#HowToHost on Airbnb

We’ve now been Airbnb hosts for about five years, and our time hosting has quite honestly completely changed our way of living. Airbnb has asked us to share the honest ups and downs with you all, and why these past five years have both been the most fulfilling and challenging years of our lives. There’s a lot to share, so hang on!

Listing our first space on Airbnb began as a way for us to supplement our income as freelance designers, and provide a way for us to pay the mortgage for our very own creative retreat. Over time it transitioned into a love of creating spaces for others to reflect, reset, and create and enjoy well designed spaces immersed in nature. We ultimately craved a business of our own with which we could have complete creative freedom, and this time as Airbnb hosts has offered us exactly that. 

Hosting on Airbnb and growing our brand, The Joshua Tree House, has become our full-time work and passion. We’re so grateful to have our business in a place where it can now pay our bills without the need for outside freelance work, and has allowed us to hire JTH team members to help us keep up with the workload. Honestly though, it all started very small and has been a constant transition through the years. We are still ever evolving and learning, but are here to share some things we’ve learned or noted along the way that might be helpful for current or aspiring Airbnb hosts.

Become a Host

Where to Begin

A lot of you have reached out to us over the years with the desire to become an Airbnb host, but wondering where to even begin. To us, the special thing about Airbnb is that you get to visit new locations with SOUL—the soul on these adventures emanates from the hosts themselves (even if you don’t get to personally meet them). As guests our favorite experiences were always when we could tell that the host had a deep love and appreciation for their location, and an excitement to share that with their guests.

Design
When considering the space that you’ll be listing on Airbnb, first think about the full experience that you’d like your guests to have. What is it about that location that first drew you in? What would your ideal day in that place look like? What does the house or room that you’d be sharing need to have in it to support that experience? Design is so much more than the aesthetics of a room (which is also important!), but how it makes your guests feel. If you don’t yet have a location or home you’d like to share, head out on a road trip as a guest yourself and allow the answer to unfold as you travel. Your gut always knows!

We love sharing our spaces in Joshua Tree and Tucson because of the incredible surrounding natural landscapes, and the charming local communities. We were drawn to each location because they personally made us feel curious, creative, and put us at ease. We love bringing some of those slow living elements into our spaces to interact with. A few ideas for starters are:

• Curate a location specific music selection
  All of our spaces have their very own record collection and record player to help set the mood, and a seasonal playlist we share with our guests before check-in. That way they can even listen to it while they’re on their way to check-in!
• Remember that your space is much more than a photo
  Collect vintage books, games, and the work of local artists, creators, coffee shops, etc. Not only is this sustainable, but it adds so much life to a space. It’s also important to give your guests something to interact with—coffee to brew, books to read, and games to play complete the experience.
• Create a location specific color palette
  For us this means dusty neutral tones that mimic the surrounding desert landscape. The majority of our guests are on vacation to experience the location, so bringing a bit of that exterior aesthetic indoors makes a cohesive experience.
• Make it comfortable
  Our most frequent type of guest comment or question after a stay with us is where our mattress, pillows, or bedding are from. A great experience is highly dependent on comfort, and how rested your guests begin each day. This is a place to make your guests feel truly taken care of.

Marketing
Every time we list a new space on Airbnb we get crazy butterflies. We’re nervous every single time! It’s a very vulnerable place to be, putting a place that you’ve poured your heart and soul into and wondering if anyone will book it. We’re true believers that the energy you put into creating your space will be returned to you in your guests’ excitement to stay. People have a sixth sense for these things, so yes it will book—but here are a few things that have helped us get the word out in the very beginning:

• Imagine your ideal guests, and then invite them to come stay You know your space better than anyone, and who might enjoy it. Is it a space for artists and dreamers? A perfect spot for a business meeting? A surfer’s paradise? Invite that artist, business, or surfer to come experience your space for a discounted rate to share with other like minded travelers. Both word of mouth and social media are everything these days—this will help you achieve some momentum in the early days!
• Update your listing often Airbnb itself provides great exposure for your listing, and prioritizes listings with frequently updated content. In the very beginning, we obsessively checked our listing page every day to see if there were more images we could add to tell the story, more local recommendations to share, or pricing we could adjust to increase bookings.

Media & Press
You can create a press release, and folder of hi-res images of your space to send along to publications that your ideal guest would read. You can also share these images through an Instagram account, Pinterest page etc with links out to your Airbnb listing. We’ve found most of our press has actually come through media reaching out to us from images they’ve seen on social media!

Outsourcing
There are so many levels of interaction you can have with your Airbnb listing, from extremely passive to not-so-passive! The choice is yours.

• Finding a cleaning team and management (if needed)
  This is not always needed, say if you host your guest house and have a flexible schedule to go over and clean yourself. However if you won’t be available, you’ll need to find a cleaning team. This is one of the most crucial decisions you can make for your Airbnb, as your cleaner is often your eyes. They are part of the team, so pay them well and take them out to dinner from time to time (it’s hard work!) 

