A total of 1 review of this product on Reddit.
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Congrats on your purchase.
(1) Should have thought of that earlier. Just kidding. Since you’re not in a tourist area where servicing airbnb’s is a cottage industry, I would first see if you can find a regular housekeeping person or company. Cleaning a rental is no different than cleaning any other house, right? But you will have to figure out what to do about the linens. Maybe your housekeeper can bring the linens home and wash them, or drop them off at a laundry service. That’s something you’ll need to negotiate. Count on needing at least two full sets of linens and towels so you can ping-pong between guests. If there is a local craigslist, check for ads there and place one yourself. If there’s not, there’s probably buy-sell-trade and services-wanted/services-offered facebook pages for that area.
You’re going to need a lockable closet where you can securely store consumables for your housekeeper to get to – toilet paper, paper towels, soaps, etc. I installed shampoo and body wash dispensers in my unit and that’s worked out well.
My brother had a bed-bug scare at his beach rental, so to avoid that you should consider getting special mattress covers for both the mattress and box springs.
(2) That’s something that you’ll have to figure out on your own and will probably evolve over time. My unit is in a ski town 6.5 hours away, and it was a dump when I got it, so I was up there every few weeks for several months getting it ready. Nowadays I try to get up there at least once a month, but I’m the sort that wants to stay on top of issues at the property, plus I just love going up there.
(3) Pretty much. Since you don’t have other competing units in the area, you’re just gonna have to throw a dart and see what happens. If you start getting lots of bookings, raise your rates. If you don’t, lower them.
(4) Because I’m 6.5 hours away, the only interaction I ever have is through the app, or sometimes text messages. So I’m 100% remote. I have a housekeeping company, and the jurisdiction I’m in requires a local 24h contact, so I have a company that handles that for me, and they stop by once a week to check in on the place. The housekeeping company is set up on Airbnb as my co-host, so they can see my Airbnb calendar and figure out on their own when to turn the unit over. My previous housekeeper didn’t work that way and I used to send text messages with the turnover dates.
(5) Thumbs up on the automation. Single best thing I’ve bought for my property is a LockState Remote Lock. It is the shit. The lock runs on four AA batteries, and mounts in the door like a regular door lock. Has a handle and a physical key, and it also has a keypad. The lock wakes up periodically or if an event occurs (keypad mostly) and talks to the server using your wifi network. The server meanwhile, syncs up with Airbnb. So if somebody books the place, Airbnb’s server talks to the LockState server. The LockState server generates a four digit code that’s valid from the check-in time on the arrival date and ends at the checkout time on the departure date, and it sends a canned message to the guest that says “Hello ((guest)), welcome to the place, here’s the address, here’s your personalized access code, blah blah blah.” That happens within a minute or two. And then the next time the door lock wakes up, it gets the updated guest schedule. There’s a bunch of things you can configure. I have set mine to wake up once an hour, which is the default and works well for me. Theres all sorts of text and email notifications you can set up. I have mine configured to send me an email the first time a guest unlocks the door (so I know they made it in) but every time the housekeeper or local management company does. If somebody enters an incorrect code, I get a notification for that (is the guest having troubles? random person trying to get in?) It is amazing and all of this happens without any intervention on my part, even for last-minute bookings. And because the housekeeper is a co-host, I could be completely hands-off if I wanted.
I just installed web-enabled thermostats too so i can turn the heat down during vacancies, warm the place up in anticipation of guest arrivals, etc
In my opinion, you don’t need a full-time person to handle four units. If I had four units in the same market, I’d still use contractors. Maybe have a backup housekeeping company if you wind up with four turnovers on the same day.
