Debunking weird Airbnb tips from TikTok

What’s up guys in today’s video, we’re going to be debunking some pretty weird tips that I’ve seen on Tik Tok for Airbnb. So they relate to Airbnb investing and arbitrage, managing properties on Airbnb and just kind of hosting tips and tricks in general, I’ve found a few that are pretty questionable, pretty weird, and they seem to be pretty popular as well. So I want to give my thoughts on them and kind of debunk some of these that I think are range from potentially controversial or I would disagree to just flat out they are terrible advice. So let’s jump in. And let’s get started with this first one. Let’s take a look. I’ve been an Airbnb host for two years, I have six properties. And here are three lessons I learned the hard way, part two. Number one, you have to have a camera pointed at your front door, people will try to sleep 14 people in an Airbnb that sleeps for and if you don’t have evidence, it’s really hard to accuse them of that to Airbnb. Number two. Okay, so right off the bat, this is in my like my opinion, this is kind of the controversial advice. I wouldn’t say this is flat out wrong, and everyone would agree and everyone have the same point of view. I personally, do you disagree with this. This tip, I think it is pretty much useless to have a camera pointed at your front door. Sure, it can be useful at times, if you really have like a big issue happen, and you need to file a claim. But the context of this is that you should as a host be monitoring vigilantly the number of people that come into your property, and that you should do that by watching over the front door camera. Number one, I think it’s insane for you to as an Airbnb or short term rental host care about the number of people in your property up until a certain extent. So I’ve always been of the opinion that you should solve actual problems when there are problems. But for example, if I have a six bedroom home, and eight people stay there, and I never hear about it, because they never make noise, they leave the house really clean and tidy. You know, everything’s good, then who cares? Maybe if you’ve got a septic system that doesn’t support it, and they have extra people like maybe I could see some reasoning there. But there are better ways to monitor it than by like watching and hopping over a security camera like some graveyard shift security guard. And so I just think that it’s silly to I think a lot of hosts care way too much about monitoring this, I think you should just let the guests do their thing. And use something like a noise monitor so that if there’s excess noise, you’re then going to know about it and can you know, bring that issue up with the guests. If there’s excess noise, or if there’s excess cleaning, then charge them an additional cleaning fee once they check out. But who cares, you know, if they stay there, they’re respectful. They don’t make a bunch of noise, they don’t leave additional mess then for the most part who really cares. And then second to that, I think that just using the camera as a way to track that is a terrible way to do it because it’s just so labour intensive to have to like Hawk over this camera to watch how many people are coming into your property. So jumping into the next one here, or my Airbnb hosts, here’s a tip that will help both you and whoever’s cleaning your Airbnb. Oh, this is I’m just going to preface this by saying this is a bad one. I remember this one. And this is absolutely gross. This is a terrible tip. I wholeheartedly disagree with it and this is flat out wrong. This isn’t just like my opinion this is just like there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. And this is a terrible awful tip. I agree that there is nothing more clean and fresh than white sheets. But if you are not the one cleaning your Airbnb, and it’s not a hotel it can be very difficult to keep white sheets clean. This is what I do instead between women’s makeup and self tanner, it was like every fourth guest I was replacing my white sheets. So now I get coloured sheets and when I’m selecting coloured sheets, I make sure that every different size bed in my house has a different coloured sheet this method serves. Okay so she goes on to talk about how like the different coloured sheets make it easier for the cleaners to know which size sheet goes on which beds like which sheets are what size is basically which I think that’s great and labelling your sheets is really intelligent so that you know your cleaners don’t have to do guesswork to figure out the difference between a queen size and a king sized bed sheet. But this this tip is fundamentally it grosses me out to my core because what she is saying is that she can’t keep her sheets clean. So instead get sheets that will hide how filthy they are. Your guests are still going to be sleeping on filthy dirty sheets that she wasn’t able to get clean but they just won’t know it because they’re dark coloured sheets not white ones that show how filthy they are. That is gross. If you think about that and that doesn’t gross you the heck out I don’t know what would that is terrible, terrible advice. I am not saying that you like absolutely need to have one

