Transcription
Photos are more important than reviews. I'll come back to that in a moment. As you know, I purchased a new Airbnb last year. Except this time, I ran a little experiment. It was managed before I bought it, just like all of the Airbnbs that I purchase. But this time, I made minimal changes—only the most obvious changes, many of which were simply photos.
We're going to cover a few things in this video: one, we're going to go over the prior photos from the professional, and I'm going to call out some ideas. If you hire a professional, there's nothing wrong with that, but you're going to want to follow them around and make sure that the angles are right. The angles are important. And then I'm going to show you my photos—the photos I took on this phone that I'm recording this video with. Yes, I did edit them a little bit, and I'll show you the difference and how much of a difference tiny little edits make. And then I'm going to share also some photo tech—yes, photo tech—that's visual, so I'll show that when I show you the photos.
Now, the photos are more important than the reviews because the guests see the photos first in P2, which is the Airbnb page where the listings are on the left and the map is on the right. The guest is first going to look at the photos, and then they're going to click the listing if they identify that the photos are nice. Then they'll see the reviews. The review is hidden—almost. The photos are highlighted on that page. The photos take up 80% of the announcement, right? So it makes sense that the guest isn't even paying attention to reviews.
Now, there's a little exception because the best hosts have the best photos, who also have the best reviews. So I don't want to communicate here that reviews are not important, because they are. In fact, the number of reviews is the most important factor in how you rank. There's a difference between how you rank and how a guest chooses you. Keep that in mind. Let's jump in here. Let's first—I want to show you the photos from the prior professional photographer.
Now, unlike Bel Monte Penthouse, I knew I was going to do this experiment, so I saved all the photos before. Now, in no particular order, we're going to go through all of them, and you're going to start picking up on themes. I want to go through all of these photos so that you do understand the themes. Now, if you get it eventually, you want to skip this; you want to see my photos. There are always timestamps on the bottom here. So, first and foremost, these are called vertical lines here, and you see they start upwards and then they kind of come in—this wall here—it's like coming in. That actually makes the viewer dizzy—subconsciously or consciously—they're dizzy when they see these photos. It doesn't look as nice. That means you're standing up at 6 feet tall, and then you're angling the phone down. You don't want to do that. So, first tip: move the phone down to your chest level—about 4T high. I would also advise the professional photographer to turn on that light there and even probably turn on the TV and hide the cable and the fan in the back right there. That might be missed—remember, the photo is going to be much smaller than this normally—that might be missed. I would move that up to the left portion of the desk. That white on brown will have a nice contrast. I like how they showed that there are hangers. Let's move on to the next one—the kitchen one. I would have added some more things on the counter. I would have—again, same thing with the angle—last time I'll mention that until I'll show you an example when I do my photos, and you'll see the drastic difference it makes—just straightening the lines. Now, of course, we want to do horizontal photos. This is a vertical photo. Airbnb still is best with horizontal photos. Professional photographers—they're not stagers, and staging is the most important part of your Airbnb—taking of the photos. So, in this particular photo, I wish the photographer would have opened these windows, and there's even some kind of a fence. Now that I own it, I know that you could open the windows, and you can open that fence thing to see outside, and there's a greenery outside, so that's beautiful. Remove the trash cans from the bathroom; they're totally unnecessary. You want to remove everything—key tip—from any space that's going to distract. You want the guest just focusing on what you want them to focus on. Also, we don't even need the space here. I would have them take a little bit of a step in.
Now, this one is obvious. You'll see what I did. Tiny little changes—drastically different photo. On the beds, I like when you actually fold the bed in. You'll see that when I take my photos. I had the cleaner fold—hold the portion down here—actually in—it looks a lot cleaner. Okay, so now you all know—Pop Quiz—what would you do? You'd turn on the lamps, you'd open the window, you'd hide the cords, you'd turn on the TV, you'd fold the bed sheets into the bed, and I would have probably taken the fan from the other room and put it here, and I would have bought two fans as well. I noticed there's no AC in. Now, this is a strange angle. I actually would walk to the left and get that angle as if I was standing over here. Getting this door in the photo is not—not necessary. And this is common feedback when I have feedback for photographers—there's often some portion on the left or the right of the photo that's unnecessary for the photo. So take a step in. The chairs here are a little disheveled, so I would even them out. Opening the doors is a good idea. I would generally keep the doors open. See what I'm talking about? Just take a step in. Take that trash can out. Good on keeping the toilet seat down—always keep the toilet seat down. And oh, this is a big tip—always open the shower curtain. This doesn't have a shower curtain—it's GL—but a lot of hosts—they cover the shower curtain. Why would a guest want to see the shower curtain? They want to see inside the shower. And I'll take it a step further—turn the faucet on, turn the shower water on. Sometimes you can't see it, but sometimes you can. I'll actually show you an example of that here. Not super obvious—I actually thought it was a little bit more obvious—but the water is on there; you could see it here. These auxiliary shots—we do not need. I—I would never have an image of the—the hallway. And I'll take it a step further—if I have three or four bathrooms and they look identical, I would only include two or three of them. I do that, in fact, and I have never had somebody ask me, "Hey, where's the fourth bathroom?" He said there's fourth bathrooms. Guests don't notice that. You'd be surprised at how little time they—they actually take on the photos.
