How to List your house on Airbnb | A Step-by-Step Guide (Part 1)

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Hope you're doing excellent out there, wherever you are. I just got back from a long trip. Well, long for me. It was about three weeks and I was jumping around all over the place, all over in the U.S. i always try to pack in way too much. I don't know what it is, I guess. I guess I have sort of a type A personality. But anyways, we got some new properties set up in Oklahoma, where I have some properties already and I've had some for several years. And I met my manager over there that came over from Tennessee and we knocked out two apartments. So I want to break down this week the process for you from start to finish on physically setting up our property. I've got nine steps for you and they're by no means comprehensive. In fact, a lot of the nine steps I break down in much, much more depth than other podcasts. But I want to just give you briefly in a nutshell what the process is so you make sure that you don't leave out any of those steps. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals, quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

So the first step is we gotta have a property, right? And I know this one's obvious, but we want to make sure we have the right property. I don't want to beat this point up. I've got lots of other episodes on this. If you guys haven't heard those yet or if this is your first time listening. Thank you for tuning in. You can check out all of our prior episodes at Strom. We got a bunch of resources for you there. But that is the first step. You got to make sure you have a good property. And I'm assuming for the purpose of this episode, one that's already renovated as well. So assuming you got that out of the way, our next step is making a game plan. And again, I've talked about this point too. We talk about making floor plans and I have a whole episode on that. But we gotta have a game plan or floor plan for our property. We gotta kinda know how we want to furnish it before we're going to furnish it. So we want to make sure we know what style we're going with and what type of guest we're going to have in our apartment or in our house or in our vacation rental or in our yurt. Whatever type of short term rental it is, we need to know what type of guest is going to be staying there, because that's going to determine the type of furniture that, that we put in there. So after we know that, we need to go ahead and order our furniture. I'm already on step three right now. I told you I was going to blow right through this. This is in a nutshell. So step three, we need to order our furniture. And there's all types of different places to do that. The easiest way is to order on Amazon, but that doesn't necessarily provide a nice looking rental. There is lots of good stuff that we can get off of Amazon and we definitely order a lot. But we like to get a combination of furniture.

