Don't use smart pricing and don't offer any discounts other than a small week long stay discount. I'm even considering turning that off.

I remember the night we went live with our two listings. We hit the button about 11pm and went to sleep. We woke up to three, month long bookings for about $500 each. It was a gut punch and we were freaking out. We emailed support and they reached out to us immediately to tell us what happened.

While I was setting up the listings the platform suggested we use smart listing and offer discounts for weekly and monthly stays so that's how we set it up. First the smart pricing was about $10 less than were we wanted to start per night. Second, the discounts ended up giving something like 60% off the nightly rate.

Support told us this happens a lot, people will search for new listings with discounts and book long stays. They did go ahead and cancel all three of those stays.

The second piece of advice I have is that people are dumb. No matter how simple you think your check in/out instructions are, they will still find a way to **** them up. We have splurged and bought nice keypad deadbolts and eventually stopped using them. We had simple 4 digit codes and people still managed to enter it wrong enough times that they got locked out of the lock.

Now we have a lock box with physical keys (and a second lock box for each door in a different location just in case they lose those or lock themselves out). The instructions say "walk up the steps, turn right and look for the lock boxes on the center column". Well I can see the front porch from my office and I can't tell you how many people walk up the sidewalk, obviously reading the instructions on their phones, and they turn left on the porch and look for the lock boxes on the left column. A few walk around looking up at the 10' porch ceiling. I lol all the time watching people check in.

Don't do the cleaning/laundry yourself. Find a good cleaner and work with them to develop your systems. Ours have just a few clients and we are her only short term rental. She loves us and we love her. Which brings me to my next point, find a back up cleaner. **** happens, even for trusted team members. My new favorite quote is "if you have one you have none, if you have two you have one".

Relax and have fun with it, keep trying new things until you get a well oiled system. You'll make some mistakes along the way no doubt but its a ton of fun. Congrats on taking a chance on yourself, no matter what I think that's a win worth celebrating.