5K Super Host Grant

[Darrell60]

Why are Superhosts with more than two properties excluded from receiving the $5K grant??  Just when I thought Airbnb was going to do something right. Most casual STR are only supplementing their income. I have 4 STR and these are my only income. I have lost over $25K just in March and April cancellations. I have 4 mortgages to pay and have zero income. Airbnb please reconsider your requirements to receive aid. You are excluding the Hosts that most need your support. 

[Sarah977]

@Juan63 It's definitely still a business to rent private rooms in a shared home where the host lives. Many entire home hosts seem to think that home-sharing is more in the realm of a "hobby", but I don't consider pulling other people's hair out of the shower drain and doing mounds of laundry much of a hobby. 

I do think it's true, though, that home-share hosts have less overhead in general, percentage-wise. Utility bills, for instance. Yes, if I am hosting a guest, they are going to use more electricity, water, etc, than I would if I was here alone. But that just means slightly higher bills- if it's an entire home, one would have to have another electric account, for instance, which usually has a base charge, whether there is any electricity being consumed or not. The property tax bill for a home-share host isn't more because they happen to rent out a room. We can usually manage to do the cleaning ourselves. We don't have to spend gas money to get to our listings. 

So even if a host provides a space and amenities for guests in their home that might be equivalent to the space and amenities of an entire studio apartment, even if the studio apartment already has the mortgage paid off, the home-share host's overhead is going to be lower.

However, a home-share host can also have a bad business model, for sure, if they have gotten themselves into a situation where they depend solely on that income to pay their mortgage and all their other personal and business expenses.

[Nanxing0]

@Juan63 Well I can confidently say my math is better than most American's, with the olympic medals I earned during my lower school years and and my 4 years collage degree in mathematics. Let's do a simple calculation. If you have 2 rooms rented at $50 per night and assume a 80% occupancy rate it should generate $2400 per month normally, and 12.5% of that would $300. That should be enough to pay utilities given nobody is staying during this month so you can do something to save the utilities. However if you are dealing with an energy wasting house that's another story.

The "bad business model" I referred to is those have multiple properties listed that generate 10k revenue per month but have to pay 5k mortgage, for example, and when such incident happens the 10k revenue is gone then he/she has to figure out how to pay the 5k mortgage per month. I'm actually in a situation somehow like this so I'm trying to figure it out but it's a completely different story from those hosts who make use of their own property to make ends meet. I don't feel I'm entitled to get too much help from Airbnb on this, although I would sincerely appreciate if they offer any, if you don't agree with that. And in my case, the 12.5% from the 10k revenue is about right to cover utilities as well that's why I had this conclusion.

I agree that it's a more complicated issue especially for those with flexible or moderate policies. My guess is that Airbnb will soon have something to make up for those hosts otherwise it would be the fact that they are pushing everyone to switch to strict policy in the future. I don't think Airbnb is willing to see that happen.

[Juan63]

@Nanxing0  Sorry, your examples are hypothetical and not real and you are assuming you have enough cancellations to amount to anything. So with the 12.5% you can pay utilities, yippee. What about all the other bills a home requires? The mortgage company doesn’t care if you paid your utilities. So, no, you can not pay your bills with 12.5%. If not your math, your logic is wrong.

[Nanxing0]

@Juan63 That comes again down to the question why you are listing your room on Airbnb? Like @Sarah977 has mentioned, it depends on whether you are doing it as a "hobby" or a "job". If you are doing it as hobby, then it's totally wrong to rely on such "hobby" to pay all your house bills including the property tax. It's a common sense that nobody should rely on "hobby" to make a living. That means you cannot depend on the income from here to cover all your costs from the first day.

If you are doing it as a "job", then you need to make sure you are doing it professionally. By saying professionally, it has to follow some basic business rules, including that you need to make sure you can sustain for a certain period of time, usually 3 months is considered at least. If you don't understand that, take a look at here

http://lesseverything.com/business-advice/small-business-cash-flow/

[Juan63]

@Nanxing0  You misunderstood Sarah. She said it is a business, not a hobby. And she is right as I said. You pay taxes, so to it’s a business. I would tackle that misconception first before trying to create any additional theories.

[Nanxing0]

@Juan63 OK, if it's a business, then like I said, 3 months reserve is minimum. Receiving help from Airbnb can be additional but should not be relied on. I don't see the reason to complain about this. Within this 3 months, you can figure out if you want to continue with it or switch to other business. At the end of the day it's your own business. WE are not Airbnb employees.

