How to FURNISH an Airbnb

(00:00) how you furnish your Airbnb or short-term rental property can be absolutely make or break for your property’s ultimate performance the amount of profit you make off of that property simple design changes and Furnishing changes and additional amenities can yield massive Returns on the investment that you make into them this is probably one of the areas of short-term rental investing co-hosting hosting your own space that can lead to the biggest payoff with the least amount of initial investment so in this video
(00:35) I’m going to share with you my stepbystep ad toz process for exactly how to furnish a short-term rental property I’m going to walk you through how I do my research on a market to figure out exactly which amenities and what type of style to go with for a property I’m going to share with you my entire process for ideating the whole design and coming up with the right design plan for the property I’m then going to share with you exactly how I go about sourcing all the different pieces of furniture from every single bed and
(01:09) bed frame to the Linens to the cutlery everything I’m going to share with you my process for organizing everything all the different hundreds and hundreds of different items that I’m going to be purchasing for a property and ultimately I’m going to show you and share with you my whole process for exactly how to actually execute on that whole plan buy everything get it all set up get it ready to go without me having to physically go by and assemble every single little piece of furniture and organize it all myself so the goal in
(01:38) this video is going to be to share with you absolutely everything that you need to know in order to successfully come up with a design execute on it and get that property ready for photography and ready to perform at its absolute Peak potential so that you’re not leaving money on the table but also not wasting a bunch of money on potential mistakes things that you shouldn’t do or you shouldn’t be spending money on when it comes to your Furnishing and design so with all that out of the way let’s go
(02:05) ahead and Dive Right In and a quick reminder before we do is that if you want to get all the different tools resources and more in-depth training on my whole process for this and everything else to do with Airbnb and short-term rental performance and making things more more profitable and a lot more fun then check out BMB tribe it’s going to be linked in the description down below we’ve got all kinds of trainings and an incredible community all kinds of deals and discounts and you can join right now
(02:34) at the time of this video for about $49 per month it is incredibly affordable we tried to make it as affordable as possible so that you could literally pay off your entire Year’s membership with you know just a basically one additional booking on your property so if you’re interested in that check it out link is in the description down below now let’s start by talking about how you figure out which amenities and what style to go with for your property now a lot of of people would think that what you want to
(03:01) do is just you know play to your specific style whatever you like for a property and although you certainly can do that and you may decide to if it’s more of a lifestyle asset a property that you are going to be frequently visiting yourself and that you’re just kind of renting it short term on the side to make some extra income it’s generally not going to be the most optimal way to furnish your property what you rather do is give your guest what they want because that’s going to allow you to collect higher nightly
(03:29) rates and collect a higher occupancy rate on your property so the question is then how do you decide what guests want well the best way that I found to do this is to go and look at the properties the guests want the most and get inspiration from those so you’ll want to grab a subscription to a platform like airdna where you can go and check out all the different High performing listings in your area one of the things I like to do is go on to airdna look for other similar properties to mine in my area and when you go and look at the
(03:57) whole list of all the different listings I like to sort by Revenue this is going to tell me which properties are the highest performing from a revenue perspective and then I can look through them to find any commonalities so for example if every single one of those High performing properties has a sort of movie theater set up with a projector and a big comfy couch or maybe they all have pingpong tables or a hot tub in the backyard this is going to give me really good inspiration for what types of amenities are most desirable in
(04:25) properties which ones guests like choose the most and pay the most for so that’s going to be one really great starting point the other thing you can do is use a tool like price Labs which will allow you with their Market dashboards where you can see all the performance of the properties around you you can actually go in and see amenity by amenity exactly which ones are in the most demand relative to the amount of Supply so if you can start offering some amenities that not as many other hosts have but the guests really do like and want to
