How I Setup an Airbnb property. Furnishing an Airbnb like a Pro in 2021

in this video i'm going to teach you how to properly plan and set up an airbnb property how to furnish your airbnb apartment or your home and we're specifically going to cover the topics of choosing pieces based on like aesthetic durability cleanability replaceability functionality like all this good stuff these are important topics because if you set up an airbnb apartment in a hurry and don't really plan ahead and plan for the future things are gonna break um they're gonna wear out uh they're gonna be unsightly you're gonna end up having to give guest refunds and then replace stuff that costs you money down the road and this can be prevented on the front end so um i'm setting up 13 apartments as we speak here in philadelphia in the same building and there's a lot of boxes as you can see but this is obviously fresh in my mind so i think i'm well qualified to talk to you about furnishing airbnb properties my name's sean rockyjeech i actually have over 100 properties on airbnb been doing this for six years and let's jump into furnishing your first or next airbnb welcome back airbnb family thank you so much for tuning in on this video uh this is a fun one because it's so fresh in my mind as you see all these boxes i'm setting up 13 apartments at the same time right now here in philadelphia um and more to come in this building it's a pretty big negotiation that i did uh they actually gave me five hundred thousand dollars in rent concessions to pick up this deal and i've got a video on that um a few videos back so i want to talk to you about the six main like key metrics the factors that we use when choosing stuff that we buy whether it's furniture decor stuff for the kitchen new stuff like that and their relationship with each other and how some things need to have certain characteristics and some things don't the implications matter so when you do airbnb the most time and cost effective part of this business is staging taking photos setting the thing up and then getting it listed right you spend the most money and you spend the most time on it from there it should be easily maintained where guests are just checking in and out um you're dealing with them through the phone and you're doing light maintenance but if you don't do this appropriately you don't plan ahead for things to break or things will wear down you know like you don't pick your pieces because of that inevitable future um things will go wrong eventually where things will start to look like grody and dirty even though it's technically in the best condition it can be in at the time and guess what want refunds because things don't look like they were in the photos or they don't look good and then you're gonna have to you have to replace stuff or things are just gonna break then you have to spend people time and resources to go replace things that break um and this stuff costs you money down the road so when you set up an airbnb right from the beginning you should be looking at the next two years at least of the future of your property because we budget for about two years of use at minimum for the stuff that we buy so before we get into the details please like this video um i really do appreciate it it helps the video perform it really does the algorithm's fun like that and subscribe if you're new welcome to the channel uh we're going to talk a lot about the functionality of running the airbnb business and of course i welcome you to watch like playlists i've got ones on topics so the six things that we look for when setting up an airbnb property first off is price right everything's driven by price because we have a budget if you blow your budget and spend like twenty thousand dollars more in your home than you should it's gonna take you so much more money time to get your money back right so there is always a ceiling on budget you've got to be thrifty within that number but then there's things like aesthetic things have to look good in the photos they also have to look good when the guest shows up there's durability like i said things can't be breaking randomly and you're constantly sending people to replace or fix stuff that's tough things have to be cleanable right they have to be serviceable so um like for example like fabric can stain where leather does not and so like things like that where you might be keeping it in the best condition you can put it in but a year from now it's gonna look diminished a year from now and that means you're probably gonna have to replace it when a guest gets upset about it like so that's the kind of whole the cleanable aspect and then there's the replaceability where you need to find things that are either common enough that you can always buy them or they are neutral enough that you can replace them with a like product something similar where you won't have to go shoot new photos again right so replaceability matters there then functionality um there's things that you buy because they look good they're good value but um they just suck right and we're gonna talk about a few things that you shouldn't really buy for your space because they they actually harm your guest experience you know for example as opposed to actually you know giving them a better one so functionality matters too um so yeah let's jump right in let's talk about budget so we spent about five thousand dollars on an apartment like out the door one bedroom or smaller apartment complex like this and that covers all of your basics like furniture it covers the decor to make your place look competitive like an accent wall you paint to make it pop all the amenities that make you more competitive like a coffee station with the decaf and the tea full length mirror you know tv with the disney plus on it all that good stuff and then of course um getting in rent and security deposit and stuff like that but i negotiate a lot of like rents and security