Last updated on November 30th, 2022
Welcome back to another episode of Into The Airbnb, where we talk with Airbnb hosts about their short-term rental experience.
Our guest for today is Jason Centeno, an ex Airbnb host from the Philadelphia area, who recently decided to quit Airbnb with his over 20 listings, move to Tampa and take a break from the short-term rental world. Come to hear about his years of experience with Airbnb, what made him quit the platform and also about his current startup project: Trashmitter, an on demand waste disposal service.
This episode is sponsored by Airbtics, short-term rental analytics for high return investment, comprehensive data for insights, ideas and inspiration. Go to app.airbtics.com to find precise Airbnb data such as occupancy rate, revenue, average daily rate and so on. So, without further ado, let’s get into it!
Into The Airbnb Podcast S2 EP 39: Ex-Airbnb host tells us about why he decided to leave and his takes on the business – Featuring Jason Centeno from Trashmitter
You can also listen to this Into The Airbnb Podcast Episode on Otter.
Delia:
So can you tell me how did you get started on Airbnb back then when you were working on that?
Jason Centeno:
So let me see in 2017, probably, so I, you know, I was a short-term rental host in the city of Philadelphia, I found out about it from, you know, various sources and I was, you know, to be honest with you, I was having some trouble in a specific building that I had and I was either going to sell it or try this, right? So I took a chance and I put, it was a five unit building or two buildings with five units between them. So I took a chance on one unit. As you know, with Airbnb, your first one’s always going to cost the most because you got to kind of get used to what things cost to do. But you know, as soon as I did it, it started to produce right and this was, you know, back before everybody and their grandma was doing Airbnb, that started to produce results and so I decided to go all in and convert the two unit and a three unit to five units for Airbnb, that’s kind of got how I got started. And over time I expanded to about, might have been 28 at the highest point, it’s hard to say because one of them was kind of like a shared space, so it’s kind of like, do you count each room? Or do you count the whole building? So the numbers kind of throw me off there and how somebody would count that, but each, we had one building that had six individual units, as rooms a shared space, so you know, that would have been six, but it was an all in one building. So you know, between 25 to 28, I was managing an operating and all of those, so you know, the three flavors of hosting is usually you own and operate, you know, you don’t have arbitrage you’re just doing, you just take your own property, so that’s the one. The second would be on rental arbitrage, you’d go out there and you would lease an apartment, go sheet that and you know, make the spread in between. So I had a good amount of those two, after I took over all the properties that I could. And the third is co-hosting, which each one of those has pros and cons to it. To be honest with you, co-hosting is almost as being an employee and you have cost to that. So it’s imagine you being an employee with like a lot of, you know, overhead, especially if you have a built, you know, if you’re using stuff like PriceLabs, or post flyer or, you know, just integrations that you have to pay for, each post that you take on, each co-hosting UT has a set of expenses that go with it, you might have a virtual assistant that’s helping operate part time even and so the costs associated with that, you know, I want to say that for me, as I recall, as a co-host, I’d have, you know, between services and an employee, I’d have $180 or so per unit that I would co-host that had to be covered. So the trick with that is, you don’t want to be co-hosting a property that’s not making that much money because you won’t even cover your nut with their, if it’s like I said, if it’s like a $2,000 small apartment, it’s kind of not worth it. So that’s something I learned, you know, just by doing it. But yeah, I mean, you know, I got all sorts of flavors of Airbnb, you know, operations I guess you could say.
Delia:
And out of those three operations, you said, own and manage rental arbitrage and CO-hosting, which one is your favorite and why? Which one brings like less expenses to you and more revenue?
