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.
Our guests for today are Rebecca and Arun, based in British Columbia, Canada. They manage a multi dwelling unit remotely in London, Ontario and today they’ll share with us about their journey, experience and success story with Airbnb and remote hosting since the very beginning.
This episode is sponsored by Airbtics, the only one analytics dashboard for short-term rental investors and managers, where you can 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 25: A Guide to Successful Remote Hosting in Ontario, Canada
You can also listen to this Into The Airbnb Podcast Episode on Otter.
Delia:
Can you tell me how did you get started with your first Airbnb listing?
Arun:
Yep, absolutely. Um, so I was, well, it was actually my parents, they actually made a investment into a pre-construction home in London, Ontario, I think it was about like, four and a half years ago. So they make this investment into a pre-construction. Once a unit was built, they were looking for long-term tenants and my friend of mine who also had a property in London, Ontario, at the time was doing Airbnb. So he showed me his month to month earnings and you know, how he operates it and all of the details that I needed to know. He said to give it a shot and I convinced my parents to do that. We started like that and then from there, we kind of just built our portfolio.
Delia:
I see! And how is the seasonality for example, in Ontario?
Rebecca:
So kind of going back to our rental that we had four years ago, so that was actually our first rental and we ended up selling that rental. Since we only had it for like one year, so we really only got to see all the seasons one time, we found that in Ontario specifically in the summer months, it picked up a lot during I guess between like June and August, then I think in the fall it kind of slowed down a little more. And then after selling that property, we reinvested the money into our Airbnb house that we have now as we opened it in mid January. So now we’re kind of going through our first time into each month and each season. But we’re noticing it seems kind of similar to our last listing, which was also posted in London, Ontario. Surprisingly, in March, it was actually, I think less busy than January and February and now it’s picked up a lot from April and our big bookings going into June have also increased.
Arun:
So I feel like the type of listings that I have is kind of like a utilitarian listing, so it’s more for like the day to day people, people who need to go to work or visiting family close by. It’s not a vacational property, it’s more for your day to day use. So with that being said, the fluctuation between the summer months to the winter months are not substantial. It’s not significant in like $10,000 or something like that. It’s just a few thousand dollar differences. But there is a peak in the summertime, obviously, because of the availability of time for people to travel and for people to see other family members. I think it’s just more prominent in the summertime and for that reason it is a little bit higher in the summer months, but yeah, like our business models, like revolved around, you know, providing adequate hospitality for the people that need it on a day to day basis and not more so on the vacational side of things. So yeah.
Delia:
I see and with the first listing you had, how was your first like Airbnb experience? I heard that you had like support from a friend who already did Airbnb?
Arun:
Yeah. So initially, I’m very thankful for and I’m grateful for because we had a lot of the resources. So Rebecca and I, we weren’t left in the dark when we initially started. So we had a cleaner, a professional handyman and just a team of people that would be able to, you know, get to work and really get things done. That really helped us because we had the resources and then we had the guidance, those two things in combination really helped navigate the blind area in going into Airbnb initially. Then after a few months you just kind of get used to it, you understand the rhythm of things and it just becomes second nature.
Delia:
Great and how did you manage to get your first crew for that listing? Like the cleaning people, handyman.
Arun:
Yeah, so like I said, I think this is like valuable advice to other people as well. I think like your cleaners and your handyman or if you have even a property manager or whatever, I think it should come through for all bases like, I think it’s very hard, like we’ve tried getting cleaners on our own terms, you know, and building them from scratch and it’s much harder. When it comes to a referral or like you know, if you can get, if you’re fortunate enough to get a referral base cleaner or handyman, you have a proof of concept, you know that they know how to run the cleaning in accordance to the Airbnb policies and all of these things and it just makes it so much easier. So yeah, that was very helpful, the referral to our crew was integral, but it was from our friend who was already in London, Ontario and he had an established Airbnb already. So yeah, we were fortunate enough to get a referral. But I think that’s it’s extremely important that you know, you go through a vetting process for your cleaners and handyman because it makes your job a lot easier as a host.
Delia:
Yeah, I agree with that. Where is your current listing located?
Rebecca:
So it’s also in London, Ontario and the location is very central to like shopping malls, grocery stores, restaurants. I don’t know if you’re familiar with London, Ontario, but it has a large university and a large college, which is about a 15 minute drive to both and it’s 5 to 10 minutes off of the highway. So it’s pretty central to every single thing that someone would need to come into London. So like Arun was saying earlier, a lot of our people who do come to stay in our rental, it’s usually for business or some of them are, especially in June, they’re coming for their sons or daughters graduation in the universities or the college. It’s also right by four large hospitals, so we actually have a lot of doctors and nurses stay in our rental as well.
