STRSS 39 – How to Optimize Your Airbnb Listings w/ Daniel Rusteen

Video Transcript

00:00:00

Airbnb does say they seem to hint that more photos is better. I don’t buy it. I’m more concerned about the conversion rate. So you don’t have to take I’m in my kitchen right now. You don’t have to take five angles of the kitchen. You just have to take one angle that gets 90% of it.

00:00:16

This is episode number three, nine of the Short Term mental success stories podcast. Are you an investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed, go to cohost.com for more information. Welcome back to short term rental success stories. I’m your host, Julian Sage. This is a show where I talk to hosts about their journeys and starting and growing their short-term rental business. My goal is that you’ll be able to walk away with practical information. That’ll help you become a better host and learn how to scale your business. Like any exceptional host that we all strive for five star reviews. So please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy. It really helps support the show if you haven’t done so already going over to our Facebook group, the host nation to connect with the community. Hey, what’s going on host nation.

00:00:58

I am super excited to be able to bring to you someone that I’ve been really following since I first got started in the short-term rental space. This guy, he is super knowledgeable in his blog articles on Airbnb and optimizing our really, really well thought out. But as the season is upon us, it’s a lot more challenging to get bookings because everybody is dropping their prices. It’s a lot more competitive because there’s a lot just less traveling going on. So being able to optimize your listing is crucial. If you’re trying to get more bookings. And in this episode, we have these special honor of speaking with Daniel Rustin. Danny is the author of optimize your BNB, the highest rated and most highlighted book on Airbnb in Amazon. Danny shares just so much valuable content on how to get your Airbnb listing to the top and to increase your chances of getting booked and making more money.

00:01:42

If you haven’t subscribed to the show notes where I share my success secrets, this is one that you definitely want to subscribe today. Guys, there is just so much knowledge dropped in the sub. So there’s, there’s a lot of success secrets in this episode. So if you haven’t done so already go to Short Term, Sage dot com backslash STR three nine. But if you’d like my success secrets sent directly to your inbox every week, then go to Short Term Sage dot com backslash show notes with all that being said onto this week’s conversation. Hey, welcome back. Host nation to another episode of short term rental success stories. In this episode, I have these special, special honor of speaking with the one and only Danny Rustin. Danny is the founder. He’s the person that wrote the book on optimize my Airbnb. It is a game changer guys.

00:02:26

He previously, he was working for Airbnb and now he is really more like an optimization expert. He has a blog about it, writes all about this stuff. When I got into the space, when I first started, I followed Danny’s content and use that in my own listing. And he, his book is, is just a gold mine of information. So I got him on the show. I know a lot of you guys have been asking about him. So without further ado, Danny, what, please let the audience know a little bit more about who you are and what inspired you to get into short-term rentals.

00:02:58

Sure. So I’m Danny and I, I first heard of Airbnb in 2000 12, 8, 8 years ago, and through a process of working at Airbnb and then working through Airbnb property management company, and then starting my own Airbnb property management company. And then from there starting the optimization, which is the thing that I spend my most time on. That’s like the brain. And then there’s the, there’s the book. There’s the rowboat property management. There’s the blog and the YouTube and everything else.

00:03:29

Now what, what bef before you started working at Airbnb, because this, this is kind of probably what started at all. What, what brought you to that position?

00:03:39

Oh, I hated my job, but I didn’t know it at the time. So I quit without having another job lined up. This was back in 2012, I think. And you’re not supposed to do that, especially when you have a prestigious, I’m a CPA by trade. I’m still a CPA actually, but you have a prestigious job and your family happy and society thinks you’re doing really good things. I just quit my job. We have two week break over Christmas and I just, it just like hit me. I was like, I just don’t like it. I didn’t know. I hit it at the time. I knew I really didn’t like it. And we were just coming into busy season. So this is like the last time that typically you’re supposed to cancel because people need you. But I was just like, I just can’t do it. I don’t want to.

00:04:23

So I quit and I heard of Airbnb through my job search. At that time I interviewed for Airbnb. They said, no. At first I worked for another company. So my thought process was I was a public accountant. So I said, all right, I know I don’t like my job. Maybe if I work for a private company in the county, all like him. So I worked for a private company and the counter department because everybody said no, when I went to Airbnb, I was like, ah, this is, I will work there. They said, no, the first time I stayed in touch work for a different company. Didn’t like that job equally did not like both jobs equally. So then my thought process was okay, so I don’t like accounting, public accounting. I don’t like accounting at a private company. Maybe it’s I need to like the actual company and that’s, that’s the missing piece.

00:05:11

So I was like, I like Airbnb. I travel like this. Anyways. Clicks for people back then were like, there’s a famous quote where Brian Chesky, the CEO was telling one of his idols about his idea. And his idol said something to the effect of like, I hope that’s not your only idea you’re working on. He didn’t get it. I got it right away. Someone told me I got it right away. It makes sense. So I stayed in touch with Airbnb a few months, three, four or five months later, the recruiter said, Hey, we got a, another job, different, different position, same team. So they said, you want to interview for it? I said, yes. So I did. And after like some like 18 interviews, like two weeks, the prior job must’ve known because there’s only so many doctor’s appointments and calling in sick and have to pick your brother up. You can do in a two week period without being found out. And they said, yes. And I, and that’s how I got worked my way into Airbnb.