deposit discounts and that's why i can get in for less than five thousand dollars i'm getting a lot of free rents on the front end typically and that's how that number comes now we add two thousand dollars per bedroom in budget for staging but if it's a house um add a thousand dollars to the base so six thousand instead of five and then add twenty five hundred instead of two thousand per bedroom so you're looking at about 11 000 for a three bedroom house as opposed to 9 000 for a three bedroom apartment that's based on square footage and usually homes have a little bit more needs because apartments tend to like have more amenities better fixtures and all that good stuff right out the door where if you sell a landlord on letting you airbnb their property there's more that you have to put in there more love to make that thing competitive and that's why there's a little bit more money there now let's first talk about aesthetic see the aesthetic of the home isn't about the individual quality of the piece but how it all comes together so if you've ever walked through an ikea and saw all the little rooms that they make that stuff isn't expensive stuff but they find a way to make these rooms look really cool and so you can increase the overall aesthetic of your space by using common themes that tie together well and like painting an accent wall can give you a pop of color and you know using just like a few main colors where you might have a couple more cool colors and then one pop of warm right so you like you do like blue like maybe two shades of blue and then like just canary yellow for example right it'd be a way to like use that use like a like an electric blue a royal blue or something and then a midnight blue and then a pop of canary yellow and that's a way to use three colors in a space and it's gonna make it look really clean you can always cut your colors with neutrals you can always use anything white black around the gray scale because they don't really make more chaos i wouldn't recommend doing more than three colors and you want to make sure that those colors have a relationship with each other and then have fun with the accent wall and all the good stuff right textures um matter too so if everything's like farmhouse style like wood metal leather that's really cool um if you do something modern um you could do things that are more like glass acrylic like plastic but like like more quality plastic um like that white porcelain style plastic and stuff like that and go for this more modern contemporary maybe some like stone like um some really smooth concrete stuff uh custom poured i mean that starts to get expensive but you get my point now this leads to what's what's gonna be the next one which is like like serviceability but what i do want to hammer home here is aesthetic is about designing a room as a composition and making sure you pay attention to like the little details and give the place personality and you're doing it for the photos more so than for the space you're doing it for the photos so as long as your home looks good at a couple key angles and can get some good shots out of it that's good enough so you don't have to like adorn the place and overload it so that way it looks good at every single angle if you are on a budget and you want a good aesthetic and you kind of end up having to cut corners anywhere skip one wall right just skip one wall and just kind of basic out that wall but make sure that your photos don't include that one wall right and that's just coming in on a budget you can always upgrade that later as you make some more money if you want to but serviceability is next see the reason why the examples i gave you were like wood metal leather plastic acrylic glass concrete is because they can be cleaned right and this is super important what i've noticed with a lot of stuff that we've bought even high quality items if they've got that fabric top to it um like couches that are fabric or bar stools that are fabric those stain um and if you've got like certain types of certain types of wood too certain types of wood tops where like a cup sweats on the wood and then it gets a ring on it that's no fun and then there are like like like lacquer um nightstands that if like somebody spills something on the nightstand then it creates this like really weird off-color white translucent thing so there's some stuff that you just shouldn't buy because even though they're cheap and they look nice this stuff just goes bad and even though you try to clean them and ever it says it's sterile it's not going to look clean a few examples of other stuff that you may not even be control of one of the older properties i picked up in fort worth years ago um the apartment was so old that the tubs needed to be acid washed so as clean as we could get them they still had like this like kind of blackish color and they kind of had this off texture from excessive cleaning the outside of the tub was rough looking and we had to give refunds for a completely clean pristine sterile tub because they looked old and in the photos that meant that they looked dirty so you should be careful with properties that you pick up where there are things that if it looks dirty but it's clean that means that that's the best condition you can get it in and if it's going to give you problems with guests you should skip that apartment and so we be careful with like be careful with tubs you can get them resurfaced and so if you're negotiating with an apartment you should negotiate to resurface those tubs for an example but try to stay away from fabrics uh try to stay away from things with cheap coatings and you know try to make sure you move into a place that has new stuff and that'll avoid that lack of serviceability another example of something that is like durable enough to continue to be used but just starts looking bad we love the home hero knife sets for the most part they're the ones with the