Airbnb is officially no longer just a cute way to make some extra cash by renting out a spare room in your apartment. It’s a big business now. And like most other big businesses, it’s entered a period where managed services have emerged to support super users on the platform.
Enter Superhost, which has quietly emerged as a property management service for Airbnb hosts.
Superhost reduces the pain associated with managing your Airbnb listing — like updating your listing’s calendar and responding to guest emails, as well as setting up cleaning services for your listing in between guest stays. That’s important because the faster a host responds to a guest request, the more likely they are to stay at a certain place. And cleanliness is increasingly becoming an important part of boosting ratings of your listing.
It does all that by hooking into hosts’ Airbnb accounts and taking control of all the details that most hosts don’t want to deal with. It’s not all about having a dedicated service team, however.
“We see this as a software problem to automate the process,” co-founder Koby Soto tells me. That software can be used to optimize pricing based on hotel and other Airbnb inventory.
But Superhost can help hosts in other ways. For newcomers to Airbnb, the service can help hosts determine a price for their listings, as well as optimize their profile to be more attractive to guests.
It also helps to choose which guests to accept and which not to, and helps navigate their stay. That means providing 24/7 support during stays, including scheduling key drops and troubleshooting issues that might pop up.
For all that, Superhost takes just 1 percent of each booking — that is, for now. It expects to raise that to 3 percent after it becomes a bit more established. In the meantime, it’s growing about 40 percent week-over-week.
The company was founded by twin brothers Amiad and Koby Soto, with service is available for listings in the U.S. and in Israel. Over time, the team wants to expand into other geographies, as well as making its service available on other services, like Homeaway and VRBO.