00:06:07

So you’re you were working at Airbnb. What, what, what year was this when you started working with them?

00:06:13

2013, 2000 1300 employee, right around the 17 hundreds.

00:06:19

So, so you saw, you saw Airbnb really like at, at that point, where was Airbnb? As far as like the growth, because Airbnb started in 2008, 2013. Where, where was it around there?

00:06:32

The valuation was $8 billion, but it was a significantly less known than that. That sad. That is a big company, but people in San Francisco, a lot of people in San Francisco, most people in San Francisco at this time, this was before the politics started. Didn’t hear, didn’t know about Airbnb. Even nowadays. I was just in Argentina and I, and I was taking an Uber ride. Uber is very similar to Airbnb. You would think if you heard of Uber, especially if you’re Airbnb. No. He’s like air what it brings me back to the days when I entered thousand 13, when I ordered packages, I was at Airbnb office all the time. So when I had to order packages, I got them to Airbnb and I’d be like, you know, Airbnb headquarters. And they’d be like, what? And I’d be like a, I R I’m sure it’s the same thing that happens.

00:07:20

Like I Googled all these companies like goo and then eventually everyone knows about it back then the unaided awareness. So if you just, if you just, if you didn’t say what it was, if you just like put a logo on front, the unaided awareness was that 6%, only 6% of the us population. So no one knew about this thing. I even think today, very few people know about this thing. When they go public next year, where they just announced this will be, this will be bigger than it is for most companies. Because like Google, everyone uses search Uber. Pretty much everyone needs that. But Airbnb only if you have extra space, only if you travel. And a lot of people don’t travel. The vast majority of people don’t travel. So yeah, I was there pretty early on, maybe a year after that the politics started happening. And then like the city of San Francisco, everyone knew about it. But like I said, even now it is a lot of people never heard the word Airbnb before, and it’s a 30, well, it’s a 30, 35 billion company. I believe it’s four times that amount at this, at this time.

00:08:31

Yeah. That, that that’s really helpful for a lot of people getting into this space because they’re thinking, oh man, everybody’s making money. Everybody’s getting into this. How am I supposed to, you know, get my listing up there and be able to do well and a perfect guy for that. We have the optimizer on the show. So what, from that point, so you started working at Airbnb. What, what made you leave and wants to kind of venture out on your own?

00:08:55

Nothing made me want to leave. I was fired. I was on the right bus. I was just thinking about this before the call. Cause it always comes up. I was on, I was on, I was in the wrong seat on the right bus. So after those two years, pretty quickly after I arrived, I realized, okay, so now in that accompany that I love I’m with a team that is awesome, but I’m still doing accounting. So it’s that third I’m still gets accounting. It’s I mean, it’s accounting that I don’t like, so eventually caught up with me. No, no real good story there. Just like I said, wrong seat, right? Bus. Not making any mistakes, but such a competitive team, such a growth growing company. You need to like put in more than the bare minimum and add a job you don’t like, it’s like, and it’s hard to put in.

00:09:44

And in fact, when I would work home or work at home from air, when I was at Airbnb, I really wouldn’t do anything, but I’d play that game where I was like signed onto the computer just to make them think I was working because it was so hard. I would do anything. I’m seeing the house work out anything, call my parents besides work. And I was like, yeah, you know, I just can’t work from home nowadays or talking to you from my home. Well, for someone else’s home, but from my home at the moment. And actually I turns out I’m so much more productive and so much more enjoyable working at home. It wasn’t, it wasn’t the working at home. It was the type of work that I was doing that I

01:10:24

Now. So, so you, you finally found this, this thing that you love, you, you, you love working from home, you, you, within that space, you know, that process of, you know, cutting out. What, what about staying? So after you got fired, what, what made you want to stay in the space and how did you kind of discover the optimization for Airbnb short-term rentals was where you were more passionate about.

01:10:49

It starts one step before that. So I’m like, I’m an accountant. I’m in the accounting department. Have you ever had a dead desk job before? So what does the company think? I mean, what kind of reputation does the accounting department and the accounting folks have?

01:11:08

Yeah. They’re, they’re, they’re kind of the bottom of the barrel. Like don’t, don’t, don’t really want to mess with those guys. Those guys are kind of like, I don’t know, not the great, not the greatest view.

01:11:19

Yeah. Like, like, yeah, like they’re like they’re viewed as like a cost center heads down bean counters, just sitting at their desks, working all day long, eating lunch, eating dinner at their desk. Well, in my case, eating lunch at dinner at their desk, most people just lunch. So, and that’s, that’s the reputation we have. But there was just a few months before I got fired, there was a promotion and it was, you were first someone to host, you get 500 bucks, they get 500 bucks. So I heard this at the company meeting. I was like, whoa, that was first of all, whenever there was any kind of going on with the user interface, when I was at everybody, I was a host. So whenever there was any experiments, I was like, I’ll do anything besides my job. I’ll yeah, I’ll do that. Yeah. And then I did want to do it as well.