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Eat sheets that’s controversial. I fair enough, you don’t have to have white sheets, I think that white sheets are a total no brainer. And you should definitely have white sheets, but you need to keep your sheets clean. The solution to the problem of not keeping your sheets clean is not to change the colour to something that hides how dirty they are. That’s disgusting. Your solution should be to figure out how to get your sheets cleaned better. Like clearly she’s not using the right washing techniques to clean the sheets, if they’re coming out dirty if you don’t know how to clean sheets properly, go learn how to clean sheets properly, don’t hide them and make your guests sleep in some disgusting bad that you’ve done a bad job of cleaning. This is horrible advice. And I would highly recommend you not take this advice. If you want to have any form of decent reviews or even just a an acceptable level of sanitation in your short term rental. This is a gross one. All right, let’s go to the next one year. I’ve been an Airbnb host for almost three years. And here are three lessons I learned the hard way, part three. And in case you missed part one and two, they are linked in the comments. Number one, you cannot rely solely on one cleaner, always have two or more in rotation so that if one cleaner is sick or something happens, you have someone who is already experienced and onboarded who can cover for them. So this is actually a decent piece of advice, I just have a better piece of advice than this. So I totally agree you never want to be relying on one single cleaner. And you should have backups if you’re working with a with a cleaning person, not a cleaning team. But my pro tip that’s even better than this is to have a cleaning team. Because if you work with one individual cleaner, and then you have a backup cleaner, and like maybe even a second backup cleaner, you still end up having to kind of jockey the team to figure out oh, this cleaner is sick this day. Let me jump in last minute because they just told me they’re sick. And I’ll go find this person, call them see if they’re available. Oh, they’re not because last minute notice now I’ve got to jump over the next person. Like that’s a lot of headache. And all that stuff inherently tends to come up last minute because you’re covering for someone who’s like sick or something like that. And you don’t want to be the one dealing with that as an Airbnb host or manager you’d rather have your cleaning team the head of it, the owner of the cleaning team be the one that takes care of that. So their team is sick one like one of the members of their team is sick one day, they rework their schedule and their team schedule to make sure they can accommodate so I would just recommend working with a medium sized cleaning company that has multiple people within it so that you can not have the downside of what she’s trying to avoid here which is like having a cleaner not show up and then you’re high and dry. But you also don’t have the downside of the headache that this creates of you having to kind of coordinate everything yourself. So that’s just kind of improvement I think on this overall tip which is fundamentally in Okay, tip number two, stay away from upholstered furniture. I am sitting on my beautiful white couch but I would never put something like this in an Airbnb unless you’re going for like a luxury look at a luxury price point.

Unknown Speaker 7:59
I don’t really agree with this I feel it I get it I get that like yes fabric can stain and light coloured fabric. I think we generally steer clear of so yeah, fair enough but saying fabric overall you want to avoid in favour of leather, leather wears and tears as well and like leather can rip and there’s a whole bunch of issues so like ultimately I would say that fabric is probably easier that like when something does go wrong with fabric you can then clean it and it’s gonna be extra work but you can clean it but if you rip leather there’s kind of no going back and now you gotta get a new couch or just like you know, find a way to deal with it. So I actually prefer fabric I would say overall I don’t really have any leather furniture in any of our properties and I would keep it that way. So I actually prefer fabric I don’t think this is like an overly good tip. I think it’s just one that generally is going to be a little bit lower maintenance but also I just find that leather doesn’t look that good but that’s totally a personal opinion. There is a great option as as wood as something else like waterproof and washable or dark fabric number three yeah I like that she said they’re dark fabric like I I wouldn’t

Unknown Speaker 9:07
I wouldn’t go so far as to say like it only can be dark fabric I might just avoid white but again, it’s like you don’t want to on the same note as like the the as the bedding you don’t want to steer into dark so that you can hide the stains more like you don’t want to hide stains you want to to be able to actually identify stains and then clean them properly. So I like kind of like mid tone fabrics like I don’t like going black or really deep blue or something like that because then you don’t even know if there’s if there’s a stain there and just gonna be gross whereas the other ones like they might not if you can only get the stain out so much and it’s still clean but you can only get the stain out so much. Then it kind of mid coloured fabric like a grey like a light grey or something like that is a good way to go. And again, just going back to the fabric like the sheets. I really think that sheet

