How to do furnished MTR without platforms like Airbnb? What are the basics?

[Allan Smith]

I have 40 LTR units so I'm not new, but I'm struggling with the best way to do MTR if I don't want to put the listing on Airbnb. If you all know of a post or other resource you can link to with basics like this, I'm happy to read that instead of you typing a bunch of stuff out ha!

I have a new listing that is a 1/1 750SF and furnished, 30+ day in Nashville. I figure I'll have everyone pay a deposit and sign a lease to book it and hold a spot on the calendar. Nashville has plenty of hospitals (travel nurses) but also people stay over 30 days for tons of reasons.

Here are some of my current questions:

- How much of an application do you do and why? I was thinking only doing credit/BG check through buildium like I do for my LTRs.

- Where do you advertise for bookings? I get one inquiry on zillow every couple days. No bookings yet in a week. I've tried furnished finder on other bookings in the past and never even got CLOSE to a booking. Total waste of money. I guess I was able to get more on Airbnb so I never needed to drop it to FF prices.

- What do you use for calendar mgmt if any?

And any other operation basics. I searched the forums here twice and people weren't talking about the fundamentals much.

[Jeff Copeland]

My first question is why would you not want to use Airbnb?

I manage around 30 furnished MTRs in Florida, and I have tried all of the main platforms:

Airbnb - By far has the biggest market share (and the biggest marketing machine), and only charges the host 3% (this is less than you pay for credit card processing on other platforms).

Note: There's an enduring fallacy out there that Airbnb = STR or "nightly stays". How often have you asked someone about or discussed whther you are "doing Airbnb", when referring to short term stays. But in reality, you can set your minimum stay to any number (30, 60, 90 nights - whatever you want or need to comply with things like local ordinances or HOA requirements). And for long term stays, they typically charge the guest once per month. 

VRBO - Probably the second highest market share (but less than 1/3 of Airbnb). As a host, I find the platform (and moreso, the process of handling payments, etc) far more clunky than Airbnb. Plus you end up paying VRBO their fees (which they bill in arrears, after the fact), plus paying your credit card processor around 4% of the payment, so it's far more expensive than Airbnb. 

Furnished Finder - Decent source of leads, but a confusing platform with no functional calendar/availability tools. Fairly inexpensive (not tied to revenue), but requires a lot of "manual" attention (in the form of cutting and pasting email addresses and communicating individually with each lead, many of whom are non-responsive because the platform is a confusing mess). 

Booking . com - Useless in my experience. Geared more for hotel rooms than homes and apartments.

PMS for Direct Bookings - In the STR/MTR world, PMS stands for property management software (also referred to as channel management). But, unlike most LTR software (where a handful of big players such as Appfolio, Buildium, and Propertyware dominate), there are dozens of PMS systems that help you 1) create a direct booking site of your own, but also 2)"syndicate" your listings to other "Channels" such as Airbnb and VRBO, and 3) sync your calendar across all of the different booking options. On the back end, these can also tie in to a larger tech stack and incorporate things like third party dynamic pricing software, smart lock integrations, credit card processing, and all sorts of other useful features. 

So it's a bit of a balancing act: You don't want to build your MTR business on Airbnb's land, so you speak (meaning if you are 100% reliant on Airbnb (or any channel for that matter), what happens if they go belly up? While it may be hard to imagine a world without Airbnb, remember: That world existed as recently as 2007!

At the same time, you can't and shouldn't ignore Airbnb's massive market share (almost 50% of the global market, over 3X the market share of VRBO, and a million times the market share of your direct booking site). 

We have found a great system to be:

1. Develop your own tech stack for MTR using a STR PMS/channel management tool (we use Hostfully, but there are literally dozens to compare).

2. Flesh it out with all the bells and whistles; dynamic pricing tools (such as PriceLabs), smart lock integrations, payment processing, etc, so that you at least have the capability of hosting a guest 100% on your own if someone called you today looking for a direct MTR booking. You can typically earn more, while the guest pays less, on a direct booking.

3. Also leverage Airbnb, VRBO, and any other channel you feel compelled to participate in by syndicating your listings there and syncing your calendars.

4. A very common scenario with MTR is a guest realizes they will pay a ton of fees to Airbnb for a long term stay, so they hint that they'd like to work something out to save some money. We still direct them back to the source (Airbnb for example), but for a shorter stay. For example: "Why don't you book the unit on Airbnb for two weeks (instead of 90 days or whatever), and then we can discuss transitioning you to our direct booking option or a long term lease?" This allows: 1) The channel to get their vig on a 2-week stay, 2) You to get a review on their platform to drive future business, 3) You to earn more overall, and 4) The guest to pay less overall.

Note that Airbnb and other platforms' terms of service are understandably fussy about users taking their guests "off platform", so this has to be done with some tact. That's one reason I've always felt it's important to have the guest actually book something on the source platform (plus the reviews are crucial to your long term success as a host).