01:12:04

And so there was a promotion and as soon as I heard it, I was like, I’m doing that. That makes a lot of sense. So through that promotion, I met a property manager, local property manager. And that’s how, when I was fired, I, I walked out on that Monday afternoon and I felt like I felt good. Actually. It was weird. I didn’t have a job and I’d just been fired. But I felt like a week was that I was like, you know, that feeling in college when you have finals. And then just after five, that last final you’re like, you don’t have a job. You don’t have any classes. You’re like 100% free. Like what should I do? That’s how I felt. And so, and by the way, I left with $15,000 Airbnb credit, I was number one, I referred 36. I think people, the next best was 12. So that’s where I kind of knew inside me. I was more than an accountant. I was different. So that was kind of the first, the first, what is the thing fall down. I’m forgetting

01:13:12

The word. Yeah. The domino effect

01:13:14

Domino. Yeah, that was the first domino. I was like, not only did I get number one, but I’m going to count it. And so people actually took notice in the company and this is why I was hired back just a few weeks later in a limited role in a marketing type role in San Francisco. And I finished after that six months, eight months, I finished number one in that class, in all every category as well. And at this time I was working for the Short Term property manager. I was now doing business development. I was securing deals with the cleaning team. I was figuring out processes for when things go wrong and everything. And this is when it all kind of like clicked. I know I’m doing something different than accounting. I love it. And through the air, the Short Term property manager, my salary was based partly on my bonus, which was part, which was based on revenue. So if we had a crappy listing, I would tweak some things. It made the host happy and make the owner happy. It’d make me happy because I get money. And eventually I started realizing like, oh, I’m changing like stains. And sometimes within three hours, one hour a booking would come in and it doesn’t take too many of those to be with a crappy listing to be like, oh, wait a minute. There’s something

01:14:26

Now, how does, how does a CPA that, that really didn’t have too too much experience with like, you know, SEO or optimization, be able to figure out like this. If I tweak this thing, it’s going to have this type of result.

01:14:41

Very good with money. I’ve always been very good with money. So my bonus was based on how, how much money the company makes. So I had my poles right on how much money you were making

01:14:52

And the more money I was able to make it. I also brought in, I tripled the amount of listings they had. They had like something around 20 when I left that some that around 70. So I brought in a bunch of listings in that year. So I just thought of ways, how can I make more money? How can I make more money? I can bring in more listings. Yeah. But with the existing listings, I can also make, make them more money. How about pricing the calendar? And, but specifically with the tweaking, the title, the photos, there was a point where I would go photos or I realized photos were so important. So I had a team, I hired a team around me at this company, but I knew photos were so important that I insisted on being there in person for every photo shoot. I would lay out the house. I wouldn’t take the photos, but I would, I would, I would lay out the house and I would tell the photographer, okay, take this, take that, take that.

01:15:40

Was it because of your experience working at Airbnb that you knew, like these are the things that they’re looking for or how, how did you know, like these are the types of photos, these are the types of results that would, would impact how, how profitable a property would be?

01:15:56

Well, clearly I was at Airbnb. I was doing a bunch of experiments, any kind of UI test, user interface, user experience testing, anytime I could get in and do that stuff, I was in there. So there was some sort of a foundation for sure. I was in the company. I was hearing what the founders were saying. I was seeing the changes that were being discussed and whatnot. So at some level yet it was kind of internalized, but I feel like I learned about all this stuff through trial and error after the fact when I was not doing accounting fair BB, but when I was being a property mentor and keep in mind when I was doing the property management for eight of the months, that first year I did property management after RBD for eight of those months, I was still working for Airbnb, was paying me. And I was in the Airbnb offices twice, once to three times a week.

01:16:49

Now you said that you like being at the properties when you were taking the photos, you wrote the book, optimize, optimize my BNB previously optimized my Airbnb, but

01:17:03

Book is optimized.

01:17:04

Your optimize, your BNB, optimize your Airbnb. Okay. Okay. Optimize your BNB. But you’re, you’re wanting to be at the properties to view and kind of have oversight. Did you figure out like a way for other people, even just reading a book to be able to, you know, have their photos because photos are very, it’s very personal. Like, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to maybe distill the, the artistic creative ability of, of, you know, telling someone that, Hey, you should take this type of photo down to, you know, words on a page. How are you able to do that?