Delia:
So based on that, am I right to assume that you also do like mid-term and long-term rentals?
Arun:
So because of the tenancy policies in Ontario, it becomes hazardous to keep a guest over 28 days. They are now illegible for like legal action if we were to try to take them mid-term or anything over 28 days, so we try to keep our occupancy less than 28 days.
Rebecca:
We have had one family though that did stay longer, but we don’t do it always.
Arun:
Yeah. Like, you know, we assess the situation you understand, you know, if the guests are cooperative and we understand their situation. Yeah, we definitely will accommodate more than 28 days, but for a general rule of them, less than 28 days.
Delia:
I see, okay, that’s great as well. So what is your average occupancy rate in that listing?
Arun:
So right now we have about an average occupancy rate, a total occupancy rate, average rate at 82%, however, I think that’s kind of a skew number. Occupancy rate is really hard to determine on Airbnb when you have the three listing like, the way I structured my listing because, you know, like for example, the entire unit will have a very low occupancy rate, but that’s the two separate units are being utilised. That’s why the third listing has a very low occupancy rate. So the average is around 83%, but 80% to 82%. But yeah, it is, I think kind of skewed, I’m not sure of the exact numbers for each listing.
Delia:
I see! And is the listing like a duplex or something, that’s why you list two different parts of it?
Rebecca:
Yeah, so it’s a whole house. It’s a three bedroom house upstairs and then in the basement, there’s two bedrooms, so we split it off. So the stairs go into the basement, there’s like a locked door, so it’s actually two units. Then we have a third listing which if someone wants to rent out the whole house, so they would have five bedrooms. They can do that too.
Delia:
I see and have you had any problem with the guests conviving at the same time in the listing?
Arun:
No. In fact, I think it actually tied to helps. I think a lot of times, guests feel more comfortable when they know that there’s someone else in the property area. Especially with the basement unit, I think it gives some comfort knowing that there are other people in the unit.
Rebecca:
And I think it actually really helped us not to have any issues so far with complaints from neighbours or any parties being thrown because I think they know that there’s either guests upstairs or guests downstairs. Some people know that’s an Airbnb, other people just assume its tenants. So I think they’ve been more respectful that way and that actually helped us in terms of making sure that they’re not throwing any parties.
Arun:
Noise complaints, nothing like, you know, people are much more compelled to meet the noise standards of 10:30pm and stuff like that, just because they know that there’s other people in the house. So yeah, it does make it easier.
Delia:
That’s great. I actually didn’t expect that because I’ve heard from other hosts that if they host two different people in the same listing, they don’t get along or something like that.
Arun:
We ensure that, like both our units have separate entrances, the guests don’t have to interact, if they don’t need to, like they have their own way of getting inside the house. It’s completely separated. There’s very little interaction, the only time they need to interact is, like they would interact if they needed to, you know. So I think, because of the way we set it up, it makes it so that it’s conflict free.
Rebecca:
Yeah and our driveway is really big too. So there’s no issues with parking, which is nice.
Delia:
Yeah, I agree. That’s nice! What is your pricing strategy for all of your three listings?
Rebecca:
So right now we’re kind of playing around with it since it’s our first few months with this current listing, we manually adjust our prices. I think before we kind of put our prices more on the lower end just to get started with the bookings.
Arun:
We’d look at reviews and ratings initially. So we’re huge proponent on ensuring that we have good cause customer satisfaction. So initially, what we did was, we gave our house for really cheap, like, you know, we were putting money into our property the first few months, just because we wanted the review and we wanted to build relationships. But now we have, you know, returning customers, we got a good set amount of reviews on all our listings now. So now we can start to increase our price points and it’s not drastically increases, I’m talking about like $5 to $10 increases and our occupancy rates still remains pretty high. So, in fact, it actually hasn’t changed since we increased our pricing.
Rebecca:
I think we’re going into the summer months too now. I think we’re gonna have to reevaluate our pricing and continue to increase it because, yeah, I think people are willing to pay more than were, putting our place up and it’s getting booked actually more than we expected it to be.
Delia:
Would you say your market is competitive or not? Because many hosts have to base their price on the competition.
Arun:
Yeah, so absolutely. Our initial price points were in reference to a competitive analysis, like we did do market research, we understood where to put our price points. We did try to do a low cost leadership strategy and ensuring that we were going to make a mark with our competitors. However, I think as soon as you establish your listing, I think that like some of those factors kind of get mitigated. And I think we no longer have to be so concerned about our competitors. It’s more about just focusing on what we need to do now. But initially, yeah, of course, our price points were based off of our competitors, but I think we’ve kind of evolved from that.
Delia:
I understand. In this past time being an Airbnb host, were there any particular big challenges that you went through?