Okay, that was the professional photos taken on the live listing from the prior Airbnb listing. Now, I took—with my own hands—and my camera actually wasn't this phone; it was this one—the Google Pixel. This is better for pictures, especially on wide angle. The iPhone is—is lacking there. So let's move on over to my listing here. I'm actually really proud of these. I hope you are too. I know you'll share with me in the comments, but here we go. I'm off to a good start. I got six reviews. This is the cover photo that I chose. Okay, and obviously you can see right away I added a hammock. That space there was useless space; it was not being used, and it wouldn't have been used. I decided to add this—turned on the TV to something super colorful—added some greenery and then added these roses. I don't know—what do you think about that? Tell me in the comments if that—like—catches some attention—same color as the TV there. Now, again, this is taken with my phone, and it's slightly edited. I'll tell you what I edited. I had this starburst come around there. I had the uh—editor brighten this a little bit—brighten the colors here and generally brighten the photo and straighten the lines. I'm going to show you what that means on a different photo that's more obvious. Here's the photo tech I was talking about. Here we've got floating moon. We've got the Netflix on the TV. There was the same exact fan—exactly where I wanted to put it—I put it there. That's an often question—"You don't have AC—where's the AC?" Okay, at least you have a fan. Uh, I folded the towels. I decided to hide the hangers and show the other side. Added some things on the shelves. I think you would agree that this looks at least twice as good as the last photo. Here it is, by the way. I love that freaking moon. I'll put a link to that in the description, actually, if you're curious to get it. Think like that—you can find in my amenities checklist. Here's another one. Now look—look at this—did you notice that this—this cube with—with dice—now it's a decoration, but also there's actual dice in there, so people can play dice games. And I took it from one room and put it in another room. You don't have to buy a bunch of stuff for every single room—reuse. One of these plants is also—I put in that other room when I wasn't photoing here, and you can compare this angle to the angle from the other listing. Now, what did I get in, and what did they miss? So I got in the TV and the bathroom, and I'm missing the closet, which is more important. I decide as a host that the TV and the—the—ins—bathroom is probably more important. And then you can see what I'm talking about with the bed. So that bed is folded in there; the towels are folded, and look at that floating moon again. I've only got one of them in this house. There we go. So this is much better. Actually, I had to wait a long time, cuz there's a car that parks right here, and as soon as that car left, I just popped out there and took a photo. I've got some succulent plants on here, but really like this photo, so I kept that there. You'll also see—if you come to Metagene and you want to stay here with my—we got two black cats that keep the grounds safe. Added the cover on the top and made a starburst of this light and then generally just made the photo brighter. Now look at this—does this even look like it was in the last house? I'm going to show you that photo—that's the same image. What's the difference? The difference is the angle, and I turned on the backlight to this mirror. I didn't add that backlight; I just simply turned it on. This was just something extra I added. I bought these at the store; they were all coordinated, so I was like, "This looks really cool," so I'm going to add that photo. But uh—you'll see with my next photo—this one actually isn't even edited. I—I probably should take this out. I added that in when I was super excited—I just got the hammock. This, of course, is the floor plan. I sell these on my website—in my Super Host Optimization report, which helps you rank high in search. I give you a link to my favorite—I think three tools—how you can build this yourself if you want to, but this really sets the guest expectations, so you don't have to add a bunch of layout photos. A layout photo would be someone in this corner, so you can see all this—someone in this corner, so you could see all this—uh, I don't—I'm not a big fan of those photos. I would do just one of those photos maximum, and you'll see I have one here towards the end. Here is the kitchen. You can see these items here. I put the—the knives and the scissors up here. If someone's really paying attention, they can find that we've got a coffee grinder, we've got an espresso maker, we've got a blender, we've got other coffee—acurrent—we've got the laundry back here. Now, I'm not going to include a separate laundry photo; I'm just going to include this laundry here, and of course, I'm going to check off laundry on the amenities checklist. Now, filtered water—big thing—people going—third-world country—"Can I drink the water?" this and that. I'm letting them know that that is filtered water there, and you can drink it. Now, this one actually had my cleaner take, and it's good enough. I'll probably redo it at some later point, but I would have removed some of these roses; they look a little bit dead to me. I also would have removed my bag here. I would have evened up the chairs, but everything else is pretty good.
