Do you wonder if successful Airbnb investors have tools and systems in place that you don’t know about? Are you looking for solutions to time-consuming tasks you may experience as a host? Would you like to work smarter and not harder on your investment?
If so, don’t miss Episode 30 of the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast where we pull back the curtain and share the exact tools that we use to streamline our processes for managing our 10 Airbnb properties.
Read on to learn about the different softwares that help automate maximizing our occupancy and profits across the portfolio, so you know specifically how to set up a tech stack to save time and make more money on your Airbnb investments!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Why tech stacks are essential to investor success
- The 8 tools in our Airbnb tech stack & how they benefit our businessHow a tech stack can save you thousands of dollars in co-host or management fees
Host Coach Airbnb Podcast Episode 30 Show Notes:
Recently, we were on a wealth-building webinar and asked what our tech stack was. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, tech stacks combine technology products and services that work together to build or complete a project or task.
So in layman's terms, a tech stack is the combination of tools you use to be successful in your business. This can be highly technical, bear with me, like the tech stack that supports Airbnb's platform. On the front end, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript combine to deliver responsive and intuitive web and mobile applications while Python runs the back end.
The good news is a tech stack can also be simple, like how we found a few software tools over the years to help streamline our management processes to help us succeed as Airbnb investors. Today, we're going to share our complete Airbnb tech stack so you know what tools are available to help you fast track your Airbnb journey to financial freedom.
Airbnb Market Research Tools
And it starts with market research tools. We begin with AirDNA, which is an online software that tracks the performance data of over 10 million vacation rentals to analyze occupancy rates, revenue, and pricing.
We can use AirDNA to begin to evaluate markets that we might be interested in investing. Is this a good market? Is it highly regulated? What are the average daily rates like? How many properties are in that market? It allows us to begin analyzing is this a good market for you to invest or not?
AirDNA is not an expensive software - they have a free version. There's a $15 and a $25 a month version. From there, once we've established the market that we're interested in, I use one of the free online real estate search engines. Personally, I use Redfin to set up a search area.
I usually just draw around a zip code or use a lasso and draw a circle around an area I'm interested in. Then that platform will send me daily emails of properties that become available for sale in that geography. I get that daily email, and I can quickly flip through it to see which properties might meet our criteria.
A townhouse may not meet our criteria, where something that looks like a cabin does. I love getting emails from Redfin. It's sort of like daily Christmas because I'm like, "Oh, this could be our next Airbnb!" From there, once we've established our property, we need to list it somewhere. We call these OTAs or online travel agencies, If you have listened to any other episodes, you know we're big proponents of Airbnb.
But, you do not have to be Airbnb. We're mainly proponents of sole sourcing a listing on a single platform to maximize your benefit and reviews and search placement on that one platform. And Airbnb is free to list.
Airbnb Pricing Software
Once we have the listing up, we need to think about pricing. We use PriceLabs, which is a third party dynamic pricing model. Okay. What does that mean? PriceLabs is connected directly to Airbnb, and it knows specifically how many people are searching in a given neighborhood and a given geography for any given day.
When those searches are up 200% due to a concert or event coming in town, PriceLabs may not know what that event is, but they're going to know that the demand for searches is up and automatically adjust your pricing upwards accordingly. During set up we create a base price, say $200. And if there's a holiday weekend coming up PriceLabs will increase that base price, maybe to $300 a night. And it actually doesn't just recommend that number to you. It plugs it back in to your Airbnb listing automatically. So your calendar is changing daily meeting price demands and fluctuations.
Conversely, on the other side, if we're static pricing, it's at $200 a night - that might be too much for next Tuesday and Wednesday night. So if that demand is down, and searches are down, Pricelabs will automatically adjust your price downward for you to book that night and keep your occupancy high.
There are other third party pricing tools available. We tend to recommend PriceLabs. We don't recommend using Airbnb's smart pricing tool. It is universally despised and we're very positive people! PriceLabs is $20 a month for your first property, and that rate decreases with each additional property. So at our 10 property level, we're ending up paying about $14 per property, which is incredibly reasonable.
Airbnb Guest Messaging Software
The next thing that we have in our tech stack is an automated messaging tool. We personally LOVE Hospitable. It's a software that centralizes and automates our guest messaging through Airbnb's platform. So this saves us tons of time and gives our guests near-immediate communication, which leads to higher booking rates and five star reviews. It's $30 a month for the first property, and it decreases to $15 per property as you grow your Airbnb investment portfolio.
Airbnb Housekeeper Scheduling Software
Next up is a cleaning schedule for our housekeepers. How do we communicate the endless changes that happen with bookings and cancellations at our various Airbnbs? We use Google Sheets. These are online spreadsheets with the ability to be accessed and updated by multiple people in real time.
