Prevent Parties in Your Airbnb BEFORE They Even Start
Parties 🥳 🥂 are an Airbnb host's worst nightmare 😡
There are steps that you can take to prevent a party from erupting in your Airbnb. In this week's video🎥, I'll show exactly how to do it. Step by step📝. With a little preparation, you can take much of the worry out of your Airbnb business.
Being able to stop parties in our listings is probably the most important thing we can do to ensure that our industry survives. Nearly every negative news story 📰 about Airbnb is the result of a party. It's these negative stories that have caused politicians to enact regulations 👨⚖️. Parties annoy our neighbors and keep us awake at night. To ensure the short term rentals industry gets the opportunity to flourish, we, as hosts need to get this right.
This week's video is all about what you can do to stop a party before it event begins. I share the 4 key steps I take to prevent a party before it happens.
👉Access Control
👉 Real-Time Monitoring (from a distance)
👉Checking and Enforcement
👉 Vetting
🔗🔗🔗Here is the link to download my free, 4-page guide on the best tech to prevent parties: https://www.airbnbuncovered.com/prevent_parties_download 🔗🔗🔗
👉👉Every week I post a few quick Airbnb tips on my Instagram account! 📸📸 Follow me: @airbnbuncovered
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TRANSCRIPT
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Welcome back to my channel! I’m Matt the creator of Airbnbuncovered dot com and Airbnb super host. On this channel I UNCOVER some of the best kept hosting secrets as well as share with you everything that I’ve ever learned after hosting over 3000 guests.
One of the biggest concerns on any host’s mind is parties in their homes. And this is a legitimate concern. It’s one that we all have to deal with as hosts. There are ways to prevent parties from happening and on this week’s episode, I’ll show you exactly what they are.
Preventing parties along with other strategies to become a reliable and responsible host is what this channel is all about. I post a new video every Tuesday and they’re all geared towards helping new hosts attract the best guests, earn more and ultimately become a super host. If you’re new to my channel, please subscribe and click on the notification bell. If you’re enjoying my videos please hit the thumbs up button. Doing both of these things boosts my results in the YouTube search results so that we can reach more new hosts together.
While the very large majority of guests on Airbnb are lovely and respectful people, there are a few bad apples out there. The home-sharing community is no different than the community you live in. Most of the people where you live are likely friendly and respectful, but there are a few questionable ones.
Our job as hosts is to ensure we’re only hosting the friendly ones.
Hotels are equipped to monitor the activity in their rooms, but as Airbnb hosts, we’re often not. We don’t have the luxury of a front desk staff on-duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We also don’t have a security team at our disposal.
The very existence of our community of home-sharers depends on us getting this right. I’m sure you’ve no doubt seen at least one news story about a big party that happened in an Airbnb. These parties leave the hosts devastated, the neighbors annoyed and angry, and the community concerned. It’s these types of news stories that push lawmakers to restrict Airbnb and place rules on home-sharing.
A few weeks ago, I did a three-part video series about attracting the best guests and avoiding the worst ones. You can check them out here, here and here.
In this week’s video, I’m going to get very tactical about what actions you can take, today, to prevent a party from breaking out in your home. I’m going to go over 4 key areas in this video :
- Access control
- Real-time monitoring from a distance
- Checking and enforcement, and finally;
- Vetting
In this video, I’ll be referencing different types of devices that you can buy to protect your home against unauthorized parties. To help you along, I’ve written up a list of these devices and you can get it from my website. I’ll link to the list in the description below. The list is simply the most commonly used devices I’ve seen in my research over the years and the ones I use in my listings. I’m not affiliated with any of these companies and I won’t be earning any commission if you decide to purchase them.
The first area is access control. And this means controlling who has access to your home and when. You have a few options here. If you do an in-person check in, then you have the ultimate control of who you give your keys to. For many hosts though, this isn’t possible. So we use some kind of key exchange or technology solution.
The defacto for many hosts is a lockbox. If you’re using a lockbox, make sure you change the code often to prevent past guests from coming back.
If you’re looking for a more secure solution you can check out some of the smart locks on the market that either grant access via a unique keycode or grant access via an app the guest downloads to their phone prior to their arrival. The advantage to using a smart lock is that since the locks are “smart” they’re sending you information about when the door is locked, unlocked and in some cases when it’s opened and closed.