acrylic stands and the knives all fan out they look really pretty but we've bought a lot of ones that are black and black black blade black handle problem with that is the blades as you re-sharpen them and you use them uh the the silver underneath starts to show and the outside layer starts to like oh no in a way like chip away as like you know like a ceramic pan would i'm not a ceramic pen but like one of the like a teflon pan would and they just start to look really junky and old so we're now moving to using knives that just have a stainless steel outside because we don't have to worry about the coating going away and that way they last longer that's one example now the acrylic thing it's actually hard to clean so that's the only drawback to the home hero knife sets is people stick dirty knives in there for some stupid reason and cleaning the inside part can be really tough so you really have to stay diligent with your housekeepers to have those cleaned um another example is like um what coffee stations you use keurig machines they they go dirty and people don't know how to properly clean keurig machines um and it's nasty mold grows inside of them so i always recommend get a regular coffee station if you want to have a perfectly manageable perfectly clean and pretty coffee situation you should do a kettle and you should do a pour over like a chemex with the tin on the top this means that a housekeeper will never forget to open the coffee machine to check for a filter and coffee because they'll forget that sometimes which sucks so this coffee station if it's used it's obvious and it has to get cleaned every time so i would recommend those now they're not as durable somebody could drop the glass or chip the glass and you'll need to replace it but that's the kind of trade-off that we're looking for here or we're considering is um for the proper maintenance of the property and proper cleaning a regular coffee machine doesn't get cleaned properly typically and i used to work as a barista in a coffee shop and i kind of know how grody that stuff gets and so i'm leaning towards pour overs and the chemex style thing just because i think they look cool it's more of an like um like a do-it-yourself coffee thing which is kind of a fun activity some people hate it um but it just saves us from ever disappointing a guest with a with the subpar quality of clean so those are some stuff in the kitchen that matters just the same now uh durability is next so these things are all still usable but um they just become unsightly or problematic and that's kind of like the point there but with durable um there are things that just like break they look good and they're cheap and stuff but like ikea furniture that's like the eight dollar nightstands they just break and they're hard to repair and so this is the other part of the durability airbnb has got a policy where you have to try to repair something before you build the guest to replace it in its entirety so we're looking at this a lot at scale as how to manage our property based on durability and how to fix stuff so we've got this beautiful 10 foot long blue couch that we bought off of sofa mania because we had a really unique floor plan and somebody put a cigarette burn mark in it well it's a blue uh like velvety felt kind of fake fabric and so it is really tough because um i had to throw my phone it keeps ringing um it's really tough to replace because that fabric's so unique so we have to pull fabric like a like a little patch of fabric from the back of the couch and then patch the cushion and like restuff the couch and then cover the back of the couch with a black patch or something like that the part that's not aesthetic can have that off color patch so that's what we have to do to replace like the fabric of the couch now the cool thing with this couch is this fabric doesn't stain like other fabrics right like if you have like the cross stitch like linen or cotton like you know like the weaving that stuff stains it has like water marks really easily and those ones have given us the most trouble but this felt like like velvet thing they i like the velvet they it doesn't stain so easily so if you're going to use a fabric you can use velvet but watch out for burn marks i think it is better too considering burn marks even though people aren't supposed to be smoking um it is better for that than leather uh but leather is completely easily cleanable like and it's hypoallergenic which is great i'm sitting on a faux leather couch cushion right now from a new couch that we're buying we're testing something let me tell you about it um but i will say uh that like burning this with a cigarette there's no way to fix it you just have to replace the whole cushion or replace that section of couch so with that in mind the couch i'm sitting on see if i can get you to link i think i bought these on sofa mini as well they're black faux leather chesterfield style couches and they're modular they just click together so the arms click and the bottom clicks and the back clicks together so what we can do is we can have 10 or 20 of them and then keep keep a couple in inventory and then if somebody breaks a piece of the couch we can just replace it we can use two spare couches for parts right and so now we can very quickly replace an entire couch by fixing the piece that's broken so it's easy for our housekeeper or someone to go into a storage closet grab the arm of a couch and bring it in and have some maintenance guy come in real quick and put it together all right so that serviceability or the repair ability replaceability kind of intersects there you have to plan for things to break down now so this one right we can't just patch it with a little sewing machine but we can replace the whole chunk of it other things that need to be really durable in your place is like the bed frame we've noticed that a lot of times the bed frames give out so we've been buying these