I’ve noticed this scenario happening with some owners we manage for under our short term lease property management program.
While we are advertising their unit for monthly stay purposes the owner is advertising the same unit on AirBnB themselves for daily stays.
Recently we have noticed language creeping into various building’s HOA charters that outlaws not only daily stays but also monthly stays as well.
This can cause a lot of problems especially when trying to resolve a conflict. Should there be a dispute between you, the owner, and AirBnB (for example), the conflict resolution process can be complicated by the fact that the same property is being managed by us which then can land the blame on unfairly on a non-AirBnB tenant.
The opposite holds true as well. Should a tenant of ours have an issue with the unit but the cause might have been from a daily stay tenant the owner hosted, we as property managers lose a leg to stand on when trying to defend you from having to pay for something that was a tenant’s fault and not yours.
Case in point; there was an expensive floor tile that broke after an extensive renovation in a property we manage for monthly stays. Our tenant who had just moved in alerted us about the breakage and we immediately assumed they were to blame.
We spoke to the owner who said they hadn’t used the property in the two weeks it was vacant so all evidence pointed to our current tenant.
While trying to bring this problem to a conclusion, our tenant informed us that the same unit they are staying in was being advertised on AirBnB as a daily stay with a different host.
We took a look and found the owner operating an account to elicit daily stays.
We presented this to the owner and only then did they confess what they were doing and there were guests that stayed in the unit during the two weeks we thought the unit was empty.
We asked if the owner had checked the unit after their daily stay tenants had left and the owner said they ask their part time cleaning staff to check while they clean for any problems.
The cleaning staff either didn’t notice the broken tile or didn’t bother to say anything to the owner.
Needless to say we had to charge the owner for the repair. The owner couldn’t claim anything back from the daily stay tenants as too much time had passed and we couldn’t do anything but apologize to our current monthly tenant.
If you are going to hire a property manager for monthly stays (like us) then don’t try and source tenants yourself for daily stays. Once the 180 day / year deregulation for daily stays passes, we can manage daily stays on behalf of owners.
For now though, if you are looking to do both then we can not manage the property for you.
Find out more about monthly furnished property management.
Editor’s Note:Takahashi San is Housing Japan’s Director of MFA (Monthly Furnished Apartments). He writes a weekly column about where this service sits in a rapidly changing regulatory environment.