(04:54) book with you then that’s going to set you apart from the competition and allow you to get better performance out of your listing so that’s a really good starting point for some of those bigger ticket or more important amenities but then what about Gathering inspiration for your actual design well if there’s a specific theme that most properties that are high performers tend to cater to then you want to be mindful of that for example there are some markets that do really really well with like a cottage
(05:19) cabin type feel log homes lots of kind of more rustic type of design and so you don’t want to have an Ultra Modern Property necessarily that doesn’t have any that kind of rustic charm in a market like that whereas you may want to have a more modern less rustic property in a different Market or some other markets like the markets around Disneyland tend to have a lot of themed properties and that’s kind of the bare minimum that it takes to perform in those markets is to have a really cool Disney themed property so you want to be
(05:47) mindful of that and then once you have the general theme what I recommend is either working with a professional interior design firm one of the ones that I really recommend to people is called Summerland design because they actually specialize in working with short-term rental investors and host uh and they really have a Keen Eye For What performs well on Airbnb and short-term rental if you’re not going to do that route and you’re going to go ahead and do it yourself then what I recommend is if you’re not super design Savvy
(06:14) yourself you can pretty easily come up with a really good cohesive design by checking out Pinterest Pinterest is where I personally like to go to get a lot of my design inspiration because I don’t necessarily have a great eye for design and know exactly which things are going to look good together and how to organize an entire living room find the right coffee table that’s going to match with a couch etc etc but by going to Pinterest I can search up different rooms that are designed with the theme that I want whether it’s
(06:41) rustic or modern or whatever it might be and I can then take inspiration from them and find a couch that resembles the couch in that photo find chairs that resemble those chairs and use it as my kind of inspiration for the overall design now I don’t necessarily recommend actually buying the individual items that are in the photo because they might not be the most cost effective options that you’re looking for but in terms of the overall aesthetic design you can definitely follow that and use that as
(07:09) inspiration at some specific stores that tend to have good reasonably priced durable and goodlook furniture options for short-term rental properties so some of the sites that I like to shop at the most or stores that I like to shop at the most are going to be Ikea Amazon in Canada we have a company called struct tube that has a lot of great stuff that looks good is durable and is very affordable Wayfair can be another really great option for getting some those kind of higher ticket larger items uh you can also find different stuff like bunk bed
(07:40) frame stuff at Walmart and what you want to do is take your design and start shopping around online what I’ll often do is I’ll go and I’ll find a couch that I’m looking for I know I want a let’s say a beige couch well now I’ll go and shop around to try to find one of those beige couches that’s reasonably priced at one of those stores and I’ll take a screenshot of the image and overlay it onto my design I’ll put my design photo the inspiration photo on a slide whether that’s in canva or in PowerPoint
(08:06) whatever you want to use and then I’ll put all the different Furniture items pictures of them in that kind of mood board that I’ve got to make sure everything is actually looking good together at the same time as I find those items I’m going to record them in a spreadsheet so we have a whole interior design tracking spreadsheet that we use to keep track of every single item that we need so we can list it out from the photo and make sure we have everything then we could track all the different links to the actual
(08:29) products that we find that match that design so we can keep track of that when it comes time to ordering and we can input all the details like how many we need the price of them everything we need to keep track of the budget that’s really really important as well you want to make sure that you go into your design initially with a budget in mind of what you’re trying to stick to for the property and then what you can do is once you’ve gone through every different room and you’ve found all the different
(08:52) items I don’t worry too too much about sticking on budget at this point I want to make sure I’m not shopping at unreasonably expensive stores so so to a certain extent I am mindful of the prices of things but I’m not really being a stickler on budget right yet what I’ll do is put the entire design together in this spreadsheet and see where I come out relative to my budget if I’m at or under my budget great I can just go ahead and move on to the next phase of actually organizing The Ordering of all these products but if I
(09:20) am over budget then what I really want to do at that stage is going to be look at any of the high ticket items things like couches things like mattresses things like bed frames uh maybe I’m buying a hot tub or a sauna and I want to try to reduce the cost of some of those higher ticket items because if you try to narrow down your budget and tighten it up by trying to buy less expensive forks and knives it’s going to take a lot of work to make a really really small difference on budget whereas if you take something like a
