Airbnb has been growing in popularity across the United States.
As an affordable and fun way to travel, the Airbnb guest experience offers short-term guests as much of the local flavor as possible. The app allows hosts to rent out their rooms, apartments, houses, and even castles at rates significantly lower than those of most nearby hotels and short-term rentals.
While this is a great way to travel and get a unique guest experience, Airbnb is also a great way to make money as a host. Entering an apartment or home on Airbnb’s online listings is free, though you do pay a 3% service fee when reservations are confirmed.
As a host, you can make anywhere from $300 to $400 a week in major cities such as New York City or San Francisco by renting out a spare room in your home. However, you can rent out your entire house or apartment at a much higher rate.
Now may be the time for potential hosts to sign up. Between the growing trend of personal use of the service and recent news of Airbnb expanding its business guest travel program, there is a growing opportunity for hosts to find success in renting their space.
Our helpful guide on how to prepare your house for Airbnb hosting will give you the basics you need to know before getting your house ready for Airbnb.
We’ll also cover how Storage.com can help provide business storage solutions for hosts running out of space.
Advice for Hosts: How to Make Money with Airbnb Hosting
The beauty of Airbnb is that nearly anyone can be an active host as long as they have the room. However, much like hotels and other accommodations, you’ll be competing with other rates, rooms, and experienced hosts.
So, what can you do to get the most from your space through Airbnb? For an active host to make money, you need to create a welcoming living space for renters.
While Airbnb offers new host checklists, including accurately listing amenities and nearby attractions, starting with a lower, competitive price to build up good reviews, and even setting guidelines as to who can rent the space, you also need to have photos that will draw renters in and a room that will live up to what’s promised.
Getting Your House Ready for Airbnb: Provide the Ideal Guest Experience
“You want to give the illusion that your space is always ready to be rented.”
—Eric Foutch, Airbnb Host
Preparing your home for Airbnb is similar to staging a home that is for sale in that you have to create a space that is attractive to renters. Airbnb hosts provide photos of their available rooms through the Airbnb listing page to give potential renters a glimpse into the space’s layout.
“You want to give the illusion that your place is always ready to be rented,” says Eric Foutch, who hosts out of downtown Omaha, Nebraska, using Airbnb. He said he learned how to stage a room while growing up around his mother, an interior designer who owned and staged a furniture store.
The first step, he says, is conducting a deep cleaning. “Even a little dust will show up in pictures and will make the place look dirty,” he warns. “Clean first and then set the room.”
While cleaning, keep an eye out for “stuff” that may clutter the listing photos. Eric says this can be small, everyday things that you may not think about. A few things to keep an eye out for when preparing to take pictures of your available space are:
- Personal photos on end tables and shelves.
- Bills, mail, and other papers on dining and coffee tables.
- Food, spices, and other disorganized items are in the kitchen.
- Toiletry items such as hand soaps and toothpaste.
- Any garbage cans that may be in the way of the picture?
While Airbnb can provide a professional photographer in some cases, you may find yourself having to take your own pictures. While doing this, there are some important tips to follow.
For starters, always be aware of the lighting, especially when having windows in the background. Avoid having direct sunlight behind any images to prevent silhouetting. Additionally, it may be good to hang drapes or curtains to create soft lighting, making your space seem all the more inviting.
Another solid tip is getting the right angles of your space. In most instances, you can really show the dimensions of a room by taking a photo from a corner.
It may even help to take the photo from a step stool for a slightly elevated view of the room. Showing the outside of your space can be a huge advantage to you as well, as staging goes beyond setting up the inside of your house or apartment.
People care to see what the neighborhood is like, where they’ll be parking, and any other outdoor space they may have access to, such as a fire pit or backyard pool. Be sure to clear out such spaces of any clutter when possible and use similar practices as you would inside your home.
Lastly, when taking photos, be sure to take a lot. While you shouldn’t take the same shot over and over again, renters enjoy seeing different aspects of the home.
Highlight the living space, bedrooms, bathrooms, outdoor areas, kitchen, and any other space that may be important. Renters want to know the space before they stay, so provide them plenty of photos to look at.