Jason Centeno:
Ideally and this gotta keep in mind that it’s because of taxes that own and operate is going to be your best bet, you know, obviously, you spend the most money there because you have to buy a property, then you have to furnish it. So it’s not just buying a property and then putting it and turning into a rental, you also got to do the setup costs and then utilities and everything are on top are on you as well, maintenance, everything. So everything is on you, so you have complete and total control. Having said that complete and total responsibility. So the benefits being like, hey, you know, if you bought the property right and you didn’t try to buy it based off of like, I see a lot of people trying to sell it off the potential for short term rental and they’ll call that the cash flow, like that’s going to be actual cash flow. Terrible idea would never buy a property based off of that because as we’ve been seeing, you know, whatever location you’re at, the local legislators could change their mind in a heartbeat about is it going to be legal, what’s going to be the new standards and unless you have something in place where like, you know, in Florida, where they can never really shut down vacation rentals, totally, you know, you might buy something way overpriced just because you think you’re gonna get Airbnb type money and find out that, you know, four months after you bought it, something changed and now you’re screwed. So the benefits of ownership is like, if that happens, you can kind of just switch back to long-term or medium-term is ideal because if you already started as a short-term rental company, you’d want to go after the maybe you know, short-term rentals, obviously, the highest prices you’re gonna get. But the medium-term rentals, the corporate renters, the you know, traveling nurses, the workforce people, the corporate renters, everybody’s going after them. But you know, you could probably get a piece of that too, depending on your location or how good your marketing and branding is. Having said that, that would be my favorite, but it’s also the most expensive, but you get to control everything. The reason why arbitrage is so high is because people think you can get in for like less money, but it’s also way riskier, if you think about it because you’re not going to get your money back from a lease, you might get some of your money back from furniture, but probably not because you’re buying it at you know, buying expensive furniture generally or just brand new and all you got to do is go on Facebook marketplace to see, you know, people selling brand new furniture for cheap. So it’s kind of like and there’s a lot more work involved trying to put together something cheaply. So sometimes it’s better to just, you know, go to one place and get everything nice and coordinated. But with arbitrage too like, if you’ve haven’t negotiated a great lease or something past a year, you’re probably not going to make your money back. For me, my calculation was, I would not be make my money back normally until 18 months, after 18 months and spot where I’d get all my money back, right? Because yes, you’re making money on that time period, but you’re also spending it. So realistically, you might be making three times the amount of a normal rental. Keep in mind, this is for like a smaller one, maybe two bedroom. Three and four or five bedroom houses have different numbers. So yes, you can make more money, but there’s still more maintenance, more cleaning, more everything, right? So it’s kind of relative. But with arbitrage, you got to be in a place like a year and a half, just to break even after everything that you’re spending there, so people don’t really kind of see that. They see the money coming in, but they’re forgetting how much they’re spending to keep it up. So it’s kind of like three times the income, but two times the amount of work and expense. You have to kind of decide like, “is it really worth it for me to do this to be constantly landing planes, as I like to call it on the weekends, on Fridays when everybody’s coming in and making sure everything’s clean on Sundays when everybody’s going out?” And that’s the kind of norm. How much of that is it really worth to me? And you’ll never know until you hit a market and kind of get a taste of one to see, but as a market might get oversaturated or you might just have a unique property, the more unique property obviously you cannot say like across the board, everybody’s going to make this kind of money because it’s a unique property. It makes money because it’s a unique property sometimes because of the location, but sometimes it’s just because it’s so unique that it’s just going to always be in demand. So what kind of product you’re putting out it’s really not about it’s the prettiest or the most well designed, it’s like how unique is it really because at the end of the day, not too many people want to pay $300 a night for a one bedroom unless that one bedroom happens to be, I don’t know, on the top of a mountain hanging over a cliff or something, I don’t know. Or you’re in the middle of the woods or a tree house or something like that because they can go get a hotel for a lot cheaper and not have to pay a cleaning fee and you know not have to worry about parking, neighbors or trash or doing chores as they like to say now like, people were complaining that Airbnb is like a hotel except with chores. I thought that was kind of funny, but kind of true, too. So I hope that explains kind of what you were asking me.
Delia:
Yes, it explains completely! And about rental arbitrage, there are also some, you know, challenges when it comes to get to convince, for example, the landlord and stuff like that, did you get to experience that?
