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Why I ONLY List My Properties On Airbnb (Almost)

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SUMMARY:

Many people don’t believe I’m on track to get $150k in bookings this year JUST from Airbnb. It’s true. And it’s on purpose. Find out why I don’t bother with VRBO, Booking.com, or direct bookings.

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In today’s video, I’m going to finally share why I only list on Airbnb. 

(It’s not just that I think Airbnb is a great platform.)

In previous videos, I’ve shared the biggest secret to success that I’ve seen. 

Between success from my partners, my own business, and the hundreds of students I’ve worked with, one thing is constant.

The ability to focus is what makes the difference.

So when people think they’re doing me a favor by telling me to post my Airbnb on VRBO and Booking.com – oh, and I need to focus on direct bookings – what do I tell them?

This video has the answer.

Sure, I’m better at leveraging Airbnb than almost anyone in the world. 

But that’s not it. 

In this video, I also break down the math behind my decision.

There’s $20-50,000 at stake here. That’s not worth it to me?

Not really, no.

I’ll share what it really takes to run those other programs. I’ll go into the skills you need if you want to build them out. 

Do I still get phenomenal returns? You bet. 

Now, I do have some risk management systems in place. I “almost” only list on Airbnb.

Find what my contingency plan is should Airbnb ever go away. (I don’t think it will, but as you know, I love reducing risk.)

