Tips for Hosting a Tiny House for Airbnb – Tiny Houses 101

Renting a tiny house on Airbnb is an excellent idea if you want to get an extra source of income apart from your main job. However, people often think this is as easy as publishing an ad online and waiting for people to get to your house, and things are a bit different than that.  

There are a few things you should know if you want to start a tiny house business, so read this page to learn tips for hosting one. You can visit our website to read similar blog posts.  

What Is a Tiny House?

Tiny houses are small living spaces that often are between 100 and 400 square feet in size people use as multi-functional spaces. You could have one as an addition to your house or backyard. These small buildings often work as home offices, storage solutions, or guest rooms.  

People like tiny houses because they use minimal resources, require minimal maintenance, and are often made of sustainable materials. Therefore, they are more affordable than full homes.

Are There Any Different Types of Tiny Houses?

While all of them work under the same concept, there are different types of tiny houses. The main difference between them is how they look and the structure layout, but they often offer similar benefits. These are the main types of tiny homes:  

• Traditional tiny houses (built on foundation)
• Tiny houses on wheels
• Shipping container tiny houses
• ADUs

Why Should I Make a Tiny House Airbnb Investment?

There are many reasons to turn your shed or tiny house into an Airbnb. Some people actually buy or build these buildings with that purpose in mind due to the benefits they offer. Firstly, they represent an extra source of income you will get only by paying the maintenance costs of the place.

If you are looking forward to selling your tiny house in the future, renting it as an Airbnb can give you enough exposure to meet future buyers. People who already had a shed or tiny house they were not using can use the profits of Airbnb to cover maintenance expenses they would need to pay for anyway.

Tips to Successfully Manage a Tiny House Airbnb

You can face several challenges if this is your first time hosting a tiny house Airbnb. Hosts need to make sure guests have everything they need to live there and be ready to address any emergency they may have. 

Although the things you can do to make your tiny house business more comfortable for your guests vary depending on the design of your Airbnb, we have a few tips that could help. These are our general recommendations: 

Set Rules

One of the main issues between guests and landlords is that they often have problems with the things people staying in the house can do and the activities they should avoid. Not having good communication between hosts and clients leads to misunderstandings, and you could keep many problems from happening if you just state your conditions clearly in time.  

Before offering your backyard Airbnb, think about the specific rules guests will need to follow while they stay there. However, we recommend that you only set general rules to keep everything in place, as many people don’t like to stay in places with strict regulations.   

A few examples of the rules you can have in your tiny house Airbnb are not letting pets in or asking guests to avoid making too much noise after midnight. Once you have set all the regulations you need for the place, you should make sure anyone interested in staying there knows them before making any deal. 

Take enough time to think of the rules you want. It’s not a good idea to add restrictions once people already paid for staying in the tiny home Airbnb.

Provide Instructions for Appliances and Amenities

Living in small cabins on Airbnb has many benefits, such as staying in a place with all the appliances and amenities you need without paying for something as expensive as a hotel. There will always be the risk of your guests breaking your appliances or not using them right, which is a problem for both of you. 

Even if you have common appliances that everyone should know how to use, provide clear instructions for all the amenities you have in the Airbnb tiny house to ensure guests use them correctly. Doing that will help you prevent many accidents from happening. You can add any other relevant information your clients need about the place there. 

Be Ready to Address Emergencies

Giving your clients specific rules and instructions for staying in the Airbnb will save you from many problems in the future, but there can always be an unforeseeable situation we didn’t think of. Regardless of the kind of emergency it is, you should always be ready to address it as quickly as possible. 

The best way to do this is to make an easy-to-approach communication channel available for guests to contact you anytime they need it. We’d use two; one for regular inquiries and concerns that work under a preset schedule and another for emergencies that happen outside your working hours. 

Clients really appreciate it when the host of the shed Airbnb they are staying in is eager to solve all their problems, and that will help you get more clients in the future.

Offer Special Deals and Promotions

Anyone looking for a place to stay will always choose cheap tiny homes over more expensive options, and while that doesn’t mean you have to offer your services for an unreasonable price, you can make it more affordable with deals and promotions. Those deals can include lowering the price or giving more benefits for a higher cost.

Hire Professional Cleaning

Although you will have to use money from your own pocket to pay for it, investing in professional cleaning for tiny home vacation rentals is a huge appeal for clients. The more services you offer in your Airbnb, the more you can charge for it. 

Besides that, investing in professional cleaning proves you are serious about the place and gives clients more reasons to trust you. We can assure you that if you follow all the tips on this list and do things right, it’s an investment you will recover from in the long run. 

