What To Do If Your Airbnb Bookings Are Slowing Down

Hey, what’s up guys, in today’s video, we’re gonna be talking about what you should do if your bookings on Airbnb or VRBO or other platforms start to slow down for your short term rental property.

Now, I know this is a common issue right now with a lot of people seeing a slowdown in bookings. And the first thing I want to address is that it makes sense and it’s actually totally normal. You see what happened is during the pandemic and everything that happened with international travel, naturally, a whole bunch more travel started flowing domestically. So we saw this huge, huge spike in demand for short term rental properties. Domestically, good staycation, destinations, think cottages by mountains, by resorts, you know, Disneyland, those sorts of things. It was a couple of hours drive away from major metro hub, good chances are your revenues and your bookings shot up over the last couple of years. And so naturally, things had to slow down, that gravy train wasn’t going to keep going forever. And so for any sophisticated investors who have been doing their due diligence properly running their analysis properly, they know that now is not the time to panic. Because this was expected, we knew this was gonna happen. So for example, a few of the properties that I bought throughout that period over the last couple of years, they performed insanely well like way, way better than I ever could have imagined way, way better than my projections. And I cashflow incredibly well on those properties. Now, I’m still cash flowing well, because I’m not panicking, I’m taking the right strategic moves, I understood that there was going to be a slowdown. And even with that slowdown, my properties are still performing really, really well. In fact, now there are also even more opportunities for buying because some people are panicking, and they are selling. And there are properties that have just cooled down in price naturally as interest rates have gone up. So there’s really great deal still to be had, as long as you can keep your wits about you and be a data driven investor, not an emotion driven investor. So with that said, I want to point out a thing that I think a lot of people overlook when it comes to short term rental investing. And that is that when times are good, and prices are booming, and there’s all this demand, like there has been over the past couple of years, the average investor actually does lose a lot of money. They just don’t realise it. You see what happens. And I’ve seen this happen time and time and time again, I’ve been managing other people’s properties and investing in short term rental properties for over eight years now. So trust me when I tell you this is not a rare thing to say something I see happen all the time is that people have their short term rental property, and they’ll get a whole bunch of bookings. And think that because they’re super high occupancy rate right now that they’re maximising their returns, and they’re not leaving any money on the table. And that’s honestly one of the worst problems to have. Because as an investor, if you think that you’re doing really well, when in reality, you’re actually leaving a whole bunch of money on the table, and you don’t even know it, then you’re probably not going to do much to try to fix it. And so over the last couple of years, a lot of investors lost a whole bunch of money, because they didn’t adjust their prices to account for the increase in demand. And so as a result, they sure they got fully booked, but they got fully booked at lower 90 rates than what they should have been booked at. And so they probably left 1020 $30,000 on the table. A perfect example of this is a property that I start at the beginning of the pandemic. And our best case scenario projection for this property was $100,000 in revenue. Now had we priced our property accordingly and not adjusted to what was going on in the market, we would have left $50,000 on the table that one year alone, because in its first year, that same property that we projected best case scenario would do $100,000 In bookings, it did $150,000 In bookings again, because this huge surge in demand. And so what happens is that investors have been leaving money on the table, they just weren’t aware of it. They were blissfully ignorant. And now they’ve become aware of it. Because they’re in a same way they didn’t adjust their prices up and make the proper accommodations to deal with the change in the market. They’re now not adjusting their prices down and they’re not making the proper changes to accommodate for the changes going on in the market. And so tactically speaking, here’s what you got to do to stay ahead and to keep your property getting booked and perform well during a slowdown when things are retracting from where they once were. Now, just to be clear, it is not an overall slowdown from where things were a couple of years ago. Yes, it is a slowdown in a lot of markets from where it was last year, because it shot way up and then it’s coming back down. But we’re still in a lot of markets, most of them, in fact, still way ahead of where we were a couple of years ago. So your property should still be performing really, really well. Our properties are still cash flowing really, really well. They’re just not flowing cash flowing as well as the insane numbers that we’ve been pulling Over the last couple of years. And so what you got to do number one is, guys just want to take a quick break here to say that for those of you watching, who want to build cashflow, and long term wealth by purchasing Airbnb and short term rental properties, there’s a link in the description right down below for a free training that will walk you through my exact strategy for investing successfully in Airbnbs. Now, if you’re not ready to actually buy properties, and you want to get started managing other people’s properties on Airbnb the same way I got started and build a full time income managing other people’s properties, there’s actually another free training linked in the description down below as well, there’ll be a really great fit for you. So whether you want to invest in short term rental properties and actually build amazing cash flow and long term wealth by acquiring the assets, buying the properties themselves, or you’re looking to earn a full time income managing other people’s properties on Airbnb, we’ve got some awesome trainings that are linked in the description down below, that will definitely help you out. When you sign up for the trainings, we’re also going to send you a few other tools and resources completely for free just to help you get started. Again, the links to sign up are in the description down below. And both trainings and all the tools are completely free. So make sure to register for the trainings, links in the description down below. And so what you got to do number one is be willing to adjust your prices and have a great data driven pricing strategy. So you make the right adjustments at the right time. Again, this is something that people are often lacking, and it causes them to lose out on potential upside when things are going really well. And then conversely, it causes them to yield a bunch of downside when they’re bad. So it’s really just the worst thing to have going wrong in your portfolio. Because if you don’t capitalise on the upswing in the market, sure, maybe you look at and you go well, I still made really good money. So who cares, as long as it’s still made money, then all good. And that’s well and fine and dandy. But what happens when things start to pull back, a lot of people are priced up at the last couple years of pricing their price where they think they should be based on the last couple years of performance. So they’re pricing their property at $1,000 at night, when the market can only bear 600 700 800. Now, because normally it can only bear 500. And the only reason it shopped to 1000 last year was because of the slowdown from the pandemic. And so naturally if your property is priced at 1000. Now, it’s not like it was before where you were getting booked at 1000. And you could have been charging 1200 or 1300. Now it’s at your price 1000. And you’re not even getting booked. And so a lot of hosts are being stubborn with this. And they’re not adjusting down their rates to account for that. And to get bookings. They’re just trying to hold out just based purely on emotion. So number one, first and foremost, you need to be willing to lower your rates. And I’m not saying lower them down to the floor, I’m not saying drop them down and panic, I’m just saying you need to have a good data driven pricing strategy that tells you what the right decision is to make at any given time. So you know when to lower your prices. And you don’t let your ego get in front of you actually doing that. And taking the advice. I’ve seen too many people have their properties just sitting vacant, because the data told them to lower their prices, but they just weren’t willing to. And so yeah, sure you don’t get a lower paying guests in there. But you also don’t get any guests in there. So what’s better? Would you rather have some money or no money at all? Would you rather have a 20% cash on cash return which you know, I think is pretty great. Or would you rather have none at all, or 10% cash on cash return because you were stubborn and wouldn’t lower your rates. So that’s number one. Number two, is you have to be willing to adjust other things like your middle night stay.

