How to hit the top 5% on Airbnb

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What's up guys, it's James here and in today's video, we're going to talk about how to become a top 5% performer on Airbnb, I'm going to show you how you can take your listing, whether you're buying it, managing it, whatever it might be, and turn it into a top 5% listing, meaning that you're outperforming 95% of the other hosts in your area. Now, this is going to be an incredibly useful video for any of you who want to invest in Airbnb, or who want to manage properties on Airbnb.

Now, with the most recent investment that I made into a property that we're using as an Airbnb, I got that property. And our projections showed that the worst case scenario for the property was going to be $50,000 a year. Now with those numbers, the ROI, the return on investment was still astronomical, so it made sense to go ahead with, but leveraging the strategies I'm going to talk to you about in this video, we've been able to get the property book at $80,000 in total revenue just between June and middle of September. So that's obviously a lot better than expected.

That means that this property, if it keeps trending, the way it's trending right now, we're going to earn somewhere between 60 and $80,000. In net cash flow, meaning that's the profit that we're making. After we pay for all the expenses, the cleaning expenses, the mortgage, the taxes, insurance, absolutely everything on this property. Now, obviously, for a lot of people, that would be an incredible life changing amount, that means that you could replace your income or a big chunk of it with one single property. And it really boils down to finding the right property, and then leveraging what I'm going to be talking about in this video to turn it into a top 5% performer.

Now, if you are interested in actually investing in properties for Airbnb, replacing your income, doing it building up a really great portfolio of heavy cash flowing short term rental properties, then just click the link down below to schedule a quick 15 minute chat with me, my myself and my business partner Riley, we're going to be working with a really small, intimate group of students over the next six months, helping them to grow their short term rental portfolio or start investing in short term rentals if they haven't yet started.

So we're gonna be doing that in a private mentorship format. A really small tight knit group of students is very selective. But if it's something that you're interested in, you want to learn more about how you could potentially work with us and get the chance to have us investing with you side by side, then just click the link down below and schedule a quick 15 minute chat where we can talk and figure out whether or not it would be a good fit. Now with all that out of the way, let's dive into the meat of the video. And let's talk about some of the strategies that I implemented in order to turn this property into a top 5% performer.

Now, one of the really big ones is taking that property and furnishing it and decorating it designing it in the ideal way. I talk about this in a lot more detail in other videos. But that's one of the foundational pieces there is making sure the property is set up to be as attractive as possible to the ideal guests that you're trying to attract. Meaning that we add things amenities that the guests care about, that are going to cause them to book our listings over others. So those are things like board games, maybe a hot tub, a sauna, these different amenities, and it ultimately depends on what type of guests you're trying to attract.

If for example, for us, we're trying to attract families and groups of friends, then board games, yard games, all these cool things, a projection movie theater, kayaks, ping pong table, those things can add a lot of value to those guests. And they can get us a lot of bookings. So the return on spending the money on those items is going to be really, really big. Whereas if we had a business travel listing, so it was catering to specifically business travelers coming in for a couple days or a week to do their work in a different city, well, then they're not going to really want a cornhole set there.

So buying one isn't going to make any sense, you'd be a lot better off investing in a higher speed internet package, or some different items. Like for example, having them have fresh coffee, they're ready for them to have at the beginning of their stay. There's different amenities for different types of guests. So that's really the foundational piece. Now the second thing is getting the right photos. And in order to get top 5% worthy material photos, you need to really know what you're doing and what you're looking for. It's not enough to just hire a professional photographer, it's certainly not enough to take amateur photos yourself.

You need to invest the money, you know, whether it's 100 200, sometimes even $300, into a professional photographer, and a lot of people think that that's where it ends. If you hire a professional photographer, they're gonna come they're gonna get you all the right photos, and you're gonna be off to the races. But the reality is, that's what the top 75th percentile is doing. That's what the top 25% of the market is doing. If we're talking about really going above and beyond and becoming the top 5% then it's really not even about spending more money to get a better photographer.

It's really about having the right list of shots that you Give me your photographer, the right idea of exactly what your goal is with the photos. And so again, we talk a lot more about that with our students. But really, it revolves around getting the right photos, the right lighting, the right types of photos shot the right way. And a professional photographer, or real estate photographer isn't going to know what you need, they're just going to know how to deliver, they know how to shoot photos, great, but they don't know how to get the right photos, or what photos are necessary for Airbnb.

