Designing Your Home (Step #2 to Your Property Management Success)

Once we analyze your home, and you decide Open Air Homes is the right choice for you, we will send you a contract and begin the onboarding process.

Once you are in the onboarding process, we will send you a guide to success during the design of your home.  Oftentimes, homeowners will choose to partner with our preferred design partners who understand how to get the best return on your investment.  When it comes to designing the home yourself or working with our team to set up the home, we are happy to let our homeowners decide what works best for them.

Should you need help with designing your home, we are here to help. In an industry with a lot of competition, desirability is the most important factor to keep in mind when renting your home.    A highly desirable home will have a higher view count, higher conversion rate for bookings, a higher occupancy rate, and ultimately a higher monthly net return to you.

There is an upfront cost to turn your home into a premiere and exciting choice on sites like Airbnb and VRBO.  We have met with a lot of homeowners over the years that prefer to shop at places like Ikea to save money during the design and set up process.  That is not what we do at Open Air Homes. We have learned that homes that don’t stand out online are stuck with low reviews, low view counts, and ultimately are not successful rental properties.

We are not, however, asking you to buy $10,000 couches for your home.  We understand the business side of owning a rental, and it does not make sense to buy fragile luxury items when various groups of people will be using your home and furniture.  At Open Air Homes, we try to focus our homeowners’ attention on purchasing higher quality materials that will last a long time.

Open Air Design work

In our years of experience, we have learned some things about hospitality design. Such as suggesting Sunbrella fabric items inside and outside the home. Sunbrella makes the home look and feel upscale while remaining affordable and durable.  This material is technically made of a plastic material, but feels as soft as fabric and can be cleaned with bleach when stained. Small decisions like that allow us to spend more time providing the best experience possible for your guests, while limiting how much time and money is spent replacing and maintaining the furniture.

Similarly, we’ve also learned what not to do. Some homeowners design a space solely based on their preferences, forgetting to incorporate elements of hospitality driven design. The most obvious mistake we see here is putting in something like a white rug, that will inevitably require being replaced regularly. While this might seem obvious in retrospect, striking the balance between having your property feel like your home while still being a functional rental can be surprisingly difficult.

Open Air Design work

These are just two examples of how designing correctly from the beginning can set you up for long-term success, and while we never force you to hire our design team, they are currently working on a number of exciting  projects for us. Their projects tend to rent for higher nightly rates, and maintain a higher occupancy, largely because of the cohesive experience brought to the whole home.

Many of our homeowners intend to use their home for 2-6 months a year and monetize the home when they are away, so we do want the home to feel like your own.  We will guide you through suggestions with this in mind, but ultimately these decisions are up to what you want from your home.

Once we have had a chance to discuss design with you, you are ready to work on the onboarding of your home.