Transcription
The two biggest Airbnb influencers just published a video, both on cleaning fees, saying different things. As a prior Airbnb employee and current Airbnb guest of 3000 nights, superhost property manager, and short-term rental investor, I'd like to share my thoughts.
In this video, I am going to make you an expert on cleaning fees by summarizing what Shawn is saying about the cleaning fee, what Ro Built is saying about the cleaning fee, and then I'm going to show my own thoughts about how I am using the Airbnb cleaning fee in my listings; some of which have a cleaning fee, some of which don't. Throughout this video, you're going to see I'm going to mention the opinions and philosophies that these influencers think work for them, and then I'm also going to be correcting sometimes there's just false information. I'll show a demonstration on my screen here shortly about that. There is a reason why Airbnb hosts pay me over $1,000 to apply my strategy IES to their listings. So for these influencers to sometimes be very confident in their positions, I have a challenge for them: show me your performance dashboard; show me your Airbnb listings and your profile. Sometimes that's hard to find. I have discovered both of their profiles, which I will share with you in this video, and I will also show again my performance dashboard to let you know that, hey, I am a top performer in my market. Market. Let's jump in here.
So we're going to start with Shawn's video, and to summarize, he's saying it's not about whether or not you need a fee, it's about how much your fee is. So he always has a cleaning fee, except in one instance we'll talk about. And what you're going to do is you're going to notice the first six listings will have six hero photos. Then I want you to go to the upper right, and I want you to click "no cleaning fees" or "all fees included" and let it reload. You're going to notice that at least two of those hero photos should change. And what this is telling us is there is a separate algorithm rating for listings based on whether or not their final price is good, meaning that Airbnb is still giving an algorithmic boost to listings that have a cleaning fee when that toggle is not turned on. That is false. Two things wrong with that: number one is that button that he's referring to sometimes is there and sometimes is not there. Nowadays, it is less often there. So let's go to Houston, which is where I believe he has many of his listings, and we'll see if that button is there. But then even more than that, he is claiming that there is a different algorithm for cleaning fee and no cleaning fee. What he says makes sense when you toggle off that button, the listings that you see here are different, but I want to show you something real interesting. Okay, notice these six listings. I'm just going to change the language; I'm going to change it to English, but the Australian version of English, and you're going to see that these last two photos here, two of the top six as Sean mentioned, change. So is he suggesting that Airbnb has a different algorithm for every single language? And this also works if you change the currency. The answer is no.
Now what's going on here? Airbnb search is extraordinarily dynamic, and it changes based on everything: the guest behavior, where their location is at, what language and currency they're in. But it's not a different algorithm. I have a blog post and a video about how Airbnb's algorithm is so dynamic and how it's different than Google and how you can optimize it. Now, houses—a lot of you have houses—zero cleaning fee does not work for houses. I have a house, so I'm going to bring you back into my performance dashboard, and I'm going to let you look at how I'm doing without any cleaning fee. First, I want to show you that I don't have a cleaning fee. They actually—Airbnb moved this—you're going to have to go to your calendar. We're going to look at the Bonte Penthouse. Come down here to additional charges—uh, per day cleaning fee: $0. Now let's go to the insights dashboard. I released a recent video where I show you a lot more detailed information of my performance dashboard, but let's just narrow it down to Belti Penthouse. This is the occupancy rate, and if we go to similar listings, we'll see that 93.5% is already pretty good. It doesn't include direct bookings, and then you see here compared to regular listings who are performing right around 60%. So what I want you guys to do is I want you to right-size your cleaning fee so that way you still get good algorithm performance, even if your cleaning fee is a little bit less than it actually costs you to clean. You still need to make sure that your cleaning fee is sized for your market.
Shawn pays his cleaners nothing, and that is one of his core tenants. So I need to take some time to explain to you when that strategy works, which it does sometimes work. Shawn has hundreds, I believe, of listings—at least 100. And so if you're a host with one listing or two or even 10 listings, this is bad advice because your cleaner is much more important to you. If you have, or your goal is to get, 100-200 listings, then you need to turn your cleaner's job into an assembly line position, which means they have a very stringent process to follow. I'm going to bring up Shawn's profile in a moment and show you what a cheap cleaner gets you in terms of ratings. It is not pretty. But if you are a host with one or two or five listings like me, then your cleaner is an essential aspect of your team because they become more than just cleaners. So you actually want to pay them a lot more because they reduce the amount of headaches and time that it takes you to actually manage your Airbnb.
