General Help and Questions

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Chris - hope you guys can find a way to help us with this. A big topic of discussion for a lot of our Tennessee owners (as Victoria says - some ABB guests will go along with anything and others will go along with nothing outside the site). There's just got to be a better way to do it, particularly with an eye to accurate financial reporting. Many folks don't have the time to do what Victoria does. But if owners just randomly go in and raise their nightly ABB rates by 3% that really doesn't make things accurate. Really appreciate your looking into a solution for all of us.

2) you do not need to attach agreement to Airbnb. OR handles it. You can set up trigger email once ABB booking is imported that sends the link to ABB guest to esign rental agreement AND collects all the renter info (actulay email, phone, address) and instructs them to send ID. You just need to disclose!!!! that as requirement in ABB house rules. All automated and easy. I don't ever use ABB portal to communicate post booking unless renter does. All OR

1) I made a killer rental agreement covering every imaginable way a guest could screw/screw up a VR owner. Now I am uncomfortable chasing away prospects when I have only part of the year left. Is it possible to retrieve the default ownerrez agreement?

2) Also, I saw a forum discussion that ABB does not allow/enable attaching a rental agreement for guests to sign. True? Their policy or other? Thoughts?

why would they care? if calendars are accurate, why would they care if it makes them money

Interesting idea ... But could be risky if the folks at VRBO detect the duplicate listings as such. I wonder how they would view it if it comes to that.

The suggestions and rules seem to depend on which Airbnb rep you talk to -- different ones have different solutions.

Their API team says they are working on taxes and resolutions and hopefully will have a bit more control and automation around them by earlier next year.

It is a message right in your dashboard. You have to remember, Airbnb users are a separate "breed". They worship Airbnb. maybe 4 out of 5 will be oK if you request amount outside of airbnb, but the 5th will report you or raise a fuss.

There isn't currently a way to export content to VRBO except for the API integration, but that requires 5 properties.

One thing I have noticed is that if you set rates out farther than your booking window, Airbnb will automatically reset the booking window. Could that be the case?

To do this, edit the surcharge settings and set the expense to PM gets 150. Then under commission, set it to calculate on entire amount.

That'll include a $150 expense to the owner and then also deduct commission on the entire amount. The expense will remain 150 and the 22.75 would be added into the overall commission on the booking.

"it is against ABB terms to collect amounts outside of ABB"

A lot of people (on the forums I follow) say they collect various things outside of ABB. Some claim they never do the crippled ABB security deposit thing, but request for damaged items directly from What if you upsell when ABB doesn't do that kind of thing?

Curious where you saw this?

BDC (at least used to) do a lot of having you collect from the guest at the door.?

So I am thinking of duplicating couple of my listings as PPB on VRBO. Is there a way to export them to vrbo?

Do you receive bookings or inquiries?

I have a booking window set at 3 months in advance but I still receive bookings 5 - 6 months in advance. Talked to an Air rep and she is clueless. I read the Air community forum and there seems to be mass confusion regarding settings, price tips and advance discounts.

Besides manually blocking my condos on Air does anyone else have a fix or another work around.

ALL these booking site have become a giant PITA.

Can I get commission to generate on both the rent and the cleaning fee?

If a cleaning fee Collected is $175, I am looking to apply commission to that entire figure.

$22.75 in this case is the commission I have aligned to. $150 is what the Cleaning charge is. There is a nominal difference between the two the owner keeps.

The owners expense is then my commission and what we have paid to house keepers. Or $172.75.

3) ignore anything ABB suggests price wise. According to them a 3 bd house that sleeps 10 should be rented for same price as local motel 6 room. Not very "smart".

4) you have to study your competition (size, location, etc). I am sure you know who they are. Go on VRBO (because that displays daily rates on calendar) , find your competition and see their rates. Then knock off about 5%-10% due to newness and lack of reviews. You will gradually raise it later.

Lydia, I am in TN also. I collect 3% tax via Airbnb resolution center. By the way that way they do not apply CC fee or service fee to it but it is a manual process. it is against ABB terms to collect amounts outside of ABB, so some guest may complain.

My rules on my listings for both ABB and VRBO include "Must sign Gulf Lesson Rental Agreement within 72 hours of booking or reservation will be canceled." The triggered OR email link takes them right to the agreement and they have to provide email, physical address and phone number when signing that agreement. I've had zero push back and have had only a couple of people I had to prompt to get it signed. Most do it right away.

Ahhhh - good idea! I will try that. THANK YOU!

Not really an OwnerRez question

Just seeing if you seasoned people have any thoughts or input. I am mostly done prepping 6-7 VRs. Getting ready to do pictures now.

I am struggling with (as new VR owner) pricing. These are the factors going through my mind:

1) Our high season is essentially May into November. I have lost May, June, July

2) Everyone says to lower prices until you get at least 3 positive reviews on each property.

3) ABB Smart Pricing suggests Base, High and other prices. But a lot of owners say Smart Pricing is unrealistic and leaves a lot of money on the table and encourages bargain seekers.

4) I am intending to use PriceLabs, but they key their pricing on YOUR suggested Base Price for a property, when you may have no idea what a good Base Price is.

5) am very motivated to get heads in beds, especially SUNDAY-THURSDAY

QED: I am leaning towards using AirBnB Smart Pricing (except for weekends), and use PriceLabs to have a higher price on VRBO, and an even higher price on Booking.com, to try and let different audiences book.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the details. I will discuss with dev. I'll have to see what the rationale was here.

Speaking of rental agreements, is there a way to get back the ORIGINAL ownerrez default rental agreement?

I just emailed the spreadsheet for you to inspect. You'll see that I compare two other rate sets, plus my own (adjusted) from previous year, and then I adjust each day's rate according to whatever seems right.

Think of me as a human dynamic pricing engine who wants the flexibility to set specific dates (using an imported spreadsheet). I give OR a list of rows, I just want it to consume them and overwrite previous rates I've imported.

I would use Seasonal Rates and break up the time periods into weeks or two week or 10 day periods where the rates will go up and down. Then create a "season" for each of those small periods based on where you will set base rates.

I don't know how your base rate will go up or down or if there are any patterns. For any given week, will the week DAY nights be different than the weekend END nights? Give me a real string of rates and I'll know what to recommend for.

Sounds like you want seasonal with base rates and then set spot rates as you watch the calendar. Spot rates override seasonal rates for whatever night there is a spot rate on.

https://app.ownerrez.com/reports/bookingstats?ExportFormat=&DownloadTrackId=&StartDate=2018-09-01&EndDate=2019-08-31&AsOfDate=&GroupBy=1&PivotBy=4&IncludeBlockedOffTime=false&PivotSummaryField=10&DateField=Arrival#report

I also sent a screenshot by email.

That's what it was. I wasn't able to edit the security deposit amount in the booking, but there was a button to 'reset to property' which did the trick.

In my situation the sec dep is held by VRBO, so it's not really meaningful in the OR side of things, but it's in my agreement. An alert guest noticed ;-)

What is the security deposit amount on the booking > Rules tab? Changing rules at the property level does not change them on pre-existing quotes or bookings. You have to change them there too. There is a "Apply To" button on the property rules page that will bulk update any pre-existing quotes or bookings.

I had tried that but it still gave me the same result. Stale data ($200 sec dep instead of $100).

I have update my properties security deposit settings, so was expecting the refreshed legal document to pull in the new values, but that doesn't seem to be happening.