Last updated on April 14th, 2020

Today Guest is Rhees. He is preparing to run 6 Airbnb listings in Kanab in Utah. The listing is called “Timber & Tin C 2 bed 2 bath w/ Pool & Rooftop Deck.” They are still under construction and his first guests will arrive in May. There is no historical data about the occupancy rate. 

Rhees: They’re actually duplexes. All right. And so there’s gonna be two, two sides of each, you know, so there are two sides to the duplex. Each side is about 1000 little over 1000 square feet. two bedrooms, two baths, and is going to be able to sleep about 7 on each side. There’s going to be 3 duplexes on the property. And then we’ve also we’ve put in a pool and a nice Recreation Area pavilion, and we’ve restored an old barn that was my great grandparents’ barn we restored that so that’s going to be a cool kind of gathering place for everybody that stays at the property

J: What makes you want to get into this?

Rhees: I’ve always wanted to get into real estate investing to try to find a way to get into. That makes financial sense. I feel like this is a way that you can get into it even without, you know, necessarily finding the best, you know, super cheap, low priced deals that a lot of real estates investors are looking for I mean, you can still buy In a regular priced home or unit somewhere. And if you do it the right way you can, you can turn a profit and a good profit did a good return on your investment with Airbnb. And you know, just vacation rentals, short term rentals. So that’s kind of why I started to get into it is because the financial opportunity is there.

J: What’s your expected return or monthly

Rhees: Right now our expected ROI, our vacation rentals are in Kanab Utah, which is where I’m from my hometown. And it’s right in the middle of a bunch of different national parks Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon National Park. So it’s just a really beautiful area a lot of tourists come through here. So, even if we calculate, you know, at the price point that we want to introduce the conservative price point We believe we can get for the rental and a conservative amount of nights booked a year, which we say, you know, $100- $150 a night at our rentals and 200 nights a year is pretty, pretty average around here in Kanab in this tourist area. And so with if we hit those numbers we’d be able to turn about at 12 to 13% return on investment based on our expenses and what we’d be able to pull from it. 

J: What channels will you be using? 

Rhees: Yeah, we’ll be using Airbnb, VRBO, Homeaway and then we will also work to, you know, Get bookings through our own website, which we’re currently building.

J: Do you use any kind of service to build a website?

Rhees: We’re just No, I’m actually just doing it myself using Wix. 

J: How did you price?

Rhees: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the way we’ve kind of looked at it is we try to price you know, we always want to price competitively but we don’t want to sometimes that Airbnb suggested prices are a little low or just, you know not quite right for our market and so we’re pricing we kind of priced day today we’re always checking in. We are always looking at the prices. So you know, we have a set price that we don’t want to go below but then if we have, you know, days in between bookings that need to be full when they once it starts getting closer to that time that we can, you know, drop the price to see if we can fill those dates.  

J: How did you do your market research? 

Rhees: We just know a lot of people around town that run Airbnb. We went to the travel council got stats from them of how many people are coming through every night and how many are staying in hotels versus vacation rentals and then we just did a lot of research on Airbnb, ourselves scrolling through seeing what people are pricing their places and seeing what the places look like and how we can gain a competitive advantage right. So newer places with amenities like a pool or a hot tub always booked out first and so we figured we could create a place like that right that we don’t do well in the market,

J: What Market Research tool do you use? Eg. AirDNA, Mashivisor, Alltherooms.

Rhees: We kind of tried to look. We tried to use one of those right but the town we’re in is pretty small and so they didn’t have a tonne of There’s a couple weeks of depth, there wasn’t a tonne of data, just not on our town.

J: How many listings are there in your area?

Rhees: There are about a little over 250 listings around town. Yeah.

J: What were the exact problems you had with data from AirDNA and other tools? 

Rhees: There were over 200 listings on Airbnb and VRBO. And yeah, we just when we did our market research, we just kind of tried to find, like, what were people doing right. And also what were other hosts not doing that we could do and just kind of make our place more marketable.

They just didn’t have some of the bigger cities around us, right? Like they had done they put the data together on But they didn’t have it like Wheelhouse pricing, or AirDNA, alltherooms. We tried to look up data just on our specific town and for some reason there just wasn’t a lot. Right. So. Okay,

J: And do you use any other software to run your Airbnb?

Rhees: Um, no, we just have a plug-in on our Wix site that we’re able to, you know, have bookings. And then we and then we have, you know, a scheduler for gaming and stuff as well. 

J: Is this scheduler integrated with Airbnb?

Rhees: Well, yeah, it’s a calendar that’s linked to Airbnb and VRBO and all of the platforms – using Onerooftop.

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