AIRBNB TIPS FOR BEGINNERS
In this section, I’m going to give you three big tips so you can get started with your very first Airbnb property. The first tip is a cliche bit of advice that I’m modifying to actually make it useful. The one that I hear like when people ask for one tip that I would give people when they're first starting out. A lot of gurus say, “Just start.” Cool advice, but not really usable. Just start okay, but I’m scared or I don't know enough. You have reasons why you're not starting yet, so let's modify this. “Just start” should really be that you need to get comfortablewith the fact that you'll actually never know enough until you get started. A friend of mine recommends that you should know just enough to be dangerous. That's really good advice. You can learn a lot from this book,but if you don't have an Airbnb property of your own if you're not getting guests in and out talking to guestsdoing pricing cleaning the rooms and stuff eighty percent possibly more of this book won't make full sense if you don't have the context or the experience.
Get started
Airbnb is safe enough that even if you didn't know much at all you could start an Airbnb property, make enough money, not fail, but not feel bad enough to be sad. You could fail forward and survive so you should pick up an Airbnb property sooner than later for the sake of learning not necessarily for the sake ofsucceeding. It's really hard to fail that much in this industry but having that property and then going back through this book and reviewing the content, you will learn so much faster. The goal isn't to be good today it's to be good like as soon as humanly possible so you can make a lot of money as soon as possible. I am tellingyou, the soonest way to be good at this is to have a property and learn through trial and error. That's going to be your best friend. Get started, start making some money and learning some lessons on the way.
Listing descriptions
Number two is the copy in your listing descriptions. Everybody that's good copy people that are good. It's totally cool to be a copycat and there's a lot of useful applications for this you don't have to just copysomeone like me with over 100 properties you can copy people just have a few maybe even a super host that just has one. There's a lot that you can learn from other people and see I teach my students to do bothmarket research and they do competitor research when they jump into a market to do Airbnb maybe for thefirst time or when they're expanding. Both market research and researching competition involve looking atAirbnb listings other people's properties.
We're looking for specific things. First we're trying to find out if there's going to be a need in the market where we can fill it by having property and then making money. You want to see if your competition's any good so you want to look at people's listings you want to see are their photos good what amenities do they offer like different things like that. If you're just learning and you really cannot size up your competition, then they're all your mentors. You go through the listings and go what are in these listings: do they have beds, do they havecouches, do you have tvs, what's on the tv, do they have like smart tvs or what are they do they stream? How fast is their wi-fi, what do they have in their kitchens, do they have coffee or what? Look at listings find listings that you like and just take thorough notes and copy them. Copy all of the details and go through that wholelisting just get ready to copy it even down to the color of the wall. If you want to copy, remember that imitation is the best form of flattery, they should just take the compliment. If you find a listing that looks just like theirs and you can learn running that listing. I think that's a great way to get started and then of course as you go you're going to learn what's good and what's bad. You're going to learn what you like and what your personal identity will be in your business. You're going to start to do unique stuff you're going to start being a thought leader in your design and like in the way that you run your business and you won't need to copy other people. Once you've figured out your own thing, that’s when you know enough that when you look at other competition you can size them up. You can consider new cities you are looking to expand into and do your research on the current competition. You might look at the competition and realize they don't know as much as you do. You could totally out outclass this competition and that gives you confidence to go break it intomarkets.
Copy first, figure your own thing out and then keep that competitor research thing going as you expand your business.
Know your Why
Number three has a few moving parts to this and so let me break it down for you. It's all centered around yourwhy you need to know why this matters to you. Why you're building your business, what your plan is going to be and what you're really willing to commit to doing something new.
I’m going to give you my story as a good context for you to learn what I mean by this. When I started myAirbnb business it was by accident. I wasted two years of my life right before that I started a business in the newspaper industry. Before that I went homeless in 2009. This is really where this is rooted see I sold newspaper subscriptions right out of college dropped out of music school sold newspaper subscriptions. I got into sales management was not good at it and then ended up getting demoted. I quit that job, tried to start my own thing, failed, went homeless, lived in a Mazda mpv van for a while. Then I lived with a girlfriend and was in a toxic relationship that was not good for me but that's how I got here. Then 2010 rolls around I started business in the newspaper industry and succeed. We grew for a few years by the time 2013 was rolling around I had finally built my first business that made a million dollars a year in revenue in the newspaper industry. In 2013 I’m feeling great: I start hiring people from California and Michigan and Wisconsin and I’d moved them to Houston where my headquarters was. I picked up apartments furnished them and gave people free rent for eight weeks or so as they came to work for me as a way to settle in. I was doing my own corporate housing so at the end of 2014 I had some empty apartments because I didn't plan ahead and I needed to get the rent paid so I started putting them on Airbnb.
