Last updated on July 16th, 2022
Welcome back to another episode of Into The Airbnb, where we talk with Airbnb hosts about their short-term rental experience.
Today’s guest is Lauren Keen, based in the West Coast of Florida, who manages eight listings in three different units. Join us to hear about her journey from acquiring all properties, how she manages them and also some useful insights from her area.
This episode is sponsored by Airbtics, it’s the only one analytics dashboard for short-term rental investors and managers, where you can find precise Airbnb data such as occupancy rate, right revenue, average daily rate and so on. So, without further ado, let’s get into it!
Into The Airbnb S2 EP 22: 90% occupancy rate in 8 listings in West Coast of Florida
You can also listen to this Into The Airbnb Podcast Episode on Otter.
Delia:
So can you tell us how did you get started on Airbnb?
Lauren Keen:
My husband and I were looking to house hack, which is when you buy a property where you can live in part of it and rent the rest of it out. So a very obvious example of this would be if you bought a duplex, lived in one side and rented the other side out and the reason for doing this is to basically cut down on your living expenses, right? Have a property where it pays some of its own mortgage. And we found a Bed and Breakfast, a true Bed and Breakfast where a woman owned it and she lived there and she had guests and she would cook and clean and things like that. It was for sale and it had two cottages in the back and a mobile home. So we decided to buy it and live in the house and because it had already been a Bed and Breakfast, it had favourable zoning. Also the cottages didn’t have like, one of them didn’t have a kitchen at all and neither one of them had washers and dryers. So because of that we felt like they would make better short-term rentals than long-term rentals. It’s also in a tourist town here in Florida. So we bought this Bed and Breakfast to renovate it, we lived in the cottages. Then after six months and everything was renovated, we moved into the house and started renting the cottages. So we started out to just have a rental on our property, it just kind of one thing led to another and it ended up being short-term rentals instead of long-term rentals.
Delia:
Oh, and how was your experience renting, you know, a place where you live really near to?
Lauren Keen:
It’s been good, it was really helpful, especially the first few months while we were learning. So I could talk to the cleaners during the day when they were there cleaning, we could keep a really quick close eye on supplies and order things and restock things before we got things up to speed. So it was actually really helpful.
Delia:
And you told me you, right now, own about eight listings and also manage them. How was the process to acquire all the other seven listings?
Lauren Keen:
Yeah, so we traded out that mobile home that I mentioned earlier for a camper. Also now we rent out the main house when we’re gone. So there’s four of the eight listings right there. We bought another property about six months after we started. It’s a duplex and we made half of it a short-term rental and half of it a long-term rental. So sometimes we stay there if our house rents out. So that was listing number five. Then a few months later than that, so late 2021, December 2021, we bought a six unit apartment building and use three of those units for short-term rentals and left three of those as long-term rentals. So those are the other three.
Delia:
Oh, that’s great. And what about your zone? How are the laws there? Is it easy or hard to make short-term rentals around there?
Lauren Keen:
It’s a little bit hard because with Florida, there’s not kind of one overarching rule about short-term rentals. But we have found places where they are legal and that helps us to operate them. We don’t have a tonne of vacancy because a lot of people want to come to Florida, especially in the winter. Obviously, it’s a little bit seasonal for that reason. But it hasn’t been that hard because we took what we learned in the first six months or so before we bought that second property and really added a lot of systems and processes in place. So it’s probably 15 to 30 minutes a day that we spend managing the properties and we still are able to keep our full time jobs for right now.
Delia::
Oh my, that’s great! I didn’t expect that because usually when, you know, hosts run a lot of listings, they have to give up their normal jobs just for managing.
Lauren Keen:
It’s eight listings, but it’s only three properties. So I think that makes it a little bit easier.
Delia:
Yeah, that’s right. And do you manage all for yourself?
Lauren Keen:
Yes.
Delia:
Oh, I see. And what about cleaning crew, maintenance?
Lauren Keen:
Yes, so my husband is very handy and two of our properties are very close together, they’re within 20 minute and that’s where we spend most of our time. So if there’s an issue in terms of maintenance or kind of a repair, he can easily handle those things. We obviously have people in place as well for that. At another one of our properties, the sixth unit, my uncle lives in the same county and he is a handyman by trade, so he can go over there for us if things break when we’re not there. Then in terms of cleaning, we don’t clean, I have never cleaned one of them myself. We have a fantastic cleaner and she manages kind of a team under her and then manages them for all eight of the listings.
Delia:
Wow, that’s great! And now I’ll like to talk about the area you’re hosting, you told me was the West Coast of Florida, right?
Lauren Keen:
Yes.
Delia:
What is the seasonality like in this area?
Lauren Keen:
So with Florida, obviously, our winters are mild to almost non existent. So January, February, and March are very busy for us. April, May, June and July are also fairly busy. April and May, just because the weather is still pretty good and then in the summer, I think kids are out of school, so people want to come to Florida. We’re a little bit slower in August and September and October and then a little bit kind of start to speed up again in November, December, kind of because of holidays and things like that. So it’s a little bit seasonal, for sure.
Delia:
And how is your average occupancy rate in the high season versus the low season?