Unknown Speaker 10:00
should just be like impeccably clean. So and white is just so easy to keep clean, if you know how to do it properly. So yeah, anyway, let’s go on to the next one here, top things I would never do as an Airbnb host, I would never buy and a super popular tourist location, unless you have a lot of money to spend and a team to help you set it up perfectly, I would never invest in a super popular, busy oversaturated market. So again, pick them into your market with room for error. Number two, I think this is like this erring on the side of terrible advice. I’m going to call it bad advice. And I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt because I’ve watched some of her other videos and they tend to be generally good. So I’m going to assume that that was just more meant to be like kind of controversial and like cause people to be curious and watch the video, which fair enough, whatever. But I think it’s pretty bad advice overall. So when it comes to investing in short term rental properties, I really err away from like the whole like never should you ever type of type of phrasing of something like that way of viewing things. For example, if you if she were to find a property in a super popular market that she thinks she would never ever buy in, and so we’re selling it for $1. I’m sure she would buy it. I’m sure that’d be a great investments. If like, you can’t really make this overarching generalisation? Should you buy a short term rental property in a really, really popular market that has a really high price point, because it’s so popular, and therefore your return on investment on that property is going to be really, really low, probably not like, but in some of those markets, you get a lot of additional stability. So for example, if you look at Hawaii, really, really popular, very saturated, short term rental market with really high prices, but tonnes of stability there, that short term rental market is so much more well established. So it’s like, yes, you’re giving up some upside, but you’re getting a lot of downside protection as well, which, depending on who you are, and what your goals are, that might be desirable. Also, if you just want to buy a property there, go for it, as long as the returns are within your parameters for what you’re looking for, then go for it. I would definitely not say to never ever buy a property in those markets. Honestly, I think that like super popular markets can be really, really solid. You just have to buy the right property at the right price. So I think that is like pretty bad advice. Overall. I wouldn’t I personally would not recommend following that piece of advice at all.

Unknown Speaker 12:23
I would never buy cheap shit for my Airbnb, some hosts will tell you otherwise. But it’s going to break and you’re going to end up spending more in the long run if you go cheap to begin with. I teach other hosts what to splurge on and once. Yeah, so I think like here again, the key is like pitching for, hey, like you should, you should like check out my checklist for exactly what to buy, which is totally cool. Like, I respect that. And it’s awesome. Like those, that can be a really cool resource. So like no shade there at all. But to say like, never buy cheap furniture, because it’ll break. And she says some hosts will disagree. I disagree with that. I think that it all really depends. But like price does not indicate durability at all. It certainly can have a correlation but can also be the exact opposite. For example, if you buy secondhand furniture, you can usually get cheap furniture that is going to be really durable, really high end, it’s usually going to be you can get older stuff as well, that a lot of the times it’s going to be cheap. And it was made a lot better when it was made. It wasn’t used like mass manufacturing to make these things. So it is gonna be really durable. So to say that like less expensive furniture overall as a blanket statement is always going to be less durable. And it’s going to break as opposed to the high end stuff. Totally not the case. And in most cases, when you’re paying for like high end furniture, really expensive stuff, you’re not paying for more durability, they’re not so like they’re building it better. So you can jump up and down on it. They just have like a better brand name, or they’re using maybe higher end fabrics or things like that, it’s like more aesthetically appealing, like it just looks better. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually worth investing in because it might not actually generate an additional ROI on your property on your investment by buying that $3,000 couch as opposed to $1,000 one. So I would say that like generally I disagree with this tip. I don’t think that you should gauge what property what furniture you buy for your property based on the price I think you should actually do your research on what furniture is great for what purposes. So for example, I like to get bed frames from one place and I’ll get my couches from another place and I know what mattresses I like that sort of thing. And it’s based on what is best for each piece of furniture and like how valuable it is to guess so for example, a comfortable couch. Not a really big deal as long as you have a relatively comfortable couch, your guests are going to be happy with it. But if you get like the ultra comfortable couch it’s not really going to make a big difference. Whereas if you have like a kind of comfortable bed, that sucks like if they have okay bed that sucks if you have a really comfortable bed guests love that so it’s worth investing in getting away more comfortable bed more so than it is getting away more