These areas are easily overlooked when you see them every day in your home, however, your space is new to renters, and they’ll be sure to spot anything that may distract or disengage them. By following these simple steps, you can capture the attention of potential renters and start making a profit.
How to Prepare for Airbnb Guests
One thing renters always check out before renting a particular space are the reviews.
Was the space clean as promised? Was the room just as described in your listing? Are things just like the pictures?
Having previous guests giving positive reviews on these issues makes you a trustworthy host that people will rent from in the future, and they may be willing to pay a bit more for that trust.
“Preparing a home is a lot of work, but the payoff is always worth it!”
—Kristen Hoffman, Airbnb Host
“I initially pay attention to creativity within the space, followed by photo quality,” says Kristen Hoffman. “After that, I read the reviews and comments.”
Kristen says she and her husband, Joshua, use Airbnb about once or twice a month and host guests in their home as well. As someone who uses both sides of the service, she says it’s very important to read the reviews.
“We put a lot of effort into preparing our home for our guests and would like to be treated with that same respect. Preparing a home is a lot of work, but the payoff is always worth it!” she says.
Hosts, such as she and her husband, should want potential guests to feel clean, safe, and, “most importantly—at home!”
To give guests this secure, at-home feeling, Eric says that, in addition to picking up things around his home that would otherwise clutter the rental space for his short-term guests, he takes basic steps such as:
- Digital locks on the front door, granting easy access to short-term guests
- Fresh linens or clean linens
- Fluff pillows and throw pillows
- Locks on bedroom doors
- Alarm clocks on bedside tables
- Cleaning supplies and laundry detergent
- Ironing board
- First-aid kit
- Additional paper products such as paper towels and toilet paper
- Fresh bathroom products such as body wash, bath mat, and bath towels for guests
- Additional amenities and personal items for self-care and hygiene
- Amenities for guests like simple food items and bottled water
- A well-stocked kitchen with ample kitchen items and basic food preparation tools, including a coffee maker, tea kettle, cooking utensils, clean towels, and other basic kitchen supplies.
- Fresh air filters in the air conditioning system
“I am always tucking things into closets and putting things under my bed to make the place feel open and clean,” he says. “I want it to look just like the picture that made them rent my place.”
Even though he has plenty of extra storage space in his home, Eric adds that a storage unit would definitely help those with less storage space at home or renting out their space for longer time periods.
How to Prepare Your House for Airbnb: Storage.com Can Help
By now you should have a pretty good idea of how to prepare your house for Airbnb hosting. But keep in mind that running an Airbnb isn’t always the passive income people think it is.
Hosting Airbnb guests is essentially running a small business. And like any small business owner, you’ll need to have a rotating variety of goods and services you offer.
For example, we suggest having multiple linen sets. That way, you can swap the dirty sheets out for clean linens right away instead of rushing to the laundry before the new gusts arrive.
But the last thing you want to do is turn a part of your house into storage. Like any business, you’ll need a dedicated type of business storage.
That’s where Storage.com comes into the picture. We have a long history of helping businesses optimize their storage usage.
A basic 5×5 storage unit is comparable in size to a spare closet in your home. For a step up, a 5×10 storage unit can be used to better prepare and clean out your home before guests arrive.
But not all storage units are created equally. So, how do you find a storage unit in your area that has all the storage amenities you need?
Just punch your zip code into our handy Storage.com search tool, and you’ll see what we mean.
Storage.com lets you browse and compare self-storage units using amenity filters that isolate the storage facilities in your area with all the ideal storage features every Airbnb host needs.
We’ll filter through the thousands of local storage facilities for you, making it easy to find the storage unit that best fits your online business’s needs.
Honing your storage unit search results based on size, location, and features ensures you’ll have enough space to hold any documents, photos, or even furniture you have to clear out to make room for short-term guests.
These units also give you a secure location to store more of your personal valuables during longer rental periods.
All you have to do is choose a storage unit and your move-in date, and we’ll take care of the rest.