Jason Centeno:
Yeah, so one of the things about rental arbitrage is, you kind of halfway got to be a Property Inspector, like people getting into rental arbitrage that have no real estate experience at all are going to be hurt because I don’t know if you’ve ever just moved into an apartment, but you know, the first day you go through, they make you sign off on like, do the lights work, how’s the water pressure and sometimes you just run through it, right? But unless you stay in a place for a while, you’re not going to know that now you have a slow clog. Now you have a toilet that runs a lot. Now you have a leak that just started to show up because you know when you moved in the landlord painted over, but now it’s a chronic situation, but now you’re embedded with this person. So it’s these chronic problems that pop up that sort of affect your guests experience and then how fast the landlord has to respond to these problems. Because if it’s me and I know it’s messing with my money and I own the place, I’m going to make it happen like that, somebody’s going to come fix that like right away because obviously it affects your reviews, right? versus a regular tenant is not going to be meeting some, they’ll complain, but it’s not like they can leave a review on Airbnb about you or Google or whatever. Landlords speed to handle you is their attitude is the same as if you were a regular tenant because you are renting monthly from them. So you got to be prepared to come out of your pocket and have like something in place that like pre negotiate and say, “Look, if I have to fix this problem, I’m taking it out of your rent” and that causes issues sometimes because if you have an automatic rent payment and you got to go in and mess with it. So there’s all these kinds of wrinkles to arbitrage that people don’t really get. They only see like, “Oh, I can get all in for $5,000 to start making Airbnb money”, great until you have a crappy landlord that just took you because he was looking for a consistent tenant, but wasn’t really that, you know, diligent about keeping his tenants happy, you know what I mean? So, I experience a little bit of that. And then COVID definitely showed how some landlords were going to be because they got desperate and they start putting, for example, we had a building that we have five units in, like an apartment building, it was like 40 apartments and they had just bought it and they were starting to do renovations and then COVID hit so then, because of COVID, they started accepting any old person to hold rent, including, like, hate to say about six or eight tenants. And the last thing you want to see when you’re going to stay somewhere like a kind of place where you know, the pictures do great and things are great is looking and watching people walking around, you know, half undressed in hallways, smoking weed and you know, cooking and talking loud on phones, like really obnoxious because they don’t care. They don’t care, they don’t have pride of ownership, I guess you can say. Most people that are renters in a nicer building well, but if you start putting in renters that you just putting into stabilize the building, you end up with this mess. So I literally had to like abandon five units because that’s what happened in the middle COVID and I was like, “Look, I can’t keep having this experience”, people worrying about, you know, people knocking at their door in the middle of the night, you know, thinking is somebody else’s apartment because somebody else used to live there banging on the door crazy, like just nonsense like that. They weren’t keeping up their end of like, the property management. So I was just like, look, I gotta break these leases because you guys are killing me, like we can’t keep people in here. We keep having to give people money back. So some things that look great in the beginning, don’t turn out so after you know, you can’t blame the pandemic, you know, hit everybody, so that’s not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is how you handle it moving forward and detach without being unethical or just doing bad business. I mean, you can’t drown with people but you can’t like also just trash a lease or something like that because that also affects people. So that’s the part of rental arbitrage that I think a lot of people would not be able to handle, you know, come another pandemic or just any kind of challenges like that. How do they handle it? I don’t know. So.
Delia:
Yeah, what you just heard is very important. It is actually my first time listening about these because usually when people tend to talk about rental arbitrage they use talk about the good side of it. These challenges are what is really important to know about to be transparent about your experience, so other people know what they might get into if they try arbitrage, right? So thank you for telling us about this. And one thing I’d like to know is how much you were making back then with Airbnb and why did you decide to quit?