Now I had to do some digging to find his profile. So I found this YouTube video, which is uh, somebody interviewing one of his employees, Haley Rachel, the director of operations for Pad Suites. Sean Rajkich is in the title here. So we pause that video. Now I'll bring up what I believe to be his profile. You'll see here we got Pad Suites, we got Haley here. We have a rating of 4.16, which you already know is is worse than horrendous. I'm actually surprised Airbnb hasn't suspended some of these listings. I see he has created duplicate listings, but if we come down here, you can see that his ratings are are horrendous across the board. Now that's because Sha's goal—with Shawn's company—is to onboard. He has a different goal than hosts with five or 10 listings. His goal: I need to onboard more listings, average mediocre listings that are profitable. I need to onboard more of them than I'm losing. Now that's a property manager. Sean, I believe, is partly property manager but partly arbitrage. So he pays a landlord a fixed monthly rate, and he keeps everything above that he makes.
Now I'm sure you're wondering what does a cleaner get you who doesn't make any money? Now let's go to his highest-rated listing here, which is 4.63, 297 reviews. It's in Dallas, and if we go down to his cleaning fee, 4.6—horrendous—hurting his occupancy, hurting his nightly rate, hurting his profitability. But again, his goal: get in a bunch of listings that are profitable. The amount of profitability matters less because he has as a whole team measuring it. My strategies are: hey, let's optimize our few listings because I don't want a rental management company. Okay, that's why I am getting 30% returns on my STRs. A typical investor is happy with 15%; 20% would be a home run, a grand slam. And if it isn't already abundantly clear, I teach those videos on my channel. My investing videos are actually my least popular videos, which makes me—I'm going to do less of them, but I'm just going to give you what you're showing me you like. So if you like this video, you can show me that with a thumbs up, and watching the full video you might be surprised at what you find. But I will tell you you need a cleaning fee because Airbnbs just created a a a retail for their algorithm that allows people to bypass fees in their consideration. And if you notice that your listing performs better on the algorithm with a fee than without a fee, keep the fee. You can even use maybe Rank Breeze. I'll call Rank Breeze and ask them to do us a favor. They're not going to do that because that doesn't exist. They probably already know that I showed you that that toggle thing that he's talking about actually isn't on Airbnb anymore, and there are not various different algorithms. I get questions way too frequently from people about how to hack the algorithm—this thing and that thing. Some influencers said one thing, they told me to change my last two photos and I'll rank higher, or or raise a price on a random day a dollar and I'll rank higher. And that comes from these types of videos when Airbnb instructors or certain influencers claim to know an answer to something that doesn't have an answer, or it's just based on false information like that toggle-off button or outdated information, better said. So I don't want you wasting your time unnecessarily. Let's focus on what matters, and the cleaning fee actually doesn't matter that much. I'll fill you in at the end of this video after we do Ro Built's so that you know, in spite of this influencer's video that says do not remove your cleaning fee, I'm warning you, and I don't have a cleaning fee yet, I am higher rated and more revenue-generating listing.
Let's move on to Ro Built, who essentially is saying take some of your cleaning fee, reduce your cleaning fee, and add it to the management fee. This is a bad strategy, and I need to demonstrate with an example, but let's hear Rob say it himself. So we're looking at the original listing where the cleaning fee was 225, and as you can see for these specific dates, my property is listed at $54 a night. Now watch what happens when I go in and I make the change that I just showed you. When we hit refresh, check it out—that $100 is now going to be divided over the nightly rate. So $554—there's now an additional $50 on each night. It's a two-night reservation; 50 + 50 is 100 bucks. All right, so his listing in that video, I have found here, it's in Austin right here. So I'm going to change the currency up to US dollars like he has, and I'm going to show you with an example why raising your nightly rate is a very bad idea. All right, so I've selected dates, and by the way, I just want to show you something that often times Airbnb isn't even promoting the cleaning fee. Often times it's not even shown in the listing or in the checkout page at all, but I'll come back to that. Let's look at this. He's got $682 per night. So assuming he—let's click on this and see what his actual cleaning fee is. So again, no cleaning fee shown on P3, which is where you need to make the booking. Still no cleaning fee. So that's because the guest doesn't care actually about the cleaning fee. I'll go into that in a moment because you're like, well, what happened to all that social media and all that news about guests being upset with the cleaning fee? But nevertheless, let's say he had a cleaning fee and his nightly rate now is is $682, right? So before he did this hack, his nightly rate was maybe $600 something like that. So if I'm a guest here looking at this area and you know I'm doing entire home—uh, his place is still showing up, but one of the most highly used search filters is the price. So this is Airbnb—another change in pricing—Airbnb showing the two nights, not nightly rate. Let's do a quick quick math here: 600 * 2 would be 1200. So let's say my budget was 1,200 bucks, and I move it over to here—his listing disappeared. Raising your nightly rate makes you show up in less searches, even though your final price is the same. Go back to his example—his final price was the same; his nightly rate went up. Avoid that at all costs. Absolutely choose the listing with the lower cleaning fee; it just matters to them. It doesn't actually matter to them.
