If you’re into Airbnb arbitrage, you’ll eventually find a landlord that’ll allow you to use their property. And if you can’t, this article talks about how the fastest way to get Airbnb arbitrage leads. Once you do find a property, you might be wondering how to furnish an Airbnb.
Is it better to have save money, or is it better to have expensive furniture so you get good reviews?
The answer: it’s much better to save money – guests don’t really care about the quality of the furniture that much. Guests care about the location and amenities.
In this post, I’ll show you 3 ways to furnish an Airbnb, ranging from the cheapest (slowest) way to the most expensive (fastest) way.
The Cheapest Ways To Furnish An Airbnb
There’s a few ways to furnish your Airbnb for cheap. I’ll go through them here.
All these methods below require buying second-hand goods. You might think “wow, my guests only like new furniture! They won’t like second hand goods!”
I used to think that way as well, and I personally would like to stay at an Airbnb with new-ish furniture. But the fact of the matter is, even if you buy your furniture “new” – a year later your furniture will become just as used, if not more used, than most craigslist furniture.
So if you’re not going to commit to buying new furniture every year, I don’t recommend buying it new upfront as there’s no real reason to do it (other than for convenience).
But obviously, don’t just pick up any piece of ripped up furniture. That’s just ghetto. You should still vet to make sure that the furniture is in good enough shape for your guests.
Craigslist
First, there’s Craigslist. Type “craigslist.org” on your browser and you’ll be automatically directed to your location’s classified ads.
Then, you can just type in the “search craigslist” box to find used furniture. OR you can go into the “free” section to search for furniture that you’d need. I’d recommend searching the “free” section first, and then looking for used items.
After, make sure you have a large truck/car to load furniture in. People are giving you free stuff already; they’re not going to deliver it to you. And no, you can’t pay them to deliver it to you – people giving stuff out for free obviously value convenience over money.
That said, you can get some sweet gems. See an example below. An office chair could cost you between $50-$200 new.
Finally, all you have to do is contact the owner to grab the item. Free items go fast, so make sure you schedule them ASAP. Even if you’re rich and can afford 100 new chairs, just pretend to be broke on the phone. This way, the seller feels good about giving you free stuff and you’ll beat out the next Airbnb arbitraging schmuck that’s dumb enough to say “I’m doing Airbnb arbitrage and looking for free stuff.”
Buying used furniture is similar to picking them up for free, except:
- Owners take a bit longer to sell, as they cost money. This gives you some room to negotiate price down.
- They’re not free.
Facebook Marketplace
These items aren’t going to be free, but will be used. First, go on your Facebook app and then tab Menu on the bottom right, then tap Marketplace.
Then, tap the search icon (magnifying glass) to search for the item you need.
Next, tap the filter button and select Used. You can filter by maximum price if you’d like as well. Finally, tap See Listings.
Then all you need to do is browse the listings, contact the seller, negotiate, and schedule a pickup.
OfferUp
First, download the app OfferUp. Its logo looks like this:
It’s a fairly straightforward app because you don’t need to adjust filters to find used items – everything in the app is second-hand.
Once you’ve installed the app, just type what you need in the search box, browse through the listings, contact the seller, negotiate, and schedule a pickup.
Recommendation: In order to get the best option possible, I highly recommend you “shop around” all 3 platforms. Optimize for furniture that’s in 1) good shape, 2) proximity to your location, and 3) price.
The Not So Cheap Way To Furnish Your Apartment
When we did Airbnb arbitrage, we used to furnish the apartments in the cheapest way possible. Then we wanted “scalability.” And a business partner left. So now with only 2 people instead of 3, it’s a lot harder to do everything manually and get set up quickly.
What we did instead was just use Amazon + Ikea to purchase our items. So all of our items were new. There might be some low-priority items that are easy to buy off Craigslist (i.e. microwaves, TV) and we’d only do the large items through Ikea (i.e. beds, sofas, etc). We’d use either Amazon or Ikea for smaller items (i.e. floor lamps, extension cords, trash cans, etc).