Unknown Speaker 15:00
comfortable couch or a way more comfortable dining chair, something like that. So I think it really, really depends. I think this is just a big overgeneralization. I have been an Airbnb host for two years. And I have six properties. And here are three lessons I had to learn the hard way. Number one, being pet friendly is not worth it. So allowing pets could potentially get you more bookings. But it doesn’t come with other costs. Everything in your Airbnb gets dirty, quicker. Your furniture, throw pillows, blankets, bedding, everything just gets so dirty, your rugs, your flooring, it’s a lot. Second one. Okay, this is a terrible piece of advice. I think that again, like it’s just a big generalisation that’s based on this, the problem is that a lot of hosts have one or two or three or four or five properties, and they have them in one area. And they just don’t have exposure to other types of properties than the ones they own or other types of areas from the one that they own in. So like, for example, I own properties in one area that’s like cottage country, and then my business partner owns a triplex in a more urban area. That’s like a relatively limited sample size of experience, if that were all of our experience, but I’ve also managed a tonne of properties in different areas. And I’ve worked with literally hundreds 1000s At this point of Airbnb hosts, investors and property managers in all different parts of the world. And I’ve analysed properties in all different parts of the world, all different kinds of markets. And there’s so much nuance to it. So for example, this host you’re saying never allow pets, it’s never worth it likely has properties that are in a more urban area, that would be okay to cater to business and kind of like small group travellers. For example, I’ll give you an idea. A business travel listing should you allow pets are not? Probably not. Because if you think about it, the average guests that staying there, that’s like a solo business traveller. If you’re if you have like a one bedroom condo downtown in the financial district, then no like they’re probably not going to bring pets with them, the average business traveller won’t bring pets. So your average guest isn’t going to use that as sort of a valuable amenity, the ability to bring pets there, so you’re probably not going to really get much more bookings by allowing pets and some of your business travellers would probably want to avoid pet friendly listings because they don’t want to get hair on their suit, or they don’t want to have their allergies act up or something like that. So it probably actually makes more sense to not allow pets than to allow pets. So that’s probably the frame of reference that this host is coming from. Whereas if you own a vacation rental property, and let’s say a staycation type market, like we own properties in cottage country outside of Toronto, those areas, a lot of guests, the average guest for us, I would say one in every two to three guests is bringing a pet with them and they’re specifically looking for a short term rental property that accommodates pets. So you’re missing out on tonnes of bookings not just one or two here and there you’re listening missing out on tonnes of bookings if you don’t allow pets have you choose not to allow them and the other thing is like from a cleaning perspective, if it’s actually worth the money to do so then yeah, allow pets because you can just you know pay your cleaners to go in there for a little bit of extra time and clean things better. Yeah, it’ll be a little bit more wear and tear a little bit more cleaning. But it’s worth it if the return is there and the property is the right property. So saying to never allow pets I would say is just again just bad advice kids a blanket statement. That’s just an oversimplification of it. It really depends on the type of property that you have and location you have in your ideal type of guest. Let’s jump into the next one here in a two bedroom one bath property four to six guests in a three bedroom two bathroom property.

Unknown Speaker 18:39
Yeah, so this is bad advice. Again, because it’s just an oversimplification of things. I think the really important thing is to remember that like as a an Airbnb host your situation is not everyone situations there’s lots of people out here on tick tock on the internet in general that just don’t have enough experience do you making these like really overgeneralize claims and so for something like this to say that in a three bed two bath house you should accommodate eight to 12 guests like that is insane. Think about if you have a normal three bedroom two bathroom house that just has like average size rooms that means that with 12 guests there’s going to be four people in every single room. What are you going to do put like Queen over Queen bunk beds and every one of your rooms and then what there’s six people to a bathroom? That’s crazy what you know and then and then your dining room what your dining room people are just going to eat in shifts like how is that going to work with the right three bed two bath property. There might be a you know a huge rec room downstairs and you could add a pull out couch in to accommodate a few more people. I generally I wouldn’t put more than five people to one bathroom so I would max a two bathroom place out at 10 and even 10 It depends on if there’s enough actual living space