[Sarah977]

@Juan63  Nice to see someone around here has reading comprehension skills :-))

[Sarah977]

@Nanxing0  Actually, you misconstrued my post entirely- no one does it as a "hobby", which I thought I was quite clear about.

There's far too much involved in hosting, much of which is quite unglamorous grunt work, for it to ever be classified as a hobby. A hobby is something people do in their spare time for pleasure. Just because I home-share and enjoy spending time with my guests, doesn't mean I enjoy rushing around cleaning and preparing the room for guests, washing piles of laundry, or checking my account every day to make sure I haven't missed a booking request that Airbnb tech failed to notify me of by my normal SMS option, or any one of the many tedious and frustrating things that comprise the life of a host. Small time hosts do more or less exactly the same things that big time hosts do, just on a smaller scale. And to be honest, we probably put in more in the way of personal effort than hosts with many multiple listings, who have staff to attend to the grunt work, and whose work is often more on the organizational level.

[Nanxing0]

@Sarah977 Understand. To me those who share their own home are indeed doing it as a "hobby" although it runs with some commitment that sometimes you need to rush to catch up with. That's not contradictory at all. Hobby doesn't necessarily need to be done in spare time. For example I do work on my own cars as a hobby as well and a lot of times I need to try to do it as quickly as possible so I have a car to drive the next day. And as you mentioned part of the motivation doing this work is to meet people, at least not solely aiming to make profit out of it. This is the case that the super host grant is aimed to help I believe.

I believe you are not 100% counting on the income from sharing 1-2 rooms from your home to cover all your house cost, although in reality when it was running well it could cover most of the mortgage and utilities. I have friends doing this and that's usually the outcome, but they all have their regular job and not counting on Airbnb income to cover all their housing cost. It's a perfect "addition" to the current incomes.

This is in contrast to those who rely on Airbnb as their solely income. Some of them quitted their primary job to dedicate on Airbnb listing, some of them were housewives before starting this business, and so on. For those who rely on it, like I said, it's business at this point, and that's a different story. Usually those who do it as business have 2nd or 3rd home listed, and the monthly revenue easily passes 5k or even 10k depending on number of properties he/she has, but the cost is usually tremendous as well. The 5k grant is not aiming to help this category of hosts from the very beginning.

[Sarah977]

@Nanxing0  No, just because one doesn't earn their main income from something doesn't mean it's a hobby. What it could be referred to is a side gig, a part time job, etc. If it's a service someone pays you for, it's a business. You're free to make up your own definition of a word, but that doesn't mean it's correct.

Here is the official definition of the word "hobby" from the Merriam-Webster English dictionary:

A pursuit outside one's regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation

[Nanxing0]

@Sarah977 I'm not interested in making definition of any words, just expressing my point here. It's not only those Airbnb hosts that are losing revenue in this pandemic. Everyone, including restaurant owners, RE brokers, trade companies, etc. are all hit. Some of them are suffering more serious revenue loss than those Airbnb hosts are but they have nobody to cry in front of, while hosts can cry in front of Airbnb asking for help. Some hosts are simply taking this as an advantage they can take that they can attribute everything to Airbnb, seemingly Airbnb is a "guarantor" for them to make enough money to make up for their own lives. That's totally wrong. 

[Juan63]

@Nanxing0 You are not in a position to decide wether or not someone should rely on Airbnb as main income or not. Frankly, it doesn't matter if it's a room or a whole house. It's a BUSINESS! Sure you should have some money saved for a rainy day but every business can only last for so long. No one expected this kind of financial damage. You speak as if you know. Financially, the world will be paying for this for years not 3 months.  Please just admit your analysis was terribly flawed and move on.

[Nanxing0]

@Juan63 Then what? You sit and cry and then others will help you go through it? Now everyone is struggling financially so try to figure it out yourself rather than demanding from others that's my point. I'm not deciding whether or not someone should rely on Airbnb as main income or not. I'm just saying don't rely on Airbnb to help you go through this difficulty -- in fact they might be having difficulty as well. The only people you can rely on to go through this difficult time is yourself.

We live in a generation of emotionally weak people. Everything has to be watered down because it’s offensive, including the truth.

[Juan63]

@Nanxing0 Fortunately I'll be one of the ones that will come through this just fine. I'm a conservative republican so I'm all about only counting on yourself at the end of the day. Big fan of the first and second amendment. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't call BS when a company does something wrong. If you have read any my other posts, many have been about "NO HANDOUTS." What you said was wrong not offensive*offensive comment removed*

[Juan63]

Calling someone a snowflake is so offensive you have to omit it? Wow!