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8 Tips To Sell Your Airbnb Vacation Rental Fast [FSBO or Agent]

As the fastest growing short-term rental selling marketplace, our knowledge of the best attributes that make an Airbnb sell fast is one thing we have a ton of experience in. Investors tend to want active vacation rentals due to the less risk associated with buying an active STR than starting one fresh. The benefits to investors are huge including having financial history, reviews, and most importantly future listings. VRBO makes it easy to transfer a property to a new owner keeping the listing active, while Airbnb will have to have a new listing created and communicate to future guests to rebook with the new listing.

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Sell Your Airbnb Vacation Rental

The one big problem is making the Airbnb information easy for people to see, most real estate agents don’t know to get all this information, and listing websites like Zillow and Realtor.com don’t showcase the documents that get attached to the listing which is the only place most Agents put financial documents. This causes many issues including potential investors having to spend extra time trying to get the documents they need to run their financial numbers.

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Sell Your Airbnb or Vacation Rental Fast With These Tips

  • Sell your Airbnb on a dedicated short-term rental investor marketplace like Airdeed. This creates a direct connection to investors, bypassing Realtors to save sellers potentially thousands of dollars.
  • Within the real estate listing, include the link to the VRBO and/or Airbnb listing. In addition, if you have a high number of reviews and ratings make sure to mention this and tell buyers to check out the pics and reviews on the home-sharing websites.
  • Include your Average Daily Rate, Occupancy Rate, and Revenue For the last two years if it's been an active STR that long. This can be a downloaded PDF from Airbnb and/or Vrbo, these platforms make it easy to export this data into an excel sheet. Investors need this information to decide if the value is in the deal and instead of getting a ton of texts, calls, and emails asking for these details it's best to have them easily available to decrease your time in responding.
  • Use An MLS Listings Service. While our listing service is considered premium and more expensive than other mass produce services, we are geared towards STRs and how to properly get your Airbnb details to potential buyers. However, if you use another service make sure it includes everything we discuss here as basic listing services won't write your product description for you like we do or create a public shared drive with all investor must-have information, etc.
  • Have a full P&L included. The more details and information you can give a buyer upfront means you'll have fewer spam requests for this information. A P&L is simple to create if you don't already have one and it includes all your expenses and income to give a full picture of the vacation rentals potential. Expenses will include your monthly costs like utilities, HOA dues, property management, taxes, insurance, cleaning fees, maintenance, etc while income will include rental fees, buyer-paid cleaning fees, and other revenue.
  • Include your short-term rental license document if applicable for your STR and steps about how the buyer and transfer it or acquire their own. Essentially this could be the permit you have and then a link to the city/county website regarding these STR permits.
  • Understand your STRs Revenue. STRs are much riskier than long-term rentals or commercial properties, so can't be sold based purely on CAP rate. This may be the most important thing to understand, knowing if an investor would even be interested in the return will help your path to selling. If your property is making under roughly 10% gross revenue to your desired list price, you're going to want to list on the MLS as investors aren't super interested in these lower grossing properties unless they are in big tourist areas and have great future appreciation potential.
  • Create a VRBO listing. Ideally, you have been using both Airbnb and VRBO to maximize your visibility on home-sharing websites but if you haven't then you need to create a VRBO right away. VRBO listings, unlike Airbnb listings, can be transferred to the new buyer which makes the success of your listing (future bookings, reviews, and such) even more important and valuable. If you're getting just as many or more reservations from VRBO than Airbnb, you may consider limiting future reservations to VRBO since they won't need to be canceled when you sell.

Very few Airbnbs being sold have the above information within their property listing and therefore deal with never-ending back and forth between many buyers who aren’t engaged fully in the property. A buyer who sees all the above information and reaches out to you is a far better lead than someone who sees “Airbnb rental machine” in the listings and texts asking for the gross income. If you’re a real estate agent that’s selling an Airbnb short-term rental, you need to create a public shared drive with this information for investors to see easily.