So the reality is, you need to have a proven system for giving that photographer guidance, they need to get all the shots, that's crucial photography is really, really, really important. Now, next thing comes to optimizing your listing, that's the other big component here to making this listing perform is obviously just optimizing it. And that goes for everything from the way you structure your photos and lay them out, we have a specific methodology for exactly what order your photo should be in, and especially which photo you should use for your cover photo.

Because ultimately, you need to understand Airbnb algorithm and how it performs in order to game it in order to not you know, not take advantage of it. But really just leverage it to your advantage, so that you can then go and perform really, really well. Now part of that that's going to be I'll talk a little bit more later on in this video about that algorithm and a bit more detail. But part of that is making sure you get a high click through rate on your listing. Airbnb wants to optimize and promote the properties that are getting them the most bookings because that's how Airbnb makes their money. And the first step of that process of getting your property booked is having people click through.

And the two main factors to getting people to do that are the cover photo and the listing title. So optimizing that cover photo to be as attractive as possible to your ideal guest is also really key. The next piece I mentioned is the listings title, the listing title needs to be perfect, you've got about 50 characters there that you can use, and you need to optimize that attack as much value into those 50 characters as possible. So you've got formulas for exactly how you should set up your title so that it performs exceptionally well. Now, the next piece is your listings description.

You want that to be as detailed as possible. And you want to be able to allow guests to easily gather all the information they need. There's nothing worse than having a big huge wall of text in your description, because no guest is going to take the time to read through that again, they're going to take one look at it, maybe read a sentence or two and then abandon the process entirely. You want them to be able to grab the information that they need quickly and easily from that description. Now, the next step is pricing strategy. And that has a lot to do as well with what I mentioned before Airbnb is algorithm and how it works.

So there's a different pricing strategy that you're going to want to adopt when you're first launching your listing compared to when you've got it up and running for a few months. And if you do it properly, if you execute Well, you're gonna be able to really leverage that initial boost, get a huge amount of traffic up front, turn that into initial bookings, and then initial reviews, and have that create a flywheel effect where the More Bookings you get, the more reviews you get, the more reviews you get, the more you The more, the higher your conversion rate on your listing is going to be because there's more social proof there, there's more views.

So people are gonna be more likely to book that property. And because people are more likely to book that property, you can then increase your rates and you can command more, when you increase your rates, you still get more bookings, and then you get those bookings turning into more reviews, more reviews means you're gonna get more traffic. And then again, you can repeat the same cycle over and over again. And that's how you really build a listing up to be a top 5% or even a top 1% performer doesn't take long, it just takes the right strategy. Over all your pricing strategy also needs to be a data driven pricing strategy.

This means having the tools to know exactly where you're at, relative to where you should be. A lot of people have this idea in their mind, a lot of hosts think that they should just be aiming for 100% occupancy or they think that it's fair enough to just, you know, guesstimate that they'll be at about 70% throughout the year and try to aim for that. The reality is you're going to have different occupancy rate targets for different seasonal periods of the year, some months of the year, you are aiming for 100% occupancy, other months, you are aiming for 70%.

But it's really about combining those two and knowing what months you're aiming for what goal so that you can tell well in advance how you're doing relative to that target and adjust prices accordingly. Now again, we go into all this detail in more depth everything we talked about the pricing strategy, really pull back the curtain in our private mentorship program. So it's something that you're interested in getting Riley nice help with hands on one on one really guiding you through the entire process and being right there alongside with you, then just go ahead and click the link down below. Schedule A quick 15 minute chat with me.

I'd be happy to talk to you more and figure out what your goals are and where you're at right now. And based on that identify whether or not we can actually help you. If we can help you then I'll offer to set you up into another call with Riley where you can discuss all that in more detail. And if not, I'll be sure to guide you in the right direction and show you some resources. You can get started with to get you closer to whatever your goals are, if it's not a fit to work directly with us.

So again, if you're interested in getting started along that process if you want our help and our guidance to actually get you started investing in properties for Airbnb, then just go ahead and click the link down below and schedule that call. As always, please give this video a thumbs up give it a like, if you liked this video if you got value from it. If you want to see more content like this, then just let me know by clicking that like button, it does help me out a whole bunch with YouTube's algorithm. And then also if you're not already subscribed to the channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button.

I post two new videos every single week on Tuesdays and Thursdays so be ready for those make sure you subscribe to the channel so you stay up to date with all of our new content. I hope you like this video. I hope you got a lot of value from it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below and I'll see you next