HOW TO PREVENT AIRBNB PARTIES

It is nearly every day in every city that I know of in the united states that Airbnb hosts are dealing with parties. There's been a massive spike since Covid 19 of people throwing parties in Airbnb properties with totaldisregard for the host or the platform. The problem here is that if you cannot prevent these parties Airbnb will remove you as a host from the platform because they're going to say it's your fault even though it's their guests throwing the parties and violating the terms of service. I know it's completely upside down but right now that's the way it is. Airbnb is not in control of this so I’m going to teach you how to take control of your business. In this section, I’m going to show you what I’ve been doing to prevent parties prevent people from even getting into my home so the party never happens because prevention is by far more valuable than cure in this situation. You want a combination approach to prevent parties because it is that important one bad party causes a neighbor to call you in and you get investigated.

If Airbnb doesn't like what they find from that investigation (which means if your dog and pony show isn't good enough) they can remove your listing. If you try to relist that listing, they will remove your entire account.I have friends who can no longer host their homes that they purchased because of parties. Big properties are much more at risk of parties than small ones but everybody's dealing with it. Even my small one bedroomapartments can have people trying to throw parties.

Here's what we're doing to prevent parties. First we have a text message like inbox message on Airbnb levelof screening that we've amped up so anybody without multiple positive reviews anybody who's local anybody whose account is generally new, we will reach out to them after they book and we'll say “Hi we see that you're local or hi we see that you're new or we see you don't have reviews yet I would like to remind you to read our house rules before arriving. I would also like to ask that you confirm that you read our house rules here in the message thread. I would also like to repeat that we have a no smoking and no party policy due to Covid 19. As a result of the many attempts to throw a party, we have on-site security preventing the limit of preventing the breaking of the per person limit in each of our units.”

With one property we'll say we have on-site security preventing access of more than six people to this homedue to fire code or due to Covid and then that message is like our first line of defense to let people know that someone will be there to prevent them from coming in. I can achieve this because my business model rental arbitrage allows me to get batches of properties in the same area. I have four townhomes in Philadelphia thatI put a person in front of and that person is preventing people from accessing these homes beyond the you know the limited number of people that are allowed there every weekend. We have a problem at this four-town home and even last night at three a.m someone tried to throw a party and our security guy had to handle it. Last last week we had two party attempts at these four properties. We have apartment complexes here in Dallas that we're going to be adding security to, that's been working.

We will be using extra technologies as we always do. I want to talk to you about that mix here. The minute system for noise monitoring is a great tool for a couple reasons. For weekdays noise violations when peopleare being too loud on weekdays. Not throwing a party or because you've only budgeted security on the weekends this weekday system can let you know if a party's about to happen on the weekdays and you can dispatch someone this also allows you to use a combination of security guard and technology to cover a wider territory with less staff. You could have one security guard that goes between homes because youcannot have a security guard standing in front of one home's door effect effectively you're spending $50-$60on having the security guard there for a few hours. That's eating into your profits a lot. 

Let's say you have five homes inside of Dallas in just different neighborhoods but you know generally close by, around 20 minutes away from each other. At max you know within a 20 minute radius. What you can do is have a security phone and you can set up minute point systems or minute systems in all of these homes and then you have them all go to the same security phone where they get push notifications if it's too loud you have that security guard hang out in the most you unit dense area possible where he's actually in front. Maybe you have four or five apartments in one building he hangs out there as his home base but then every hour or every two hours he goes from home to home and spends five or ten minutes in front of it just to check for abnormal activity. Then the noise monitors will let you know if there's abnormal amount of noise and that person could then respond to that immediately your security guard would contact that guest through thephone through the Airbnb platform and say “You guys are being too loud I want to make sure you're not throwing a party. This is a firm warning because we will remove anybody beyond the limit of say six persons.You also need to quiet it down because quiet hours after 11 you know the neighborhood could call and make a complaint thank you for your cooperation.“ You give them maybe 10 minutes to quiet it down and these noise systems give you real-time feedback on how loud it is that security person will start to immediately make their way towards that property just in case. This is kind of your rapid escalation protocol and at that point, you might have to remove some people when they get there if it hasn't quieted down so a point systemor the minute system and a security guard together can allow one person to cover broader territory. I find that it is better for you as a host to prevent people from even getting into the home to get loud in the first place soI do recommend that you use my business model.

