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432. Hosting Hotline: Can You List a New Construction Airbnb with Renderings?

Introduction and Welcome

Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Hello. Welcome back to another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant, and together we are Thanks for Visiting, and this is the Hosting Hotline.

Sarah Karakaian: If you want to get your hosting business question answered here in the hotline, we would love for you to do it. It’s one of our favorite things to do is this episode.

Go to hostinghotline.com. You ask your question. And then it gets answered. I mean, it’s as easy as that. Today. We’ve got a great question. I love some of you though. You sneak in these two questions, but just fine. Cause we like to talk about hosting and business. So it all works out.

Listener Question: New Construction Airbnb

Hosting Hotline Caller: Hey, Sarah, Annette, my name is Donnie.

Thank you for everything you guys do, really enjoy your podcast and , appreciate how professional you guys are. My questions regarding a new construction Airbnb. I’m building one in the mountains and I was curious how far in advance of the construction being complete could I list it? I didn’t know if I could use some renderings to put it up on Airbnb, since probably the [00:02:00] booking window is more than 30 days.

that’s the first question. My second question is regarding, month long stays during the summertime. I feel pretty confident that I could. book it for a month solid, a couple of months out of the year. So I’m curious, what, what strategy should I use, to be able to do that? hopefully right off the bat.

Look forward to hearing from you guys. Donnie, I love how you called us professional. I’m glad that’s how we come off. That’s, that’s, that’s a win.

Sarah Karakaian: But if they could see I got up and did it, I danced when he said professional just to, just to make sure we’re not too serious at all times.

Annette Grant: Congrats on the new property. Number one, thank you for the compliment. We will take those any day of the week. If you could leave us a review, that’d be awesome. So two questions.

Using Renderings for Listings

Annette Grant: First, you’re talking about, would you be able to use renderings to launch your listing? [00:03:00] Let’s dig in. The answer is yes, you are able to do that.

We want to give a big, big, what’s, what’s the warning, the, uh, When are you going to open your calendar though?

Sarah Karakaian: That, that’s a thing. I remember I was coaching someone before Donnie about this exact same topic and their renderings were gorgeous and they had a professional construction company. Things were going well.

And so we talked about that. And I think it’s just best to be as clear and open as possible with your potential guest. So in your listing mentioning that these photos are renderings and that you are excited to open on X date and your plan to make sure that you’ll be able to honor those bookings because we’ve seen it happen.

Where, whether it’s last minute or something major happens that you never could have imagined. And now you’ve got these bookings that you’ll either have to cancel or, or just stress over moving to maybe a, a fellow colleague or [00:04:00] competitor in the area. I agree with you. It’s like, you want to make sure that you are getting things started so you can get revenue as quickly as possible, especially if your booking window is longer.

But just to heed caution and make sure that you are being conservative with those dates. For example, I know a company that they’ve got a lot of land and they already have properties open, but they’re opening up more properties and to help fund those properties. They will pre sell the other properties and have.

renderings and, and, and video renderings of what they’re offering. And that helps them with their financial process. But I just know that they’re up again, that they create a timeline for themselves and they create extra pressure. Right. So

just start with caution.

Annette Grant: Yeah. And we don’t know, you know, we don’t. know the financial picture. We don’t know the completion picture. We don’t know the booking window, but we would not be serving you if we didn’t say proceed with caution. You might be putting a second layer of undue stress on yourself by knowing you have reservations because [00:05:00] remember, in our world, we do not cancel.

That is someone’s vacation. That’s someone’s plan. That is, you don’t want to start people

who disagree with us on that, but we, We have to have beliefs over here at TFV.

you could definitely launch with the renderings, but we just want you to know, you might have some additional, there might need to be an extra layer of communication with the guest.

there might be a lot more questions than normal. You might even want to call the guest and, remind them that it’s, not finished yet or, that they’re booking for something that will be completed, but you can definitely make that an advantageous thing that there’ll be the first people that’ll be able to experience it,

So just be prepared for maybe an additional layer of questions or maybe people wanting, looking for discounts to negotiate since you aren’t, you know, that they’re, You’re still like, they might not be able to tell the difference in the renderings, but make sure that those renderings, too, are on point for what you’re going to put what the property is going to look like.

