Real Estate Side Hustle: How to Earn Money with Your Rental Property

Are you looking for ways to earn extra cash in your spare time? Consider a real estate side hustle. Renting out your unoccupied property on a short-term basis is a great way to generate passive income and build your wealth without sacrificing a significant amount of your time for money.

Real Estate Side Hustle: Is It Worth It?

Even if you have no business experience, the real estate side hustle is a great way to make extra money, in addition to working full-time, while learning about the industry. Rental properties are one of the most popular ways to generate passive income while benefiting from tax advantages, although, frankly speaking, it’s not entirely passive.

The truth is that the real estate passive income investment requires effort from the start, and you should treat it as a business. However, once you get a rental property up and running, it can provide a steady monthly income flow without requiring you to participate in any daily work if you organize everything correctly.

How to Arrange the Real Estate Side Hustle

The easiest way to set up a real estate side hustle is to list your rental property on popular websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, Agoda, or Booking.com, which can help eliminate problems with finding guests, receiving payments, and more. All you need to get listed is a great description of what your place offers and clear photos that showcase your property’s unique features and the best amenities.

Before you do so, ensure that your property is suitable for it. Otherwise, you may drain your income on unnecessary operational expenses. Our free guide will show the way.

When it comes to running a short-term rental, at first, it may seem that you can easily build your wealth without trading a lot of your time for money. However, in reality, ensuring everything goes smoothly requires careful management, especially when managing listings across multiple platforms.

You should plan to take an active role and treat it like a business that requires a certain level of involvement, especially if you want to maximize your profit. That means you need to be directly involved at all times:

• To communicate with your guests and reply to their messages on time
• To figure out and set flexible and smart pricing
• To maintain your house or apartment and get it cleaned on time
• To make sure you get regular bookings.

Sooner or later, you may realize that your side hustle begins to resemble a real part-time job. Don’t like the idea of doing all that work yourself, and don’t want to hire a property management company? Utilize short-term rental software, such as Hospitable, for optimal results.

Real Estate Side Hustle: Why Choose Hospitable?

We offer a comprehensive solution for property owners who choose to self-manage their short-term rentals. Hospitable can help you save 25+ hours each month with AI automation. Our STR super app allows you to

• Automate personalized communication with your guests with the help of AI
• Notify your cleaning team about new tasks based on your booking schedule
• Synchronize your calendars and pricing across multiple platforms, including such major OTAs as Airbnb, Vrbo, Agoda, and Booking.com.

Here is an overview of Hospitable’s most essential features, designed to make your life easier.

Connect Multiple Accounts in One Place

Hospitable’s channel management software provides a centralized, synchronized dashboard that will allow you to manage all listings across multiple platforms, including Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Agoda, and Google Vacation Rentals, in one place.

You don’t have to log in to different booking portals to see all of your reservations, reply to guest messages, and update prices and availability. You’ll also receive instant protection from double-booking, as we’ll sync your calendars across different platforms and make updates in real-time.

Accept Direct Bookings

Listing your home on one or multiple vacation rental marketplaces is the first step toward success and gaining clients. To maximize your bookings and revenue, you need your own website to consistently market your property and establish a strong brand.

With Hospitable, you can get a beautiful, fully functional website within minutes and use it to accept direct bookings and generate new leads. Your Hospitable Direct properties will get listed on Google Vacation Rentals, and you’ll have an opportunity to get direct bookings without paying high third-party fees.

Automate Guest Communication

We’ll fully automate your communication with guests across platforms. You can think of guest communication in two ways: active and reactive.

The active part is when you provide guests with important information at the right time. These are scheduled messages. Think about thanking them for their booking, sharing check-in instructions, asking how their trip was, reminding them to leave a review, etc. There are hundreds of triggers and timing options to create a perfect scheduled flow.

Still, your guests will have questions. This is where a reactive part comes in. You can use Suggest with AI and Improve AI tools in your Hospitable’s Inbox to quickly draft and correct detailed, personalized responses when you want to message your guests manually. You can help our AI create more accurate and relevant messages by creating a digital guidebook and uploading it to the Knowledge Hub. This will educate the AI about your properties and policies, allowing it to use this information when drafting responses.

As you get confident with our AI performance, you can opt for complete automation with Auto Inbox. In this case, we will respond to your guests’ questions using AI without your review of drafts.

Watch this explainer video to learn more about Hospitable’s AI features.

We can also manage your reviews. Our system will remind your guests to leave a review and automatically generate draft reviews for them. The AI will have access to the guest’s booking details and your conversations. Thus, each review will be unique and very personalized. Moreover, it will draft responses to guests’ reviews on Airbnb.

Dynamic Pricing

Hospitable features a proprietary dynamic pricing at no extra cost for our users on Host, Professional, and Mogul subscription plans. If you enable it for your property, it will automatically optimize your listing’s rates based on market demand, seasonality, and other factors to help maximize revenue and occupancy.

Prices are automatically updated every 24 hours based on the latest market conditions and immediately pushed to all your connected channels. However, you still maintain complete control over your pricing strategy and can manually adjust rates for specific dates, as well as set custom rules for specific seasons.

Organize and Automate Communication with Your Team

Renting out a STR property involves many regular tasks like cleaning your space, doing laundry, maintenance, replenishments, check-ins, checkouts, etc. You may want to consider hiring a team to assist you. Then, you’ll need to keep each member of your team informed and up to date with the tasks required of them, which can be rather time-consuming.

Hospitable allows you to automate this process. You can create task rules, and Hospitable will assign tasks to your cleaners when you get a new booking. The system will send auto-reminders to your team via email or text/SMS when a new job is coming up.

Manage your smart devices

Installing a smart lock is always a good idea because it allows you to offer a self-check-in for your guests, and you don’t have to meet them in person. Hospitable integrates with popular smart lock systems and automatically creates and sends unique door codes to your guests before check-in. The door codes are automatically deleted after checkout.

You can also connect your smart thermostats, and Hospitable will automatically adjust your thermostat settings based on your guest’s reservation status to optimize energy usage at your rental property. By automating temperature control, you’ll ensure comfort for your guests during their stays and save time and money.

Thus, your quick to-do list to get started with a real estate side hustle:

1. Make sure your property is optimized for short-term rentals.
2. Create listings on Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, and Vrbo.
3. Start using Hospitable

Conclusion

If you want to make the most of your real estate property, you should list it on multiple OTA websites. But you should treat it less as a passive income investment and more like a side hustle, meaning it requires your active, regular effort.

Vacation rentals require constant scheduling, dealing with cancellations, paying for housekeeping services, and worrying about slow seasons. But that doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. You can outsource the tasks that you don’t have time for or just don’t want to do. And you can use Hospitable to automate routine tasks and manage all your listings in one place, and save time and money in the process.