LINKED LISTINGS | AIRBNB TIPS for HOSTS | Tim Hubbard

The more flexibility we have with our properties and the more options our guests have to rent it, the higher our occupancy should be. So we're going to talk this week about one way where we might actually be able to create multiple listings out of one. Stay tuned. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches, where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache as possible.

So it's quite possible that you might have the ability to create more than one listing out of the one listing that you have right now. A single family home, for example. What am I talking about here? I'm going to jump to the point. Linked listings. So maybe you have a single family home that has a guest house in the back. Maybe you have a country home out in the forest and you also have a rentable home treehouse. Or you have a single family home or some sort of multifamily property where you have more than one unit in the same area. Maybe you have an RV parked in a place that has electrical hookups and water hookups. If all these properties or if these units are in the same location, well, then we can actually create a joint listing. So, for example, in the single family home scenario, we have a single family home and we have a guest house in the back. Well, it may be that we have one listing on Airbnb for the guest house and we have another listing for the single family home, but we really should have a third listing that combines both of those. That way you can accommodate different types of guests. You could accommodate a little bigger party. Now, there's some things we want to consider here, but I'm exploring this right now, so I want to share it with you guys this week to see if you might have the opportunity to do this as well. So I have a single family home that actually has a guest house. It's fully separate in the back, and it also has a granny flat upstairs that's totally separate, has its own kitchen, it has its own entrance. And so I'm experimenting combining the two listings. Now you might be thinking, oh, that sounds complicated. You know, if one gets booked, then we've got to make sure the other calendar doesn't get booked right away. But Airbnb has this feature already and so do most of the better property management software platforms available. So I'm experimenting with this and essentially it's gonna go from a three bedroom home and a one bedroom apartment to a potentially a four bedroom Home. Now, there's lots of things that we need to do here, right. This new listing needs to have all of these pictures, so we need to combine both of them. Hopefully you have a floor plan for your existing listing, but you want to add both those floor plans. If you're renting out both the spaces at the same time, you're going to want to consider where you want your guests to check in. Remember, we want to be able to monitor the check in entrance with a security camera on the exterior, so we know that not too many guests are showing up or that our guests aren't showing up with pets or anything like that. So take that into consideration when you set this up on Airbnb. They're going to do or they're going to call it a parent listing and then a child listing. And so if you book one or the other, it's going to block the other one. And you can go ahead and link that on your calendar. So essentially just creates like three listings out of two. Now, if you're using software like property management software and pricing software and guidebooks, all things that I highly recommend and we talk a lot about on this channel, well, you are going to have a few extra subscription fees if you're creating a third listing. So you might want to test this out. And if it doesn't really work that well, then maybe you cancel it. But it doesn't take that much time to test out. So it's something I'm experimenting with. And I in the past have not liked renting to huge parties. I just, it's just been easier as I've been scaling and on the operations side. But now that we have a lot of good systems in place with our rules and our additional contracts and our security cameras and all these things, I'm a little more comfortable with it. So I'm going to be accommodating more people, but I'm also going to be applying an extra guest charge. So in this example, the three bedroom home and the one bedroom apartment, there's four bedrooms there. I'm going to list it for, let's say six people and up to eight with four beds. Four couples it could be, but after six people, I'm going to go ahead and apply an additional charge per person, up to eight people. So what that will do is it's going to likely deter a little larger groups, but it still gives larger groups the opportunity to book this property because I'm going to be accommodating larger groups. I want a little more time to make sure the guests coming are going to be good guests. So what you can do on Airbnb or your property management software or your pricing software, if you're using that is you can shorten your booking window. In other words, you can have a two day gap before a guest can check in your property. And so that's what I'm going to do with this one. I'm going to make it so that no guests can check in last minute. Essentially, there's going to be a two day gap. That'll give us plenty of time to make sure that this larger group coming are going to be a good guess and it's going to be a good fit. Now, I'm excited about this because most of my properties have kind of traditionally gone to smaller properties, but a lot of the bigger properties you can rent out further in advance. So by being able to accommodate more people in the same space, I'm hoping to fill up some of my calendar a little further out. Now, I'll see how this goes. I've got lots of other properties, multifamily properties. I talk a lot about that on this channel too, and why I like those because of economy's of scale and all that. But with a multifamily property, you have this ability as well. Let's say you have a four plex and right now you have four individual listings in there. Well, you could create a fifth one that allows someone to rent. All four of those can be really good for a wedding coming to town. It can be good for a family reunion or a big family gathering of some sort. It can really accommodate a lot of different situations. You just want to make sure that because you're accommodating more people at the same time that you've got some of those other measures in place. So I'm going to be experimenting with this. I think if you guys have a property that fits this sort of model where you have the ability to add an additional listing out of maybe one listing, the more options that we give our guests or potential guests, the higher our occupancy should be, right? And now, of course, you can charge more for these larger units and stuff like that. So I'm excited to check it out. If you guys have a property that might fit this model, explore, see how it works out for you, and until next time, have a wonderful week.