Preparing a French House for AirBnb: Lessons for new hosts.
This continues our series of blogs about looking for and then purchasing a house in France as expats. This one covers our decision and the process in preparing the french house for rental.
Why We Decided to Rent
To rent or not to rent that was the question.
When we were arranging to buy our house in rural France, La Tour Blanche, we knew that for the first few years we would only be using it as a holiday home. We discussed the idea of renting it out but were not certain that this was something that we really wanted to do. With both us working good jobs we had made sure that the finances would not break us so rental income was not an absolute requirement. We could chose to keep the house just for us and avoid having to pack away personal things before leaving after each visit, or having to trust strangers to take care of the place in the way that we would.
Unplanned change in circumstances
8 days after completing the purchase of the house, I discovered that I was to be made redundant from my job and on day 14 the legal process completed and I started a period of garden leave, being paid but not having to work until my termination period ended in 4 months. A lovely long buffer period to be follwed by strong unemployment support. Thank goodness we live in Europe and even more in Luxembourg where there is probably the best unemployment support in the world.
However, good social support aside, the long term picture and financial plans had changed. It suddenly seemed much more sensible to rent out the house. So the decision was taken. We would make the house available to rent. The next sections explain everything we did in opreparing the house as a holiday rental.
Rental Platforms
Obviously AirBnb is the most famous rental platform and we did list the house there, but also we had advice about other sites and services for managing and advertising rentals. We were lucky to meet someone local who as well as helping us with our pool winterisation said that he selectively managed larger rental homes for people that they liked and chose to work with. He advised us of some other advertising and management options and agreed to take on our property. For now it can also be found on www.longtermrentalsinfrance.com but could well appear else where as we find out about other selective rental sites. The advantage of not using AirBnb is that fees are often less and you can be more selective about renters.
Prparing The House For Guests
As of writing we have not had any fussy guests, IE those that complain or are not happy. But as we started to think about how to prepare for the house to be rented it was clear that quite a few things needed doing to make guests comfortable and experience the kind of stay that we would wish. Many of these things were what we should have noticed but didn’t when inspecting the house. We toured the house trying to consider guest expectations and comfort. We also asked all the visiting family and friends to provide feedback that might help. We already had the comfor aspect sorted and knowing the locks were a work in progress they did not highlight much, other than removing personal possessions and preparing good information.
Doors, doors, doors!
It was only when we started living in the house that we discovered how many doors did not latch properly. Two bedrooms and the main bathroom, plus the toilet door coud not be locked. So they all got new lock or latch mechanisms, plus the toilet and bathroom doors had twist locks added. This allows a user to lock the door but if they end up being stuck then it can be openned from the other side with a screw driver. We previously had a 3 year old girl stuck in a toilet when she locked a toilet door from inside with the key and we wish to avoid that trauma for any visitiing families. It was surprising that the previous owners had lived with bathroom doors not latching. I suspect they had started to be unable to deal with all the things that needed doing in the house.
Locking bathroom doors are extremely important even for single family groups.
Difficult Bulb Replacement!
Another thing that needed doing was replacing a light bulb. that does not sound too difficult does it. Is it even worth a mention in a blog, even perhaps the world’s most boring blog?
Well yes, because when it is approximately 7-8 metres off the ground and indoors, it is not easy to replace. We have a 2 section ladder but this fell about 2m short of the bulb position. When a roofer visited we asked him to try with his 3 section ladder, that too had not been long enough to reach the light with the faulty bulb!
Finally when our good friend Zhenya visited over Christmas, as well as doing most of the work to replace the door mechanisms, he helped me reach the bulb by securing the ladder on the balcony from where the light coud be reached.
This also provided an opportunity to dust the cobwebs from the highest points of the beams that we could reach any other way. It was a great relief finding a way to change the bulb that had puzzled us for many weeks.
Finally being able to change a bulb and dust the high beams over the lounge.
Secure Storage for Owners
Finally, a practical issue that was needed for us more than guests, was having secure spaces to store our possessions during rental periods. This required 2 more doors to be updated with locks, the dressing room behind our bedroom, where we can store all our clothes and personal possessions that needed hiding away and the basement door from the kithen. Both gained locking mechanisms. It was a relief to add a lock to the basement door as this had also worried me as a safety issue for young children.
Mr I can build or fix anthing - our friend Zhenya, installing a lock on the basement door.