01:17:45

And the short answer is no, I haven’t found a way to do that because it’s half science. There’s, there’s half, you know, don’t do a closeup of that ornament on the dining table. That’s like a fact don’t ever do that, but the other 50% is art. And I haven’t, I dunno, I just, I think I have a knack for it. I have, I have a helper who helps me a little bit with the reports, downloads photos and whatnot. And he tells me if they’re professionally taken or not. And sometimes for me, it’s just, I know right away if it’s version taken, but sometimes he knows like 90% of the time, but there’s some times where he’s not sure if it’s professional or not professional photo. And for me, I can just tell right away. And the photo layout is different. The angles are different. So some listings have like four angles of the same room. Well, I haven’t been able to really figure out, like pull out the facts in my brain to figure out, well, why exactly am I taking this, these two angles or why just one angle this time at two angles that time, it all kind of fits into the, to the whole experience. But yeah, short answer is, I don’t really have a answer for that.

01:18:58

Now, as you’re working on this and kind of fine tuning your, your skill, when, when did it come to the point where it’s like, okay, I can, I can really be able to, you know, do this and create a system and, and write a book about this to be able to help other people. And now you’re, you’re, you’re doing this on your own. W how did that progression take place?

01:19:20

That progression was pretty quick. I knew right away I could do this for other people. And so I sold my first one and I think June, 2016, it was five bucks. And it took me about 45 minutes. And it’s worked up nowadays, it’s $300. And the first in August, Airbnb guide.com, they were the first ones to, so back then I would reach out to everyone. And I would say, Hey, I’m starting this business. And he was the first one to promote me to his list. And he was rather large. And I remember in August, a few people bought me at that time. It was a hundred bucks. I think it was a hundred bucks or 99 bucks. And a few people bought the service. And I remember thinking like, oh, this, these random people just paid another random person on the internet who says you can do something. And so then since then it just took off. I wrote a ton of blog posts and just reached out to everyone, reached out to media and still, and refi still we’re finding out the report. Maybe once every two months, I’ll add it up. It doesn’t change as to it.

02:20:37

Very cool. And, and so, so you really kind of found where your, your passion was with, with the creative aspect, the, you know, the optimization, and then you also started taking some properties under yourself, taking those properties. How, how has that been able to afford your lifestyle? Now,

02:20:58

I was going to start the first, the initial plan was to create a property management company and create a huge one and create the world’s best property, Airbnb property management company. When I realized pretty quickly, as soon as I left for the one weekend that I didn’t want to do this because I can’t leave. It’s too much work. I have to deal with hosts. I have to deal with guests. I have to deal with Airbnb. I have to deal with maintenance folks. I was like, I knew I didn’t want to do this. When I was working at the other company, I guess I was, she was taking care of a lot of the sales and customer service for the hosts and whatnot. And I was working on making her money. So I pivoted to the optimized business, but I kept, I kept the property management website.

02:21:48

And actually it does tremendously. Well, I get inquiries daily almost. And I forward them to people who, well, one or two people actually, who are my preferred people in the, in the bay area. Most of them come from the bay area. But I also mentioned it a couple of times in the books and people come to me through the book and I right now has six properties. I say on my website, I want, I don’t, I don’t serve more than five at a time because I’m not focused on property management. I’m focused on optimization, writing articles, creating videos, getting my information out. But I like to have a foot in the property, men game. I can test my strategies until I get my own properties, which will be next year, hopefully in Metagene. And that’s that’s, that’s how it works. Since then I get inquiries. Like I said, from the wet, from just organic, from Yelp, I have really positive reviews from prior hosts who I’ve worked with. And that’s, what’s, that’s, what’s helped me keep myself in the property management game. It’s actually been quite easy. I work for out by 95% of inquiries that come in

02:22:59

Now, what, what are the biggest things? Because you, you get a lot of people coming to you wanting to have their listings optimized. What are the biggest things that people are having problems with that you’re able to quickly resolve? Like, what is something that without you having to look at it, if that you can just tell someone and they can be like, they can easily change that. And then their, their listing will do a lot better.

02:23:22

If I, if I didn’t see the listing of someone just come to me, let’s say we’re at like some sort of a, an event venue. And they say, Hey, my listing is doing, it’s the same thing. I’m not making enough money. Sometimes it’s, I’m not getting enough views, but it’s, that is also, I’m not making enough money views don’t matter. So if I didn’t see the listing and they didn’t say anything else than that, I would say this one thing, it would probably be texts, texts, their photos, text, and title, and most important. A lot of people have professional photos. They just don’t have the right layout. They have too many photos, but almost always, unless they’ve seen me at my stuff, almost always, the text is really poorly done. It’s in big blurbs of block text. It’s too much flowery, fluffy texts in there. And this is, it’s like the third thing that guests sees. But I think this is really important for my conversion rate.

02:24:19

Now, what type of text should someone be having in their listing? You said you don’t want fluff. You don’t want big blocks of texts. How, how, how do you want a listings text to be able to attract clients?

02:24:31

My strategy is treat people like the big news media treats them and Facebook treats them. People have short attention spans. And so you have to grab their attention and you have to keep it. And how I do that is I tell them what they’re getting. And bullet point format, very easy to consume and absorb that’s it it’s as easy as that.