I use smart locks in most of my units. I can tell you that after monitoring the activity of about 3000 guests, a guest is up to something they’re not supposed to be doing when they’re locking and unlocking the door numerous times over a short period of time. I like smart locks because they’re non-intrusive and can provide helpful information not related to ensuring a party isn’t happening. They tell me things whether a guest has checked in or not and I can tell when they've checked out.
The second area is real-time monitoring. Again, here there are few options. If you live close enough to your listing that you can easily check on it in person to see what’s going on, then this is the best option. But a more common scenario is for the host not to be onsite or nearby. For these hosts, they need to use technology to monitor how things are going in real-time.
The best solution here is to have a video camera pointed on every door to your home. This way you can see who’s coming and going.
I am 100% against having video cameras inside the home – guests deserve their privacy. And I believe seeing who’s coming in and leaving will give you enough information to properly monitor your home.
Video cameras on the exterior of your home are the ideal situation, but sometimes it’s not possible – especially in condo complexes where private video cameras are not permitted in the hallways.
In these situations, we need to turn to noise monitoring devices. There are few different options out there, but all of them do basically the same thing – they monitor the noise level and they do not record conversations. By monitoring the noise level, these devices are not intruding on the guests’ privacy. If noise reaches a certain level, these devices will send an alert to your phone.
With access control and real-time noise monitoring in place, all that is left to do is check on things when you’re alerted. This is the number one thing you can do to prevent a party from happening. I do not believe it is enough to simply message a guest :
- When you receive an alert that things are too loud, or
- Notice strangers entering your home on camera or
- Your door being opened and closed repeatedly over a short period of time.
I recommend that you or your property manager actually go over to the listing and check on things. I’m going to bet that if your guest has set off more than one of these thresholds, you’re going to want to evict this guest and put an end to whatever is going on.
In extremely RARE situations it may not be safe for you to put an end to whatever is going on. But please don’t put your safety in danger. Call the local police for help.
But if you're following my methods this type of situation is probably never going to happen to you. I hope it doesn't.
If you worry the police are taking too long because perhaps your situation isn’t that serious, or you not comfortable calling them, then I recommend keeping the number of a local security company on hand.
I know of a local host who had trouble getting her guests to leave, once. She googled "private security officers" and within a couple of hours she had a 6’2” large and scary man on her property enforcing her directions. Without incident, the guests left soon after.
I can’t do a video on preventing parties without stressing the importance of doing a bit of checking before agreeing to host a guest. I went into this very topic in detail in my three-part series on Avoiding the Worst Guests. So if you want to know, please check out those videos. But briefly Setting your house rules and properly understanding a guest's intentions will go a long way to keeping your property safe and secure.
Before we wrap up, I need to point out that whatever monitoring device you use needs to be outlined on your listing. Even if it’s just a smart lock. Airbnb wants guests to fully understand how your home is set up including any cameras or noise monitoring devices. There is also the added benefit of deterring would-be partiers from booking your listing since these items are noted on the listing page. You can also reference them to any guest you’re not comfortable hosting in messages with them.
I know that you don’t want to have an unauthorized party in your listing. But it’s too easy to say, this will never happen to me. Please heed my warnings and make the investment in at least, one, of the party-prevention devices. There’s a list of the most commonly used devices on my website and the link is in the description below. This list is entirely for your benefit. I’m not affiliated with any of these companies or earning a commission from the sale of any device. My recommendation is for you to invest in access control and a real-time monitoring device. I hope that you never have to use any of these, but at the very least you can use it as a deterrent to prevent would-be partiers from booking your listing.
I hope this video helped to put some of your hosting stress at ease. If you enjoyed it, please give it a thumbs up and share it with your fellow hosts. Together we can build a community of responsible and reliable hosts that refuse to allow unruly guests to ruin the home-sharing industry.
Together we can put an end to the headlines about parties happening in Airbnbs. I hope you’re already on board with this goal and have subscribed to my channel, but if you haven’t, please subscribe and click on the notification bell to be alerted of when I post a new video.
Thanks again for watching and until next week.
