Airbnb hosts running profitable businesses share the software tools they use to work as little as 6 hours a month
Hospitable, a property management software, helps him keep his workload to 90 minutes a week.
Other short-term rental hosts BI talked to use PriceLabs and Rankbreeze for efficient management.
Todd Baldwin estimates he spends 90 minutes a week self-managing his two Airbnb units, which bring in about $9,000 a month combined.
Assuming six hours of work a month, that comes out to an hourly rate of $1,500.
His setup is unique in that his two short-term rentals are attached to his primary home, a duplex outside Seattle. He and his family live in one unit and rent the other, and he converted the garage into a studio apartment that's also listed on Airbnb.
The rental income more than covers his mortgage, meaning his family lives for free in their own home, and leaves him with about $5,000 in profit each month. Baldwin, who spent years wholesaling real estate and is now focused on spending time with his two kids and building his family's "dream home," considers himself financially independent.
"I don't actually have to work anymore," he told Business Insider.
He and other Airbnb hosts shared the software tools they use to run efficient and profitable short-term rental businesses. BI confirmed each investor's property ownership and rental income.
1. Hospitable
Baldwin said that Hospitable is the tool that keeps his Airbnb workload light. It's a property management software that allows him to set up automated messages for guest communication and manage bookings, tasks, and team reminders.
Here's his calendar view. Guest names have been removed for privacy.
Todd Baldwin via Hospitable
The gray blocks are past bookings, while the green blocks are future bookings. He only uses Airbnb, but the platform allows users to sync their Vrbo and Booking.com calendars to prevent double-bookings.
Whenever a guest books a unit, they receive a welcome message. Baldwin is not sending this every time; he created a template in Hospitable that will automatically fill in the guest's name and land in their inbox. The day before their stay, they'll receive another message with check-in instructions. While it looks like it's coming from the host, again, it's simply a template that Baldwin has already created.
He also gets a lot out of the task management feature, which allows him to assign cleaners to his units.
"The biggest work is setting up the systems, which we did in a couple of weeks, and hiring cleaners," said Baldwin. "But once you have a great cleaning crew and you have all of your messaging locked in and your check-in instructions, it's pretty much automated and doesn't require much of our time at all."
2. PriceLabs
PriceLabs is a tool that helps you accurately price your rental units based on demand and seasonality in your area. Manny Reyna, who lives with his family in Japan but owns rentals in Texas, uses it to manage his portfolio from abroad.
"It automates the pricing for you, so you don't have to go into the apps and keep updating the prices — and it's meant to increase booking rates," said Reyna. "Say there's some special event going on. It'll raise the prices for you to meet that demand. Or, if nothing's really going on in the area, it'll lower the prices for you so that your listing stays competitive."
The tool does more than recommend prices. It has a market dashboard that helps you analyze markets for investment potential. It's how San Diego-based real estate investor Kent He chose to buy short-term rentals in Scottsdale. It even helped him select the specific neighborhood in the desert city.
He used PriceLabs to look at the top 200 listings in Scottsdale. Then, he did a keyword search in the reviews section of each listing. Specifically, he was looking for how many times the word "location" popped up in the reviews.
"It's generally a positive connotation associated with that word," he explained, so he was looking for properties with a lot of mentions of "location" in the reviews. "Now, you know which neighborhoods people are raving about."
3. Rankbreeze
Another tool He likes to use is a listing optimization software called Rankbreeze. It helps hosts fine-tune the description of their property and discover amenities that guests in their area are looking for.
One of his favorite features is the A/B testing, which lets you change your cover photo or pet policy, for example, to see how it affects your Airbnb ranking.
"On Google, no one really goes to page five or 10 after searching. It's the same for Airbnb. You want to be ranked as high as possible," he explained. "I use Rankbreeze to play around with my cover photos to see which one allows me to rank highest. I also play around with the listing title. For example, during colder months, I might highlight that we have a heated pool."
You could offer the best Airbnb property in your area, but if it's not properly marketed, guests may never see it.
Especially with the cover photo, "don't waste that space," said He. "Be intentional with your listing title and call out to your target customer so that they're more likely to click. Because if they never click into your listing, they'll never book with you."
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