Monthly Stays Market

[Susan990]

   I am an Airbnb Superhost.  I have been hosting since 2013. My two guesthouse business achieved an occupancy rate of 93% for 2021. This success was achieved by offering my properties through the Monthly Stays platform exclusively- 31 DAY  minimum.

   December of 2021 Airbnb destroyed my business when it deleted the Monthly Stays platform  The monthly stays platform was the most popular search engine for the Travel Worker community to find housing to Live & Work wherever they needed to be in this post COVID world.

   The Monthly Stays platform Airbnb created was intended to serve the lodging needs of the hungry for housing long term stays market.  And now with Federal Infrastructure projects looming across the country the future was golden for this booming market.

  Without so much as a tweet to notify Hosts and Stockholders that Airbnb had decided to delete its most lucrative and in demand Product and replace it with new products no one wants to buy and no market has been created---Airbnb had destroyed itself.  Airbnb forgot it was in the business of Lodging.

[Karla533]

Dear Susan, this is sad to hear. But I am a little confused. When users input the dates of their stay, don't your properties show up on those searches? And properties that are STR only do not show up?

@Susan990 

[Susan990]

You are being mislead by this issue of when you input specific dates you want ofcourse everything that has an open calendar for those dates comes up, then other filter criteria reduce down to more specifics you want after that search.

  The thing you must understand is that the Monthly  Stays platform, which was displayed pre-Dec. 2021 presented the 3 products ABB offered:

   Places to Stay   Monthly Stays   Experiences

post Dec. 2021 the platform was reconfigured:

Places to Stay  Experiences   On-Line Experiences

    Not  sure where to go?  Perfect.

         ( flexible)

[Susan990]

Oh, I forgot to respond to your statment " And properties that are not STR onlly do not show up?"

Wrong.  They all show up because there is no designated platform for Monthly Stays dedicated listings.

Literally everything shows up that has a hole in their calendar which is 28 days or more.

  The entire Market Place has been abolished. My business has crashed. Example. my unit that vacates Feb. 28th. and I have 2 days gap to detox, sanitized and restock for COVID puts the available date at March. 2nd.  Therefor anyone seeking a place to monthly stay who inputs March 1st. is not presented with my property. It is not presented because it does not start availability on the 1st. The public is totally blocked from discovering the availability of monthly stays properties like mine. We are floating the pool of vacation rentals.  The platform that Hosted us is gone.

  My other unit came vacant Dec. 18th. and it stayed vacant until Feb. 1st. when a guest input those dates and ofcourse it was vacant, and she booked it for 2 months. Previously I had back to back reservations for my 2 guesthouses during the covid pandemic. Because the abb platform provided places to find housing to fullfill travel worker needs.

[Susan990]

That is not correct . STR do come up if those dates are open AND if the STR does not limit the length of stay in the settings, as in max nights setting. Searching by  dates is not the same service as searching by monthly stays exclusive listings. With Monthlys you are either booked solid for a long time on the calendar or you are completely open going forward.  Most users only look about a month ahead to search for their next monthly stays property.  The monthly stays platform was set up perfectly to scout the properties in the location desired and compare properties. Plus, even when you then input the dates you wanted it would show all that fit perfectly those dates it would offer across the bottom of the page other properties which offered the same number of nights but the start date and end date varied

by a few days as options.  When you rent monthly there is always flexibility involved.

  When I tested this issue with my listing I input the first of the month, a common starting point and made for 2 months and my listing did not show up because it was not available on the 1st-  but it was open on the 2nd. When the monthly stays platform was up and running it would have shown my listing as an option. 

  The programmers of that platform knew what they were doing. And as for the gap between monthlys, it set up an option to over ride the minimum stays limit set- I use 31 days- and encouraged host to manually set a price for each night in the gap and set minimum number of nights custom for each night in that gap. So nothing is wasted.  Full opportunity to make for money with fuller occupancy.  That is how I achieved 93%  occupancy last year.

[Maia29]

@Susan990 I understand what you are saying after you described it in detail-that is really unfortunate and basically excludes your listing from the market/search.

Have you tried to explore other platforms for long term stays? I have noticed that some of the other platforms charge hosts a subscription fee; however, and that is less than ideal. Also, other platforms don't have the exposure that Airbnb does in the marketplace (this is why a lot of people favor Airbnb).

[Susan990]

Yes I have explored other platforms and used them in the past- pre-covid. VRBO does not allow for a listing which is a solo traveler product i.e. one single person. and it is not geared to the monthly rental worker market at all. In my are we have Furnished Finder which I subscribe to and then funnel those persons to the Airbnb platform to book their stay. But now with the expanding market place of travel workers there no new net to focus their attention to seek places to stay " genuinely " monthly.  Airbnb was the only thing around, at least here in Oregon. 

[Debra300]

@Susan990,

I know that you are devastated and frustrated, as I would also if I lost my rental revenue stream, but haven't you made a couple of posts that are similar this topic earlier this month?

