or as an agent. So agents who have sellers listings who want to market their property to short terminal buyers are using this tool to market to prospective investors.

So if I'm an agent, and I get a listing and it's not currently used as a short term rental, but it's at the beach or it's near a lake, and I think that the way to maximize the sale price for this would be to sell to an investor - in addition to just putting it on the MLS where the buyer is just going to be anothervacation user, I, as the agent, can list that property with Rabu with the specific intent of finding people that would use this as a profit generating investment property and therefore potentially get higher quality or higher dollar offers. Is that correct?

That's exactly right! Great use case that you mentioned. So we get people who are listing current Airbnbs for sale, or properties that they think would be a great short term rental investment. We get a lot of agents that list properties. They use our revenue calculator to figure out how much it could make as a full time investment property. And then they post the listing with that intent. And we have buyers looking for properties exactly like that. So, why not market to this type of audience, because you're going to find higher intent to buy?

That's brilliant. And I haven't seen that anywhere else. That's a hole in the market.

An Online Marketplace for Airbnb Properties

You're right. We've been wanting to do this for years. What we wanted to always have was a place where you could go, where you would know that you're finding high quality properties that either are current short terminals and they have historical financials, or there are properties that would be a great potential Airbnb, and you use our software to help you understand that. There's nowhere else in the market, like you said, that you can get this data.

I think that's crazy exciting! We're both entrepreneurs from past tech businesses. So, seeing different softwares evolve and platforms changes is exciting. That leads me to What has surprised and excited you the most about working at Rabbu over the last six years?

One of the things that's excited me is, I just love the short-term rental industry. I'm just an Airbnb person and have been for 10 years or more. I'm not a hotel person. That's not to say hotels aren't great for certain times. But I just love Airbnb. I think it's a great company. I think it's a great concept.

Airbnb Hospitality Matters When it Comes to Revenue

Hospitable tools and messaging tools and how to be a five star host. So that's a really accurate point, which is if people are using Rabu and you see a revene number - keep in mind that's based on the average host.

That's how you're going to make the most money. And why else would you want to do it? Right? You're not getting into Airbnb investing to provide a very basic experience because the returns won't be worth it. The industry as evolved. You can't set it and forget it and be successful.

The Shift in the Airbnb Industry

There's been so much shift in the industry post COVID, we've talked about that a lot. Looking forward, how do you see the short term rental market unfolding?

I think the moonlighters have the set and forget it mentality of post COVID where there wasn't enough supply and there was a ton of demand and you could easily make outsized returns. That time is over. And I actually think that's really good for the industry. Because, I think it leaves the people who are actually committed to being great hosts and providing a great experience. The ones who really want to be in this industry are the ones that are still remaining. I think that's good for people looking to get into investing and I think it's good for guests.

This is just my personal opinion, but I think Airbnb is going to continue to dominate the short term rental space. I see them getting bigger and better over time. I think they have an incredible business model, and I see them just continuing to take market share from the other OTAs.

Building off the bigger and better Airbnb, what do you think is the biggest value Rabbu offers short term rental investors?

I think it's understanding how nearby properties are performing so that you can make the better informed purchase decision. Soon though, it'll be having the best supply of short term rentals for sale - anywhere. Having just launched that part of our platform. It's newish, but a year from now that'll be the primary thing that people come to our platform to find - actual short terminals in the marketplace to buy.

That makes a lot of sense. And you beat me to that. I was going to say, what do you see in the future? But you've already told me what you see in the future. Who doesn't love a well curated marketplace where it's not sifting through Facebook, is this real or not real? It's a legitimate. A place that has statistics at your fingertips.

Advice for New Airbnb Investors

What advice do you have forthe new Airbnb investor who is just getting started?

Provide the experience that you want yourself. If you want to stay at a place where the host is a great communicator and clean and has something unique to offer, then provide that. And if you live up to that standard, you'll do well.

Is there anything else you want to tell us about Rabbu, about tools, about functions, about new stuff that we haven't asked you about?

One of the things I would love to say is that for anybody who uses the product - if you have suggestions about how to improve it, please reach out. There's a support email on the site. I read those emails, there's a very small team at Rabbu who's in charge of the product and we react to customer feedback. We try to make the product better based on it.

Thank you for your time, Trent. Thank you for educating us about the new facets of Rabbu and we look forward to seeing what you all do in the future.

Appreciate that so much. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm about to fire up my computer and head over to that marketplace and dig into it. Hopefully others will as well!