What to consider before setting up your first listing

Are you thinking about setting up your first listing as a property manager?

Here are 4 tips to help you navigate the short term rental industry, to ensure you are well equipped with the right knowledge to start your property journey.

Understanding the STR industry

Just like any other business, in order to succeed, you need to know the basics of the short-term rental (STR) industry. While formal education is not required, one does need to have a comprehensive understanding of how STR works. This is the first step to becoming a successful property manager. You can gain this knowledge through personal experience as a host on Airbnb. This makes it easy to relate to the needs of future guests; but if this is completely new to you, using your own personal experience staying at a hotel or Airbnb as a guest is also useful to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. When in doubt, we recommend exploring Airbnb’s resource centre to learn more about the ins and outs of listing a property and what you can expect as a new property manager.

How to promote your listings

Learning how to sell yourself and your services is a critical skill to have as an entrepreneur. Word of mouth is also a very powerful marketing tool but will only get you so far. And while a lot of your marketing will come from Airbnb’s customer review system, extra effort needs to go into generating awareness of not only your property listings - but your service quality too. Social platforms like Instagram and Twitter are both great for showcasing property visuals, linking to your website and engaging with your audience. When you combine this online presence with attending networking events, great reviews and word of mouth chatter, you have a powerful combination of marketing tools to get the good word out. We recommend ensuring your booking calendar is up-to-date and you’re regularly communicating with your customers so that you build a strong reputation and generate positive customer feedback.

Invest in Property Management Tools

When you first become a property manager and you’ve got less than 5 properties under your belt, you can manage them with simple tools like spreadsheets. However, this becomes near impossible once you start adding more properties to your portfolio. This is where a PMS - property management software - becomes handy to stay organised so that you can scale your business and live a stress-free life!

A good property management tool should do it all, from task management, financial management to operational support. To get started, we suggest making use of Airbnb’s basic automation features and searching for a good dynamic pricing tool to get a picture of other listings’ performance in the market so that you know how to price your property.

For a robust piece of software that does all the above and more, take a look at the Hometime Platform, which takes care of everything, from revenue management, automating messages and intersecting effortlessly with clients to helping you scale your listings to grow your bottom line.

Create a guest management plan

Customer service is probably one of, if not the most important skills to develop as a property manager.

This is how successful property managers set themselves apart from the crowd. Customer service that goes above and beyond is a great selling point, and having a guest management plan in place means being fully prepared to support your guests at any time during their stay.

From guest-hosting, cleaning, maintenance, listing optimisation and occupancy management — proactively managing the performance of your listing means keeping your guests happy. As Airbnb runs on a customer experience rating system, having a solid customer service function in place will be the difference that makes a difference to your listing performance.

The Hometime Platform’s Automated Messaging helps you manage the guest check-in and check-out process. It’s never been easier to send lockbox codes 1 hour before check-in, remind the cleaning services about a check-out and inform your team about their next tasks.

For more support related to property management of short-term rentals, get in touch - we love to chat!