James Svetec 0:00
What’s up guys in today’s video we’re gonna be jumping into more terrible awful horrendous investing advice that I have found on tick tock around short term rentals and Airbnb ease and investing and I’m just going to share my thoughts about this let me know in the comment section down below if you guys agree with how horrible I think this advice is, I really like to do these videos because I just like to debunk some of these like bad advice that people are getting, because I think it’s really important that investors have the right advice that’s going to help them to make the right decisions and be successful. And I don’t like seeing people that are giving really really bad advice, but let me know if you agree or disagree with me in the comment section down below. And if you liked this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up make sure to hit the subscribe button. Let’s go ahead and jump right into it. And let’s start with this advice that has 370,000 views, okay, just 370,000 people that have have had to see this let’s take a look.

Speaker 2 1:00
Okay, pro tip if you’re hosting on Airbnb, pick fabrics that have prints on it because it’ll hide stains and dirt more easily. Do something solid coloured stains are gonna show up a lot more that prints hide it. Okay,

James Svetec 1:13
okay. 22,000 people like that. And I need to give disclaimer in case any of you guys saw that. I’d like that. I liked it to save it for doing this video. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It’s terrible advice. Okay, I do not like any of this advice. In these in this video today. This we covered something similar. And another video I just want to say again, that this is horrible advice. If you have stains on your sheets, you should make sure you can see them and remove them. If you can’t remove them. You need to figure out how to do laundry more effectively or replace your sheets. I don’t know about you, but when I check into a hotel or an Airbnb, I don’t want there to be stains on the sheets and I can’t see them. That is horrible. That’s horrendous. This makes me want to never stay at an Airbnb again, that doesn’t have white sheets. It’s gross. Make sure you get the stains out of your sheets, just wash them properly. Make sure you get the stains out if anything, it sucks to have any kind of coloured fabric because you can’t bleach it. You can’t get the stains out properly hiding dirty things in your Airbnb is not the same as removing them. So stop acting like it is this is terrible advice, clean your short term rentals. Okay, we’ve already covered that in another video, so I won’t go too much. But that one really, really gets me let’s jump into this next video that has 1000 views.

Speaker 3 2:33
If it’s your first time setting up an Airbnb property and you don’t know what to buy to maximise the performance of your listing. The trick is when you’re shopping, go to the list of amenities on the platforms such as Airbnb and go through what they have listed there. Make sure that you’re able to buy all of the ones featured on there. These are the ones that these platforms are optimising for faster booking they can pick and choose which amenities.

James Svetec 2:59
Yeah, okay, I forgot about this video. I picked these videos a couple of days ago. So I’d forgotten about this one. Yeah, this one is just bad advice. I understand where he’s coming from in this video. But ultimately, it’s really bad advice. And I’ll explain why is because when you’re on Airbnb, if you look like what he’s saying is as a host on Airbnb, there’s a bunch of different checkboxes that you can go through and check off which amenities you have in your property. And he’s saying look at those checkboxes because those are the ones that guests can often search for. Those are the ones that Airbnb is encouraging people to have. So if you want to find a good a good amenity, then go grab the ones that are listed there. And this is like kind of true, but like mostly pretty bad advice, because he doesn’t give the proper context to what he’s saying, which is that some amenities in that list are applicable to all listings, and you should have them in almost all listings, such as a coffeemaker, but other lists other amenities in that list are dependent on the type of property you have the type of guests you’re catering to the location of the property, all kinds of different things. And so it doesn’t make sense to say you should buy every single amenity in that list because remember, every single host on Airbnb has that same list of potential amenities. That means that whether you have a one bedroom condo, condo, a, you know, seven bedroom, big mansion, whether you’re beachfront whether you’re in Alaska, whether you’re in the downtown metro area, wherever you are, whatever kind of property you have, you all have the same many options. So by his logic, you should go and add for example, a hot tub to your one bedroom condo that caters to business travellers or to your place in the middle of the desert. Like obviously that doesn’t make sense. So yes, some of the amenities there are like must have amenities or a nice to have amenities even for every listing, but a lot of them aren’t a lot of them really don’t apply to certain listings. And so you really want to more so think about who is your ideal guest who is the person you’re trying to cater towards. Then go with through that list of amenities and say, okay, would my ideal guest actually care about and want this specific amenity? So when you see an amenity on there like board game, you go, Okay, well, if I have a listing that caters to families or groups of friends, yeah, sure, board games wouldn’t be something they’d care about. Whereas if I’m catering towards business travellers and solo business travellers, then no, a board game isn’t going to make sense for them. Who the heck are they going to play it with? They’re not going to want to that’s silly. And so you really want to just qualify that list more than anything, which is who is your ideal guest? Why are they booking your place? What kind of amenities are going to be important to them? Okay, let’s jump into this next piece of advice, which is honestly, this is just someone kind of venting about something that I see other hosts venting about often too. And so I really want to debunk this is we’ve got quite a bit of traction as well. 474,000 views on it. So let’s, let’s jump in and see what she’s saying.

Speaker 4 5:51
I losing my mind, someone needs to explain to me why we use Airbnb, and I’m a host on Airbnb. I just became hosts in January. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate the company. I hate the company. Let me explain something to you. Okay. Okay. I knew that when I signed up for Airbnb that I was gonna have to pay a host fee. It’s like 3% or whatever. But did you know that as a guest, you have to pay an additional fee to Airbnb, and it’s about on average, globally. 14%. Okay, that’s a lot. I charge quite a bit in my place in Whistler. And so for like a two night stay, sometimes that’s like 120 bucks on top of what you’re already paying. So this infuriated me, I was like, I don’t like this because it shows up on the bill as a service fee, which like, what the guest is going to look at that and think it’s a service fee for me, how are they supposed to know what’s Airbnb charging it. So I didn’t feel comfortable with that. And I went in and change the settings so that I paid for that fee on behalf of my guests so that they’re not stuck with this like shocking fee that they don’t even recognise. And so that means that in total with the 3% host fee and taking care of this other fee for my guests, I pay about like 17% to Airbnb for every listing. I looked into it, and I was like, okay, honestly, what is the reason for this? Like, what is this really doing? And it’s like, oh, they have air cover, it’s like insurance. Do you know that insurance would not cost anywhere near what they’re actually charging? Let me just tell you how much they’re making per month in North America.

