The future of Airbnb businesses + Thoughts on Brian Chesky & Airbnb IPO

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What's up guys? My name is James and in today's video I'm going to talk to you about my thoughts on the future of Airbnb and Airbnb businesses like ours that are managing properties on Airbnb.

I also want to share some of my thoughts on Brian chesky, the CEO of Airbnb and I want to share my thoughts on how he's handled everything Coronavirus related, you know how he's handled all the changes that are happening in the industry in the marketplace, I just want to share my general thoughts on him as a leader of the company. And I also want to talk about and touch on their potential for an IPO this year, maybe next year. I'm just kind of want to talk about that because a lot of people anticipate and we're looking out for Airbnb to be one of the hottest IPOs of 2020.

And now it looks uncertain whether Airbnb is going to IPO later this year, or postponed till next year, or what's going to happen with the company. So that's what we're going to be discussing in today's video and the goal here. I don't want to just fill you with a bunch of boring news. I really want to give you as a person. I'm I'm looking at you as you know my audience as being people that are interested in starting Airbnb businesses or making money through Airbnb.

So I really want to make this as practical as possible and share this from the perspective of someone who wants to use Airbnb to make money and seeing if there's actually longevity to that opportunity. So let's get started. Let's start off by talking about Airbnb as a business as a company, where they're going and where we as Airbnb businesses are we management companies are likely to head over the next six to 12 to 24 months and beyond.

So if you look at like the one big data point that we have is that Airbnb laid off a third of its staff not too long ago there and that looks a little bit daunting. Airbnb also had to raise some additional capital and they decreased their valuation quite a bit in order to do so when Coronavirus first hit. And so if you look at that, and that might be a little bit scary. But then if you look at the more recent numbers and I've been talking about this on the For months now, since everything started is that we're likely to see a pretty big rebound once things did start to open back up.

And what's happened is that that's actually a little bit larger than we initially would have expected. That rebound is actually quite substantial. Not just because people are pent up and looking to travel, but because people are starting to travel, but they're starting to travel domestically. And so what we're seeing is in a number of different countries, the US included us being one of them. We're seeing a surge in domestic bookings, we're seeing a surge in bookings in those countries, that actually is has made those that the number of total bookings greater than that of one year prior.

So if you look at the last month of bookings on Airbnb in the US, I'm not talking about exclusively US citizens booking in the US, I mean, all bookings in the US for the last month of 2020. And you compare that back to the same time period of 2019. You'd see there's actually even more overall bookings in the 2020 period. Just 2019. And that's largely a result of that surge that we were talking about where people want to get out, they want to travel, they want to see more places.

And then you've also got the combination of people doing work from home. And really, that means working from any home. Because there are a lot of times booking an Airbnb that helps them to work from home more effectively, maybe has a little bit more space for their family, a better office space, you know, those sorts of things, that that's another factor in it. And then the other one's really big, is a lot of people are booking within 200 miles or less of their home.

Because what's happening is a lot of the US tourists travelers who would typically go internationally and travel and get away. They're wanting to travel, like we predicted, but they're not wanting to travel on a plane, they're not wanting to go and fly internationally. And it's very challenging to do so obviously, given everything going on in the world. And so what they're doing instead is they're booking domestically and they're staying domestically so they're still taking that getaway.

They're just taking it domestically which means more money in the US more to host in the US more minor property managers in the US. And so that's a really positive thing is that we're seeing that upset uptick upsurge. And the other thing that's really cool is you're seeing Airbnb really dial back into its core focus. And that kind of leads me into my next point, which is talking about Brian chesky and his leadership throughout this whole period.

And quite frankly, I know there's a lot of people that are going to disagree with me on this, but I think that Brian has done a really really fantastic job of leading the company through an exceptionally challenging time. Now don't get me wrong, I understand the different points of view of all the cancellations if you've kept up with it at all. You'll know that Airbnb refunded guests on their bookings for you know, this whole crisis that period and so early on hosts were very upset with Brian about the refunds being issued without the host, you know, prior consent and going against the host cancellation policies they had formally set on their listings.

But Airbnb then later put together a 200 and $50 million fund to give Back to those hosts, as well as a $10 million super hosts fund to provide additional relief to Super hosts who are in substantial financial need. And so I think that overall from a public health and safety perspective, Brian actually did the right thing there. And I think that he went above and beyond by giving back to the hosts in the way they did, I think that that overall situation was actually handled very effectively.

And then you look beyond that and you look at the the need for Airbnb to go and raise money and lay off a third of their staff and the way that Brian handled that, I think that was done impeccably, I think that the the way that Brian laid off his staff, you know, I think that you can measure a person's leadership quality and leadership style and tell a lot about them based on not so much the really easy times but more so the challenging times. And certainly laying off a third of your staff is a challenging thing to do for absolutely anyone.

I think that Brian did it with a lot of grace, a lot of tact. I think that he did it in the right way. The best way possible when you're talking about something of that nature. And then the other thing is you look at what Airbnb has done with Airbnb online experiences. Now, if you're not familiar with that, they took their Airbnb experiences platform that allowed people all around the world to host all kinds of different experiences to people that were traveling to their area.