02:24:56

And going from the top, you said that the, the photos not to put too, too many photos in there is there. Cause I know Airbnb likes to have people include as many photos as you can, but you’re saying that you shouldn’t put too, too many photos. What, what, what type of photos are you trying to put in there?

02:25:14

I, the absolute minimum is 10, probably like 12 is I’m more comfortable with really small houses. Studios. It’s hard to fit 12 in without repeating information. And this case, I would take neighborhood photos. I have a blog about that. There is an art and there’s a way to optimize the bird photos. And I think most people should have at least one neighborhood photo, but at least 12 photos. And you really don’t need. Airbnb does say that they seem to hint that more photos is better. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. I’m more concerned about the conversion rate. So you don’t have to take I’m in my kitchen right now. You don’t have to take five angles of the kitchen. You just have to take one angle that gets 90% of it. If you can’t do that, then do two photos. But I’m never having more than two photos per room, two photos of this living room, normally one photo, but they have a hammock. So I would do two photos here. Definitely a lot of people do four angles of the bedroom. You don’t need that. You need one angle with a bedroom. And then another, like if it’s a, if it’s a room here, you’ll do one angle here. And then one angle, one angle here. So you get both, you get both corners and the sides of the walls, you get everything. Then just two photos from different sides.

02:26:38

Now for the, for the people that are listening on the other podcasts, this might be a little bit difficult to visualize, but on YouTube you can see daddy’s, Danny’s hand, hand gestures. So definitely

02:26:49

Graphics in there on the YouTube. Yeah. And for the, for the blog, for the podcasts folks, just, you’re going to go to the opposite corners of the room and you’re going to shoot in kind of a similar angle. So you get in each, in each photo, you get like two to two walls, two opposing walls.

02:27:10

Now going down, the next thing would be the title. What are you? What do you see being the biggest issues that most people have common when they are putting in their titles? And what is the optimized way of doing that?

02:27:23

Yeah. Titles is another one where basically everyone gets it wrong. I just did it. I have a blog post on my website. It’s one of my most popular ones. And I just did an accompanying Airbnb quick tip, which I do once a week, five minutes or less about the same subjects and the things that I would say remove any generic words like the 80 20 principle, I would say remove any generic words, add in amenities that you’re offering, add in an emoji of some sort to catch more people’s eyeballs and attention. And then you’re going to set yourself apart from the 90% of list to say two bedroom, one bathroom in sunset district, San Francisco or whatever. The funny thing is I did a, I rented an Airbnb plus one and they had the neighborhood in the Airbnb plus title. And the host loses control of this. I’m convinced it’s just some random employee is controlling this and they just give them kind of guidelines. And that’s that they’re already a plus. It doesn’t matter putting the neighborhood in most of the time. It doesn’t make sense either. They’ve already heard about it cause very famous or they’ve never heard about it. Neither of which it makes sense to include it.

02:28:44

So when people are searching on Airbnb, that they’re not looking for a specific neighborhood, they’re looking more for like amenities. Is that, is that what you’re saying?

02:28:53

No, I’m not saying that if someone is, let’s say so when I went to I already knew Palermo is like the premier neighborhood. So if there’s the first name you gotta hear about Claire hall, probably. So yeah. I indeed typed in Palermo neighborhood, but that takes me to the neighborhood of Lerma, which it’s rather not focused. So I specifically, I’ve been traveling a lot, so I know exactly where I want to stay, but it’s not a lot of people have claim on their title, but it’s not. So, so having clear on your title, isn’t going to bring you to first of the list, it’s bringing, bringing you to the neighborhood, not to.

02:29:29

So, so people think that by putting the specific location in their title, that that’ll help with the optimization, almost like you were to put into Google, like it, you know, Palermo, Airbnbs, they would think because that’s in their title, that it would come up as number one. But you’re saying that’s not true.

02:29:46

Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I wrote an article about how and why Airbnb is not Google. There’s significant differences. Airbnb is not Google. There’s a lot of SEO. People who try and get into their space and they’re like, yeah, I use the keywords beef up. The texts use the keywords man. And I’m like, no, it doesn’t work like that on Airbnb. It might. Airbnb’s never said it might rank them higher. Maybe, maybe they’re one spot. Let’s say it works. So maybe they’re a one or two spots higher than me. But my conversion rate is going to be way higher than theirs because I’m giving them the facts. What are they getting? I’m getting excited. Oh, I get, oh, Netflix school. Oh, I get a hammock in the, in the living room in indoor him. Oh, cool. The other listing keyword, the keyword beefing, the beefy keyword guys. I’ve got to read a paragraph and pick out, okay, that’s hammock, indoor hammock balcony. I’ve stopped reading here. So all I see is Netflix.

03:30:46

So, so really what? It sounds like everything from the photo, the photo has to be a hook. The title has to be a hook. And then the description has to be a hook. It’s not so much about what specifically you’re putting in there. It’s just, how can you attract a, your certain ideal client is kind of what you’re saying. Yeah.