Make our properties a little more unique. So it doesn't look like we just opened up a big box from Ikea or something like that. So you can order from all over the place and online we can definitely do that. I always recommend getting some furniture locally too, or at a thrift store or on Facebook Marketplace. Of course that takes time. And if you're not there locally, which I am not, I spend most of my time in South America, very far from all the properties. Then you either got to have someone on your team that helps you with that or you can always hire a designer, interior designer. So you want to make sure that you don't just have all one type of furniture. So that is a big piece. We could go on and on about that and I have in prior episodes, but I just wanted to put this point in here to show the process. So we need our property, we need our plan, we need our furniture, we need to deliver our furniture. We need to get it at the property. So that's point number four. And that could be done. If you're ordering online, you can ship right to the property. If you have a manager that helps you, you can ship right to them. Of course that's going to be a lot of boxes, a lot of furniture. To unbox and take over to the property takes a lot of time and you will end up with a lot of cardboard. Trust me, you got to find a place for that cardboard too. So if you're not shipping it to someone that helps you on your team or you're not shipping it directly to the property, well, you could send it to a mail center or a post office box, but you got to check with them too. They don't really like big mattresses show up and all that. So there is a little bit of a balance that goes on with the coordinating and you want to make sure that you really plan that out, it's best to send it in as few shipments as possible so you're not bouncing all over the place or running back to the property. And if they're expensive items, you might want to think about shipping those to your personal residence. If you happen to live near the property, that's an easy way. Or if you do have some sort of mail center, you might want to send the more expensive items to that post office box or anywhere where you can accept packages. Another thing that they have with Amazon is they have pickup locations. So if you don't feel comfortable shipping the furniture directly to the property or to your house, if you're not living locally, you can check out some of those drop off locations or those pickup locations, I should say. But you gotta haul them, right? And so this is a lot of furniture. So what do we do? Well, I lucked out on this one because one of my managers from Memphis, we have a big delivery van that we use there and you can fit couches in there, you can stand up. I mean, it's like a full blown delivery van. Actually bought it to run this laundry operation, which we are using it for laundry. More on that subject in another episode. But anyways, we have a giant delivery van and so they packed that thing full and he drove over. It wasn't too far, luckily, and that made it so much easier. So I met him in Oklahoma City and we had some help to unpack it all. And that really saves a lot of time because you can spend a lot of time on the furniture piece if you're not just ordering online. That can take a lot of time. The last thing I want to talk about here is how much time this really does take. And that depends on the size of property. But we will get to that. So after we've got our property, we've got our furniture plan together, we've ordered our furniture, we got to figure out the best way for us to accept it or to have it delivered. And then we got to set it up, right? So that's point number five. And if you're ordering furniture that's already put together, well, then that process is going to be a little easier. Of course it's going to be a little more difficult to ship it or it's going to be a little more bulky to move. So you got to keep that in mind. But if you're getting furniture from Ikea, for example, there are a lot of little pieces in there if you've ever put something together from ikea. So it's nice to have some help because these things can take longer than you expect. And if you're on a time crunch, it's nice to have an extra hand. Where can you find extra help? Well, you can look on places like TaskRabbit or Next Door or Thumbtack. These are all sort of service oriented websites where you can look up people locally where your properties are to get an extra hand. They're one time contractor jobs where you guys can negotiate on how much it's going to cost. And if you don't have extra help, it'll just take longer. But it is nice to have an extra hand if you can fit it in the budget. So after we get it all set up, and that includes putting our art on the walls, making sure we have our linens and our bedding and all those little things. There are a lot of little things. So you want to make sure you have a checklist. Checklists are the best ways to make sure that we don't forget anything. That's why airlines and pilots have been using them for a very, very long time. So have a checklist. And the next step is getting our home automation set up. So this is part of the furniture, but things like security cameras, door locks, which we definitely want to have a digital door lock and getting your smart TV connected. So those are things you're going to need the Internet for. And so you got to set up the Internet too. And that is another coordination act. Unless the property that you are turning into short term rental already had a recent Internet connection. Well then usually it's pretty easy. You can just plug your modem in. But if it hasn't had an Internet connection connection before, or maybe it's in a room that you didn't want, allocate a little bit of time for that because it could take longer than you think to have a wire rerouted. And that is a big piece to the whole puzzle. Internet's really important. You want to make sure you have a strong signal throughout your whole property. Even if you have outdoor space, lounge area. If you can get Internet out there, the more signal the better. So we've got our property, we've got our furniture in place, we figured out the coordination. We got all of our home security and autom tech setup, including the Internet. Now it's time to take photos again. Another thing that you're going to want to schedule out so we can pack all these things in. If we schedule really well. I'm going to tell you how long it took us to set up this property at the end of this episode, you might be surprised, but we got to have pro photos. And I highly recommend having professional photos. You don't want to doctor them up too much to where someone's going to show up to your property and it doesn't actually look like the photos. Maybe it's too light again, I know I've covered these topics in prior episodes in the past. We've talked about all these things in more depth. I just wanted to give you this whole process in a quick nutshell. So professional photos, you know that already, that's super important. Now step number eight, and this might not come as a normal step, but this one's very important. And it's to stay in your property. Yeah. Seriously, Sleep in the bed, stay there. It's important because there's guaranteed something little that you weren't aware of. Unless this happens to be a property that you lived in for a long time and you know it like the back of your hand. But if it's a new property or you bought it specifically for short term rental, there will be things that pop up. And you know what, if you don't find them, you know who's going to find them? You know who's going to find those little issues and it's not going to come out in a good way. It's going to be your guests. Yeah. And we don't want our guests finding the issues for us. So that's a really important one. And it is an easy one if you allocate enough time. And I am guilty as charged, but I did not allocate enough time on this last trip to actually stay in this property. I know I'm. I sound like a hypocrite, don't I? I did stay in another short term rental in the same city that I set up a while ago. And you know what? Even though we' had that one for a couple years, there were some real small things that I wrote down to make sure we changed or improved. So it's always a good idea to stay in our short term rentals because little things just pop up. Okay, so that was eight steps. The ninth point here is just how long does this take? Well, I will tell you that we did these two apartments, did two apartments at the same time. They were in the same building, so that made it easier. But about two and a half days. Now that's two and a half days of setup. That doesn't count the time that my team used or spent finding the furniture and organizing it and doing all of that and there were a couple little things that we didn't quite get to, a couple little maintenance items that we want to tackle before we actually launch these properties. But it took about two and a half days. So that was from start to finish. We had a plan together for the furniture. We ordered the furniture, we had it shipped to a place or organized it in a place that was convenient and secure so nothing goes missing. We did have a couple extra hands on this one, which made it nice putting together some of the beds and the furniture and stuff like that and fixing some little maintenance items while we're there. We got our home automation set up. So I had the Internet set up for this property before I went out there. And this property happened to have an Internet connection already in it. So I didn't really need to do too much there when I showed up. Plugged in the modem and we had Internet, so that was good. But then we set up all the routers, installed the door locks, we installed the security cameras. We made sure those were all dialed in. And then I had the photos scheduled for the day that I flew out of town. And so we really backed it in. Reality is we could have spent another couple days there. I would have really liked to stay in those properties. Now, our housekeeper that helps us out there will be going through the property again to double check things and we'll make sure that we have all of our T's crossed and our I's dotted before we actually launch the property. Because the launch is the most important. Those initial reviews can make or break you. So those are nine steps, nine points to starting our property, to finishing the property. Just in a nutshell, again, I've got lots of episodes on all of these topics in depth and the topics within the topics. So go back and check those out@striches.com if you haven't already. There's a lot of other resources on there and we'd also love to hear from you guys. I know you have tons and tons of good questions, and my team and I have managed over 20,000 guest arrivals in my portfolio now. So we've learned a lot. Believe me, anything you can pretty much think of, we've handled or figured out or come across. And so know no question is a stupid question. Please let us know if you have something else that you want us to chat about. And one last bonus tip for you on this whole process. This is after you've stayed in the property, that is that you went around with a little label maker and you labeled all of the things in the house that didn't make sense or that weren't super intuitive to use. So if your controller, these TCL TVs that we buy have this little controller and the volume buttons on the side, a lot of guests don't find that volume button. You might want to put a little sticker there. Sometimes people unplug our Internet routers. So we label the Internet routers Internet, please do not unplug. People want Internet, so they find that one out the hard way. And who knows why they're unplugging them. Maybe they think it's a noise monitor or something like that. But these little types of things happen. If you have any sort of device or anything in the property that's not intuitive and you can answer it with a tiny little label and then just print out that label and put it there and that will answer the question. Now, if we want to answer more in depth questions, we can do that in our guidebook. And stay tuned because I'm going to do a part two to this episode which is all the online setup. So getting our listing up, setting up our property management software and the actual software that I use, that's the whole other side to this. We got to make sure we answer all of our guest questions before they ask them. That's how we get good reviews, that's how we keep high occupancies and that's how we can earn really, really great returns. Some of the best returns in the real estate world that I've encountered and that's investing in short term rentals. So thanks again for joining in. It's great to have you here and I look forward to doing part two to this. So stay tuned until then. Have a fabulous week.

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