4 ms·

Good, concise write up with real numbers which is nice. But the woman who is doing all that cleaning and contact work for $200/month is the one making this poss

by atwebb 13y ago

Good, concise write up with real numbers which is nice. But the woman who is doing all that cleaning and contact work for $200/month is the one making this possible (so it seems) and that could quickly eat up profits (though the ROI is great enough that there's lots of room there). EDIT: Also, is there currently an AirBnb manager market? Similar to the cleaner/manager he has, it would be great for people to invest remotely. Do research, fly in to inspect potential properties, purchase and give the cleaner/manager a nice cut? I know there are property management companies but there seems to be some extra finesse (and possible discretion) needed here that I haven't seen from PM companies before.

205guy 13y ago
Indeed. Seems like the place to be is AirBnB property manager. Have 6-12 properties to manage and you have a full-time income and perhaps part-time work. Of course, I would start out low ($200/month) then raise and raise the fee when you become indispensible. The absentee owner is essentially just an investor with the capital outlay. And being far away and totally reliant on the cleaner/manager, you can probably squeeze him until he's making only 10% annual return (better than stock market, just to leave some incentive). The owner makes it easy to arbitrage him when he puts his financials in the open. In your EDIT, I think you are essentially talking about a real-estate investment portfolio manager. You'd take money from investors, fly around and buy up property, then manage the cleaner/managers, take 50% of the profits and give the other 50% to the investors.
brightsize 13y ago
In a couple of the Airbnb places I stayed at, which had remote owners who I never saw, the manager was really just a minimum-wage sort of person who met me, oriented me, and periodically came in to do some light cleaning (I was a long-term (months) tenant). In Berlin, one of the guys had the gig as a "mini-job", and seemed quite unhappy when I tried to do any of the housekeeping myself - it was taking EUR out of his pocket by cutting his hours. I would think that it would be very easy, and cheap, to find assistants like this in the States who were not licensed PMs but were just plain folks.
- camus2 13y ago
  and that can sue you when things go south...
abracar 13y ago
To answer your question, there's at least one company that believes there's money to be made out of this: https://urbanbellhop.com/ https://urbanbellhop.com/. I read about them on Springwise a while ago, and they handle all the check-in/check-out process for Airbnb and VRBO hosts. They don't provide cleaners, but it would make sense for them or another company to do so. I think there could definitely be a market for that kind of all-around vacation rental management services, at least in cities like SF and NYC. Edit: Airenvy mentioned somewhere in this thread seems to do just that.
aetherson 13y ago
That stood out to me as well. She's cleaning his place probably > 4x per month plus doing miscellaneous point-of-contact duties, all for $200 a month? That's insane. It's hard to imagine that if she doubled her prices, the blogger would be better-served to find a new manager.

by atwebb 13y ago

205guy 13y ago

Indeed. Seems like the place to be is AirBnB property manager. Have 6-12 properties to manage and you have a full-time income and perhaps part-time work. Of course, I would start out low ($200/month) then raise and raise the fee when you become indispensible. The absentee owner is essentially just an investor with the capital outlay. And being far away and totally reliant on the cleaner/manager, you can probably squeeze him until he's making only 10% annual return (better than stock market, just to leave some incentive). The owner makes it easy to arbitrage him when he puts his financials in the open. In your EDIT, I think you are essentially talking about a real-estate investment portfolio manager. You'd take money from investors, fly around and buy up property, then manage the cleaner/managers, take 50% of the profits and give the other 50% to the investors.

brightsize 13y ago

In a couple of the Airbnb places I stayed at, which had remote owners who I never saw, the manager was really just a minimum-wage sort of person who met me, oriented me, and periodically came in to do some light cleaning (I was a long-term (months) tenant). In Berlin, one of the guys had the gig as a "mini-job", and seemed quite unhappy when I tried to do any of the housekeeping myself - it was taking EUR out of his pocket by cutting his hours. I would think that it would be very easy, and cheap, to find assistants like this in the States who were not licensed PMs but were just plain folks.

camus2 13y ago
and that can sue you when things go south...

abracar 13y ago

To answer your question, there's at least one company that believes there's money to be made out of this: https://urbanbellhop.com/ https://urbanbellhop.com/. I read about them on Springwise a while ago, and they handle all the check-in/check-out process for Airbnb and VRBO hosts. They don't provide cleaners, but it would make sense for them or another company to do so. I think there could definitely be a market for that kind of all-around vacation rental management services, at least in cities like SF and NYC. Edit: Airenvy mentioned somewhere in this thread seems to do just that.

aetherson 13y ago

That stood out to me as well. She's cleaning his place probably > 4x per month plus doing miscellaneous point-of-contact duties, all for $200 a month? That's insane. It's hard to imagine that if she doubled her prices, the blogger would be better-served to find a new manager.