In today’s short-term rental environment, maximizing efficiency and saving costs are paramount to succeeding. The solution? Rental home automation. By integrating smart devices into your property, you can streamline operations, reduce costs and protect your property.
But what do we mean by rental home automation? In short, using smart home devices you can automate many of the routine tasks at your Airbnb. When we started renting our place about 11 years ago, most things were done manually to get ready for guests. Over time we slowly realized that it would be better for us to be able to control these devices remotely. This way we wouldn’t need to have someone go there to turn the water on and off, or adjust the thermostat before and after a guest stay.
Once we got these smart devices installed, the next step was to hook them all up to our rental calendar. We searched around for some good solutions but eventually decided to build our own that is tailored specifically for Airbnb hosts. By connecting your smart devices to your rental calendar, you can ensure the property is ready for guests when they arrive without having to remember to do anything!
Here’s how you can make your Airbnb more passive with rental home automation:
Develop a Rental Home Automation Strategy
The first thing you need to do is to decide what you want (or what you can) automate. Think about what you do repetitively and that costs you the most money. This is the best place to start with rental home automation. We’ve written a lot of articles here to help you get started since it took us a number of years to figure it all out.
What Can I Automate At My Short-Term Rental Property?
There are lots of devices out there that can automate just about anything these days. Some of them we recommend, but others won’t be reliable enough and will cause you more headaches than anything. We’ll highlight our top suggestions on what devices to get and how to automate them in the next sections.
Get Your Smart Devices
After you’ve developed your strategy – or at least a starting point – you’ll want to order your smart devices and get them installed or set up. For simple things like a smart door lock, you may be able to do this yourself. For other things, you may want to call a licensed professional to install it for you so you can make sure it’s done right.
These are the devices we would highly recommend to any host who is looking to automate things at their Airbnb. Most people have thought about (or have maybe heard of) using a smart door lock, but we really think the following are the most important devices to get installed to really start taking advantage of rental home automation.
After you get them connected, make sure to test them out and make sure that everything works as intended. You’ll also want to make sure you have thought about what happens if one of these devices fails. Power surges, internet outages, device failures, etc can all happen and you want to make sure it causes as little disruption to your guests as possible.
Connect Your Property
The final step in the process is to connect your property to a system which can automatically adjust things based on your rental calendar. This is where Rental Home Automator comes in – it is specifically designed for automation of the smart devices at your rental property.
Check out the features of Rental Home Automator
You’ll want to connect your calendar and make sure that it syncs and the events show up on the Status page inside of the app. You’ll also want to make sure to set up your automations to give you a bit of a time buffer in case something doesn’t happen exactly as planned, or exactly on time. Remember to use multiple calendars if you have different schedules – like cleaning & maintenance – outside of your rental guests.
After you get the devices and your rental calendar connected, you’ll want to monitor things to be sure everything happens without issue. The last thing you want is for something to happen and the guest’s lock code doesn’t get programmed. (This happened to me before automating all of this at one of my properties and I lost a star on the review because of it). The Rental Home Automator app has a robust monitoring system to ensure commands are sent, and also has a retry mechanism in case something happens (e.g. your internet goes out for an hour).
Investing in rental home automation not only modernizes your property but significantly enhances your operations, setting you up for success in the competitive short-term rental market. By integrating smart devices with your rental calendar, you can make sure that your property is always ready for guests and save money when it’s vacant.
Get started today with a free 14-day trial to experience worry-free rental home automation.