Jason Centeno:
That’s hard to say because, you know, they frown on it, but I have multiple accounts, three accounts. So one, you should always have more than one because they are just algorithms been canceling people left and right for a lot of different reasons I’m hearing because of background checks or people that are even associated with them. Somebody with a jail record logs into their WiFi somehow and next thing, you know, your account cash, is so many dumb things going on. But back before that was the craziness, I would say, one point, I think we’re getting close to like 90 across all of them, but they didn’t stay that good. It’s just because for all the reasons I said, you know, apartments started getting like leaks and then we were getting bad reviews and it really I had to have one account that was kind of like I call it the quarantine account, where it would just be you’d put a property on there and give it like you know two or three stays, just make sure that it was okay. And then I would move it from that one to a better like more reviewed account and just take all the information and just shut the one down and put it on the other one. So I actually had like one account, like I said, it was like a quarantine account in case anything goes wrong, you know, that count means nothing to me. And, you know, having said that, you know, we never got shut down and if we ever had like two or three bad ones in a row, we would just get rid of that one account and start another one just to keep it so that when you’re doing arbitrage especially or even co-hosting, whenever these problems sneak up on you, it’s not killing you from, you know, as you’re getting going. Like when you first get started, they gave you a lot of extra SEO and put you higher into placings to get you rolling. So you take advantage of that, but then when it goes away, you’re gonna be screwed if you have like three and four stars, right? So that was something I sort of developed over time, I will say like I said the top we might have been doing like 90 and I say “we” because at that point I had like two people helping me, so not all mine, but you know.
Delia:
That quarantine account you told me about it’s also good to saving yourself, like from the bad reviews that you might get at the start because that one listing it’s best condition yet when it’s starting, right? So it’s a really good strategy. I’ve never heard about that, so thank you for sharing that.
Jason Centeno:
And that’s like I say there’s things with those, you’ll never know until somebody stayed there. I’ll tell you one in particular, like if you can ever avoid being on the top, if it’s a high value blankie place, like a new construction, I would never on an older building like anything like just not brand new, take a top floor because all the heat rises, no matter how much air conditioning you put into a place, all the heat from the whole building goes up there and God forbid, that’s where your bedroom, I had like a unique property like that. But I had to get an extra air conditioner just to put in there and buy one of those portable ones because the heat was just so bad that it would overwhelm what was already there and like cook people and I was like, that was one of them that thank God I had that quarantine account. But when I first got the property, it was like, in nicer weather, but once summer hit it was like ungodly and I found out in the hard way out of put in my own external on portable air conditioner in that place just to make it bearable for people, which was, you know, you’re in there in the summer and got, you know, maybe you got your arbitrage property in the winter or the spring or the fall, you will know that so.
Delia:
And how did you come with the idea of that one quarantine account you have?
Jason Centeno:
So I’m a retired firefighter and we always have like multiple plans. So I just take and think like “okay, everything’s great, but what happens if something goes wrong?”. So I just started to put up these measures in case and test them out and, you know, it was necessary. So I like at least a Plan B and Plan C with everything I do.
Delia:
That’s good to know. And one thing I’ll like to know about is why did you decided to quit on Airbnb, even after all of these buildings you already owned and all this profit you were making, why did you decided to just quit that?