Food Storage for Owners & Guests
The last significant upgrade that we made was adding a lockable larder cupboard, where we could store all our non perishable food items, releasing kitchen cupboard space for paying guests. We had initially thought that we would just have to move food stuff into the basement but while searching for bulding materials one local DIY store had the perfect larder cupboard. I enjoyed putting it together with perhaps the absolutely most useless instruction sheet known to man, but managed it and then of course Zhenya helped again by adding a lock. Below is a photo of the larder cupboard, isn’t it lovely? You know you are middle aged when you get excited about these kind of things.
The larder cupboard.
Rental Organisation
Rental Photos
Alongside preparing the house physically, we had to organise the house for rentals.
To advertise it, we needed good quality photos of each room. Andrew Blair our partner property manager reviewed the first set of photos that I prepared and advised that they needed improving. The advice was to remove personal possessions from view, remove towels and other items from view in the bathrooms and to tuck bedding in to make things look neater. All good advice. I also decided to clean everywhere before taking the photos so it turned out to be a lot of work. We were happy with the results though and Andrew approved too. The result is our rental gallery that you can see here.
Rental Calendar
Before we could release the house for rentals, we had to decide on when it would be available. Obviously we wanted to ensure that we were still able to use the house when we wanted to, but it did mean that we had to plan ahead for the next year, identify when we thought we would want to use the house and block those times in the rental calendar. No more spontaneous visits if it’s rented! This we manage by using the AirBnB calendar as the master calendar to be checked before releasing through any other sites.
Rental House Guide
A house guide is needed for renters, I suspect that most people will never read it, but in the event of some advice being needed it is a necessity. While a relatively straight forward job, it was going to be time consuming. I used chatGPT to create the template, based off the information on our website and it created a very good skeleton document that we then just filled out. It recognised all the rooms and house areas that we had and created all the section headings for them. It also added topic areas that would be needed for renters such as rubbish and recycling procedures, problem resolutions and some local information.
I saved the document as a PDF that can be sent to guests, but I was unable to print it due to not having a reliable printer in France. So as well as the PDF, I added the house guide as a password protected page on our website here.
Rental Supplies
As well as preparing the house and rental organisation, we also needed to prepare basic rental supplies. Luckily Andrew could advise on this from his experience of managing 10 other properties.
Towels. At a minimum 2 sets are needed but ideally 3 sets to allow for quick turn around of guests. We decided to just have 2 sets, because we had to allow for 8 guests at a time. We are only allowing rentals of 1 week or more, so there should be time to launder towels between each set of guests. Plus because we were trying to buy good quality towels to make the house a more luxury rental, we quickly hit the 500 Euro mark on towel expenditure.
Bedding. Like towels a minimum 2 sets are needed but ideally 3. Again we decided to just have 2 sets for similar reasons. High quality bedding being very expensive. With 5 bedroms we’ve spent well over 2000 Euros making sure that we have 2 sets of high quality bedding for all rooms. I hope the guests appreciate it. We will be interested to see if the bedding features positively in feedback.
Basic Supplies. We also need to ensure a supply of basics such as milk, coffee, tea bags, sugar, toilet paper, bin bags, soap & shower gel. All the things guests expect at the begging of a rental or are needed to turn over. These had to be stored securely, another reason to put a lock on the basement.
Keys. We’ve all stayed in rentals where the keys are stored in a lock box. This is also our preferred way of providing keys to guests. It means that they can gain access without someone being present and gives them a way to securely store or share a single set of keys with low risk of loosing them. Knowing that we would not be local to provide help if keys were lost we also wanted to get several copies of all keys. In the end we ended up with 3 key boxes fitted to the outside car port. One for guests, a backup one for guests incase they do loose keys and a master box for house management. We also cut 3 sets of other keys, one each for us, one for our son and one to give to the builder who was going to be onsite for the next 2 months. Keys became another noticeable amount of expenditure, though not as much as the bedding!
Are We Ready Now?
So after all that were we ready?
Well, it seems the answer was yes. After the initial few inquries for rentals did not come through, we got an inquiry for a 10 week rental starting the day that we would be leaving after the new year. Because there woud be building work on the back rooms ongoing through that period, it was only the night before we left that it was finally agreed with a significant discount, but yes, we were ready, we had attracted and sealed our first rental.
I hope that our temporary tenants can enjoy the house as much as we did over the Christmas period. Some photos of Christmas can be seen here.
If you made it this far then thank you and if you have any feedback or ideas for future blogs related to owning a house in France then please do contact us.