So this could be anything from you know, you setting up a hike that you're going to take a group of people on, they're going to pay to join that hike, or maybe a yoga class or a cooking class or anything like that, and allowed people live like locals, it created this whole marketplace for experiences. And they created they basically adapted it for online experiences.

So that's a whole new part of the business that, quite frankly, was really, really well poised really positioned well, very opportunistically for something like this to be going on in the world. Because they've had that add that they had that advantage and they actually capitalized on it. They're actually doing a lot better. And that's a really great platform, my opinion that they've now kind of just built out of nowhere out of all of the chaos So you see the rebound.

You see how Brian's dealt with everything, you see how they're actually making some smart decisions in the business and really refocusing on their core focus now they have laid off a substantial amount of their of their staff, largely that was working on kind of auxilary projects within Airbnb as a company. I think that overall, the company is looking very strong. I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity for money to be made on Airbnb, when you look at the different opportunities between Airbnb online experiences, like I mentioned, making money there.

And also, this huge influx of this big boost back up in in hosting income and bookings in the US presents a huge opportunity for people to manage properties on Airbnb, especially when you combine that with the fact that over the next couple months here, we're going to see a huge boost. In my opinion, my prediction is that we're going to see a huge uptick in the amount of hosts joining the platform because more people are wanting to make additional income. And what better way to do that than hosting your property on Airbnb.

It's probably one of the number one ways that people will To make additional income is by hosting on Airbnb. And when new hosts join the platform, we know one thing, they need help. They don't have experience. They want a professional to help them manage the property and make sure that they're maximizing their opportunity there. And so there's going to be a really, really big opportunity. We're already seeing it right now. There's a huge boom in demand for for Airbnb property managers. And I expect that that's only going to continue to rise.

And so all of that. And then the last thing I want to talk about is the IPO. This famed IPO that people have been talking about that was positioned for this year, but that now looks like you know, it might be later this year, it might be next year to Brian has publicly said that they haven't ruled out an IPO for this year, but they're also not committing to it. So I think that's a really strong sign if Airbnb were committing to an IPO this year, that would make me fearful that their company is not in a great place financially.

Because if they're really are in that situation where they absolutely need it. some really great thing. I think that waiting off is a really good idea quite honestly. Because once all of this stuff so besides, I do think that Airbnb is going to be even more valuable as a company if they wait long enough, because if you look at it, really they're honing in on their core focus, which ultimately I think was much needed and it's gonna help the business to grow and prosper long term.

There's a lot of other competitors, smaller competitors, who have been completely phased out of the market because of this, so there's gonna be less competition. And then they've also got a whole bunch of they've learned and developed from this that made their platform more nimble and made it more capable of enduring different things. And then capitalizing on different opportunities by using things like Airbnb online experiences.

Now, if you look at if you look at a company that right now has gone through the greatest deal of tourism, industry disaster of all of history, and they're still able to serve five that then there's not much that they that they really realistically can't survive in the Future that's gonna be a very strong very bullet proof company. It's gonna make them very resilient. Moving forward, as long as they are able to move past this which by all standards, it really looks like they will. And so you know coming out of this I think that Airbnb is IPO is likely going to hold off.

I don't think it would make a tremendous amount of sense for Airbnb to IPO the company this year, given everything that's going on, I think that the company would just be in a better position if they waited until 2021. allow a little bit more time for things to bounce back and resume back to normal and I think they'll have a really, really strong IPO when they do. I think that that's a company that's going to have a tremendous amount of resilience and investors are going to be able to have a whole lot of confidence in given how they've maneuvered everything so far.

Those are my thoughts. If you have thoughts that differ if you have questions, if you want to learn more, let me know. Again, links down below in the description to a free training if you want to learn more about how to manage properties on Airbnb and earn a full time income doing that how you can capitalize on this huge opportunities huge wave right now. With Airbnb, then just check out again the free training link down below in the description where I walk through all of the steps I took to build my business to over six figures in income in the first 12 months of managing properties on Airbnb from no experience whatsoever.

This is something that as well you can also just do completely remotely. We talked about that in the free training as well. So if you want more details on all of that, then just again, check out the link in the description below. Also, if you are just curious about Airbnb, you want to learn more about it. Our book Airbnb for dummies recently launched so it's on bookshelves nationwide, you can buy it on Amazon I'm gonna leave a link to that down in the description below as well. So you can check that out and get yourself a copy of Airbnb for dummies where we walk through everything all the ins and outs of Airbnb in insane detail.

So you can check that out as well. If you've liked this video, if you've got value from it, please just give me a quick little thumbs up if you click that little like button down below. That helps me out a lot. So I really appreciate it. If you did get value from the video if you just did that. Again, like always, if you have thoughts, comments questions, just post them in the comment section below and let me know. And finally, if you enjoy this content, you want more of it. We post two new videos every single week. And so you can get access to those by just subscribing to the channel there. I would love that if you subscribe to it.

I'm really excited to be able to share all this knowledge about Airbnb and get more people into Airbnb because I really do believe it's a phenomenal, phenomenal opportunity. It has been for me, I want to share all my knowledge with all of you. So again, thanks so much for sticking around and I will see you next time.