I'm in the same boat, I want to rent out my main house for less than 6 months (or even less for the first time I do it to see if I like it) and let people book in 1 month increments sequentially so I don't have gaps while I'm traveling with my family. I also want to book the first few months way out so people can see it, then open up the remaining months if all goes well as my trip gets closer. The only long pole in the tent for hosts will be allowing time to clean between listings but I'm sure I can figure something out.
I feel like as the workforce becomes more remote, more people are going to want to roam rather than be stuck at home forever, so why not rent out your property in cities that don't allow STRs under 30 days (Manhattan beach, CA) and reading the city councils meeting minutes about the topic everyone in MB hates STRs. I know Airbnb wants to beat that to allow STRs but people here treat it like the plague. So let's make 30 day min bookings easier a get some small wins and listings going.
As soon as you put in dates or try to find "month" bookings, the filters just sift out so much potential even if I select all the months in the year by name. I was racking my brain on this last night pretending to be an end user looking for monthly+ rentals in my city before I ran into your thread about the booking gaps tonight.
Feature enhancement ask to Airbnb web team- At least make it easier to find who's house is available for 30+= days anytime in the year in my city for some duration thereof. To @Michelle0 's point about the filters and SEO trying to find 30 day blocks throughout the year is terrible for end users unless you come in from Google on the city boundary (since the city doesn't legally have any STRs) and don't type anything, then it lists the properties potentially and and end user would then have to open each property in a new tab and view the calendar. I'm not claiming to be a web expert, but I am in the IT field and highly support customer usability and experiences and know when something is wierd, and my experience was weird.
Writeup-
Workaround- go to the map for a city with no STRs and don't put in dates and search. You get 300+ results, all of which rent monthly or greater.
Issue/bug- as soon as you add dates to any search or map view search and specify "monthly" and "I'm flexible" and select all 12 months of the year, you get 1 result (not hundreds)
1 results bug-
Hoping this gets fixed, I want to rent this place out and stay in Hawaii possibly for a few months!