James Svetec 7:19
This is this is my favourite part right here where she comes into this. So let’s see in

Speaker 4 7:24
commission fees, that they are mostly charging you guests. They are making $1.8 billion a month in North America only. I think it’s

James Svetec 7:34
okay. So she she goes on to say how ridiculous it is that everybody’s making all this money. Let’s just Let’s just bring this down. Someone else to explain to her she says why don’t we use Airbnb. You don’t have to write like just get off of Airbnb, my what I would say to her is just get off of Airbnb and see how that goes for you. If you think you can make more money by not being on Airbnb and not having to pay this fee. Why are you on Airbnb? No one is forcing you to be on Airbnb, no one’s holding a gun to your head saying you have to list your property on Airbnb, make a website listed on your own, it’s pretty simple to do. There’s tools out there that allow you to do it pretty easily. Now go ahead and do that. And then just don’t be on Airbnb and make more money. Why don’t you do that? Well, the reality is, it’s because you wouldn’t make more money. Airbnb is marketing your property for you, they’re taking care of processing payments for you, which by the way, even if you list the property yourself, you’re still going to pay 2.9% to process credit cards. So unless you want your guests to pay cash, you’re gonna have to pay for that. And then you’re also gonna have to pay for marketing expenses, you’re gonna have to run ads, or you’re gonna have to invest your time in in marketing your property yourself organically on social media, and then you’re gonna have to figure out everything else, you’re gonna have to figure out how to how to get insurance for your property that’s going to give you the kind of coverage that air cover does. And by the way, if you hold your own insurance policy, and you submit a claim against it, what happens to your premiums, they go up, your insurance is going to get more expensive with air cover. You don’t pay those premiums. So yeah, you do get air cover. Yeah, you do get the guests having customer support directly from Airbnb, you do get their merchant processing. Yeah, you do get the resolution department. Yeah, you do get the credibility of people wanting to book on Airbnb because they trust Airbnb because they built a brand around Airbnb, which costs a bunch of money. You haven’t done that. What are the odds that someone’s going to trust you when they go to your direct booking website versus trusting Airbnb? And yeah, you do get the fact that they market your property to guests because they have millions upon millions upon millions of guests all over the world that go to Airbnb specifically to look for in book properties. And then they see yours and they book it. Why? Because it was on Airbnb. So it just doesn’t make any sense to me to complain that you’re you’re paying Airbnb. Yeah, they’re providing a valuable service. If it wasn’t valuable, you wouldn’t be paying for it. Right? You would just go and list the property yourself on air be on on your own direct booking website because As you make more money, but the reality is, you can’t do that, because you wouldn’t make more money, you wouldn’t probably almost almost make no money. Or if you did make money, it would cost you more than the fees you’re paying on Airbnb, because you’d have to pay with either your time or your money for things like marketing expenses. And you know, it being outraged about the guests seeing it on there. And as a fee, I’ve never had a guest, you know, message me and ask what is this fee I’m paying? I’ll just tell them. It’s an Airbnb fee. So I’ve never had a guest give me a bad review or be outraged or anything like that, because they didn’t see the fee. It’s pretty self explanatory. It’s right there. When they book they can click on it, they can see exactly what it is. It’s really not a big deal. And then finally being outraged that Airbnb is making all this money. It’s like, yeah, they’re making money because like every other business in our capitalist society, you make money by providing value. If guests didn’t want to book on Airbnb, and host and want to host on Airbnb, they wouldn’t do it. The reason they do it is because it’s a valuable service. So I say kudos to them for making all this money, it means they’re doing a good job of providing a valuable service. Now, does this mean that I’m just an Airbnb fanboy, and that I don’t think that anything Airbnb does or has ever done has ever been wrong? No, they make mistakes that you know, at the end of the day, it’s a company that’s run by human beings and some things about Airbnb. I don’t like as much some things I would like to improve. Does it mean that I don’t ever recommend doing direct bookings? No. direct bookings can be great. But the reality is that to think that you’re going to get all your bookings from direct bookings, and not have any costs associated with that, or that it’s somehow going to be easier or more worthwhile than listing on Airbnb. That’s crazy. To me, you’re fighting an uphill battle, if you’ve decided to go that route. I think the direct bookings have their place as part of the mix, but they certainly should not be, you know, everything to you especially not right from the start. So this is something that again, not really advice that she was giving there. But I just have heard other investors and Airbnb hosts talk about this before and I want to get my thoughts on this because I think that there’s something that is just holding you back. You know, if you really want to be off of Airbnb, then figure out strategies to be off of Airbnb, but I will caution you to say that the grass is often just greener, and that realistically, it’s not going to be as good as you think it’s going to be to get off of Airbnb. Again, these are my thoughts. Let me know what you think in the comment section down below. If you liked this video, if you got value from it, if you thought it was helpful at all, then just hit that like button. And as always be sure to subscribe to the channel as well. I post two new videos here every single week all about short term rental investing Airbnbs. And so just make sure you hit the subscribe button if you want to stay up to date with that. With all that being said, thanks so much for checking out this video and I’ll see you in the next one.