Property owners know firsthand how hard it can be to run an Airbnb business and what difficulties you as a host face. It can be either a lack of time, knowledge, and skills, numerous objects for rent, or a face-to-face collision with the peculiarities of running a vacation rental business specific to a particular region. This is why so many people turn to outsourcing companies for help. Airbnb management company is responsible for solving many similar tasks for a fee. In this article, we tried to determine the benefits of cooperation with property service providers.
Airbnb Management Company services
When a client contacts a management company, he expects the company to take over most or even all the maintenance of the property. As a standard, property management company offers several vital services, which we will discuss next.
Compliance with laws
The real estate market is regulated by law. You may know the general rules, but keep in mind that there are local laws, and just not knowing them leads to problems. The management company is interested in their clients having an impeccable reputation. Therefore, it is ready to advise on legal issues.
Screening
As an Airbnb host, you will meet different potential tenants, including problematic ones. Short-term rental property management companies know how to check guests and what questions to ask them even before they arrange their check-in. As a result, managers quickly determine which of the guests should be refused and which should be invited to see the property.
Guest communication
Hospitality is valued among tenants, but you may not be able to handle all guest requests on your own. In addition to this, you will not always be in touch. A management company supports your guests from the beginning, when a guest makes a reservation, to the check-out and post-stay feedback.
Maintenance and cleaning
Cleanliness matters a lot in evaluating short-term rentals. How much you worry about keeping the apartment clean can affect the overall impression of guests about you as a host. You may be able to do laundry and cleaning if you manage one or two properties at the most. But trust us, it is almost unreal to deal with when you have a constant flow of guests and there will be three or more apartments. That is why for Airbnb housekeeping service providers, cleaning is a mandatory service; for example, HeartHomes has detailed how Airbnb cleaning happens if you hire their team.
Marketing
It is not limited to running ads. When done right, service providers constantly analyze the market and your competitors, so they can optimize their marketing strategy. The management company may be responsible for listing your property on multiple sites, taking photos, and managing all descriptions and copy. Ideally, you will regularly receive recommendations about which improvements should be done to increase demand for the property and distinguish it from other proposals.
Pricing Optimization
The market for short-term rental property is dominated by dynamic pricing. This means that you set the price by considering many factors: the cost of housing, maintenance costs, contingencies, seasonality, local trends, demand for this type of housing, competitor prices, and more. It is challenging to foresee everything. Moreover, it is necessary to control the situation and change the cost in time to price your property competitively for maximum occupancy.
Management companies have access to data services, allowing them to price based on more information. Given the database and experience, they manage to price more effectively.
Revenue management and reporting
Managing payments can be pretty challenging, especially if your properties are being booked from different sites where they are listed. At the same time, accounting for income is only a tiny part of what should be considered when summing up. You can rely on specialists to avoid getting confused in the calculations. They offer reports on the performance of your rentals, which show you what delivered the best results and increased your income. The reports also include recommendations for further action, such as how to improve or maintain results.
What are the risks of working with low-quality service providers?
Working with an unreliable service provider can be a real headache. The first thing you will encounter that will indicate the low quality of your business partner’s services will be the dissatisfaction of the guests. It can be poor-quality cleaning or inappropriate communication. Still, in any case, tenants who have a negative impression of staying in your apartment will not hesitate to leave an angry review.
In turn, negative ratings on Airbnb affect your reputation. Potential guests will pass by your offer, and the demand for your property will decrease. Accordingly, you will not receive income and will likely incur losses from such cooperation.
There are also less obvious signs that the management company is not up to the task. For example, you may only get profitable results in reports, but the actual situation is different.
What points to consider while choosing a management company?
Choosing which company to trust your property business is difficult. Therefore, we have selected for you the main criteria by which you can judge whether it is worth cooperating with this or that service provider.
Client Communication
You may already have an impression of the company from the first call. How a company communicates with a client and how quickly it responds indicates its willingness to chat with your potential tenants and look for solutions to their problems. In other words, the interested company will try to provide a personalized client experience.
Pay attention to the questions you will be asked. If the manager specifies which objects you want to transfer, whether there was an experience of delivering these objects before, what results you had, and what you want to achieve, this is a good sign.
Expertise
Companies that are genuinely involved in work boast knowledge of the local market. To assess the expertise of the company, you can prepare in advance. Make up some specific questions related to the real estate market. Ask when peak booking times occur and what seasonality is typical for the region.
One more option is to explore how the management company handles situations at some point where something doesn’t meet a guest’s expectations. Dealing with customer complaints will be one of the keys to satisfy them.
Reviews and Reputation
A responsible company protects its reputation. To get an idea about it, check out the customer reviews posted on different platforms, from Google Business up to the Facebook page. Pay attention not only to the final grade but also to the pros and cons described. You can also ask the company for testimonials from current clients to get a complete picture of the firm’s recent successes or failures.
Estimation
Deciding what weaknesses in your Airbnb business you want to level by outsourcing are significant. This will help you with a preliminary analysis of the selected companies for cooperation. Compare their services, highlight ones that are the most priority for you, learn about their quality from customer reviews, and compare their prices. As a result, you can evaluate your potential benefit.
Organizational matters
Find out how each management company you are interested in organizes financial and performance reporting to the client. You have the right to ask managers for an example of such reports, which, when correctly approached, contain an overview of how the business is progressing. Similarly, you should be given information about the fees to evaluate how beneficial the cooperation is for you and what your profit will be. If you’re looking to learn more about the property industry, then you could also take a property developer course to help you learn more about the ins and outs of building a property portfolio.