Rebecca:
Um, I’m sure there are big challenges. I’m trying to think of ones that come like up to the top of my head. One of them I guess, is like, so we live in British Columbia and our place is in Ontario and we have a great team so without them, we really wouldn’t be able to run our Airbnb. There’s times though that I wish I could just like hop on over there and help mitigate issues, like little things that come up when guests are there. Like if they have issues, we have a lock or a smart lock, so sometimes there’s issues with that. So I think just not being able to go over there for a quick like 10 minute.
Arun:
I think my proximity is, is a huge thing for sure. It’s a huge challenge not being close to the locations that you have Airbnbs in. But I think a lot of the challenges that you face on Airbnb is, it’s like, once you have a few months in it, I think you kind of figured out ways. A lot of the challenges are very similar, like they have a similar pattern and I think we have starting to figure out ways to tackle it. Being an Airbnb host is all about providing solutions and so I think that’s what you learned and you learn that very quick.
Delia:
And do you find the fact that you’re doing remote hosting, like, particularly challenging, especially in your area?
Rebecca:
Um, I think it’s actually been easier than we thought it was like, so you were saying about like remotely hosting or Airbnb?
Delia:
Yes, that’s right.
Rebecca:
Yeah. So I think, yeah, even though there are challenges and there’s times I wish we were closer, I think I’m surprised how well it has been remote.
Arun:
Considering how far we are like, even if we were closer, like, given the opportunity, if we lived, like, even five minutes away from that house, I don’t see myself having to go often, you know. It would maybe be once or twice a month. It is self sustainable. It is self sufficient and it really requires no involvement, like physically. There are times where of course, you know, there’s a problem, for example, we had a plumbing issue last month and we had to sent a plumber, but it, you know, there was a hole in the basement ceiling and so for that, I really wanted to just fly over there and look at the hole myself and see, you know, what we have doing stuff like that. But, you know, that was a challenge that we had to mitigate over a long distance. However, it’s easily doable and it’s easily possible. Yeah, it’s just figuring out ways to do that.
Delia:
Is there any particular technology or like, apps that you use to make these easier?
Arun:
Yeah. So investing into smart locks is probably like a huge benefit of mine because we have like set codes for our cleaners, set close codes for a handyman, we can create timed codes for our guests, specifically for when they check in and checkout. It just makes it easier for accessibility. That’s a huge technology advancement. Other than that, really, there’s not much else technology that we use to better make our efficiency. But that’s definitely helped us a lot. If we did have cameras, however that would be helpful, but currently we don’t.
Rebecca:
I think kind of going back to the smart locks too is, in our last Airbnb, we didn’t have that and I think that was actually a big hindrance to our property. We were having issues people not returning the key or like taking advantage of the time that they had in the place. So now with the time locks once they leave after the checkout time, they can’t go back in. And let’s say they did forget something, we can give them a one time lock passcode that they can just go on once, grab their stuff and get out. So I think with the smart locks has made a big difference and we can actually see, like if someone is using it and going into the house. So I think it also adds a layer of security to our unit. But like Arun was saying, other than that, we don’t really have any other technology.
Arun:
Streamlines or efficiency. We don’t have any technologies to do that. But I think in the future as we get more and more listings, we might have to do that.
Delia:
Yeah, I was just asking because I’ve heard from other remote hosts that I’ve interviewed before that they also use, for example, dynamic pricing solutions or some kind of apps to communicate with the cleaning crew, for example.
Rebecca:
Yeah, we have a small group of cleaners. So we just have two main cleaners and then one we use when the other two aren’t available. So we just text them or they call us if they need.
Delia:
I see. That’s great! And lastly, any tips that you’d like to share for other Airbnb hosts?
Rebecca:
I think we’ve touched on some of these, but kind of just to summarise, I think the biggest thing for us is making sure you have a good and reliable team and people that you can trust, especially if you’re not going to be within the same city or close by your Airbnb. So particularly our one cleaner, she’s kind of like our assistant too, she will drop in if something needs to be done, let’s say a guest is telling us that something’s wrong with our place, like she’ll go over and either drop something off or help solve the issue. Also, she’ll like go to the store if we need like more sheets or more towels and last minute things. So I think that’s been a huge thing for us, especially since we’re not in the town. The second thing is just making sure you have really good communication with your guests if there is an issue and like it’s inevitable that there are going to be issues and problems are going to come up, but just making sure you are transparent with your guests. We’ve had issues with plumbing and like our thermostat not working and things like that, but I think we were able to continue to host them and get a good review out of it even if they had issues come up because we were really good at communicating with them.
Delia:
That’s great. So that’d be today. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your tips as well!
Rebecca:
Thank you!
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