Ask for Feedback

Regardless of how well we do things, there will always be room for improvement. You must be eager to hear recommendations or any kind of feedback clients have about the place if you want to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Offer a Decent Quality-Price Balance

It’s essential to have competitive pricing if you want anyone to hire your services. There is a huge offer of tiny house Airbnb in the country, so you need to give people reasons to choose you over other options. Pricing, of course, could be a key advantage in that competition, but you need to be careful not to charge an absurdly low price. 

Remember that you still need to profit from the whole thing, so it’s useless to set a price that is not high enough to get profits. The balance between the quality of the services you offer and the price you charge for them is everything when it comes to a tiny house business. How much do tiny houses cost? On average, it can be anywhere between $50 and $300 per night for standard options.

Use Flexible Check-in and Check-out Policies

Clients want a place where they can live as freely as they would in their house, and while you should still set a few rules for them, you can make other aspects of living in your Airbnb more flexible to make them feel more comfortable there. One of them is your check-in and check-out policies. 

People often pay for Airbnb tiny houses because they are constantly traveling from one place to another. It’s a nuisance for that kind of people to have strict check-in and check-out policies, so making yours more flexible can help you attract more travelers to your livable prefab additions or sheds. 

Make a Guidebook of the Area for Guests

Although we already mentioned it would be a good idea to provide your clients with instructions on all the appliances and amenities available in the tiny house Airbnb, we would also add a guidebook of the activities available in the neighborhood. This is especially helpful for people new to your town. 

You can include schools, malls, and any kind of attraction nearby you think they will need to go to in the short term. Maybe it’s something that will take a few hours from you, but your guests will appreciate it a lot.

Use Social Media to Advertise Your Services

The last advice we want to give you is to advertise your services and anything related to them on social media. Today’s world is all about that, and it will help you get more clients of all ages. Platforms, such as Instagram or Facebook, let you add your contact information to your profile for people to reach out to you if they want any further information on your services.

About Autonomous ADUs

Most people make small cabins (Airbnb) available for people when they have a shed or studio in their backyard they don’t use. Others prefer not to do it if they don’t already have the shed or pod because they think it’s a lot of work, and while that work pays off in the long run, they are not mistaken.   

Although Autonomous is mostly an ergonomics company, it has a few products that could help you overcome that problem and offer tiny home vacation rentals without spending months preparing them. We are talking about its home office pods.  

Here is an overview of what each of them offers:

Autonomous WorkPod

The Autonomous WorkPod is the flagship product of this series, and it looks forward to becoming the perfect place for its users to work in peace. As its name suggests, it’s made for office workers, but it has enough space and features for you to use it as a tiny house business. 

While you would need a building permit to make a shed or tiny house in most places, the specifications of this structure don’t require you to get one in most localities. Since it’s sound-insulated, your guests will stay in a peaceful place where they will be able to escape from all the things that bother them outside. 

We can’t forget that this pod is made for office work, so it comes with an electrical cabinet, a dual monitor arm, an ergonomic chair, an anti-fatigue mat, a cable tray, a smart desk, a cabinet, and a bookshelf. You can order it without furniture to lower the price, though. 

It’s difficult to find a tiny home Airbnb that comes pre-wired and with all the outlets you need, and that’s what this product gives you. The assembling process should be ready in a couple of days.

WorkPod

84 reviews

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Autonomous WorkPod Versatile

Although the Autonomous WorkPod Versatile offers similar benefits to the WorkPod, it’s better suited for a tiny home Airbnb, as it’s meant to be a multi-purpose space for its users. This prefab studio includes an electric cabinet, TV shelf, desk, small shelf, cabinet, big shelf, sofa, and a sofa table.  

The whole structure and layout of the pod allow you to customize it to your taste and give you a flexible space to do anything you want. It also comes pre-wired, and it’s built to last for long, so it’s a profitable investment for people who want to make tiny home vacation rentals a reliable source of income for the future.

WorkPod Versatile

24 reviews

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Autonomous WorkPod mini

Autonomous home office pods are more affordable than many other options online, but it’s true that paying for a prefab ADU is more expensive than building a regular shed. If you don’t want to make a big investment right now but want a tiny house Airbnb with the benefits of the WorkPod, we recommend the Autonomous WorkPod mini. 

This alternative is a budget-friendlier version of the original, but it still includes its core features. The main difference between them is that it doesn’t offer additional features and it’s smaller. However, it still comes pre-wired and is made of the same materials.

WorkPod mini

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Wrapping Up

The benefits of starting a tiny house business are truly appealing, but rushing things will only make you lose those opportunities. You first need to understand how to be a good host, and following the tips you read on this page is a great start. 

If you are interested in getting an extra source of income from an Airbnb but don’t have a shed, we recommend you buy one of the Autonomous home office pods. Maybe one day you will even use them as a personal space or office. Go to the Autonomous website to get more information on the matter.