Some people think that they need a “furniture list” to furnish their Airbnb. This is true, but you should only have a template and not a universal list.
This is because even if you’re doing Airbnb arbitrage for, say, 1bd/1ba only where every unit seems like it could be systematized, it really can’t. The floorplan’s different enough such that you could have a couch that’ll fit in one 1/1 apartment but not another.
As such, you should come up with a template of all the Airbnb furniture you’ll need. The easiest way to do this is to literally go around your house and note down everything. Once you have a list, put it in a Google Sheet as a template file.
Now, every time you want to furnish a unit, refer to that template file. Duplicate the template file so it’s customized per Airbnb unit you’d like to furnish. In each duplicated file, you’ll have to make adjustments according to your unit.
I recommend having these columns for your spreadsheet, but you can do whatever you want: Item, URL, Ikea Or Amazon, Ikea Bin / Aisle Number.
- Item column lets you know what you’re buying (so you know what you might be missing).
- URL column lets you conveniently go to the online page and order, if you’re buying the part online.
- “Ikea or Amazon” column lets you know if this item is so you know who to contact if an item is missing. This is perhaps redundant with the URL column but it’s much easier to scan.
- “Ikea Bin / Aisle Number” column lets you do speedruns in Ikea. Ikea lines can get very long, especially in the weekends, so you want to be done shopping ASAP. Having all the bin and aisle numbers in a spreadsheet beforehand lets you collect all your items at lightning speed. This lets you leave the store before the lines get too crazy. You’ll have a very long day ahead of you building the furniture, so wasting time in line is a very bad idea.
Once you haul all your Ikea items to your apartment, and all your Amazon items have arrived, your day begins. Simply work through all the boxes of furniture and small items, and build everything and you’re done.
Note: This Ikea + Amazon method to furnish your Airbnb is more expensive than the previous method. However, it is less time consuming as you don’t have to shop for every single last piece of furniture. You could also do what we did which is use the Ikea + Amazon method for items you don’t care to save on, and then only do the cheap method for those items you can save a ton of money on.
The Most Expensive Way (Not Recommended)
This method to furnish your Airbnb isn’t recommend so I’ll keep it brief. It generally is 2.5-4X our costs of doing it the other 2 ways above. We did this because the other business partner I had moved away as well, so I was left to furnish units by myself.
For maximum speed, we did this:
- Buy everything from Ikea + Amazon.
- Hire movers to pick up the items from Ikea.
- Schedule TaskRabbiters to assemble all the heavy furniture, while I unboxed the small items myself.
Costly, would not recommend. Example: TaskRabbit labor is about $70/hr. It takes about 12 man-hours for a 2bd/1ba, and about 8 man-hours for a 1bd/1ba. Plus ~$300 for movers to move all the Ikea furniture from the store to the Airbnb location. So you’re looking at almost $1K in labor. You’re already behind in a lot of rent by the time you’ve furnished your Airbnb with this method.
Question: Why Not Deliver With Ikea Instead? Why Do You Need To Hire Movers Or Do It Yourself?
Ikea’s delivery dates are notoriously random. If you’ve signed a lease for Airbnb arbitrage, you’re losing money every single day it’s vacant.
Ikea could say they’ll be delivering on Tuesday, and on Monday night tell you it’s actually coming 3 weeks later.
You can’t start out an apartment with a 3-week delay. The reason’s because by the time you’ve finished furnishing your Airbnb, you’re already way behind in profits.
Summary
Due to extreme risk, saturation, and low barrier of entry, Airbnb arbitrage is a side hustle I’d avoid doing. I’d recommend doing e-commerce instead.
But if you’ve made up your mind already, heed the above advice and do some sweat equity. I find that the most successful people in this space do everything themselves in order to save cost.
It’s not a control freak thing, it’s more of a cost-basis reduction thing. The lower your cost basis for an Airbnb arbitrage = lower risk, because you have more margin for error. As an example, furnishing 2 units the most expensive way would be enough to furnish 3-4 units the least expensive way (or create an extra month or two buffer in rent).