uh like amazon reinforced metal frames that go below the bed and kind of like stick it into the outer part of a frame but there's been a lot of like cheapskate manufacturers on amazon selling like really low quality versions of this um and they've gone up in price we used to get the best quality metal frames on amazon for like 80 90 bucks for a king now they're like 165 bucks for king and that could be just because of logistics with covid and china shipping and stuff maybe otherwise people just know that these things are popular now and they can get more money for them i don't know but you should reinforce your bed frame so instead of buying a 160 dollar metal bed frame you can go to lowe's and get extra lumber and like reinforce the wood frame that you have i think that's a good idea because it's definitely less than 160 bucks in lumber to reinforce what's already a wood frame and these are all the beds so i'm gonna have one guy go and assemble all of the beds it's gonna be part of our like launch for these 13 units um but each one the beds will have to be reinforced because we're planning ahead for stuff like that now certain things don't have to be durable like the like the the fake plants and the lamps tend to not have to be durable because they're very rarely interacted with um the lights have to be functional but they don't have to be durable and functionality is one thing too like we'll talk about that in a second so we buy our fake plants typically from ikea or target we prefer the ones at ikea because of better price but if you order them online or go into the store it's just what they have at that store's inventory when you order online target if you buy fake plants online they'll distribute them from like a wider geographic area so you can get more so for 13 apartments i had to use target to buy tons of fake plants in bulk where if it was just one or two apartments i'd go to ikea or ship in from ikea but they they don't carry as much inventory which makes it hard to do it at scale but cups plates bowls stuff like that ikea is good for that so we buy all that kind of stuff from ikea because you can get 80 cent plates that are good quality 80 cent bowls that are good quality so in mass i mean i think we just ordered like 100 plates for this place something like that and it was super cheap which is awesome now with stuff in the kitchen of the same type we don't buy teflon pans we've switched to ceramic um we're hoping that ceramic is a little bit more durable doesn't create that grody nasty teflon scrapey thing also when you buy like cooking utensils you should be using silicone instead of like the hard plastic because the hard plastic melts and gets into food which is just super nasty and certain people know this and if they see that you have cheap cooking utensils that kind of like start to warp and bend and like flatten out they're like come on guys right so um silicone cooking utensils is more durable um and they they won't irk out certain guests so and what that said is for like functionality goes that's another thing there and like the keurig machine coffee station thing that's a functionality thing that we talked about too see all this stuff starts to intersect now the keurig is le the keurig is the easiest to wield right the regular coffee pot people are used to the coffee station with the chemex it's a little harder to like to use so it doesn't win on the functionality side um but if you if the guest likes it as an experience then way cool right um all the lights lamp switches they all have to work um we stopped using sleeper sofas combination of functionality and durability here they eventually break um sleeper sofas are hard to replace because they're heavy uh they break and they're hard to do maintenance on because they're kind of like weird and you have to find somebody who's like good at repairing them and if you can't effectively repair it it stops being couch right it just becomes like sunken in and like off center and they become problematic so if they if you lose the sleeper part of the sofa you lose the sofa part of the sofa so that's why we don't really like sleeper sofas anymore we've actually switched to rollaway beds um because they still break like sleeper sofas do but um they're easier to do maintenance on because you can remove it from the property and try to fix it and bring it back later they're easier to swap out because they're smaller and they roll and they roll out um and they're more modular right so you can have a love seat in a space that only had room for a love seat but then you can have a sleeper sofa like i mean a rollaway bed where you can still sleep an extra person with the roll-away bed didn't have room for like a whole couch but you had room for the like roll-away bed and that is something that you can do too especially with couches they're like this faux leather you may not want somebody sleeping on it so you don't want to list the couch as a sleeping space but you can have the roll-away bed and give somebody space to sleep in in the living room so that's another kind of pro tip is we're getting away from sleeper sofas and into rollaway beds for that reason so to kind of in reverse take a look at everything i kind of just dumped on you the most interacted with stuff on a property that you should plan for upkeep uh and breakage and stuff like that will be the couch the bed um the towels and the linens in the house the cups plates bowls utensils stuff like that the front door the carpet coming inside you know like that old stuff the stuff that is the least interacted with would be the fake plants uh would be the lights um the toaster probably rarely gets used but i mean they still get used um stuff like that uh stuff that it just kind of sits there and it's like hey that's nice so the art on the walls the decor the fake plants that stuff is rarely interacted with so that stuff just kind of lasts right so you should be