- Austin Weinerman, 24, oversees 100 Airbnbs for short-term rental company Techvestor.
- His staff has learned from holiday mishaps, like missing oven racks, and has a holiday checklist.
This as-told-to story is based on an interview with Austin Weinerman, 24, a property manager based in Thousand Oaks, California who manages over 100 properties for Techvestor, a platform that allows passive investing in short-term rentals. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I've been on the property management side of our company since we launched our first home in January 2022. There's been a lot of learning as we've grown from. Now, we have a 1,000 point checklist every time a house goes live.
I oversee properties in Arizona, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, and Illinois.
The holidays are some of our biggest dollar amount bookings, so it's so important that everything goes smoothly and that guests have no surprises when they check in.
For example, in Florida, we have a 5-bedroom home geared towards families with a fire pit, a pool, a jungle gym, an under-the-sea themed kids playroom. It usually rents for $400 to $700 per night depending if it's a weekday or weekend. For Thanksgiving, it will book for $1,500 to $1,700 per night and for Christmas season it will go for $2,000 to $2,300.
We reserve back up turkeys and double check for oven racks
Last Thanksgiving, we were around 20 to 30 properties that were live — now we're at 105 to 110.
We've developed a specific holiday checklist. So in the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, we send someone to every single one of our properties.
We check the ovens, the stoves, how many dishes are in the home, how many pieces of silverware, surveying all the kitchen appliances and cookware to make sure they're functional. We check on the highly-used amenities like the hot tub or pool.
In each of our markets, we've also reached out ahead of time to at least two or three restaurants. We essentially have a turkey on stand by. We can spend the weeks leading up to the holiday checking all the ovens, but something can always go wrong the day of. We talk to these restaurants ahead of time and pre-order enough turkeys for our bookings. If the oven stops working on the big day, we can have a turkey for guests in one to two hours.
All of our properties are booked for Thanksgiving, around 105 homes across nine states. We're fully stocked across each market, so there shouldn't be a scenario where someone goes without a turkey.
Last Thanksgiving, someone had taken out oven racks in one of our homes and our cleaners didn't catch it.
We didn't have this lineup of turkeys. So the guests check in on Thanksgiving night, they prep the food, they're ready too cook for whole family, they open the oven, and there's no oven rack. On Thanksgiving, it's not easy to contact the manufacturer of the oven and find an oven rack.
We just see crazy scenarios. Why would you even take an oven rack? We had an oven rack in that home for 10 or 11 months on Airbnb. And it just happened to be gone the one day you really need it. It's possible a previous guest broke it, didn't want us to see, and we didn't catch it.
Luckily a property owner who lived nearby happened to have the same exact oven model and was able to lend her oven rack. But now, checking for oven racks is part of the holiday checklist.
I have to be prepared for anything to go wrong
It's kind of funny in most of our markets, the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, and then the weeks in between Thanksgiving and Christmas are totally quiet. Then we get to the week of Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas and New Year's, and it's like all hell breaks loose.
A few days ago, we had a guest check out of a property in the Poconos and it looks like they had punched a hole through the glass in the front door. Our cleaner showed up to shattered glass everywhere.
It's cold. It's November in Pennsylvania. And now there's a hole in the front door and a new reservation checking in in six hours. Also there's a bigger weight on us to get everything completely resolved because again, these are our highest payouts.
This property was a mountain town and it's not easy to get someone out there immediately. So many of the contractors we got in touch with said they already were taking breaks for Thanksgiving. We luckily got one of our team members who was able to get out there in time and patch it up pretty quickly.
On Thanksgiving day, my family is going to come to my house. I need to be near my computer and monitoring all our properties. On a normal day, I get 1-2 slack messages per minute. My phone will not be leaving my side.
Thankfully, my family will be doing all the cooking.