How to Dominate the Airbnb Market in Your Area

What’s up, guys? If you want to dominate that is really, really outperform in your market on Airbnb or VRBO or just with short term rentals in general, then you’re going to want to stick around right till the end of this video. In this video, I’m going to share with you some my best tools and strategies and tips for really, really, truly dominating in a given market and running circles around the competition. I have a lot of people reach out to me and wonder what kind of a role competition and saturation plays when it comes to investing in or choosing properties to manage for short term rentals. And the answer I give to them is that it really shouldn’t matter much in most markets. If you just do a good job of actually performing really well, you don’t really have to matter too much about the competition. Now, obviously, there are some exceptions where there are markets with lots and lots and lots of listings, where there’s huge amounts of competition, huge amounts of supply, and not nearly enough demand to keep up. But my experience is that 95% of markets out there don’t suffer from that. 95% of the time when a person isn’t performing well on Airbnb or short term rentals, it has a lot more to do with their overall strategy and how they’re executing than it does the actual market that they’re in. Now, again, I want to preface this as well by saying that there are definitely certain properties if you’re investing and you’re buying properties that you just should not buy. And I have whole videos dedicated to doing the due diligence to help you find really, really good properties that are actually going to perform well. But when it comes to the actual performance side of things, the reason that you’re leaving money on the table and that you’re not getting the returns you want is almost certainly not because the market is too saturated. It’s almost always because you’re just missing the right strategy. So in this video, I want to share with you some of the strategies that I use to absolutely dominate. Now, a couple of these things do come before you actually purchase the property, and that’s why I want to start with picking an underserved segment of the market. Now, if you already have your property, you still want to pay attention to this step because there’s ways to adjust your property, to add certain amenities, to just adjust the way that you market your property that are going to accomplish this in the end as well. What I mean by approaching an underserved segment of the market and focusing there, trying to kind of niche down is look for a segment of the market that has a lot of demand, but just not a lot of supply. Meaning, if I want to travel with, let’s say a group of ten people to a place where I can go and enjoy a weekend of relaxation, and I want to have certain amenities, maybe it’s just not going to be very feasible for me. Maybe in order to do that, I need to travel really far. So maybe getting a place like that that is close to a specific city is just going to be really hard to come by. For example, I don’t know about you, but certain times I’m traveling, I really want to find a sauna. It’s just an amenity that I’ve grown accustomed to having. I really like doing it. I have one in my own home, so I want to be able to sauna regularly. But finding a property with a sauna in a lot of more urban metro markets is going to be tough to do. Sure, if I go to cottage country, it’s a lot easier to find properties with a sauna, but finding one in a more downtown market, pretty tough to do. Frankly, even if you’re looking for a hotel with a sauna, it can sometimes be pretty tough to find what you’re looking for. And so what you want to do is focus on some of those more underserved segments of the market. Now, property size can be a really good way to do this. What I found is that in a lot of markets, there’s an outsized amount of demand for some of those larger properties. But there’s just way less competition. There’s way fewer options for guests that want to book a property for eight or ten or twelve people. Certain amenities can allow you to set yourself apart. Or if you just set yourself up as a unique experience, which is my second tip, you want to offer more than just a place to stay. You want to offer an experience to your guests. So anything that you can do to make your stays more experiential, that’s going to make your pricing allow for your pricing to be less commoditized and for you to really charge a premium for your place, it’s also going to allow you to really dominate the competition. Because in addition to now not being in a race to the bottom on pricing, you can also get bookings when everyone else is staying empty. Because staying at your place is an experience in and of itself. So in down season, for example, people don’t need to find an excuse to go and stay at your place. They don’t need there to be something nearby to do. They can actually go and stay there just for the sake of staying there. I’ve experienced this myself with a property that I launched just over a year ago. Now that I decide to add on a geodesic dome in the backyard. Now that amenity in and of itself, not only did it make my property larger, meaning that I was serving a more underserved part of the market, but it also made it experiential, where people would go up there just to be able to sleep out underneath the stars in the dome, even when there wasn’t a lot going on. When we’re kind of in shoulder seasons, there’s not really much reason to go up that area. They decided to go up and make the trek out there because of the dome, because of the experience that they were getting staying at that property. So adding an experiential component to your property can truly allow you to dominate and not really have to be too mindful of the competition at all. Hand in hand with offering an experience is offering something unique. And that’s my third tip, is to make your property truly unique, so that, again, you’re just not really being compared to the competition. What you really want to do is set your property apart, offer different amenities, offer different services, decorate it differently, market it differently, don’t try to blend in. I see too many people going and looking at all the other properties and trying to make a cookie cutter model of everything else that’s out there in the market so they can perform just like everybody else does. But the problem is, if you do everything the exact same as everyone else, you’re almost bound to end up doing worse than them because you’re probably not going to be able to do it as well as the person who actually got creative, actually was unique, actually thought this through, and did things intentionally. A copy is never going to be quite as good as the original. And so you want to make your own experience, your own property, the original of itself. You want to, sure, model off of other people, look at other people and what they’re doing for inspiration, but don’t just try to make a carbon copy of what’s already out there. Get creative and really think about, how can I offer something that other people just aren’t offering? And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do something that no one has ever done before, but more so, you can offer, like, a combination of things that no one else in that market is doing. You can go and say, okay, well, I want to have these specific games at my property because these are games that I really loved when I stayed a different place. I want to design it in this way because I really like this way of designing. I want to offer these types amenities so that there’s something that you get, that you just can’t get all of this stuff all together all at once at one property. Sure, maybe you can go to the property down the street and get a hot tub. Sure, maybe you can go to the property down the other way and get a movie theater. But where can you get a place where you’ve got the hot tub and the movie theater and a geodesic dome and you’ve got these extra bedrooms and you’ve got the bathrooms and you’ve got a game room? Having all this come together makes it unique. And it just means that now when people are comparing your properties to others, your property is going to clearly stand out as something unique and different and just overall better than all the other properties in the market. So trying to be the exact same as everyone is going to land you with maybe average at best, performance usually suboptimal. Whereas if you try to make your experience in your property truly unique and offer a really unique experience to guests, then you’re going to set yourself above the competition and you’re not going to need to worry about them at all. So those are my thoughts, those are my strategies, those are my tips for how you can really dominate and truly set yourself apart when it comes to short term rental, investing, hosting, property management. If you have thoughts for me, let me know in the comment section down below. If you like this video, if it was valuable to you, if you got some good insights from it, if it sparks some inspiration for you, then just let me know by hitting that like button down below the video. It does help me out to get these videos in front of more people, so I do appreciate anyone takes half a second here and just hits that like button. Also just shows me what kind of content you guys enjoy. So it helps me to guide what videos I’m going to make in the future. Which by the way, if you have any ideas for videos that you want to see in the future, just let me know in the comment section down below as well. And if you’re new to the channel here and you’re not yet subscribed, make sure you do that as well. I post two new videos every single week here on the channel and I want to help you with in every way that I possibly can to be better. Airbnb host a better Airbnb investor and better short term rental property manager. So whatever your journey, we’ve got links in the description down there for free trainings that will help you make sure you subscribe to the channel to stay up to date with the videos we post every single week here. With all that being said, thank you so much for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next one.