The Perfect Holiday House
July 10, 2018
As you may be aware, the NSW Government has introduced new legislation to cap the number of days an investment property can be short-term let to 180 days. Sabine, who has been a loyal client and friend for many years, has had one of their properties listed with AirBNB for the past two years.
She shares their experience and thoughts in light of the new legislation…
Why did you decide to use AirBNB to begin with?
There are a few reasons we decided to to rent out our property on Airbnb about 2 two years ago.
1) The main reason was that our property manager was not meeting our expectations. It didn’t matter how often we asked for updates, they weren’t really forth coming… nor were they pro-active when it came to finding new tenants. Of course, we could have changed real estate agents, but our experience has been that property managers generally, don’t really care too much about landlords…..
2) We also did the sums and it looked like renting our place out via AirBNB would earn us more on an annual basis than having a tenant.
3) We started to use Airbnb during our own travels in and outside of Australia (Cuba, Cook Islands, Queensland and NSW) and absolutely enjoyed staying in someone’s home more than a hotel or serviced apartment as it had more charm and was usually a lot better equipped.
4) We liked the idea of being able to provide the same service for other people, especially given the location of the property we rent out… it’s close to the beach and has great access to the city.
Has your enthusiasm changed?
Our enthusiasm hasn’t really changed, as we still like presenting our property on AirBNB. We just keep learning and adjusting things each time we promote our place, so that our place stands out.
It does take a bit of effort as we need to keep up with pricing and making sure the place looks great for each new guest, but that maintains our ratings and keeps our income coming in.
AirBNB income certainly gives us a higher return than having a full time tenant… but it all depends on location. If a property is in a high turnover location, say for example near a university where tenants are more likely to be students, then there is already a high risk of those tenants moving every year, or being vacant during semester breaks, as well as the constant letting and re-letting fees.
Ironically, even though we’ve had more people in and out of your property with Air BNB, the property has had less wear an tear than it did with full-time tenants. Often we found that tenants didn’t maintain our place the way we would have liked. From our experience, it’s been rare to have an AirBNB guest who didn’t treat our place with respect.
Have you had any issues (noise/damage etc) with tenants?
Fortunately, we have never had any issues with any AirBNB guests. Its a golden rule to always communicate via AirBNB so that you have a record of your communications with your guests.
Have you ever had any feedback (good or bad) from neighbours?
No…and it seems that our tenants always adhere to our house rules which states no parties and no excessive noise.
What’s your opinion of the new legislation?
We are just getting our heads around the new legislation, however by our calculations, our place has only rented out about 160-200 days a year, so at this point it won’t really impact on us.
Of course we’ll have to keep an eye on the number of days we lease it out, and for what periods to block off, so we don’t miss out on any peak periods, and in turn, the higher rent.
So, AirBNB has been a little more work than having full time tenants, however we feel we have been more in control of how our property is treated. And we believe the wear and tear in 2 years has been much less than having full time tenants.