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

What's up guys, it's James here and in today's video, I'm going to be talking to you about why it is that I only list my properties on Airbnb. Almost. Now I don't not saying that absolutely everyone should only list their properties on Airbnb. But I will tell you that right now, I only have my own properties that I own listed on Airbnb. And not to say that I'll never list them on other platforms. And I'll never get bookings in other ways. But it is to say that right now, I just don't have them listed on other platforms like VRBO, HomeAway, booking.com. And I'm not focused on direct bookings whatsoever. So I want to share with you why I've made that decision. It's not out of laziness, there's actually a rationale behind it. And I want to share this perspective with you. Because I know a lot of people think that Airbnb and short term rental ownership has to be this very complicated, very time consuming thing. And I've just found the opposite to be true. Now, if you want to learn how to earn a full time income, managing other people's properties on Airbnb, or you want to invest in properties, like I'm doing right now, and like we're going to be talking about in this video, and actually buy short term rental properties and own them yourself, then I highly recommend you check out the two trainings that are linked down below depending on which path you're looking to pursue. We have trainings for each of those different strategies down in the description below. So just check out those links, they're both the trainees are completely free. And one of them focuses on how to earn a full time income managing other people's properties on Airbnb, which from my experience, is a really great place to get started if you want to actually build a business and have consistent monthly income coming in, if you don't have the capital to actually go out and start buying properties. And there's another training that's specifically geared to how to build cash flow and long term wealth investing in short term rentals is a really great strategy to deploy. If you have additional capital, you want to get into real estate, you want to start investing, and put your mind to work and earn an incredibly great return on that. And I'm also going to talk about in this video, one of the common misconceptions about Airbnb in short term rental ownership or management, which is that has to be super super time consuming, which is why I find a lot of investors shy away from it compared to investing in long term rentals. The truth is you can get way more cashflow out of a short term rental then you can have long term rental. And you can do it with as much or even less time actually spent managing if you have the right system set up. And if you know what areas to focus on. That's ultimately what this comes down to. And the reason why I only list my properties right now on Airbnb, is for two main reasons both of them having to do with essentially just focus now the benefit that I get from listed properties exclusively on Airbnb is pretty simple. On the one hand, I get to really focus all my time and energy into learning about Airbnb. And over the last six, seven years, I've primarily focused the large majority of all my energies into understanding learning and developing strategies to help properties perform really well on Airbnb. Now, of course, a lot of those strategies do crossover. And they're transferable over to other platforms like VRBO, booking.com, HomeAway, etc. But really, I focus the majority of my time and energy specifically around Airbnb. And that's allowed me to become much better at leveraging that platform than almost anyone else in the world. I know the ins and outs of how their algorithm works, how to optimize properties on there, how to set up the right listing on there, who the demographic is all these different factors, so really know how to make a property perform well on Airbnb. And the second benefit of only having my properties listed on this one platform, aside from just the ability to really focus and develop my skill set and get really great at that one platform is that now I just get to spend a lot less time managing the property, you know, takes a lot of time to go and learn other platforms. And also to list your property just adds additional complexity to list your property on multiple different platforms. Especially if you decide to go the route of really focusing your energy on driving cold traffic to your property, and actually getting people into your own funnel and trying to book traffic without using a platform like Airbnb or any of the other options out there. Sure, it is definitely doable. And sure, in some cases, you could actually probably make a better return not having to pay the platform commission fee. However, you are going to spend that time that is a you know essentially just a substitution for the money that you would spend having Airbnb do all that work for you, you're spending your time as opposed to spending your money. And that's not something I generally like to do. I certainly don't like to do it when the payoff on my time is not very substantial. So if you look at the difference, you know, we've got a property right now that's gonna do about $150,000 this year on Airbnb. And that means that Airbnb is making a tremendous amount of money off of our listing, because they're marking that up generally anywhere from let's say, 10 to 20%. So they're making a pretty penny. But let's say that I could make all that additional income myself by just focusing on driving my own direct bookings to the site. Well, then I could make me let's say another 2030, even 40 $50,000 over the course of the year, but what it would take is that I would then have to go and take on more risk of running my own paid advertising. I don't ultimately know how well it's gonna turn out. I have to learn The curve of how to actually do that online advertising, which, you know, for me, I've got some background and experience in digital marketing and online advertising. But I know a lot of you guys out there don't. And frankly, it just would, it would just kind of be counterproductive to my long term goals isn't an investment, I don't want this investment to be highly active, I want to be more or less just set it and forget it with my team for them to run everything for me. So I don't want the additional stress and the additional time, that would go into getting that extra income from the property. Now, for some people, that may make sense, but for a lot of others, they just want to be a lot more passive. And they're just perfectly happy with making, frankly, you know, $70,000 a year in cash flow on one single property, you're still getting absolutely phenomenal returns on your investment, you're just not getting maybe as good of a return as you could possibly get. But you're downsizing your risk. And you're also downsizing your time investment. So it really just comes down to focus. You know, ultimately, the reason that I only list my properties right now and Airbnb just comes down to that one thing to focus all comes down to that one thing, which is ultimately just more focused. Now there is one thing that I do as well, that will help me to, you know, develop a little bit less reliance on OTAs on booking platforms like Airbnb, and will give me a nice leg up if I do decide to start advertising. But that right now is very low hanging fruit that takes very, very little time and energy. And that's collecting guests, email addresses. So whenever it gets books, I have a strategy for collecting guests, email addresses, which actually talk about all that in more detail in another video coming up here shortly. But that is a really great opportunity for me, because frankly, it's very low hanging fruit, I don't have to do anything with emails right now, I can then use those emails in the future to drive repeat bookings if I want to. And I can also use those for more digital marketing. So I can kind of do the right targeting on sites like Facebook, different platforms. So there's a nice opportunity there to kind of give myself that backup and that safety net that a lot of people are looking for when they try to veer away from the OTAs the platforms. So you can still achieve that kind of downside mitigation without actually having to invest substantial time and energy into it. And still kind of get the best of both worlds where
you've got that protection, you've got another option your back pocket, but you're not actually using your plan B as a plan A, because it's just not really necessary at that point. So those are my thoughts. That's why I only list my property on Airbnb. I'm curious to know your thoughts in the comments down below. I'm sure a lot of people disagree with me. And I've looked at different strategies, and I've looked at what all is involved there. And I've just made the decision that it's actually not the best place to focus. For most investors. This isn't necessarily for everyone. Obviously, for some people, it does make sense. But for me and for my properties, and for most of the students that I work with, I don't recommend going that route of you know, blasting your property out to a whole bunch of platforms right off the bat, and certainly not going as far as to build your own marketing channels and marketing funnels and email automation, everything else that's involved in driving direct bookings. So yeah, I'd love to know your thoughts in the comment section down below. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't like the video, still give it a thumbs up because the world just gets a little bit brighter if you give this video like and I would appreciate that and the whole world will shine a little bit brighter. Otherwise, make sure that you're subscribed to the channel, hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. And again, there's free trainings linked in description down below whether you're looking to earn a full time income managing properties on Airbnb, or you're looking to invest in properties for Airbnb. So whatever is the right path for you just make sure you check out the free training associated with it so you can get all the tools, strategies, skills that you need to start off on the best book possible. All that being said, I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you in the next one.

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