What we are doing with our Airbnb during COVID19
It was a wild first quarter of 2020 with Airbnb and COVID19 sweeping the world. In March of 2020, we saw a drop off in bookings on our second Airbnb caused by the COVID19 pandemic. After this drop started we began doing research on ways to keep steady bookings. Lowering nightly rates, reaching out to businesses to book for their employees, contacting all the guests to say the unit is extra clean, are all great strategies.
While doing our research we noticed Airbnb was sending messages about cancellations and their policy changes to guests and all bookings came down within a few days.
In five days we went from 20 bookings at the beginning of March to 0 bookings for both April and March. The COVID pandemic brought global travel to a grinding halt. So we had to take quick action and convert our Airbnb into a long-term rental.
We follow a lot of amazing content creators in the short term rental industry like Airbnb Automated, STR University, and dozens of other home bloggers. When something sweeps the world this quickly once your family is safe, being proactive and taking control is also extremely important.
After going through and staging photos we listed the property on Zillow, Apartments.com, Trulia, and Craigslist. Our Airbnb property is a cute little in-law cottage with a private entrance and fully furnished so we decided to make it an all utilities and fully furnished listing.
Once we had the story and text written out for the listing we just used the amazing Airbnb photos for the listing. These are a few of them:
I contacted our real estate agent to discuss what was happening and he told us to post the Craigslist posting on a local Seminole Heights neighborhood Facebook group. Luckily we were already members and had the ability to post so this was pretty straightforward.
Craigslist brought 2-3 inquiries organically within the first 2 hours and once we posted on the Facebook group inquiries skyrocketed to 25+ within 12 hours. Managing everything in a simple google spreadsheet we contacted everything and showed the property to 4 people. Within 5 days we had a signed month to month lease for the rest of the year allowing us to open Airbnb back up during the Super Bowl in 2021 here in Tampa!
It’s really important to keep in mind that EVERYONE was hit by this COVID19 pandemic in some way. In the UK, rental properties have flooded into the market from Airbnb hosts taking the same action we did. Having the ability to change the property from short term to long-term is now going to be the norm for Airbnb hosts. This experience has greatly affected a lot of people that were over-leveraged with 10+ mortgages with Airbnb being their primary source of income.
Overall, if you are currently trying to long-term your property or you are just getting into real estate know that the path that worked for us getting a lease signed within 5 days was:
- Taking the airbnb photos for long-term listing
- Listing on Zillow, Trulia, Apartments.com, and Craigslist
- Sharing the listing on local Facebook community groups
- Manage potential tenants in a Google spreadsheet to track status
We hope this helps someone out there who is currently doing short-term rentals or even long-term rentals 🙂 Good luck
Love,
Scooch and Steve