Jason Centeno:
A few things. COVID was the big reason for a lot of it because I just had to get out of most of the arbitrage units. It was taking more than it was giving because of what I mentioned moving in bad elements into one apartment building affecting one account. Travel was just shut down completely in Philadelphia for like, longer than most places actually, so it was more like to stop the bleeding. The ones I own, were the last to go. I actually, I moved through Philadelphia, so I was like I mentioned, I was a firefighter, I retired and when COVID hit, I decided that I just want didn’t want to live in Philadelphia anymore because I didn’t like what was going on. I thought it was ridiculous. I saw what the administration was doing. We’re not going to get into all the specifics just because people feel the way they feel. I just felt for me and my family, I needed to us to be out of there. So I decided to leave, I said, I can go and start to somewhere else. So we ended up moving in Tampa, just in time. When I got here, you know, my management that was still in place for the ones that I still had, wasn’t really doing a great job, I thought I had a pretty good handle on it, but come to find out when you’re, when they say the cat’s away, the mice will play, it wasn’t so much that, but everything that used to cost me let’s say $10, when I was there would cost me six and seven times that. So every little thing just got way more expensive for me to do and it got to the point where I was like, you know, this long distance handling of it, it’s not worth it to me. It bugs me, right? So that I started seeing some things about Airbnb I didn’t like specifically and it was accumulation of things. And then some of it was instinct that was just like it’s getting oversaturated, I would rather pull back and do something in the industry, but not that because I personally like to operate in places where there’s like, I have a little niche. I had one there that I really liked, but again, being far away, it wasn’t really working anymore and the travel industry across the board was kind of knocked sideways. So I was just like, “well, you know what I think I’m just going to pull out and then start over when things get better or when I like the environment again”. To that end, I sort of just did nothing for a year, I kind of unattached myself from everything so that I could kind of look at it from like 1000 foot view instead of being too close to it and that’s kind of where my tech company kind of came from, which was one of the things that bugged me the most was trash became such a problem, something so small, but it affected everything. You know, if you ever go on the boards, people are like, “Oh, this area is sketchy”. In urban areas, there’s not a lot of room for things, right? Like there’s just, we don’t have a lot of garages, we have some alleyways, we don’t have big yards or anything, so storing trash, you know, if you’re in the hospitality business, trash is important because if you don’t get rid of it quickly, you don’t get the bedbugs of people bring the bedbugs, but you’ll get the, you know, the roaches, the fleas, the flies, the rats, you’ll get everything, as clean as you keep your building, they’re going to find it, right? So if you can’t store it outside because the neighbors or because you get fined or whatever and you can’t store it inside because you’re attracting these pests and affecting reviews and getting, you know, you’re like damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So it became such a big problem and I had some people working on it, but it was always agony, like to find the right person to make sure they got it out on time, that I didn’t catch a fine, that I didn’t piss off neighbors and it was just kind of like this complicated problem from something that we all kind of disregard. And it affected the, you know, affected the surroundings too because, you know, I don’t know if people have been to New York lately, but just seeing trash on the sidewalk, that kind of stuff just puts you in a bad mood. So if you want to go on vacation and you want to see maybe not the beach, but like you want to be somewhere you want to feel like you’re like relaxed and enjoying yourself, the last thing you want to see is piles of trash smelling like dead fish and dead bodies. Wherever you’re walking, it doesn’t matter if the place is gorgeous, if you smell that or see that it throws you off, it messes up your attitude. So I look at that and I was like, “You know what, this is a problem that I want to sink my teeth into” and never thought I would be the person to do this, but apparently, God saw a different and put a bunch of things in my lap and said, “You’re the guy” and you know, here I am. But I created this app called Trash matter because, you know, short-term rental hosts, small businesses, cleaning companies, you know, restaurants even or just people that have a party in their home, like we just had Memorial Day weekend and people are like, “who’s gonna pick up my trash” and it’s like, we don’t know right now because, you know, the city might take off. And you know, if you live in a place that gets hot or just you don’t have a lot of room and you just did a big cookout and you got all this food in the trash, you’re going to attract the rats, the fleas, the dogs, the cats, the raccoons, the bears, wherever you’re at or if you got to put it in a hot garage, it’s gonna stink up your garage. So there’s just people out there to just like, “I don’t want that I don’t want to be waiting for five days for this” and that’s what we’re there for. And it became the beginning of something, but right now that’s what it is. We’re like Uber for trash, we get rid of 2 to 10 bags quickly or under the amount that a normal junk person would pay attention to like, when you call those guys out, it’s usually over 100 bucks to just show up and it’s two guys in a truck and you don’t need all that. You got to three bags, you’re like, “Well, I just don’t have time to take it to the dump myself”, well, that’s what we’re for. We were there for that in between kind of a little bit too much for you, but not enough for the other guys and you don’t want to spend, you know, $100, you want to spend 50 or whatever. So like that, that’s where we live.
