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573. Is The Airbnb Market Collapsing In 2026? · Thanks For Visiting

• 1:04
  Sarah Karakaian : Welcome back to another great episode.
• 1:06
  Sarah Karakaian : My name is Sarah Karakaian.
• 1:07
  Annette Grant: I'm Annette Grant, and together we are...
• 1:09
  Annette and Sarah: Thanks for visiting.
• 1:11
  Sarah Karakaian : Rising costs, absurd house rules, cleaning fees guests are done tolerating, oversaturation, local bans, squatters, property damage.
• 1:20
  Sarah Karakaian : If you've spent any time online lately, you've seen the headlines saying that the Airbnb market is collapsing.
• 1:28
  Annette Grant: Mm, but here's what we think is happening instead.
• 1:30
  Sarah Karakaian : The Airbnb market isn't collapsing.
• 1:33
  Sarah Karakaian : Passive hosting is.
• 1:34
  Annette Grant: Our own revenue is up between 7 and 15% year over year in the middle of this collapse talk, and we've been hosting for over a decade.
• 1:45
  Sarah Karakaian : So today we're gonna talk about what is failing and what never stopped working, and why the hosts causing all the outrage online are doing the rest of us a favor.
• 1:55
  Annette Grant: By the end, you'll know exactly which side of this you're on, and what to do if you're not sure.
• 2:01
  Annette Grant: You've seen the videos.
• 2:02
  Annette Grant: A host inspecting the unit the second a guest checks out, flipping out because the remote control isn't in the exact spot where it started, or because the guests use all three of the beds in the three-bedroom house.
• 2:14
  Annette Grant: And you've probably thought the same thing we used to think, "This has to be rage bait.
• 2:19
  Annette Grant: Nobody hosts like this."
• 2:20
  Sarah Karakaian : So, like, in case you haven't seen the video, 'cause I hadn't until the Thanks for Visiting team brought this to my attention.
• 2:25
  Sarah Karakaian : I was like, "wait."
• 2:26
  Sarah Karakaian : So there are hosts on social media posting videos of them going into a unit directly after their guests check out and getting really mad because the remote wasn't in the place they left it when the guest checked in,
• 2:38
  Sarah Karakaian : or because they used all three beds in a three-bedroom home.
• 2:41
  Sarah Karakaian : This is happening.
• 2:42
  Sarah Karakaian : This is real life, okay?
• 2:44
  Sarah Karakaian : So this is not rage bait, though.
• 2:47
  Sarah Karakaian : This is real.
• 2:48
  Sarah Karakaian : Like, these hosts are serious, and we think a lot more hosts feel this way about hosting than they want to admit.
• 2:55
  Annette Grant: This has gone viral online, with guests saying flat out that it's exactly why they choose a hotel now every time.
• 3:02
  Annette Grant: The outrage guests have about this, it isn't unfounded.
• 3:06
  Annette Grant: Every viral moment has two sides, sure, but some hosts don't even seem to like hosting.
• 3:12
  Annette Grant: The house rules repel guests before they've even unpacked.
• 3:16
  Annette Grant: The energy is suspicion first, hospitality second, if at all.
• 3:21
  Sarah Karakaian : That is not a short-term rental market problem.
• 3:24
  Sarah Karakaian : That is a person who took on a hospitality business and started treating their guests like the enemy, and you guys, the guests are starting to tell.
• 3:35
  Sarah Karakaian : And we'll be fair here, because not everything driving the panic is self-inflicted.
• 3:40
  Sarah Karakaian : Squatters are a legal nightmare in certain markets, and clearing one out can take months and cost thousands of dollars in legal fees.
• 3:49
  Sarah Karakaian : Local governments are banning or heavily restricting short-term rentals overnight, and it's a risk that, you know, is out of any single host's control.
• 3:57
  Sarah Karakaian : And we've watched entire cities change the rules with almost no warning.
• 4:02
  Sarah Karakaian : And then there's that talk of oversaturation in some markets.
