To make our Airbnb party-proof, we bought these 4 Smart Home products

Our vacation rental business started as a romantic dream of my husband’s, a way to invest our savings in something other than the stock market. We’d never owned a home before — we lived in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco — and yet we were wildly optimistic about our ability to turn this into a lucrative side hustle that we could one day enjoy ourselves. in a while.

Six years and three rental properties later, the dream has become a real business for us. But it certainly didn’t happen overnight, and we made many rookie mistakes that cost us time and money. Here’s how we’re now using technology to manage our investments remotely.

Noise and visitor monitoring

This mistake could have easily put an end to our little hustle and bustle at the vacation rentals due to the two-strikes-you’re-out policy in our residential community.

Our first rental home is located in PGA West, a gated community near Palm Springs known for its world-class golf courses and resort-like grounds, making it a highly desirable place for retirees to live. With many of our neighbors living there full time, anyone operating a vacation rental like ours is already under extreme scrutiny, and it is important that our renters are respectful and adhere to the community’s quiet hours.

During our first year of business, we had a neighbor who called one of our guests for playing loud music late into the night. The next morning the guest assured us that they hadn’t even been outside the night before, let alone playing any music. It turned into a he-said-she-said situation with no real resolution, other than the fact that we were now one ‘warning’ away from losing our short-term rental license and possibly having to sell our investment properties.

To prevent this from happening again, we have a Minute sound monitor for our back patio. Unlike a baby monitor that allows you to listen to everything happening in the room, the Minut only alerts you when the sound exceeds a certain decibel level. This allows us to pre-empt any complaints from neighbors by contacting the guest directly to reduce the volume and gives us a tangible data point to argue our case in the event we receive another notification.

We also had an example at our other property, in Coachella, where the tenant decided to throw an impromptu party without us organizing it, and then denied the entire event, even though we had a Ring doorbell that had documented the flow of guests arriving at the door throughout the night. Thanks to the undeniable evidence, we were able to report the matter to Airbnb and receive compensation for the damage we suffered during that wild night.

Related: Airbnb prohibits the use of indoor security cameras in rental properties

Energy cost management

This seems like a no-brainer, but we were naive apartment dwellers when we first started — utilities were included in our rent — and I had only heard of smart thermostats when I previously worked at CNET.

Our very first guests left the air-conditioned room at a cool 65 degrees (mid-August), and we didn’t find out until two weeks later when the cleaners preparing the space for the next guests entered an ice room. The sticker shock of our first electric bill forced us to get ‘smarter’ about our air conditioning policies and replace the stupid thermostats with two Nest thermostats.

Nest allows us to control the thermostat remotely and set it on a schedule, so that even if a guest manually adjusts it, it returns to our preset range at certain times of the day. We also included some rules about energy consumption in our rental agreement, which would discourage guests from unnecessarily cooling the space to arctic levels.

We took the same approach with the pool and hot tub, which did Pentair heaters which can be controlled remotely with the Pentair app. And unlike Nest thermostats, these heaters are not easily accessible for guests to manually control, so guests must request temperature adjustments for the pool and spa from the host.

The most expensive mistake of all

Aside from party-proofing, the most expensive mistake we made was not adjusting our prices regularly. Starting without reviews on Airbnb, HomeAway or any rental platform can be difficult for even the most impressive properties, so we had to price our rental much lower than our competitors to make it more attractive.

As our ad gained some traction, people started booking future dates that we had carelessly put on the calendar for the same introductory rates we had launched with. By the time we raised our rates, one guest had already booked the week of Thanksgiving for less than a quarter of what we expected for those dates. We tried canceling and adjusting prices, but Airbnb penalizes hosts for canceling reservations; If you cancel a booked reservation, you’ll be charged a percentage of the booking, and Airbnb will block those dates on your calendar so no one else can book at a new rate.

That experience forced us to regularly reassess our prices a year in advance, taking into account the season, holidays and any major events that could increase demand. Here in Palm Springs, the two weeks of the Coachella music festival alone can generate enough revenue to cover half of our operating costs for the year. This helps make up for the slow months in the summer when temperatures are known to stay in the triple digits at night and the place is empty for weeks at a time.

We have automated many of the daily pricing decisions using Pasta revenue management platform that uses algorithms to optimize nightly rates across all your vacation rental platforms. The program cuts every booking by 1% and still requires a bit of oversight on our part, but with three properties and our regular full-time jobs to take care of, it has been a worthwhile investment.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we’ve learned about vacation rentals is that while they can become an important source of income, they are certainly not passive income. Even with experience and all the smart home gadgets and automation programs you can buy, you still have to run them like a business if you want to make money from them. That and you have to enjoy the work at least some degree. Otherwise, you’re better off placing your bets on the stock market.