We never right across the board allow a one night minimum stay on any of our properties, we just found that it’s way too much headache to be worthwhile. But for the last couple of years, I was optimising for four and five night minimum stays. And it was beautiful. I could do that because there was so much demand. But now what I’m finding is that a lot of our properties are getting booked a little more last minute than they were over the last couple of years. They’re not booking out months and months in advance fully booked. And so as we approach those dates, and things get more last minute, I am willing to drop it down to a three night or a two night minimum stay as opposed to four or five, because it just increases the overall pool of demand for my properties. And since making those adjustments, I’ve seen a huge uptick in our revenue, we started to see a bit of a slowdown, I didn’t feel like I was really optimising on it enough. And so I made some adjustments. And sure enough, they yielded really great results. We actually had a phenomenal month last month on all of our properties, because I made these adjustments and was able to dynamically update things on the fly as I was looking at the real time performance of the property. So that’s another thing that you want to make sure you’re adjusting. The third thing that I would recommend is make sure you’re driving as much traffic to your listing as possible. Again, over the last couple of years, that hasn’t been much of an issue. There was just so much demand in most markets that you didn’t really have to do anything but have a pulse and a listing and you would get booked. Now you really do things to optimise your performance in the search results. Make sure you’re showing up number one, do things like run promotions on Airbnb, or update your listing photos or update your listing Description, your headline, play around with things and make tweaks to the drive more traffic to your listing. Additionally, you can do things like direct booking strategies, where you’re promoting your property on Instagram or other social media platforms. Or you can just have an email list where you’re collecting emails for your past guests and trying to get them to rebook with you again, you can also expand other platforms, if you’re not already on multiple platforms to drive more traffic to your listing. Overall, all these things are going to help because you want to drive as much traffic as possible. That’s really the top of the funnel in order to get more bookings. Third, and honestly, most importantly, is just don’t panic. I spend a bunch of the beginning of this video explaining that explain to you why it’s so so harmful to be panicking right now, and doing things emotionally, you want to have your decisions be based on data, not on emotion. So avoid that temptation to just go and panic and lower all your prices and drop to one at minimum stay or let your ego get in the way and not do that and just do nothing at all. You really want to have a data driven approach and if you want help with implementing that, then just check out the links down below. We’ve got a whole bunch of training that I’m sure is going to help you a tonne and getting more bookings for your short term rental property law. I hope this video was helpful for you I hope you found it valuable if you did let me know by dropping a like hitting that subscribe button and let me know in the comment section down below. With all that said, thanks so much for watching this video. And I’ll see you in the next one.