My first two units start in April, and the 2am messages worry me

Do it yourself for one season and log every single overnight contact with a timestamp and a one-line reason. You can't price an answering service without knowing the volume, and every quote you get will assume more messages than you'll have.

@windlass the log is the part I'd forget. Doing it yourself and not writing it down is just suffering with no data.

Most of what I'd guess arrives at 2am is lockbox codes and wifi passwords, both of which are solvable before the guest ever messages. Fix the door and the signage first, then measure what's left.

There's a middle option nobody's said yet. A neighbor or the cleaner on call for physical problems only, small monthly retainer, and you handle messages. Lockouts need a body, wifi questions don't.

I'd want the boring version, which is that the check-in instructions are so clear that nobody has to message. Sounds obvious. Every place I've stayed that messaged me at midnight had a sign problem.

Two units of fee income won't cover a per-message service unless your nightly rates are high. Run the number before you fall in love with the idea.

The burnout thing is real and people wave it off. If you build the business around being awake, you can't sell it and you can't take a week off.

New to all of this, so a dumb question. Does Airbnb's response time metric even count overnight hours, or is it measured over 24 hours?

@rigging it's measured on the platform's own clock, not on your business hours, which is exactly the problem. Nobody at the platform cares that you were asleep.

On small multifamily I learned the same lesson slower. Every emergency call I took personally in year one was a call I later found out a $75 vendor visit would have solved. The difference with nightly rentals is the review sits there forever.

Price it. Overnight coverage costs X per month. A three star review on a two-listing portfolio costs you some occupancy and some rate for maybe six months. If you can't estimate the second number even roughly, you can't argue about the first one honestly.

I did it myself for a year on three units and the volume was lower than I feared, maybe six or seven real overnight contacts a month across all three. What got me wasn't volume, it was that I couldn't stop checking. The phone being on is different from the phone ringing.

@keystone that's the honest cost right there. Not the calls, the vigilance.

So the automated messages route doesn't actually mean nobody's awake, it means you've decided the 7am reply is acceptable and you've told the guest that up front?

@juniper that's how I read it too. Setting the expectation in the listing seems to matter more than the response itself.

Careful with the expectation framing though. A guest standing outside a locked door at midnight doesn't care what your listing said about response windows. There's a category of message where 7am is a fine answer and a category where it's a disaster, and the whole game is making sure the second category can't happen.

@lantern has it. Sort messages into "needs a human now" and "can wait." The first list should be short and you should be able to eliminate most of it with hardware. Smart lock with codes generated per booking kills the biggest one.

On the answering service question, the ones I've dealt with are fine at scripts and bad at judgment. They'll tell a guest you'll be in touch. They won't decide to comp a night.

Put a real lock on it and half this thread goes away. Codes tied to the reservation, backup code on your phone, done.

I did year one myself across five units and I'd do it again, with a change. I set a hard rule at month three that anything after 11pm that wasn't a lockout or a water leak got answered at 6am, and I stopped apologizing for it in the reply. Ratings didn't move. What moved was me sleeping.

@halyard, at two units the answering service quote is going to look absurd against your fee, and it should. Revisit it at eight.

@cobalt did any owner ever push back on the 11pm rule, or did they never find out?

That's the question I had too. The owner in @halyard's post already brought up an eight hour response as a grievance, so he's paying attention.

Put it in the management agreement. Response window, what counts as an emergency, and what you do after hours. Owners argue about it once at signing and then never again. Owners who find out in month five feel deceived, and they're right to.

My agreement says immediate response for access failures and habitability, next business morning for everything else. Nobody's ever refused to sign it.

@thatch putting it in the contract is the answer. Everything else in this thread is preference, that one's just paperwork you either did or didn't do.