(09:49) couch that you are going to spend $1,500 for and you can find it for a th000 you can pretty easily pick up $500 there you can also look at the option of buying some of these things secondhand you can go to different thrifting stores you can go on Facebook Marketplace you can look for different options to buy the stuff secondhand which for the larger ticket items can usually reduce your cost by about 50% so there can be some really great cost savings there what I don’t want to do is eliminate certain amenities what I see people doing all
(10:18) the time is they put together this big budget and they end up being a being over budget and just cutting off the hot tub because they were $5,000 over budget well what if we instead went with a secondhand hot tub that we can still get for $2 or $33,000 and then we could find other areas of the budget to reduce to pick up that extra $2 to $3,000 and now we still have that really great desirable amenity that’s going to attract guests get higher nightly rates get more occupancy rate as opposed to having that hot tub be gone and then
(10:50) having nicer couches nicer amenities things like that that aren’t actually going to lead to higher nightly rates or higher occupancy rates you really want to prioritize a amities over all else that’s not to say that you can throw styling out the window and make it totally Bland and unappealing but you do want to balance things you don’t want to just cut off things that are expensive because they’re expensive if they’re worthwhile having they’re worthwhile having there’s areas where you can
(11:16) reduce the budget that are going to be more effective or less effective so now that we’ve got everything all picked out we’ve got every different item lined up we budgeted it it’s within budget now comes the fun part of actually ordering this stuff are you a brand new or experienced Airbnb host co-host or investor who wants to host as successfully as profitably and with as much fun as possible if so then I would love to invite you to check out BNB tribe Linked In the description down below this video it’s our exclusive
(11:50) Community for Airbnb hosts investors and co-hosts from all over the world where I share some of my best trainings that go into detail on every single aspect of Airbnb hosting from A to Z we’ve got Advanced Training playbooks that will help you to use more advanced strategies to take things to the next level and make more money and have more fun hosting co-hosting or investing on Airbnb you’re also going to get access to an incredible community and over $2500 worth of deals perks discounts bonuses that I’ve negotiated with other
(12:22) vendors in the short-term rental industry so if you want access to all of that and a whole bunch more check out the link in the description down below for B&B tribe and I would love to see you on the inside I say fun part tongue and cheek because if you’ve ever tried to go and order hundreds of different items it can be a lot of work you know you have your you have to fill up your cart and make sure you get everything and make sure you track it meticulously to make sure you’re not missing anything
(12:48) and then comes delivery now a lot of the time you want to go through this whole Furnishing and design process before you actually take possession of the property so that when you take possession of the property you you can put things in or if you’re renovating the property once that renovation is complete you want to have everything ready to go you don’t want to hit the order button right then and now have to wait one two or 3 weeks for all these different items so what you want to do instead in a lot of cases is order
(13:14) in advance and find a place to store it in the meantime now if you’re a bit more relaxed you have more time on your hands and you can afford to wait the extra few weeks then by all means wait until the property is actually ready to get things delivered and take delivery of them over time but if you’re looking for for maximum efficiency what I’ve done in the past is found a storage unit to actually ship everything to store it in there and then once the proper is ready now I can get a moving company to take all of that
(13:40) extra furniture all that stuff and just move it all in one foul swoop right over to my property now this is going to add a few hundred of extra moving cost but in my experience that tends to be worth it if you can save yourself a couple of weeks of additional bookings now that you’ve got it all delivered comes the somewhat daunting task of actually assembl and getting everything ready so what you’ll want to do is either plan to do this yourself with some friends and make sure you’re ready for it bring the
(14:07) power tools don’t be sitting there with all the little we tools that you get included in the boxes bring some power tools make it more efficient or what you can do if you do want to be completely hands off with it is you can hire what I call an Ikea furniture Builder now a lot of the times you can actually go in a lot of markets and look for people that specialize in building whether it’s Ikea or Wayfair type of furniture by going onto sites like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or Kajiji if you’re in