That's where I started to waste two years of my life. My Airbnb listings were very profitable. They were doing really well but me and all my ego and my lack of plan I wanted to keep doing the newspaper thing. That business died last year and I did not see the future there, but because I was so bent out of shape on building this newspaper business, I really gave no attention to the Airbnb space. I wasn't looking at the numbers I wasn't really thinking about it but I was making a ton of money on right under my nose I didn't start building until the super bowl hit 2017. Then I realized there's going to be a lot of money that weekend I should pick up more properties to make more money. That’s what I did. I went from three doors to 10 doors made 15 grand that weekend. Then it finally all started to roll into my brain. I realized I can build this to a lot more and moreproperties more cities. That's when my vision really started to come together. You want to get there as fast aspossible.
You need to get an Airbnb property to get some context but right now you should start visualizing what your plan will be. Are you going to pick up an Airbnb property to get more and then quit your job? Will you invest a lot of time into doing this and becoming an expert in building something out? Are you going to do Airbnb just to learn more about real estate and get some cash flow so you can buy some properties? There are a lot of paths here that all involve Airbnb, but you need to start having a plan. I believe in having some big audacious goal 10 years from now that just kind of makes you excited that you don't even understand it. That's okay, I’mgoing to be billionaire 10 years from now. Something that can change because you don't have actual you don't have like a road map to that but then everything that gets closer from 10 years away to 5 years three years out one year out should become more and more realistic and more and more achievable. You should have more of an understanding how to get there. For example, you might say that you want to have 7 or 20Airbnb properties a year from now. Your plan is to start with one and do you should have three month, six month, nine month goals. Right now you spend the next couple of days learning everything you can about theAirbnb business in this book. Then spend the next couple of weeks setting up your Airbnb entity, your llc, get your ein number. Do all that but also talk to single family homeowner landlords and try to get a landlord to tell you yes they'll let you rent their property. After a couple weeks of finding a landlord, you want to get that yes and you want that lease started you want the place furnished within the next 30 days. That's your 30 daygoal, then you spend then the next month getting guests, learning from trial and error and educating yourself about hosting. Then two months From now you should have enough context to how to Airbnb becauseyou've had guests from that two months.
From there you start to reimagine what you want to do. Do you want more properties? Do you want bigger ones? Do you want smaller ones? What do you like about hosting what in the space do you think you want to change? What kind of unique value do you think you can give? As you create an identity in this Airbnb space, you're going to start to do stuff that other hosts don't just naturally do. You're going to start adding value inways that you don't think that other hosts do so that way your guests will love their stay with you and choose to come back and stay with you again. We're in hospitality what we do is we give a person a place to staywhen they're away from home just like a hotel does. That's hospitality space. People who do really good in hospitality are empathetic, they like people, they're imaginative and creative They can give someone a good relaxed atmosphere for them to fall asleep, a productive atmosphere to work within, because of work from home now and they're adaptive and responsive to their guests.
Be that person but pay attention to what people's needs are. This will allow you to guide yourself to start being the best host possible and the start doing the unique stuff that other hosts won't do right. They'resaying there's things that I cannot do with 100 and something properties that I would like to do because it'd be more intimate, but we cannot at scale have a really intimate relationship with our guests. When you're small there's things that you can do that I cannot which is going to be actually really good for you. My whole point here is you want to have a why. Why does this matter to you and that'll guide your values. Maybe you want to do these things for the world and you want to do that through my Airbnb business. Your values will help you decide what you're going to do for your guests. The ritz carlton has the value that no is not the answer. No person within ritz carlton is allowed to say that's not my job. It's part of their values. Build it in your mind first. Start to take a couple of steps. Understand that you cannot really understand enough to be good at this until you get an Airbnb property, learn and fail forward. You're not going to really fail that muchyou're just going to learn maybe bump your like toe on a piece of furniture literally or figuratively along the way. If you want to learn more not only this book, but I have a private Facebook group with over 18,000 people in it. If you want to talk to hosts in your neighborhood in your backyard, you can go there and ask some questions and other hosts will answer for you too not just me.
I also recommend that you start in your own backyard. I think it's the best way to get started because since you don't know a lot about hospitality, you don't know the nuances of why people go everywhere, but you know enough about your local area that you can be a good host there. You've got a support group and people that can help you out in favors that you can call. I think the best way to get started is in your backyard instead of going to a new city super scary learning the business and learning the city no that control your variables. Learn to AirBnb wherever you are and then once you feel like you understand it enough, you can go to a city that you think you would do good in. You should know enough about Airbnb now that you canactually do the research required to find out if you like that city or not. I have over 100 properties on Airbnb I don't own any of them. I convince landlords to give me their properties. I’m a regular tenant I sign a lease like everyone else but I just get permission to Airbnb them. It's the only difference. Then I furnish, them make them look cool, put them on Airbnb. I charge more than I pay in rent and I keep what's in the middle. That's how I do it making millions a year with properties I don't own and you can do the same thing. You do not have to buy property but you can use the whole rent thing to pick up 100 properties like me. Then take the millions a year that you're getting on Airbnb and then go buy some property if you want to.