keeping extra things on standby that are highly interacted with i recommend keeping a spare like smart tv on standby because if somebody steals it or breaks it you can just replace the tv um we're doing these extra couches that are modular so we can replace pieces of that we keep extra sheets and towels and stuff on standby and now here's a pro tip for that too guys is you you can do the white towels and linens and stuff and look really crisp and sharp and professional which i love i love that white crispy look but they're harder to maintain you gotta bleach them and stuff like that um you don't want to bleach them on site because then the washer could have bleach in it and you bleach your guests clothes and they get pissed and you have to replace those that would be bad so you would have to launder them off-site so that becomes a thing now you can use colored towels and stuff but then they may not seem as professional or as luxury and then there's a trade-off there but one thing you can do is if you want to justify using colored towels and colored sheets you can incorporate it into your design style so that way using a purple towels in a place that has like a good purple theme is like justified right now if you use white sheets uh be careful what colors you have you should probably use a blue if anything because um natural white sheets um kind of actually more dull than the vivid pearly white sheets that we all love they're like just like like pearly white teeth kind of white um those actually have a little bit of blue in them they're not actually a true white so if you want to wash white with something else probably choose a blue like a light blue um and that'll keep your white sheets lasting longer um so just keep that as a pro tip but if you want to use colors for everything then just justify your colors in your design style and you'll be good there now if you if with all this set you find yourself kind of like at a loss on budget um and you want to stick to that five thousand dollars and you want to buy some nice stuff and you want to do the accent walls and everything but you just don't have enough money to build up a whole place pro tip is you're actually designing the the place um for photos not for the space right so you are trying to make sure that the photos look good so if you can do two or three walls and make them look really good at certain angles that's good enough if you have to skip one wall and have like a basic wall that's fine but com like make sure that everything else is composed and good enough that you can get the photos that you need for the airbnb listing and then you can work on that wall later something like that um so coming in under budget means everything that you do do well think of it as photos first not the entire space um because if you do the wall with the headboard like with the bed um at that point then you're like able to um be able to get the photos of the bed at a couple different angles with the headboard the back wall with a cool backsplash or whatever spend all the money on that then if the rest of the room is generally basic that's gonna be okay to get started now um if there's things that you're not gonna slouch on money on don't slouch on the mattress and don't slouch on the pillows um and you probably also should make sure that you've got a decent quality of uh of like sheets on the bed too because the sleep experience in that in a home is probably the most important thing um the sleep experience is the most important now if you have a larger home too your cookware needs to be on point because people will be preparing meals and if they're cooking for family and that's a big thing for like their their family situation if a family can't cook like they normally would because they've got to work around like really dingy stuff that's going to give them a negative kitchen experience right so eating with family is a big experience think about greek culture italian culture just think just picture thanksgiving right you want to deliver on sleep quality and on bigger properties you want to deliver on kitchen quality those are big now the couch will get sat on a lot so couch cushions having good dense firm cushions it's probably gonna matter because otherwise they'll start to sink in and get old otherwise you have to have a plan to replace those cushions right so um keep certain things of quality the stuff that doesn't get interacted with just make sure it looks pretty now if you'd like to continue this conversation i welcome you to leave questions in the comments talk to me directly in the comments i manage those myself if you want to get a big like hearty response on something that you want like hosts opinions on like multiple hosts join my facebook group the hosts of airbnb automated there's over 16 000 people in there we talk about all sorts of stuff they're all super professional super helpful people and if you want to know what a lot of hosts think about something that's that's actually the best place on the internet to go for some good solid feedback thank you for watching this video i hope it was super helpful um in your journey as a short-term rental operator airbnb host small business owner uh if you need me find me and like on instagram hit me up in the dms as per usual i will see you on the other [Music] side

Channel: Airbnb Automated

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Keywords: airbnb, how to airbnb, airbnb design ideas, airbnb furnishing, airbnb tips for hosts, airbnb host, airbnb staging, airbnb getting started, airbnb for beginners, airbnb pro tips, airbnb course, airbnb course review, best airbnb course, how to airbnb videos, airbnb tips for new hosts, what's airbnb, airbnb overview, airbnb guide, airbnb tutorial, airbnb videos, airbnb class, airbnb classes, airbnb coach, airbnb coaches, airbnb teachers, airbnb teacher, air bnb

Id: 70igknZDZHk

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021