• 4:06
  Sarah Karakaian : It's kind of happening to the hosts who don't know how to run their businesses strategically.
• 4:11
  Sarah Karakaian : More listings chasing the same pool of guests than there used to be five years ago.
• 4:17
  Annette Grant: What we're describing is a part of the cost of doing business in hosting.
• 4:21
  Annette Grant: It needs to factor into your forecasting, your house rules, your planning from day one.
• 4:27
  Annette Grant: But planning for a cost is not the same as a market disappearing.
• 4:31
  Sarah Karakaian : The drama.
• 4:32
  Sarah Karakaian : The hosts getting hurt worse by oversaturation and rising costs are usually the same hosts doing nothing to stand out or adapt.
• 4:40
  Sarah Karakaian : The hosts who are actively managing their pricing, their photos, their positioning feel oversaturation as just competition, something to out-strategize.
• 4:50
  Sarah Karakaian : The passive host feels it as a collapse because they've got nothing built to withstand it, and these are the exact hosts, I'm just gonna call them out, who are now wanting to get into hotels or midterm rentals.
• 5:01
  Sarah Karakaian : The grass is not greener.
• 5:02
  Sarah Karakaian : Business is always going to have a challenge to solve, and that's the fun of it.
• 5:08
  Annette Grant: So that's what's failing, and hopefully by now you've noticed it has nothing to do with market saturation or a bad market.
• 5:14
  Annette Grant: You can't tell a passive host from an active one during a boom.
• 5:18
  Annette Grant: When demand is high enough, doing nothing pays exactly as well as doing nothing, and the difference only shows up when things slow down.
• 5:28
  Sarah Karakaian : Demand was through the roof during COVID, and now it's just leveled back out to pre-COVID numbers.
• 5:35
  Sarah Karakaian : Through both of those periods, so pre-COVID, post-COVID, and now, there are three things that we never did.
• 5:45
  Annette Grant: First, we never handed a guest a checkout chore list.
• 5:48
  Annette Grant: And yes, I'm using the word chore list.
• 5:50
  Annette Grant: Strip the beds, start the laundry, take out every trash can in the house, sweep the floors before you leave.
• 5:56
  Annette Grant: Our guests do nothing at checkout except lock the door behind them.
• 5:59
  Annette Grant: If we need something done before the next guest, that is our job, not theirs.
• 6:04
  Sarah Karakaian : Second, we never sat glued to our Ring camera footage after the guest leaves, hunting for something to be upset about.
• 6:12
  Sarah Karakaian : Honestly, who has the time?
• 6:14
  Sarah Karakaian : And even if we did, it's just not a good use of our time.
• 6:19
  Annette Grant: And third, we never agonized over a ruined towel or a stained sheet or a broken glass.
• 6:27
  Annette Grant: That's the cost of doing business.
• 6:29
  Annette Grant: We've got an in-house damage waiver program that covers exactly this, so a wrecked comforter doesn't turn into a week of us being upset about it.
• 6:37
  Sarah Karakaian : If you're relying only on Airbnb's AirCover and don't know what a damage waiver program covers, that's exactly what we walk hosts through live inside of our coaching program, Strategic Host.
• 6:48
  Sarah Karakaian : It can earn you thousands of dollars back a year.
• 6:51
  Sarah Karakaian : The link is in the description to learn more.
• 6:55
  Annette Grant: Here's the other side of it.
• 6:56
  Annette Grant: While some hosts are busy losing their minds over remotes, here's what's kept our numbers climbing every single year, whether bookings were flowing in or slowing down.
• 7:06
  Sarah Karakaian : We pay attention to our listings analytics constantly.
• 7:10
  Sarah Karakaian : We watch our comp set, not just our own numbers in isolation, and we track what's trending in our specific market month to month.
• 7:19
  Sarah Karakaian : We use dynamic pricing software, and we know how to use it, not just set it up and let it run by itself.
• 7:24
  Sarah Karakaian : And we push our rate right up to what the data says the market will accept, instead of guessing low out of nervousness or fear of an empty calendar
• 7:36
  Annette Grant: We take every single review seriously in both directions, good or bad.