03:31:03

Yeah. I would say to sum it up, deliver the most amount of information to the guest in the least amount of time.

03:31:11

Now, the, is there, do you also work on like the house rules and house manual? Is that stuff that you are also trying to optimize? Does that matter for conversions? Like how many house rules you have in your listing or, you know what, you know, if you’re putting a spare air mattress in the room or a pull-out couches, that stuff also put into consideration,

03:31:33

Everything you said is put into consideration. The house rules is an interesting point because I do, it’s a, it’s a sensitive area. It’s a legal, legal type areas. So I don’t mess with it too much though. I do a little bit, like if someone adds in checkout instructions on the additional rules, I’ll just remove that right away. It’s totally unnecessary. And I’ll add it to the house manual and the backend after they book. But I, I do think from my own house rules, from my own experience, I get people who ask me about, on what one of the house rules is. Hey, I require guests to have travels insurance. It protects them for lost luggage, canceled flights, et cetera. And every now and then someone will ask me about this. So guests read it. It’s pretty prominent. If you’ve ever been a guest, I’m sure most of your listeners have.

03:32:22

If you’ve ever been a guest, when you click out, they highlight the rules. They don’t make you click anything. But the rules are very highlighted. These are the house rules. I recommend you highlight the important house. Us a lot of people have like a legal contract in there. Well, I guess that protects you, but no, one’s reading that. And if you have some real like important house rules, guests are missing them. So if you go with that, legally subcontract pull out the really important rules, make it stupid people language and put it all the way at the top.

03:32:53

So we’ve covered some of the, you know, when I, when I’m thinking of optimizing a listing, I am thinking of, you know, the photos I’m thinking of the title. I’m thinking of the description. Are there other things that that host should be thinking of or that hosts should be considering that maybe they aren’t really as aware of that they should be optimizing?

03:33:12

Yes. The first thing is when Airbnb ads in selections, in the backend new new features, you should take advantage of these right away, tells the system, okay, you think Airbnb’s done? They said a while ago, changing your calendars makes you rank high. So that’s true. It still does that. But I get questions all the time. There are people are so worried about I’m going to connect to the smart or that’ll that’ll fix my issues. Well, no, Airbnb knows that nowadays it’s just like travel hacking. Like I think traveling is a waste of time. It used to be cool, but they figured it out. Now that the airline industries, you need to dedicate a lot of resources to make that work. So yeah, changing your calendar every day works. But to a small, to what degree? Probably very small, there is a new feature in the backend called accessibility.

03:34:05

So what I’m saying is, yeah, do the calendar. But also if there’s two listings and one is doing the calendar every day, well, both are doing the calendar every day. And then they add in accessibility features like they have, and this listing fills out the accessibility features. Well, okay. We recognize that this automatic tool is doing the calendars. This guy’s going in and manually, okay, we’re going to bump him up. Additionally, they’re getting, you know, he’s in a good reviews and whatnot. So there’s that I would say for your listeners, go in there. You might not have to click anything off, but go in there and see if you can. There’s probably something, that’s a lot of options on there. They added a new section on photos where you identify the spaces that you have available dining space, living here and patio, garage, exterior. And then you assign photos to those spaces. I go, go and do those. Those things matter as long as everything else, but those things as well matter. And those are, those are kind of the two, two newest things that Airbnb has added

03:35:02

With the calendar. I mean, that, that can be pretty tedious. And especially because a lot of our listeners are property managers to go in and change the, the pricing of every single listing. Can, can that be replaced by just using a dynamic pricing to automatically adjust it? Or does Airbnb know like, Hey, you’re not actually physically going in and changing this by a dollar or whatever.

03:35:24

Oh, well they don’t know what they do know. You can predict behavior. If the, if they’re changing the calendar by this amount every day at 12:37 AM, it’s pretty obvious. But I really think it has a small degree of importance go to go-to. So for your property managers, your hosts with 1, 2, 3, 5 homes, any homes go to price labs.com, sign up for the 30 day free trial enter in, I think all capitals optimize. You’ll get a little discount on your first month. I think it’s like 15 or 20 bucks per listing. And it gets cheaper with each ad listing. If your listing is more than about 80 bucks a night, 70 or 80 bucks a night, depending on your occupancy, it will be, it will, it will work out cheaper than the other services like beyond pricing and wheelhouse who charge 1% of your revenue. And then after you do that, go to my YouTube and type in, go to the playlist price labs.

03:36:26

And I have what I do is on Wednesday. I go in and I look at my occupancy, my future occupancy and my base rates. And I changed it. And I go through that process in my head, I verbalize what’s in my head and how I do things. And, and they have a lot of customizations, but I keep it simple at the beginning. All you do is this, there’s all these customizations. I have another video. Once you get into those customizations, I haven’t broken down the 12 or so customizations they have, but don’t use Airbnb smart pricing, use price lapse

03:36:57

With the price labs. So even though you, you, you recommend going into the calendars yourself, you also still recommend using a dynamic pricing for those people that have multiple listings.