Lauren Keen:
During the high season, like the first three months were probably 90%, occupied, very occupied. Then in the low season, it’s probably closer to 50%.
Delia:
Can you tell me about the kind of demographics you get for your listings?
Lauren Keen:
Our listings vary quite a bit. In the six unit apartment building that I mentioned, they’re all two bedroom units and one of those units has bunk beds, so we just kind of naturally get families there. Also couples, couples and families. In our other listings, the two cottages and the camper, it’s usually just couples. We get a lot of older couples that are retired and travelling, we get quite a few people lately who are driving, they’re driving across the state or they’re driving across the country and they’re going to just stop for a few days and one of these small tourist towns.
Delia:
I see, I see. And throughout the year, what is your pricing strategy?
Lauren Keen:
We use PriceLabs to price for us.
Delia:
That’s great. And before, you know, using the dynamic pricing solution, have you done the pricing by yourself?
Lauren Keen:
We did for about six months. We knew we wanted to price low because we wanted to have a lot of bookings and get a lot of reviews and have people rate the place very highly. So we did, we just looked at listings around us and figured kind of what our competition was and then priced a little bit lower than them at first and then we got price up to about six or maybe eight months.
Delia:
Yeah, I think the dynamic pricing solution is a great alternative as well. So in all these years being an Airbnb host, what have been your top challenges?
Lauren Keen:
The hardest thing was to automate everything. I think, when you start operating, we were operating on Airbnb and VRBO and we couldn’t take any direct bookings that way. If you wanted to make a change to your price or your listing, you had to do them in both and all of the messaging was in both and that just became really cumbersome, even with just the three listings we had at the time. So getting a reservations platform and the pricing software and the automated locks and the QuickBooks accounting system and Stripe for processing payments. Getting all of those systems in place was, really alleviated a lot of the burdens of management. And obviously cleaning is very important as well. This cleaner that I have right now that I love very much, she was the third cleaner that we’ve had and we’ve been in this about 16 months. She’s doing a really great job and she looks at the property from a different perspective, right from a very high level perspective. She can see the property from the view of a guest and see the property of the view from an owner as well.
Delia:
I understand and can you share us about what tools do you use to automate your listings? Because I think that’d be really useful to know.
Lauren Keen:
So we use ownerrez.com. We use PriceLabs. We use Schlage and Codelocks with remote lock integration to OwnerRez. We use Stripe to process payments through VRBO bookings and also through our own website. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that we use to audit, we use a little bit of automated messaging on Airbnb, mostly everything is going to run through email, automated emails through the OwnerRez platform.
Delia:
Great, thank you for sharing that with us! And do you have any experience with trouble guests in the past?
Lauren Keen:
Not too many. We’ve had about 200 guests, 200 different bookings, I would say, in the last 16 months and not very many have been problematic. We had one party and that was very recent. That was over 100 guests and probably 150 guests and you know, some kids booked a house. I don’t know if the parents booked it for the kids and they knew that or if the kids booked it and use their parents name and ID and credit card, I really don’t know. But they booked it and they arrived at like five o’clock, but we had them removed by 11 o’clock and Airbnb was actually really supportive of that. We weren’t even in the state, we were out of town and they left and there wasn’t too much damage or anything. So just really the one bad apple so far.
Delia:
Wow. So you have been very lucky!
Lauren Keen:
I think some of that is, we have a security deposit and a renters agreement that people sign. So I think, generally, if people are bad guests, they don’t want to sign those things and they don’t want to leave a security deposit.
Delia:
If the security deposit also for short-term rentals?
Lauren Keen:
Yes. It’s like between $100 and $250 depending on the size of the unit.
Delia:
Oh, and everyone who try to book any of your listing have to pay that?
Lauren Keen:
They have to put a hold on their credit card.
Delia:
Okay, yeah, I understand. Thank you for sharing that with us. And are there any tips that you’d like to share for other Airbnb hosts?
Lauren Keen:
My main tip is to know that while it’s investing in real estate, it’s also giving yourself a part time job and you’re also putting yourself in the hospitality business. I didn’t really, I mean, logically, I guess I knew all of that going in, but I don’t know that I kind of explicitly ever thought about it, so just know that and I would suggest like dipping your toe in, maybe rent a room in your house or do rental arbitrage and get one unit or get one, maybe like a single family home where you might want to long-term rent it but maybe try short-term renting at first. That would be my, I guess those would be my little nuggets for people who are interested in this space.
Delia:
Great, thank you! And that’d be it for today. Thank you for your time and thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Lauren Keen:
You’re welcome!
Do you want to maximize your profit?
As a professional in the short-term rental industry, you’d definitely know that there are intense competitors who are probably obsessed with maximizing profit & exert efforts to promote Airbnb listings. What are their unique tools, you ask? We say:
A super-accurate & reliable data analytics tool.
Similarly, you can also profit at least $28,044 annually without owning a single property through Airbnb rental arbitrage in Florida!
Designed to showcase accurate short-term rental analytics data, not only does our app help you optimize your listing, but it can also provide VERY useful data for simulating cash returns using the Airbnb Calculator. try looking at real-time data from Airbtics & stand out among your competitors!