Oh, you know what? We've got a backtrack. Now, I first had my editor just edit the existing photos, and I started the listing with those. So I'm going to show you the—the difference between the two photos from the professional and then what my editor did. So here we go—this is it, and then that is what the edited photo looked like. So the straight lines—you can see these straight lines here—evened out on the left and the right of the photo. So that's a straight line right there; it goes up and down. Here it's not—it's going from up to inwards—up to inwards. Now, on another photo, you could see in my listing that the editor actually removed these glares. Now, I want to show you the photo that I took, so this is my taken photo, and that's not edited. You can see pretty clearly what was edited. The window here was changed, and notice also the glare. My editor can take glares off of images. Who can spot the mistake here? I didn't turn on that lamp. The reason why I didn't is because it was—it was broken; I couldn't turn it on. I may also have—should have opened the closet here, but that's not—neither here nor there. Notice the strategically placed fan so that it's very visible.
Quick aside here: go into your market search—your area—make sure there's less than 1,000 listings so that you can do a calculation here at, you know, 999 or less, cuz it shows 1,000 max. So if it shows 1,000, it could be 2,000. So let's say we have 850 listings. Now click pet-friendly. If that goes down to below 85—10% are pet-friendly—you are going to make so much more money by making your house pet-friendly, and it doesn't require that much effort. Now you need to get some fences. This also makes it family-friendly—somewhere for the dog to sleep, eat, play, and poop potentially. I have an outdoor, so they—they can do that out there. Now, why do we do that? Whole reason is I want to increase my demand. I have one supply. If you studied economics, there's a supply and demand curve. Now, how do I get more money? I increase my demand. That's part of the reason why we sometimes do direct booking. I have a bunch of videos on when you do and do not want to do direct booking. It is a lot of time and money, so you want to make sure you know whether it's right for you before you do it. But the point is—for direct booking—reason why we're doing that—the reason why we're putting ourselves on Google Vacation Rentals is to increase our demand. If we increase our demand, our supply is fixed, we're going to increase our occupancy and our prices. That is the goal.
Now, I am top 1%. In another video, I'm actually going to go into my backend and show you—I'm going to prove to you—cuz Airbnb now shows us, "Hey, what occupancies are you compared to your competition?" And I am destroying the competition—destroying them. Okay, my strategies work—is what I'm saying—and this is part of my strategies. I've got a hundred small strategies, and they're always slightly—somewhat—sometimes changing, so I'm always staying ahead of the curve. I'm in markets all over the world, and I'm always top 1%—just bumping up their top 1%. Now be sure you subscribe so you don't miss that video. Okay, so here you can see I added some copper here—added some color. This angle—I think you would agree—is a better angle. They can see visually there's a hairdryer. I put the light on the back here. This photo—probably also don't need—I'm not sure. Um, you know, it was not expensive to buy these two monitors, and those who want it really want it. Uh, I haven't been able to measure the impact though. Guests don't seem to care about it so much, but that's okay. It is an amenity. I know—I know amenities are how I separate myself from the competition. I know amenities are what gives the guests something to write about in their five-star review rather than just, "Hey, this was a great place. I'll come back again." No, no—you want a big, lengthy, long five-star review. I believe that affects your search rank.
This was my original cover photo, and the reason is I just assumed the best cover photo was that of the prior listing. This was what the prior listing cover photo was, and you'll see what I did. Now, I didn't like this because the way I'm taking it—it makes it look really, really, really close. So—so ultimately, I didn't go with this. This photographer actually stepped back. I was taking it up here. Anyways, if I were to edit this, I would add the Netflix here. I would straighten the photos. I would open the window.
If you have made it to the end of the video, don't go, cuz I'm giving away a free Super Host Optimization—that's 700 bucks—that deals with your online listing. It gets you to the top of search. You probably have already liked this video if you're watching this long, right? If you haven't, you must do that to enter to win. I'm giving this away to one person for now. You must subscribe and comment—that's all—that's required to win. I will post the winner in the description. Now, this is good for the first 48 hours after this video is published. At that time, I will read the comments, and I will decide on a winner. Hosts, remember to control that which is in your control, because not everything is in your control. Photos are in your control.