(14:33) Canada and you can find really really great people that way now the benefit of working with someone like that is that they tend to be so experienced with assembling this stuff that they barely need to use the instructions they’re very very quick and efficient so even if you are paying a slightly premium hourly rate to hire this person to come and assemble everything you tend to come out ahead because they can do things so efficiently and do a really great job of it so I’ve had really great experiences
(14:58) there now if you’re you’re in a market where you can’t find someone who specializes in building furniture and assembling Furniture then what you’ll want to do as a backup to that is just hire a general handyman it’s no secret that pretty much anyone can assemble furniture from Ikea or Wayfair or wherever you’re ordering it from uh you just might be able to find someone much more efficient if they do that kind of all day every day but a handyman can be a really great solution as well what you
(15:22) want to do is make sure you have again this is where that detailed spreadsheet is really really helpful if you can have an itemized list of exactly what goes in each room and you can have those those actual visual files of exactly what the room should look like how it should be laid out that can be really helpful what you can do as well is just hand draw a quick layout of the room where the couch should go where the chair should go where everything should be placed so you make sure things end up in the right
(15:47) place what you want to do is have the person assembling your furniture assemble it into the right places in the right rooms put everything up and have them do all the wall hang as well so if you’re mounting a TV if you have wall decor pictures things like that make sure they go ahead and mount all of that stuff as well get that all ready to go then what you’ll want to do is have your cleaners come in and that’s typically the person that I have do the staging now you can come in yourself at this point as well but again for any of those
(16:14) who want to be completely hands off and really really Embrace being passive and hands off with this what you’ll want to do is have your cleaner come in again make sure they have really clear good photos of exactly what the property should look like how it should all be staged up and get them to Stage everything perfectly good chances are your handyman or Furniture Builder isn’t going to know exactly the right way to place the throw blanket to make it look really cozy and inviting for people so you want to have your cleaner come in do
(16:39) a whole deep clean of the property to make sure it’s and span and ready to go for gas and make sure they stage the property now once the staging is complete you can make sure your photographer comes in which again you want to coordinate all this stuff in advance to make sure all the timelines Lin up and you’re not wasting a bunch of time between different steps when the photographer comes in ideally you also want to have them bring in or your clean team can bring in in advance some different items for staging the property
(17:04) like maybe a bowl of popcorn for the movie room or some wine to put in the glasses to put by the fireplace or at the kitchen table uh maybe a spread of vegetables to put out on the counter different stuff like that they’re going to help to set the mood of the property then once your photography is done you want to use those photos for your listing but then also make sure that your cleaner has them so that they know exactly how the property should be done up and made ready for guest on a continuous basis you also want to make
(17:28) sure that any of those additional amenities you might have added like board games or things that are less obvious that those get photographed as well as a kind of a bonus tip for photography now we’ll have other videos on the Channel all about photography and how to master that and of course like I mentioned at the beginning of the video if you want all the in-depth access to all of our detailed training on all this where we dive even deeper and we actually give you all of our different tools like the design templates and you
(17:52) know a list of all the different furniture and amenities and everything that we like the most that I tend to use in my properties so that you can just just streamline the whole process if you want to get access to our design organization tracking spreadsheet to keep track of all this and keep it organized everything like that then I highly recommend checking out B&B tribe we’ve got all the training on all that plus all the other training you could imagine really ever need for successfully hosting co-hosting or
(18:17) investing on short-term rental properties um and so if you’re interested in that check out the link down the description below B&B tribe it’s an amazing community and in addition to all that it’s just a really great group of people it’s got all the training it’s got all the discounts that we’ve got from different vendors and service providers all this different stuff so check it out Link in the description down below now I hope you really like this video I hope you got value from it if you did please do me a
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(19:01) notification Bell to be notified whenever those new videos Drop so you can be the first to watch them um and with all that being said uh other than that if you have any comments questions thoughts for me share them in the comment section down below otherwise I hope you enjoy this video uh and I’ll see you in the next one oh