Best of all, they're free. And this is by far our least high-tech solution, but it's the best fit for our housekeepers, many of whom don't own a laptop. Google Sheets allow them to look on their phone and we simply put in the guest name, number of guests, the check in date, the checkout date, and the name of the property.
Each month is a new sheet and our housekeepers know to check it daily. So we don't have to send one off messages when there's a new booking, a cancellation, more guests are coming, less guests are coming. Communicating all of these endless things can be a huge time suck, especially as you start to get into more than one property. Culin also uses this Google sheet to run payroll for each of our housekeepers because it breaks out the number of jobs they did each week.
Payment Software
Right. And then at the beginning of each week, I'll use that Google sheet to figure out what is owed to each individual housekeeper. And instead of sending a check, we use Zelle. Zelle is like Venmo or PayPal, but it was created by the banks - so it's not something new that a person working for us has to sign up for.
When we hire a new housekeeper or vendor, we can just send a test payment to their phone number or email and all the major banks are already associated with Zelle. So there's a really quick way that I can go through and make payments to the housekeepers or handy people or other vendors, and they get the funds in their account immediately.
I don't have to cut a check. We don't have to let it go through the mail system. It is there in their accounts every Monday morning, which I feel is a real benefit. People want to get paid quickly. So this is a win win. Our team's getting paid immediately, and it's trackable. We know if we've missed a payment to somebody, there's this activity report and you know exactly that the payments have been received, which leads into the bookkeeping.
Airbnb Book Keeping Software
We encourage all of our Airbnb investors to run their properties as a business. This includes doing business-style bookkeeping. We use QuickBooks, which is an accounting software that manages invoices and expenses. We compare bills with it, and track our cash flow. The online version is $15 per month. It also helps me really think like a business owner. If I'm accounting for every expense related to my Airbnb (and those should be business expenses) and they're all tracked into QuickBooks, then I know I'm really separating my business affairs from my personal affairs.
QuickBooks also has the capability to interface directly with your bank. So I'm not keying in each of those transactions. I can import them in a bank transfer. Additionally, at the end of the financial year for tax purposes, I don't have to hand my accountant a shoebox full of invoices or an Excel spreadsheet. I'm simply able to give them a backup copy of my QuickBooks. And from there they have everything that they need to generate my tax returns with respect to my short term rental property portfolio.
Airbnb Optimization Software
Next is optimizing your Airbnb listing for optimal cashflow. How do we know how well our property is doing? Well, there's bookings and there's revenue to look at. Preceeding bookings is views, which we can get out of Airbnb. But what we don't know is where our listing is showing on the Airbnb platform.
We use a tool called RankBreeze to keep track of each of our listings, and where they're showing in search results for any given guest count and available dates. We want to be on page one, right? It's like Google search. If you're not on page one, you're really hard to find. So RankBreeze tracks our ranking for us, plots it out on a nice graph, gives us individual data on where we're showing in search placement for any given dates of availability.
If we find that we're slipping down into the number 20, 30, or 40th position, we don't have to wait until we're not getting the revenue we want to make a change. We can see In RankBreeze that we're not necessarily showing as high in search results as we want to be. From there, we can then start making some changes. We can adjust our prices. We can go and add some amenities. We can change some policies.
We can also track when we make that change. I think the other really key thing about RankBreeze is it really helps you gain maximum occupancy. When you're on page one, more people see you. Therefore more people book your Airbnb. We were just talking about it yesterday. 50% occupancy is pretty much the breakeven point for Airbnb investors. So, all of the bookings that push you over 50% is where the money comes from. The first 50% goes to your mortgage and expenses, and the next 50% is your gross margin. And for $30 a month, you can have three properties on RankBreeze that you're continuously monitoring, tweaking to make sure you stay on page one - AND you stay fully booked so you're making the most profits possible!
Airbnb Tech Stack vs. Property Management Company
So that's our complete tech stack for managing our 10 Airbnb properties with minimal stress and maximum cashflow. We added all of it up and using each of the tools we mentioned totals out at $50 on top of that for each extra property that you add to your portfolio.
Compared to a co host or a management company taking 20% to 40% of profits, that $110 is nothing. If your Airbnb is grossing $5,000 a month in revenue, you could pay $110 to use our Airbnb Tech Stack tools or $1, 000 to $2, 000 to a management company to do the same thing. You get the benefits of offloading mundane tasks while keeping all of your profits.
If you're a tech savvy person, congratulations! I know exactly what you're going to be doing this week. However, if you're someone less excited by software and could use some help integrating these tools into your processes, we're happy to help. Set up a free 30 minute Airbnb coaching session, and we'll get you plugged in and playing ASAP!
So there you have it. You now know the eight tools that we use to streamline the management of our 10 Airbnb properties to maximize our profits. You also know what each tool in our Airbnb tech stack is used for as well as how much they cost.