03:37:09

Oh, if you use a dynamic pricing, they update your calendar themselves. So it takes care of the automatic updating that I mentioned.

03:37:17

Okay. Okay. I was just clarifying because we, I, I, I thought when you said that the dynamic pricing, they Airbnb knows that it’s automatically doing it. So they, they, they kind of frowned frowned upon that.

03:37:31

I definitely don’t frown upon it. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to keep your calendar updated. The last thing Airbnb wants is someone that just happened to me. This calendar is open in August. I inquired with the host and he said, no, it’s not available. So he blocked the days off, but I really want this one of this listing. I waited a few months. I just inquired. The last week dates were open. I was like, perfect dates, November 9th. I was like, oh great, November 9th. I inquire. And he’s like, I got a check the next morning. He’s like, no, I’m not available. So everybody doesn’t want that. They want you to be updating your calendar. And that hurts. This is hurting the host. He just got two requests for one month. Each that’s a lot of money for Airbnb, the company. So this host is losing Airbnb, the company money.

03:38:11

W what would you say? Like all this, all this backend. So we have the calendars, you said opting into the, the new settings that Airbnb offers. What about, what about the types of restriction that you’re putting? I know that, you know, like if you could set it for flexible or, or very strict, does that matter as well for how your listing is going to be optimized?

03:38:32

Yeah. Pretty much everything matters. But as you just touched on the cancellation policy, I believe that no enemies never said it. I believe that they give a boost to flexible. They’ve done enough testing and how they, I can, I can see how the platform is moving. They seem to preference flexible listings. I highly recommend that there’s only one listing that I have, which I don’t have flexible one out of six because it just, it just seemed to attract crap guests and had a ton of cancellations. So that one’s a moderate, I almost, I never recommend strict, moderate or flexible go with flexible if at all possible.

03:39:13

So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve covered all, all of these different aspects. What would you say though, is the big, big things? Is it, is it just the photos title description that, that a host really should be aware of? And then everything else is just kind of a little bit extra.

03:39:28

Yeah. The 80 20 rule says photos, title text, for sure. We’ve only talked about the online listing though. Airbnb is it’s half the battle. The other half is your reviews, which are reflective of more. So your hosting strategy. Now, your online listing, you get the reservation from your optimized listing. You get reviews from your hosting strategies and billings. And that’s a whole nother topic that we could do. We can do all. I’ll be I’ll return in a few months, so we can do that topic. But the biggest thing there is, so listen up, everyone who’s listening, listen up now, turn, turn the volume up, turn the TV off, park your car, parked the car or whatever, whatever you’re doing extra. This is very important. It’s very underutilized. It’s a digital guide books, not to be confused with the guidebook and Airbnb, which is recommendations. The digital guidebook is something that I send to the guests in a link after they, after they book three days before they check in, I send them a link that says, here’s your guide book?

04:40:35

That checking information is here. Parking information. I say, Wi-Fi information is here. So that means they have to click on it because that’s the first thing that everyone wants to know. And this is under utilized. For example, I’m in a place now it’s beautiful. It’s the best interior design placed in the area. For sure. And the whole, the host was very good. He’s a Superhost. He has a, let’s see if you can see that, see those papers on the wall next to the white bag. So those are his manual house house manual, which is okay. It’s it’s like level one level two, those that digital house manual, because you can make changes easier to it. Now his looks nice. They’re laminated and whatnot, but they’re easily forgettable. You’re you’re always referring. Well, often you’re referring to the Airbnb app and you, yeah, you can update it.

04:41:31

And oftentimes they don’t look that good. They look kind of after awhile and include like, just one more thing. There’s a bunch of more things. That’s, but I feel like my argument wasn’t strong and that’s all, I’ll add one more thing. You can also, with your recommendations, you can add in directions right away. So here, oh, that sounds good. I’ll go find it on my map and whatnot in the digital guidebook, but not the thing you can do, which is big ads, the guest experience. However, the guest experience is your city that reflects in the review. They can just have it on their phone. They click the address, bring me their bam or the easy.

04:42:06

Very cool. Yeah. I love that. You brought that point up optimization is there there’s the front end optimization, which is what’s going to hook those people in, but then there’s your backend optimization. So once they’re in, how are you going to be able to create their experience enough and get those reviews so that it can boost your listing up? What, what would you say that the reviews are? I mean, the reviews, obviously that that’s a big portion, but as far as your, your front end versus your backend, what’s the weight on both of those,

04:42:35

As far as your,

04:42:39

How, how it’s, how it’s going to, how it’s going to affect your listings performance from front-end optimization versus first backend optimization.

04:42:47

For me, it’s, they’re totally different worlds. They’re like the front end is like before the review, before the reservation, that’s how you get them. And then, and then the end is your hosting strategies. So first optimization of listing, you get the reservation. Good. Now you’re hosting strategies. You get the reviews. They’re like, they’re like totally different. If you have one and not the other, it’s just not going to work.