Delia:
Can you tell us a little bit more about how does the app works? How does the person who wants the trash taken out contact this person who is going to come and take trash out? How much are the prices for it? And stuff like that.
Jason Centeno:
So right now, we’re still on the app store now. But trashmitter.com, you could go and download in your Google or iPhone. We’re only available right now in Philadelphia, but people can start to sign up and when they do, we’ll start to make a list of where we’re being asked for. So ideally, we’re going to, you know, spread out, you know, Tampa, Miami and Dallas, like there’s places we already kind of know we’re going to be headed. But right now we’re just in Philadelphia vicinity, trying to work out the kinks. So we’re still kind of fundraising and still fixing it, but it works like Uber like you would go on, you put in your address, you know, your credit card, everything that, you know, to set up your account, put in your address and you’ll be basically, you can say “I got three bags, I need to get rid of”, you put in three, like you just pick three and then you take a picture of it so that we know like where it is. So ideally, we tell people, “hey, just put it wherever your address is to make it easy, right in front” and then when we’re up and running, ideally, we want to be kind of like dominos half an hour or less, but we don’t have enough people yet, so it’s more like a couple hours. But you know, you will press the button and then the sign goes out, the trip goes out to potential drivers and as we fill that up with you know, like Lyft and Uber drivers, anybody that just wants to do this as a side gig because the cool thing about Airbnb type trash really is like most of it is not nasty trash. It’s kind of like junk food wrappers and pizza boxes and stuff like that. So people are like, “Oh, my car’s gonna get nasty”, it’s like, nah you can put something in the trunk or a tarp even and this does really not that bad, but of course, that’s right now, so who knows what they’re going to do in the future. So you know, basically, you call it and then we send somebody they come, they pick it up, they take a picture to verify that they took it and then it’s gone. Like we take it to a local dump, a passing by truck, eventually, we want to be tied into all the other Junkers and even the city systems, where our people could kind of just see one close by and throw it off there and then they would share the cost. So you know, you don’t have to drive far, you could literally just be in a one or two square mile radius and never have to leave that because there’s always some place to put it. That’s kind of where we’re going with it. And eventually, it’ll just be waste management across the world is just crowdsource that way. And then we can start working on litter. I mean, the future of this thing is we’re trying to make an app or a game where like Pokemon, kids pick up litter and pick it up and they would get cryptocurrency for it or rewards for every piece of trash or glass or mask or whatever they pick up, they will get reward points that we would eventually turn into crypto, you can go on a store and put you know, buy stuff with it. That’s where we’re going with this because I didn’t want to look at this as a simple solution just for Airbnb hosts. When I think of things I want to be bigger than that. I want it to be useful for everybody. So I went in with the thought of like “How can I make Airbnb hosts life better?” I went into thinking, “how can I make the whole world a better place?” And then that’s kind of where this all came from. So this is just the beginning of it though.
Delia:
That’s a great idea! And are you going to continue like in the future working with Airbnb hosts and these type of people you’re covering on now?
Jason Centeno:
I mean, yeah, they’re always going to be my people. In fact, I run multiple Airbnb host groups because I can advise, it’s not like, you know, I don’t want to be the guru cake person that’s out there selling education because to me, it’s kind of a zero sum game, you know, for me to keep up on that stuff and be day to day activities. There’s people better at it than I am, right? But I still want to give value. So what I do is I just create really welcoming places where people get actual information, you know, we try to give them all sorts of like, right now, I’m creating a resource manual for Airbnb hosts, like, what are all the things you can do? Well, you know, there’s property management systems, there’s cleaning apps, there’s all these things and it’s like, well, I can just put them all in one little place and download it and now you’re in my ecosystem and then all I care about is this. Whenever you have a trash disposal, you call me first, I’ll give you everything else for free. And that’s kind of like my MO and it’s been working. I mean, that’s how I’m growing. So.
