360. 12 Things Airbnb Hosts Forget to Put in the Supply Closet

Tim Hubbard (0:00)

You might be thinking, my housekeeper has everything they already need, they bring it to my property, I already have it in a supply closet. Well, these are for items that fail between turnovers. There are things that pop up that your guests are going to need, but you don't necessarily want to just leave out there on the coffee table.

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I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

Okay, real quick, before we get into the list, the question comes up, locked closet or not locked closet. We recommend having both. So there's a supply closet that your guests should have access to. This has some basic things in there, like toilet paper, some sheets. But you don't necessarily want them to have access to your whole supply inventory, and that's where a locked supply closet can come in to really save the day when your guest needs something or when your housekeeper needs something. In our properties, we recommend having a little digital door knob that goes right on the supply closet. You can program it with a simple four digit code. It's 30 bucks or so on Amazon. Your housekeeper doesn't need a key, and you can easily give your guest a code in case they need it. All right, let's get in the list. Item number one, and this is a big one.

Many guests drive off, they leave your beautiful property, and they arrive at the airport to return their rental car, and they realize that your garage door opener is still sitting there on the visor. This just happens, and so you want to be prepared and have spare universal garage door openers in your locked supply closet. Now, you want to make sure that you pre-program these. They're really easy to pre-program, right? Most of the garage door openers these days, you can just click a button on the little garage door opener, and it pairs up, and they're really only $10, $15 on Amazon these days. If you don't happen to have a backup in place already, well, I highly suggest having this in your house rules. In fact, I recommend having this in your house rules regardless, just as one additional reminder to your guests to not forget the garage door opener. And you can have it state simply that if the garage door opener shows up missing, that you have a charge for X amount of dollars, you decide. But it's because it's an inconvenience to the upcoming guests. It could mean that they can't get in the garage. And it's also an inconvenience to either have to send someone out there or to program a garage door opener if you don't have one in place. Number two, and this kind of goes along with number one in the sense that it's related to access. And that might be an HOA pass, some pass to get into your gated community, or it might be a parking pass for your property if you live maybe in an urban area where it's hard to find parking. These can be difficult to get replacements, but I guarantee you a guest is going to take these at one point or another. And so what you can do on the physical pass is print something out in big letters that says, please, please make sure to return this to the home before leaving the property. If not, we have a charge or there's a fine of $200, you name it, because it's going to inconvenience the next guest and we're gonna have to go through a process to get a new permit. So similar to the first one in that it's related to access issues. You also wanna make sure you have this in your house rules. If you haven't reviewed your house rules in a while, well, you can grab ours in the link down below.

We've been doing this for a long time, and so it's a very thorough list. You can edit it and tailor it to fit your property. All right, number three, and this is one that a lot of hosts just do not have, and it's such an easy one to get, and that is an ozone machine. An ozone machine, what is that? Well, let's say someone is smoking in your property, or maybe they were just busy cooking up a big gourmet fish feast, and it smells like fish in your kitchen. Well, if the next guest is checking in a few hours, a lot of times opening the windows to air things out isn't going to do the trick. An OZO machine is literally going to change the composition of the air, and so you got to be careful with it, actually. You don't want to be in a closed space with the machine breathing at the same time. But most time, you can leave it in a space for an hour or two, it turns off automatically, you take it out, and it's cleaned the air. These are pretty cheap these days. You can find them on Amazon for around $100, $150.