Unknown Speaker 20:00
And if the bedrooms can actually accommodate that many people, because otherwise you’re going to have a place that’s totally uncomfortable place to stay people to stay in and you’re going to have people like tripping over one another, you’re going to attract the wrong type of guests you want like a party house. This is I would say just again, overly generalised and just outright bad advice. And again, it really, really depends on the situation. All right, and now the last one here is about rental arbitrage got 2.8 million views on this Tik Tok. Let’s check it out. I’m a 20 year old six figure Airbnb host. Here’s how you get started. First, you had to Zillow and find a property that you like after you selected your property you want to add to air DNA and put the address in the rental iser tool. Be sure when running your numbers that you update your bed and bath count so that the numbers are accurate.

Unknown Speaker 20:47
So there’s actually a couple things that I think are bad about what’s going on here. The first one is using air DNase rental iser, especially if you don’t know how to use it properly. So for example, with this, she’s saying well update the bed and bath counts, and that’s fair, you need to do that. But then you can’t just trust that number. That number is literally all it does. When you put a property into the rental iser is it takes an average of some of the surrounding properties that meet that criteria and are close to that location and and averages them out. But if the sample that it takes is a really high end, three bed two bath properties that are nothing like yours that are just way nicer, or really low end ones that are not as nice as yours, then it’s going to give you skewed numbers. So you typically will want to look at a larger dataset than just the like 10 properties or so that the rental iser uses to calculate its numbers, you want to look at a bigger sample set than that. So I don’t like using rental iser for that reason. If you do use rental iser, you can actually go in and look at what properties it’s using to draw those numbers and then figure out for yourself if those properties are actual good comps or not, and whether or not you should trust the numbers. So just blindly using the rental iser, I think is a real dangerous tool that people can go very wrong with. Once you’ve updated your search, you’re going to take the annual revenue, the average daily rate and the occupancy rate and run the numbers using my property research sheet. I input the address, then I estimate the startup costs that includes security deposit first and last month’s rent application fee furnishing. Yeah. So I actually like that she included all the startup costs and like included first and last month’s rent security deposit application fee furniture, because most people don’t think about how much costs or is was starting up with starting one Airbnb and they think oh, it’s just like, $2,000 No, it’s not. It’s 15 Because you’ve got to pay first month’s rent last month’s rent security deposit. And you’ve got to furnish the place. So respect for actually like calculating the cost. And then there’s a part that I’m going to get to that I think like on macro level makes this a terrible strategy and why I hate rental arbitrage and think it’s generally a really bad strategy. But yeah, props are for actually being realistic about the total startup cost. Because this puts my startup at about 15,000. Next, I take my monthly expenses and subtract. Yeah, let’s so the other thing that she didn’t look out for if we just kind of backup in the video here.