• 7:40
  Annette Grant: A great review, we invite that guest back to stay with us again and again.
• 7:44
  Annette Grant: A constructive one, we take it as critical information that makes us better hosts, and we never get defensive about it in our response.
• 7:52
  Annette Grant: We'd rather know what went wrong than protect our ego over it.
• 7:56
  Sarah Karakaian : And we understand seasonality instead of panicking about it.
• 7:59
  Sarah Karakaian : We've never walked into our off-season expecting the same numbers as peak season.
• 8:03
  Sarah Karakaian : Instead, we focus everything on maximizing what peak season can give us, and we treat the slower months as exactly that, slower, not broken, and we use it to prepare for our peak seasons.
• 8:16
  Annette Grant: On top of that, we redesigned one of our units this year, and we've got three more planned because staying current in your market is not an option anymore.
• 8:24
  Annette Grant: Guests can tell the difference between a listing that has been refreshed and one that's been left exactly as it was five years ago.
• 8:30
  Annette Grant: We don't panic over spending $200 on a fresh photo shoot because we understand that refresh turns into thousands of dollars worth of bookings, and this is simply a marketing expense on our PNL.
• 8:41
  Sarah Karakaian : Yeah.
• 8:42
  Sarah Karakaian : We're on multiple online travel agencies as well.
• 8:45
  Sarah Karakaian : So that's Airbnb, VRBO.
• 8:47
  Sarah Karakaian : We build our own direct booking relationships, and we entertain conversations most hosts wouldn't, like a midterm stay that still hits our short-term rental goals, instead of turning it down on principle because it's not, you know, what we had
• 8:59
  Sarah Karakaian : expected.
• 9:01
  Annette Grant: Now, these hosts causing all the outrage online, they're doing the rest of us a favor.
• 9:06
  Sarah Karakaian : Because bad hosting is out in 2026.
• 9:08
  Sarah Karakaian : 10 years ago, a lame host lost a booking here and there, and nobody noticed outside of their own guest list.
• 9:14
  Sarah Karakaian : But now, a lame host can go viral overnight, and the wrong kind of press spreads in the blink of an eye.
• 9:22
  Annette Grant: And we are not saying that every viral host deserved it.
• 9:25
  Annette Grant: There are instances where the host is wrong, too.
• 9:27
  Annette Grant: But truly, bad hosts are weeding themselves out of the market every single day, and we welcome that.
• 9:34
  Sarah Karakaian : Because the accountability put on bad hosts clears out the competition for the rest of us, or what we could be perceived as competition.
• 9:43
  Sarah Karakaian : Everything we walked you through today is why we're still standing, and it's why we're thriving, and it's why our revenue keeps climbing while the headlines keep saying the sky is falling.
• 9:54
  Annette Grant: So which side of this are you on?
• 9:57
  Annette Grant: If you heard us describe the checkout chore list and the Ring camera footage and recognize yourself, that's your answer.
• 10:02
  Annette Grant: And everything we do instead, the analytics, the pricing, the reviews, that's what to do about it
• 10:11
  Sarah Karakaian : Well, the market will behave as markets do.
• 10:13
  Sarah Karakaian : It's gonna sort itself out, and it's sorting fast.
• 10:16
  Sarah Karakaian : Mm.
• 10:16
  Sarah Karakaian : The hosts still doing the bare minimum, still guessing at pricing, still treating guests like a liability instead of a customer are the ones who will feel like the sky fell.
• 10:25
  Annette Grant: The rest of us are just gonna keep watching our numbers go up.
• 10:30
  Sarah Karakaian : Inside of Strategic Host, we help hosts stop guessing and start running this like the business it is.
• 10:36
  Annette Grant: Join us live and see if Strategic Host is the right fit for you.
• 10:39
  Annette Grant: The link's in the description.
• 10:40
  Sarah Karakaian : And with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.
• 10:42
  Annette Grant: I'm Annette Grant, and together we are...
• 10:43
  Annette and Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.