Let's continue watching, and then I will give you why it does not matter to guests in spite of those viral posts that you and I saw. Many guests will not book a place with a high cleaning fee simply out of principle. People just don't like it because there's a stigma around Airbnb cleaning fees and guests being asked to do all of these crazy tasks when they check out, like repainting the house, mowing the yard, reshingling the roof, mopping all that. So if you're a host, just a quick tip on checkout rules: you should not be having your guests do anything really, if at all possible. And that's part of the reason why all of these viral posts, you know, went viral, because some hosts got crazy about this, you know, they had you do 20 things that took 2 hours on your checkout day, which is already stressful, especially if you're with friends or family. So don't do that. Limit your checkout rules to only the really bare essentials.
So then you must be wondering now, well, I've seen a bunch of Reddit posts and even sometimes it made the news about, you know, some listing would charge 79 bucks, the cleaning fee would be 250 bucks, the final price 325 plus bucks plus an Airbnb service fee blah blah blah, and on a one-night reservation that cost 80 bucks it actually costs $400. Now that is called yellow journalism, and it's sensational, and that makes it go viral. Now I have a really unique perspective being a YouTuber here, and I've been able to go behind the scenes and see, okay, how does this industry actually work? And it's really interesting because I am here trying to teach real tips and tricks to help you with your Airbnb, but that doesn't do so well on social media. We've got another influencer here that says, "Get rid of your Airbnb cleaning fee now!" And all caps—that video does good on social media. The same thing goes for the social media user who posted a screenshot to his Twitter that's inflammatory; it's sensational; it's going to get shared a lot, and that's exactly what this Instagram user or this Twitter user wants. They want a bunch of shares; they want more followers, even though in reality it doesn't matter. A guest does not care if your nightly rate is $1 and your cleaning fee is $499 if their budget is 500 bucks. If the nearest hotel of equivalent value costs 750 bucks, guests don't care. I promise you that, as a guest of years—I've been a guest on Airbnb.
Now Ro Built would disagree with me. He would say a guest is choosing his listing because they think they're getting a steal on the cleaning rate or something. That is nonsense, especially in light of the fact that Airbnb is not even showing cleaning fees anymore. Now having a cleaning fee or not having a cleaning fee makes sense and doesn't in different scenarios. In general, you should have a cleaning fee, especially if you're a smaller home, especially if you want a one-night minimum, but you want to dissuade one-night reservations. A great way to do that is add a high cleaning fee, which gets spread out over more nights. Now the reason why I started without a cleaning fee is—I will give Ro Built credit here—it was a it was purely psychological. I knew at the end of the day, whatever the guest's budget was, that what they were going to pay, no matter the split between cleaning fee and Airbnb taxes and local taxes, does not matter. They have a budget; they're going to stick to it. It's probably lower than what you're charging—that's why you get all the time, "Hey, can you offer me a discount?" But here in lies the real confusion, and it's because of the pricing strategy. If you have an optimal pricing strategy, then it really does not matter how your fees and your total income is divided up between management fee, cleaning fee, and nightly rate—does not matter. And I've proven that by showing you that I'm in the top percentile in my market in terms of views, in terms of occupancy, wishlist saves—everything. I'll go to war on this. If you are confused, and I am a little bit confused after this video, I am going to give away a free consultation call with me to clear any doubts. To enter to win, like this video and post a comment with what you want to talk about—your biggest doubts and confusions on Airbnb—and in 48 hours from the published date of this video, I will choose a winner by responding to that comment. Winner: smarter strategies, higher earnings. Optimize your Airbnb with me.