Unknown Speaker 23:12
What she didn’t calculate in here was cleaning fees, she missed the whole month the expense of cleaning fees. And so many people don’t think about this because cleaning fees are built in to the air DNA revenue data. So when you see data from air GNA, about how much a property will earn in revenue, that includes cleaning fee revenue, so you’ve got to back that out. And she’s not doing that here. So that’s like a total game changer deal breaker on this property. Why would not make any sense? She doesn’t have anything in here for supplies expense, like what are you just not going to give toilet paper paper towel, dish soap, hand soap, anything like that? Like that’s going to cost you some money every month? I don’t see that in here anywhere. So yeah, there’s definitely a few things missing from the monthly expenses side of things don’t want to overlook that the expenses and subtract them by my expected monthly revenue. After doing that, I’m left with my monthly profit of $2,327. And numbers look good. So next I reach out to Yeah, so Okay, again, let’s let’s just back up a little tickety. Boo. Let’s just go here. So she says the numbers look good. Let me just see if I can pause it right on, there we go. So it says breakeven amount in dollars is 15,100. So that’s all the startup expense, right? And then monster breakeven is six. Now, again, that would actually be in reality quite a substantial amount longer, it probably be about double that by the time you factor in your cleaning fees. But she says this deal looks good at six months to break even. And again, this is something that I respect her for being on it like showing like decently real numbers. I think she made a pretty big error there with the cleaning fees, but aside from not she’s not like patting things too much. And I think that so many people have this idea that you can be profitable on month one and that like the average person can go get whatever property they want.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
And just like negotiate with the landlord to get a few months of free rent. And that’s just not realistic for an average person getting average property. Sure, if you have a big business and like you’re working with large scale landlords and you know, getting a whole kind of slot of their of their listings of their units, then you can negotiate, you have some negotiating power, but like for the average landlord, think about it, why would they want to give you months of free rent, if you don’t have the power to negotiate, if you’re not an established business, you don’t have a brand, you know, you’re not buying a bunch of them from from them all at once, or like taking renting a bunch of them from all at once. There’s very little upside for them. So like, if you’re a really great salesperson, maybe you can swing that. But I think on average, that’s a pretty unrealistic expectation to have. And so for the average person, it’s going to take 610 12 months to break even on a property. And that’s six months of work, like you’re actually going in there furnishing the property, listing the property, managing the property. And you’re doing that for six months, just to get back to where you started, literally, just to get back to where you started. And you’ve got all like, the only thing you have to show for it with investing in property, when you actually buy the place, then yeah, it takes you a longer time to recoup your initial investment, because a bigger upfront investment, but you also by the time you recouped it, you’re not back to where you started at Ground Zero, you actually have retainer, like you have equity in the property, the property is probably appreciated, you also have like you own the asset, you actually control it. So you get full say in the property. And so it’s just not really a desirable or an ideal situation to have to work six months just to get back to break even. Because now if the landlord comes and says, Hey, I don’t want you in here anymore, we’ve been getting noise complaints from the neighbour or I want to sell the property or whatever other reason they might have, they come back to after six months and say that, what do you do, like, you just have to pack up shop, all you have to show for your hard work is a bunch of used furniture at this point. And you don’t actually get to make any real profit on this property. Because again, that rent payment every month, is just vanishing into thin air. It’s not like a mortgage payment, where a big chunk of it is going to paying down the principal on your mortgage. And that’s actually wealth that you’re building. So, you know, taking six months to get back to where you started to me just doesn’t make sense. There’s a whole bunch of downside, especially as you scale. Because if you look at this, and you kind of expand that time horizon out longer than now she’s got to spend another six months or so to get that and another $15,000, just so that you can take that and dump that $15,000 into another property and be back with zero. So that again, if a month from that, the landlord shuts you down on both properties, your whole business is gone. And you just have two units worth of used furniture at that point you don’t have, you haven’t made any money for a year now, you literally have no money to show for a year’s worth of hardware. So like the more you scale it, the more you’re stacking on top of this like House of Cards essentially. And so in a rental arbitrage business, where you actually make real money is when you stop growing, when you stop growing, and just hold the units that you’ve got. And you start reinvesting all those profits, and now you reap the reward. And if you can make it to that point, and then keep on riding that gravy train without getting shut down without regulations changing without any of that stuff happening, then you can make really good money. So I’m not saying that the potential isn’t there. I’m just saying it’s a really, really risky way to make money I don’t I don’t endorse, I don’t think it’s a solid strategy, because it’s just really, really risky. There’s better ways to do it. Frankly, there are way better ways like managing other people’s properties for a percentage management fee is going to make you the same amount of money if not more and without any of the risk. So that to me is just my 10 cents of like why I think that rental arbitrage does not make any sense. So that’s it for today. That’s all the weird Tiktok advice that we’ve got around short term rentals and Airbnb that I want to do some debunking on let me know your thoughts. Do you agree with me? Do you disagree? Do you think I’m crazy? Are you going to do a response video to this debunking my debunking and then we can make a debunking train that goes on forever? Who knows? Let me know in the comment section down below. If you liked this video, hit the like button. If you like this content in general, then hit that subscribe button. I post two new videos every single week on this channel. So just make sure you subscribe so you can stay up to date. All that being said, thanks so much for watching, and we’ll see you in the next video.