A Process All Airbnb Hosts Should Be Doing

This blog is written by one of our founders…  

On the first night while staying in an AirBNB in Boulder, CO at 2:45am a person entered our house yelling, “is anyone home?”  I got up to make sure I got between this person and my daughter’s room. Being in an unfamiliar dark house, I opened up the closet door because I was so disoriented.  My heart was racing because I was just trying to get out of my room. Once I made it out of my room I stood looking at a guy with a ski hat on, smoking a cigarette. The guy said, “Jennifer said I could crash here tonight.”  Of course, there was no “Jennifer.”

I talked the guy out of the house and then called the police.  After calling the police, I called the owner of the home. He was so sorry, very open, and we worked together trying to figure out where the breakdown was.  It came down to this. He hadn't changed the code to the home in over 2 years. He had many people the last two years who have worked on the home. They all knew the code.  So around 3:30am as a guest, I’m taking the lock apart figuring out how to change the code with the owner on the phone. Needless to say, my daughter and I never went back to sleep.

As we started looking more at the model of having a second home to list on AirBNB, there are just so many processes that can’t get overlooked.  All the right intentions are there by the homeowner, but a business with predictable results takes a full time effort. Partnering with a short-term rental management company can help take the worry of running all these processes off your plate. At Second Door, we have software that generates new keypad codes for your stay. The code is automatically deleted when your stay is over to ensure that nobody can use the keypad to enter the home with that code again.

Feeling secure in the home you are staying might be the most important part of your trip. We take it very seriously and have implemented great process to ensure what happened to one of our founders, never happens to you.