04:43:09

Now, when, when people are working with you, when you, when you are working with them, just to clarify, you’re not just working on front end optimization, you’re also working on the backend optimization as well. How, how they’re performing as a hosts.

04:43:25

It depends. I have, I used to only do front end optimization through my optimization reports. Start-up advanced and super host, but after, you know, after a while went by, I realized, okay, these people need also the hosting strategies. So I created elevate hosts, which takes in it’s a Superhost package, which is the premium front end package. And then also I do think that I work on pricing. I create a digital guidebook for you. I set you up for automatic messages, coordinate with your cleaners, give you some other. It gives you an amenities checklist. These are the things that you should have. So that’s the full package.

04:44:06

Very cool. And w we’ll we’ll get Danny on another show to talk more about the backend optimization, but don’t want to take up too, too much more of your time because you are traveling. You are, you are a busy guy. I’m just curious for the listeners and myself, how is Airbnb? Because right now you’re in Metagene Columbia. What, what is, how is Airbnb more like in the south America area? Is it, is it as popular as in the U S what’s what’s the, the view on it? The stance and how are the listings in general? Like, how are people performing?

04:44:39

And Airbnb is more popular outside the U S than it is inside the us. So, and you, you, you, you’re talking about specifically about Latin America. Yes. You want me to hit on, so the, the listings here, well, first of all, they’re very cheap. I can rent a very nice house here in a service department with a balcony or a 6, 7, 8, $900 thousand dollars, which is what I paid for my room bedroom in San Francisco. It’s, it’s comparable, it’s comparable. I would say the decor sometimes is lacking in these cities. That’s what separates the hosts here. They’re really nicely interior design, whereas in the U S and these more developed countries, pretty much most hosts have the interior design, the house looks nice. It’s updated, it’s modern. That would, that would get the biggest difference. I see.

04:45:29

Okay. But as far as how people are, are performing, is it, is it a very competitive, because a lot of the listeners on this show, they are very competitive. They they’re all about optimizing. They’re all about trying to, you know, get there. They’re listening to the top. Is that, do you get, do you see the same type of competitiveness down in Columbia as well?

04:45:48

Most of the people who buy from me are from the us, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Ireland, you know, these, these European countries and, and the English speaking countries. However, I think that has to do with the fact that my services are expensive. So this is why I’ve also, I do for you to everything else is free. All my blogs are free. There’s no secrets that I’m hiding. I’ve pretty much written about everything. And then the book is also cheap. So you don’t need to pay me at all. And actually I’d prefer you don’t because I have plenty of business. I don’t want anymore. Everything’s free out there. The only difference is at this point, you’re paying for your time. If you, if you want to pay me, yeah, I can do it for you. For sure. It will be expensive. But if you value your time, that much you’ll pay me and I’ll do it for you.

04:46:40

If you have the time or you don’t have the money, it takes some time. And read my blog, watch the videos free, read my book for sure. That’s where I take everything from my blog and all my information. And I organize it so that the organization is worth something. And then apply, apply what you can to your own listing, and then reach out to me. But only if you’ve made a concerted effort to do it yourself, because a lot of people reach out to me and they’re like, I read your book. Can you like help me? And I’ll look at their title, the first thing. And it’s like two bedroom, amazing spacious light house on the beach. And I’m like, no, you didn’t, you didn’t give me enough effort for me to spend my time working with you. So if you do that and then reach out to me on my website chat, and you’ve made an effort I could tell right away, then I’ll, yeah, this, this, this like these three things. If it’s just two or three things, I’ll just tell you do these things. Or, or if it’s something more complicated, I’ll send you a blog post or a YouTube.

04:47:39

Great. And I’ll, I’ll include Danny’s website and the book down below the book, definitely Danny lays it all all out. It’s one of the, one of the top it’s going to be probably one of the top rated books on Amazon, 128 reviews right now. So

04:47:55

The top rated top rated and most highlighted book on air, on air me. It doesn’t have the most reviews yet, but soon, but it’s the highest.

04:48:02

It is the highest rated. So that, that it says, it says a lot. And I’m great, but I just want to thank you so much, Danny, for coming on here and educating the audience you provide just so much tremendous value with the free content that you’re putting out there on YouTube and the blog posts then with the book as well. So everything that everybody needs like Danny was saying, it’s, it’s out there, it’s out there, but it’s what, what do you value if you value your time, then you know, then, then maybe you don’t want to have to go through a whole book and try to learn this. If you want one more personal coaching, it’s out there, but there, there is a cost with that. But Danny is taking the time out to give us this free resources, free content for those of you that like to travel on the go and listen.

04:48:41

So definitely want to thank him, send him a message. Leave a comment down below in the video. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me or Danny, and we’d be happy to help you guys out, but without further ado. And until next time, host nation, keep on hosting Hopi hosts, benefit from the show. If you found value, please go on over to iTunes, leave us a review and let us know what you enjoy about the show. If you’d like to talk to hosts that have been featured in these episodes, as well as the community, going over to our Facebook group, the host nation.