[Gillian166]

ah I wondered what had happened!

Last year i came up with this exact invention - a platform devoted solely to short term stays, like 1-6months.  Last year we moved interstate and the first house we contracted fell over, (the contract, not the house) as the owners decided to go for more money - the state i've moved to in Australia is still getting all the migrations right now, and the real estate market was/is hot. We bought that house without an inspection, as were many others.  So then we found another place to buy and again, same thing happened, owners realising they might be able to get more. It was devastating and the most stressful time of my life (which is saying a lot given i had 3 kids in 5 years and an aspergers entrenpeneurial ie, unemployable, husband). My daughter and I had moved up to Queensland before the rest of the family so she could start school in January, and we did a combo of staying with family, then friends and then a few airbnbs. The rest of the family moved up in March and we found a whole month airbnb rental (NOT cheap) that allowed us to have pets, but still we didn't have another house to go to. We own a farm about 4 hours drive so my family went out there and my daughter and i again did friends for a week and airbnb for a week, and we ended up doing a few room share ones which were not ideal as we were going through very stressful times.  our 3rd house we contracted also fell over, but we managed to rescue the contract and finally got a home by May.  In the end I found a house sitting job for a month,  but the whole experience was so utterly awful, and many many times I regretted taking the leap to make the move at all. If we'd been able to find a 3 month rental, furnished etc (incl pets) it would have made the whole thing so much easier, but there was nothing like available, nowhere to search, nothing. 
TLDR
moving is stressful, there are many reasons people need 1-3month stays. (in my case, we were homeless for 4 months)
There is def a market for it. I don't have the skills to launch my own site catering to this, but someone should. 

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Susan990  I have to admit I wasn't even aware Airbnb had this monthly stay option.

I use Facebook groups for mid-term and long-term stays and it works great. There are other local platforms as well. Digital nomads, Erasmus students, and people who come to town for business, study, or other purposes use them. Most of them avoid Airbnb because it is too expensive, we all have nightly prices on Airbnb with small discounts but we are open to lowering our price if they book directly with rental contracts, security deposits in cash and if utilities are charged extra. I don't even have my mid and long-term rentals on Airbnb, just short-term ones, and they are restricted to max 14 nights.

[Huma0]

@Susan990 

I don't really understand this either. I switched to long term stays a while back (pre-COVID). I was vaguely aware that Airbnb started promoting hosting longer stays after the pandemic started but, as I was already doing it, I didn't pay much attention and I wasn't even aware of a monthly stays platform.

I have a minimum stay of 28 days, but also get guests who stay a few months. While things were slow for part of 2020 and 2021 due to lockdowns, other restrictions, Airbnb blocking the calendars of shared listings etc. and I also didn't want a house full of guests at certain times, I've otherwise got plenty of these bookings via the regular Airbnb booking channel. Right now, I have more guests wanting to book my rooms than I can accommodate.

Of course, if you block out certain dates for changeovers etc. your listing is not going to show up in the search results for guests who are looking to check in on those dates, but guests who are a bit more flexible about the dates may spend a bit more time searching and contact you to double check if you have  the availability. I do get guests messaging me about dates that are shown as unavailable in the calendar, so they are still finding me.

There is obviously a high demand for longer stays here in London and, from what guests tell me, the pickings are quite slim. From what you say, there is plenty of demand in your area too so I don't understand how your business can be destroyed. Guests can and do book long term stays via the regular Airbnb search. Perhaps it will just take a little while for your occupancy to go back up.

[Scott]

Hi @Susan990 thanks for posting this. I'm sorry for this situation and any frustration surrounding it.

I'd like to better understand what you've experienced, since I'm not aware of any intention to make it harder to book or host long term stays?  From your post above, is this the problem you're referring to?

Example. my unit that vacates Feb. 28th. and I have 2 days gap to detox, sanitized and restock for COVID puts the available date at March. 2nd.  Therefor anyone seeking a place to monthly stay who inputs March 1st. is not presented with my property. It is not presented because it does not start availability on the 1st.

Are there others?  Thanks in advance for any additional details you can provide.

[Christine615]

@Scott 

The buffer issue seems moot. If there’s a two day buffer then why would a host want those dates available after a monthly stay? Seems like a deep cleaning between guests would be warranted.

If not then the buffer is easily removed. We just temporarily removed it for an existing guest wanting to rebook.

[Susan990]

Your questions display that you have no knowledge of what ABB has done to its platform to reconfigure its products offered and the complete deletion of the Monthly Stays product and what that means for delivery of a lodging product when there is no platform to host it online.

  I suggest you consult with ABB about what the Monthly Stay platform did for monthly stay properties and explain why they threw away their most advanced idea of how to disrupt a market and surge ahead of the conventional market to serve the changing needs of the post COVID world of work and travel and how they intersect .

  If there was a way to send you my essays of analysis on this subject I would like to do that and you can call me anytime and share an email so I can send a pdf document to bring you up to speed.