Delia:
Yes, that’s great! I mean, it’s also good that people can get access to the groups, but education when it comes to this, I think it’s more valuable when it comes from people who wants to give it for free, who wants to teach you like from their heart for you to grow, right?
Jason Centeno:
Yeah, I mean and again, also because if you pay thousands of dollars for something, but you feel like there’s a missing link because everybody’s different, like, you cannot give everybody 100% of the information because each market is different. Everybody’s situation is different. I mean, just in our group alone, it’s like, “are you a co-host? Are you arbitraging? Are you an owner? What’s the zoning? You know, what’s this? What’s that? It’s like, there’s so many variables that are, I got six kids, I don’t have time to be kids’ father to a million more people. It’s just like, I’ll do the best I can and I hope you got to be able to fill in the blanks on your own. But the problem is that the Guru’s to me, so in one package, and that’s what you buy. But there’s no such thing, you know, you just have to keep educating yourself, educating yourself. So why pretend that I’m the expert or the full answer to everything, I’ll give you as much as I can give you and that’s it and that’s all I promise and I feel like, for me, that works. Other people, I’m not gonna knock anybody else, there’s some guys out there that I learned from that were great, you know, I can start rattling off names, but I know they’re about their business. I just could not do what they do as consistently as they do it. So I choose to do it this other way because that’s what suits me better.
Delia:
Yes, fully understand and appreciate what you do. So you told me previously that you are currently investing in an Airbnb competitor called Workbnb, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about this and why did you decide to invest in them?
Jason Centeno:
So Workbnb, I love the model because it’s basically a b2b business instead of a b2c business, meaning all the scammers, all the people that are coming on Airbnb now that are learning how to play the system will be avoided because you’re simply dealing with an employer and their employees are being placed in these places, that person has a lot of incentive to be well behaved because I don’t know about you, but if my employee goes and has a party at a place that I put him in and wreck something and cost me thousand of dollars, that boy is getting fired, right? So like, it just keeps people more honest, you know, people get paid, hosts get paid up front, you can’t just like Airbnb be started in 10 minutes, there’s a barrier of entry, there’s some training you got to take, which I also love. So it keeps out the casual hosts, right? And it deals only with professional, it’s a professional platform and it caters, like I said, to a niche and the niche is infrastructure workers, as specifically with me and Yeves, the founder, we’re like really trying to be the housing sort of plug for tech companies because we both have tech companies, he has that tech company, I have my tech company and we’re trying to like create a little infrastructure of tech companies where we become the people that they go to when they want to place their people in different cities, while they’re trying to expand their operations, since we understand both sides of that, that’s kind of who we want to appeal to. So I invested in them simply because I was like, it answers the problem, I’m sick of the way Airbnb has been treating hosts and making things worse instead of better and the culture that they’ve created around, you know, around guests, now it’s just bottom of the barrel and they don’t seem to care about it or do too much about it. So this is why I back the competitor because I was like, I would just rather deal with that type of customer on a smaller scale and know that I’m not going to have the rug pulled out of me if something pops up, you know, businesses work together better, like if you’re not a tenant, but like if you’re a business and your landlord is a business, you’re gonna have a different conversation on negotiations and what will be a tenant versus a landlord because that’s not business to business that’s, you know, lease or lease, I like that because if there is a problem like another COVID, you can work that out with the business a lot better than you could work it out with an individual because all they want to be like, “Ah, I’m hurt, everything’s bad”, like they forget that the rest of the world is also hurt. So they don’t try to get a mutual sort of mutual solution together. I also like that about Workbnb, so I back them.
Delia:
Yes, that’s great. Thank you for telling us about it, it’s going to be great value for the hosts that my are looking to, you know, invest or work in same kind of platform you’re currently investing in. So thank you so much for that. Yeah, that’d be it for today. Thanks a lot for your time and for all the knowledge you shared with us today!
Jason Centeno:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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