Do rental arbitrage and rent out the whole floor of the building have 20 apartments and then pay for security because your cost per apartment for security is much lower if you're guarding 20 doors instead of four. If you're paying someone say 12 or 15 an hour just to be at the front of the building to prevent parties fromhappening divide that cost by 20 right or instead of dividing it by four, the weighted cost for your security goes down. This is much more achievable at scale so to prevent parties you do a pre-guest arrival screening,and you make them confirm they have to be communicating with you on the platform before they arrive. If they don't communicate you can go to Airbnb and you can actually havetheir booking removed for violation of terms of service, because if they're if they're unavailable then there's a risk that this person's a third-party booking or they're refusing to accept your house rules. You're allowed typically to cancel any reservation up to three times per year per listing because you're uncomfortable. If a guest does something that is a violation of your house rules you can cancel anybody's reservation for violation of your house rules which gives youunlimited cancellation power. Getting a firm dialogue prior to a guest arrival allows you to do this. We have people who confirmed said they will follow those house rules, then six hours or 12 hours later they cancelbecause their friends realize they don’t want to get caught so they cancel the reservation. We still get a little bit of money from it even if they go book someone else's property. This level of screening has been effective for us. here If people think that they can sneak around and get away with parties or extra guests, they'll still try to show up to the property. That's when security helps. Security is still needed even with this protocol. Theminute systems are great for monitoring noise where you don't expect it to be a problem, but you still want tocover your bases.

You might be thinking, “Sean why don't you just put a three-day minim stay or four-day minim stay or takeinstant book off for all these different things?” We've tried that. We've tried a four-day minim stay over the weekend at properties and the amount of revenue that we lose is insane. The last thing you want to do is make it harder to book on Airbnb for all the good guests. You want to keep a one-night stay, you want to keep an extremely expensive weekend night, you want to keep your instant book on for the sake of seo. For the sake of your search you want to make sure that you can make as much money as possible on yourproperty and it is more profitable to have a security guard outside of your home from 9 pm until 1am on the weekends (Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday). It's cheaper to do that every single weekend than it is to try to enforce a four-day minim night stay because you make so much more money on the one or two nighters and plenty of those guests are still good guests. If 20 of your guests misbehave and 10 try to throw a party but you get twice as much money because you allowed that risk but you managed it, you're going to come out much better now. Because we've done this, we were able to get the neighbors in one of our communities to give us recommendations and give us support so when we got investigated for a party because we inherited a party house that was a party house for about a year. When we signed the lease, we were not aware of this because nobody told us the first weekend we had the home there was a party and Airbnb tried to shut that listing down for a party violation. I showed them my lease and said I’m the new tenant here then I showed him text messages from the neighbors thanking us for having someone outside preventing parties.

The neighbors told us we were really awesome, we got community support and we were able to keep a listingthat we were going to lose. Airbnb cares about themselves they care about not getting sued by some neighbor they care about not getting their rights to Airbnb taken away in cities. They don't actually care aboutyour one listing or your hundred listings. You're still so small compared to losing an entire city. They don'twant your problem guests.

Let’s talk about the fact that Airbnb doesn't criminally background check their guests. We can talk about the fact that anybody can create an Airbnb account they can use a fake credit card they can book your place lieessentially commit fraud by defrauding you out of your property. Then they can throw a party and cause a bunch of damage that is not your fault. I think everybody can agree that that's not your fault and Airbnbknows it's not your fault but Airbnb is not in control of this. Airbnb has not created a solution to preventing bad users from joining the platform because otherwise it would make it too hard to use the platform and theywould stop getting good guests. What they're doing is they're dumping it on us because they need to make the world think that they care. Make the world think that they're doing something about it, but since they're not in control they would just shave off hosts because there's always going to be hosts to join the platform. If you lose your good users you lose them forever is their worry, so until Airbnb figures it out and grows up and becomes an adult about this we are the ones on the hook. This is what you can do to make a lot of money,but make sure that you don't have any problems. You can actually bill a guest for your security guard the one that you spend all that money on to prevent parties whenever someone breaks your rules to try to throw a party. You can bill them for it and now your actual your costs to prevent parties becomes free and or profitable. We'll talk about it again in a future section, too because this is some awesome stuff. I’m going tomake you more money on Airbnb than anybody you know. I’ve done this for six years and I’m good at it.there's not a single person on the internet who can teach you to Airbnb like I can because I learn everythingfrom like trial and error first and then I bring you what I can. I condense my knowledge down into value here.