Yeah,

Sarah Karakaian: don’t oversell it, Donny. The more you can be on point, and I’m talking about the interior, too. [00:06:00] We’ve had guests call us out on some things that if you got a new couch or, or something like that. So the more on point you can be with what you actually plan on doing, the better. And I was also going to say that there is data out there that you can find on, let’s say the booking window has passed.

Would you really have to discount or lose money because you didn’t book during like During the booking window, would you have an upper hand because your area is so well sought after? And if you have an available space, people are going to gobble it up just to relieve the pressure a little bit too. I don’t know if that’s true for your market.

You didn’t mention what your market is, but you could find that information out. That’s not so much in our market. Like if we miss our booking window, we usually have to soften the price a little bit. But obviously we still want to stay within market. We don’t let it go so low where we’re leaving money on the table.

That and Donnie, I think another great question asked too is, is it too early to start building your email list? And it’s never too early to start building your email [00:07:00] list. So that when you are open, if you need to email people who you’ve gotten excited about your project. You can email it to them as well and tell them actually that you’re going to open it up to your email list before you open up to the online travel agencies or people online.

So it’s never too early to do that and to plan whether you have a party out there for people are going to help promote your property for you, whether those are realtors or local small businesses, that sort of stuff where you are owning the information that you’re collecting. I don’t think it’s ever too early.

Strategies for Month-Long Stays

Annette Grant: And that segways into question number two of the month long stays. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, if you think you can do it, number one, all of your guests that are staying for shorter than those, 30 day stays, make sure you’re collecting their information so you can reach back out and let them know it’s available for 30 days, but our idea for you.

on marketing to the month long stays would be to have an additional listing. That’s 30 day plus or 28 day plus [00:08:00] on Airbnb, like a separate listing for midterm

Sarah Karakaian: stays. And then you connect them, Donny, because otherwise it would be tough to change your length of stay settings at a certain time of the year.

But then, let’s say you don’t get that booking and then you’ve potentially lost money because you didn’t get that booking exactly when you needed it to meet your 30 day stay requirement start date. So what people do is they’ll create a listing that has the minimum stay of 30 days. And maybe they have a listing that is short stays as well.

And then you connect the two and maybe you still make it not available during the time where you want to get that month stay, or as the booking window passes, you open it up for the short stays to fill it in until you get your month long booking. But I think the even better strategy Donnie is to build that email list.

And start talking about it on your, on your social channels or to local. I don’t know who your ideal guest is going to be. I don’t know who gets to go to the mountains for an entire month or is it nomads? Do you belong? Do you start belonging to Facebook [00:09:00] groups where you have people who are work from anywhere and are part of that?

The van or not the van movement, but the work from anywhere movement, start collecting email addresses so that you can market specifically to them and not have to stress about the calendar hacking that might need to go on to find that right renter. Absolutely.

Annette Grant: And don’t sell yourself short. make sure you do the market research of would it be more advantageous to have shorter stays, even though it is in the slower months, like do that math, you know, and make sure you make, this is for everyone.

Make sure you understand. Stand your month long stay math. Mm-hmm . Um, it gets very exciting to think, oh, I’ll be booked for a full 30 days. But you’ve gotta make sure that you find the right person willing to pay that price that makes it worth it for you to have them, because you are gonna have potentially increased cost if they’re running electricity, the air conditioning around the clock, they’re, they’re type of cool, might be different than your type of cool.

So just be prepared that there might be different expenses that go along with having someone there for, a longer stay.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Sarah Karakaian: [00:10:00] Donny, congratulations and thanks for calling into the Hosting Hotline. Again, it’s HostingHotline. com. We’ll answer your hosting business questions and get you thinking about Donny’s questions.

If any of you have a new build on the horizon or a renovation on the horizon and you want to make sure you get filled the day you’re open, trust us with our glamping site. We get you. And that’s been going in my mind. It’s like, do I get, My husband is our architect company. It’s like, do I get him to do the rendering so that we can like start planning and start building our website?

And it’s a whole thing that you have to weigh the pros and cons and where you put your investments in because that costs money. But we also just need to get electrical, you know, to the property. So it’s, it’s a lot. And sometimes hashing it out, talking to your fellow colleagues like Donnie did here on the hotline is helpful. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant and together we are Thanks for visiting. Talk to you next time. [00:11:00]