As for managing messages that come through Airbnb, we highly suggest doing this yourself for a while to get a good understanding of what your guests needs are. If time doesn’t allow, it’s great to hire a management team as well. For us, we decided to keep everything in house and hire our own team members to help us stay on top of messages. You can also outsource and hire a separate management team, but may not have as much control. If you’d prefer not to be involved and let it run as a passive income stream, this would be a great route.

Guests

Expectations (Both for yourself, and your guests)
We host our personal home while we travel, as well as two homes that are full-time Airbnbs in Joshua Tree, CA and now a five-suite inn located in Tucson, AZ. Once people find out that we host our personal home, the very first follow-up question tends to be, “’How is that?!’ and ‘What do you do with your stuff?’”.

• Put thought and care into your space, and it will be treated with thought and care in return In all of our years hosting, we have never had someone purposely steal anything from our home. Sometimes a trail guide gets brought into the park, or a knife gets dropped behind the stove but we have been so impressed with the honest intentions of our guests. We are believers that if they feel taken care of, they will return the favor and take care of your space.
• Lock away anything overly sentimental or personal When we host our personal home, we empty our dresser and put any overly sentimental or personal items locked away in our closet. This is best both for us and for our guests—we can prevent an accidental breakage of something irreplaceable, and guests can feel at home without any overly personal items lying around.
• Share as much as possible about your surrounding environment Guests love to know about the positive aspects of your area, but also want to be prepped about what kinds of things that might not be for everyone (i.e. sirens or local traffic sounds for light sleepers) or whether you’re located off of a dirt road (like we are).

Challenges

It’s always the unforeseen problems that tend to get us—and they somehow always seem to happen on a weekend, or in the middle of the night. Unless you have a full-time management team, being a host is an around-the-clock gig. There’s always a solution to every issue that arises, but there needs to be a clear and open line of communication between host and guest. 

Time
Before you list your space you may want to decide how much time you’d like to devote. While on one end of the scale it can be a very passive income stream with a management team, it can also become a full-time career. We’ve personally chosen to run the business ourselves rather than pass it off to a management team, but have hired a few team members internally to help out with the workload.

It’s completely up to you which route works best, but if you do choose to do everything internally be prepared to have some flexibility in your schedule. While there may be weeks at a time that guests are self-sufficient and happy, there may also be late night calls from guests or last minute cleanings that no one else is available for. 

Communication
Many times throughout our years of hosting, guests will let us know about an issue they had after they’ve checked out. It’s always a bummer for us when this happens, because if they had let us know during the stay we could’ve had the opportunity to help! Here are some ways to keep the line of communication open:

• Check in with your guests
  About a week before our guests arrive, we always send a personalized email with check-in information, local recommendations, and give them an opportunity to ask any questions they might have had so they feel prepared for their stay. We’ve also always found guests appreciate a note after check-in to make sure that they have everything they need! Responding to messages as quickly as possible is also always a plus.
• Create detailed house rules
  We want our guests to feel as welcome as possible during their stay, but also clearly outline what’s acceptable or not in our house rules. It’s best for both the host and guest to know in advance what’s ok and to be clearly aligned.
• Communicate through photos
  It’s also highly likely that some guests will not read your listing, so communicate as much as you can about your space through the listing photos: both the good and the ‘bad’.
• Everyone is different
  Because we’ve put so much love into creating our spaces, it can be tough when someone doesn’t enjoy their time there. We’re still working on this ourselves, but have found it to be healthiest when we don’t allow their experience to become a personal insult. Everyone has different tastes, different experiences, and that’s ok. A random or rare negative review is not a reflection of you. You never know what someone may be going through outside of their stay at your place, so always give them the benefit of the doubt.

Money

This is something everyone wants to know about—do we make a living off of Airbnb? How do you decide what to price your listing at? Is having an Airbnb a good investment?

• Making a living
  We started out by hosting just one space, at which point we were still active freelance designers. Once we scaled up to two Airbnbs, we were able to start taking on less and less client work. Today, we host two homes in Joshua Tree full-time, our personal home when we travel, and our five suite inn in Tucson. This has allowed us to hire a cleaning team, two part-time contractors, and a full time manager for the inn, as well as pay ourselves.
• Pricing your space
  Start by pulling a selection of other homes or spaces similar to yours in your area. See what features they have (or don’t have) and use your best judgement to price your listing somewhere in the middle of that range. Over time, if you find you have a high occupancy (over 75%), you can play with adjusting your nightly rate a little higher. In an ideal world, you can find your sweet spot of pricing and occupancy so that you still have a few open days here and there for maintenance and updates while optimizing your income.
• Airbnb as an investment
  We love this model of investing, since you have both a long-term investment in the property itself, and a short-term cash flow through nightly rentals. We’ve been able to devote ourselves in large part to this stream of income knowing that the equity in our homes is part of our retirement savings.

We have completely fallen in love with hosting over the years—we’ve met so many wonderful friends, and shared tears with guests who have had tough years and truly needed a calming space to reset. Our time as Airbnb hosts have honestly been the most fulfilling years of our lives as we’ve been able to create spaces with complete creative freedom to share with others. If you’re considering becoming a host yourself, we’re so excited for you! If there’s something we haven’t covered in this post please ask away, we love this community and are here to help.

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Thank you to Airbnb for sponsoring this post, and allowing us to create the business of our dreams.