Since Sydney is a popular tourist destination, there are many Airbnb hosts in the area. The 180 day limit on how long an Airbnb host can rent out their property has made it difficult for some of these hosts to maximize their rental income. This article will explore the issue with the 180 day limit and provide tips for managing around this constraint.

Gone are the days of creating an Airbnb listing and hosting guests 365 days a year solely through that platform. You’re going to have to get creative – Here’s what you need to do.

Going Multi-platform using a Channel Manager

Firstly, you’ll need to go multi-platform. To do this efficiently, you’ll need a channel manager. We use Hostaway and find them really easy to use. Reach out to us for help getting set up on Hostaway. We can add you to our group account so you only pay $30 per month instead of closer to $100. This will also get you on our direct booking site, where the bookings cannot be traced back to count towards your 180 day limit.

A channel manager is a dashboard from which you can plug all of your Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) into, i.e. Airbnb, Booking.com, Homeaway, Flipkey, Trivago, and hundreds more. This makes hosting better by:

• Getting more eyeballs on your listings, so you can charge higher prices, get more bookings, and be more competitive – rather than listing only on Airbnb where you’re competing with thousands of other hosts for lower per night bookings.
• Getting more eyeballs on your property means there are more people that will see your place to book for over 21 night stays, which don’t count towards your 180-day limit in Sydney.
• Getting bookings from multiple platforms will be much harder to track your listing to see if 180 days have been surpassed – however there is always a risk. The only way to truly avoid this is direct bookings.
• Maximising your income from the nights you are allowed to host
• Getting people to see your listing and read between the lines and BOOK DIRECT. We can help you set up your listings to encourage direct bookings through our site – so they don’t count towards your 180 day limit. We can use these OTAs as unpaid marketing affiliates to get direct bookings.
• If you join our Hostaway account, you will be automatically added to our direct booking website. We have our own Airbnbs and 30% of our bookings are direct. Most of our bookings are generated through Google search, Facebook ads and Google Adwords

Convert OTA Bookings to Direct Bookings

When you get a booking through one of these platforms, you can call the guest and offer early check-in/late check-out or a discount to encourage them to cancel through the OTA and pay you directly so you don’t waste your 180-day limit. We recommend doing this for stays of 7-20 nights to make it clearly worthwhile for both of you. Airbnb’s 14-17% fees really add up on a few grand!

Rent your property out for 4-6 months over winter

If you’re not up for dodging the rules, you can always list your property on Domain.com.au or RealEstate.com.au for winter. We use forsalebyowner.com.au to advertise there without using an agent.

Set your discount for long stays high

Since 21 day bookings don’t count towards the 180 day limit, and you can still get some really good returns on these longer bookings, make sure your discount settings in OTA’s or Hostaway (which pushes these discounts to OTA’s) are generous. Remember that hosting 7 x 3 night bookings in a 21 night period is a lot more work, and sometimes less profit than 1 booking, because you need to discount these small gaps in your calendar to fill them. Most of the time, a discounted 3 week stay beats all these smaller stays, except in December where you can charge through the roof.

Offering these discounts also attracts a better quality guest. Often corporate clients stay for such periods. And if they want to extend their stay, you can also do it off the OTA.

Engage our help getting set up with Hostaway and listed on our website

Protecting your 180-day limit is critical, so any short-term booking you can get off a major OTA is worth its weight in gold. We can get you set up on our direct booking website and have a good amount of your bookings come through us, so you can keep those 365 days per year returns rolling.

Airbode will help you do all of the following with no up front cost:

• Get set up with Hostaway and listed on our incredible direct booking site
• Get set up with PriceLabs.co – You do not want to be using Airbnb’s Smart Pricing and leaving 30% of profits on the table
• Automate your messages to save you hours per week
• Getting listed on multiple OTA’s through Hostaway
• Setting up message templates (you can use ours) to save you re-typing answers to the same questions all the time
• Automate reviews
• Improve your listings to increase your conversion rate
• Learn more about hosting best practices to increase your income and efficiency

For any booking generated through our direct booking website, Airbode will collect 12% of the booking total in commission only when you receive a booking – otherwise all of the above is free.

Please reach out to us to get started.