With an average of 2 million people staying in an Airbnb every night, it is no surprise that hosting your home as an Airbnb has become such a popular way to make some extra bucks.
However, sometimes you’ll have tenants who will overuse your utilities, thus reducing your profit.
If you are curious about how to evict a tenant that overuses utilities, you should review the local eviction regulations in your area.
It is hard to avoid bad tenants and guests in your Airbnb rentals. They happen to everyone. What are some options that landlords can do today to still help them improve their rental and profitability?
In such cases, increasing your prices might seem the obvious solution to you, but that would be a mistake.
In a supply and demand economy, increasing your real prices just to recoup energy costs is not the best solution.
To make more profits, you want to stay competitive in your market, which means you’ll need to find alternative ways to make up for the extra electricity usage.
Luckily, there are certain things and easy fixes you can do to manage these expenses and keep your costs down, regardless of who is staying in your home.
Replace Your Old Lights with LEDs
Think about it, if we as homeowners tend to leave the lights around the house on all the time, why wouldn’t your Airbnb tenants do the same?
If you still haven’t changed your incandescent bulbs with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, it’s high time you did. LED lights are a super-easy way to save up some money on electricity.
They last longer, use less energy and produce more natural light than traditional incandescent models. Plus, they limit heat exposure and are entirely eco-friendly.
Control Your Home’s Temperature
Cooling and heating a house are two of the biggest costs that Airbnb owners have to deal with and take up a major part of the average household’s energy consumption.
Luckily, technology comes to the rescue thanks to the new kind of roof-and-attic system that’s field-tested at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) which improves the efficiency of summer cooling and winter heating.
This multi-seasonal efficiency is very uncommon in the roof and attic design and luckily, the new system can be retrofitted to most existing roofs.
The central part of the design is foiled covered polystyrene insulation which fits between and over rafters in new construction or can be added on top of an already established shingle roof system.
The ORNL roof and attic system significantly improve efficiency by using controls for convection, radiation, and insulation, including a passive ventilation system that pulls air from the underbelly of the attic into an inclined space above the roof.
Use ENERGY STAR Appliances
If you have already equipped your Airbnb with appliances, this one might take you a while to completely accomplish. However, your ultimate goal should be having your Airbnb home as close to ENERGY STAR certified as possible.
Everything from heaters and refrigerators to laptops and TV’s can be ENERGY STAR certified. Such homes are at least 10% more energy-efficient and achieve 20% improvement on average, all while providing homeowners with higher performance, quality, and comfort.
Wire For Success
If you want to incorporate smart home options in your Airbnb, it’s essential that your property has a reliable internet connection with speeds that can meet the needs of the various devices around the house.
In most cases, it takes up to 2.5 Mbps to keep most smart home security systems running smoothly, and if you have multiple smart home devices, that number is higher.
Smartly wiring your home and combining that with sensors and efficient smart tech, will help you to set up your own rules and commands to regulate energy use.
Use Water Wisely
Fixing leaks around the house and opting for quality low-flow showerheads is a simple way to save up some money on water.
Did you know that low-flow fixtures can save you up to 60 percent on your water bill? Plus, nowadays, there is a range of smart showers that can track water usage so that you can adjust the flow and temperature of water to save on bills.
You can also switch to using a low-flow toilet and invest in a solar water heating system which can result in significant savings over time.