All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

Depends on how you want to run your rental. If you want to just set it and forget it and accept 100% of every request that comes your way because you’re only taking with that OTAs are sending you, get ready for a fight. If you treat the place like your own property (which it is) and have an understanding what it takes to screen guests or apply booking specific requirements up front or leverage noise monitoring systems to ensure parties don’t get out of control, go for it.

Everyone purchasing within him HOA community should already make it a standard practice to contact the board with a set of standard questions to ensure they understand how it is functioning, and what the rules are and how solvent the association really is (most aren't).

As an HOA board member and someone who runs STRs in these communities I have absolutely no problem making slumlord investors lives' hard while doing everything I can to protect the rights of responsible investors. We have a mix of full-time, seasonal, and investors, and everyone generally gets along well so long as folks understand the rules and do their best to manage responsibly.

Another means of reducing host profitability to make the middleman/platform more profitable. It’s incredible the level of doublespeak AirBnB promotes with every one of its new updates. You really have to read between the lines to realize how you’re being taken advantage of with each new release.

Let’s put this another way: “lower your pricing to show up on page one.“

Bought this at $420 a couple years go and thought it was a steal.

@Wilson Hunter disagree. There is an inevitable outcome to these high level filters and that is that hosts will soon be asked to “pay to play” for featured listing status. That’s already in place for other platforms and is a logical next step for Airbnb to extract additional $$$ out of hosts. Trust me I’d love to be wrong on this, but as JD and others have pointed out the trajectory here on the platform is pretty easy to predict.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think these changes already went into effect. And within this first week or two I already have a guest asking for discounts because they saw my prices jump and want to know why I myself increased prices so much. This is exactly what Airbnb’s game is: Lowering the perception of price by ensuring hosts absorb the cost of their failures in NYC and a softening overall market.

But I would actually argue it’s worse than margin reduction alone: the other aspect of this is that if your property is not scoring above a 4.9 rating you have yet another filter that guests can quickly check to filter your listing out, aka: “guest favorites“. For anyone that has ever lost, superhost status you know how quickly that can reduce your search rank on the platform. So here today is yet another way that Airbnb is limiting your discoverability by focusing on the very very top percentage of available listings in a particular market. And yes, I am assure the Airbnb apologists will immediately jump in and simply say that this means many of us are not managing our rentals properly, however this perspective ignores the fact that in some markets we are fighting for occupancy rates that often fall well below 50%: putting much higher pressure on each individual review than one would have at 80-90% occupancy in other more active short term rental markets and creating the real possibility that even the most successful rentals within a particular region will dip below 4.9 on rating across slower parts of the year. 

As with everything in real estate location matters. Some regions (like my own in New England) are over saturating, others at 90% occupancy sound pretty far from it. As others have said, had I not bought before the COVID price and rate hikes I’d be suffering right now. I’ve run numbers in detail for friends who’ve been looking to get into identical rentals as I manage: the numbers don’t work, even self managed or when transitioned to MTR or LTR. It’s very easy to say management explains everything. It’s far more nuanced to admit most everything in a real estate market is regional.

Anyone in hospitality should long ago have discovered that the mattress industry is either showrooms + commissions or websites + paid promotion. Casper and other venture-backed brands just buy out the online influencers to show higher in the online reviews and even the almighty Consumer Reports can’t accurately rate them well.

The real truth on Zinus? Just about exactly the same reliability as any other quality-control challenged mattress: you win some and lose some based on the quality of a particular production run. Sounds like you got a bad one. So return and retry. Or buy another brand. At this price point you’ll spend more on TP in a year than a memory foam mattress. Don’t believe me? Check out the ratings of one of the few non-paid matters reviewers out there still left:

https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/mattressreview-memory-foam.html

I didn't see an article linked in the OP and can't scroll through 70 quotes posts on mobile. Is the NAR colluding to raise realtor commissions, the largest landlords colluding to raise rental prices via algorithms, or something else?

https://apple.news/ARHnS3y_PQ4q6F3WSdOiH6A

Hey @Andrew Bosco hello from a few miles south. I bought one of these systems a few months back from my STRs and as@Mason Weisscorrectly points out, they're fragile and you have to put yourself in the shoes of the average 7yo when anticipating usage. I haven't found them to be much of a draw versus showcasing a property's board game collection since it's the parents booking the place not the kids. Agreed with others' points that there could be a dedicated game room opportunity where a stand-up system would fit right in, I just haven't seen it add much value outside of that niche. 

@Nathan W. great question. I've had a lot of luck with the 50% add-on offer, on days where the day before or after a guest's stay is available. That said, it did take me a while to get the messaging right so as not to sound like an "upsell" versus an offer to make a guest's arrival/departure a little easier by extending a stay a significantly discounted rate.