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The Importance of AirBnb Photography

airibnb phoitography of my first property before
By | November 22, 2024
5 min to read
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We bought this house back in December 2023 in Lake Harmony PA area. This is my first Airbnb property. Initially, I didn’t plan to do much with it since I intended to keep it as a vacation property for our family and generate some extra income on the side to cover the mortgage.

After realizing we don’t go there as often as a family, the house became a liability.
Personally, I’m not a fan of having additional liabilities when they can be assets.

So, I started educating myself on how to make this property net positive.
All resources, including my property manager, kept saying the same thing:

You need to have professional photography done for your Airbnb property.

For almost a year, I ignored this advice.

Finally, we hired a professional Airbnb photographer who took pictures of 3 spaces in our house out of 6+. Since we’re still in the staging and renovation phase, we decided to postpone photographing the other spaces.

I do expect a better booking rate, but by how much? I have no idea.

That’s why I’m writing this blog post—to document whether this change improves bookings or not.

I’ll share what we have now and the new pictures.

KPIs to Track and Compare

For this testing, I will be tracking:

  • Number of nights booked
  • Average night stay
  • Monthly income for the property

It’s important to keep in mind that some months we may stay there as a family instead of renting it out, which will lower the property’s income.

Here are stats for 2024 before we update the pictures for this property.

Some Airbnb SEO Updates

In addition to adding new pictures, I will update the description and focus on keywords that are more likely to generate traffic.

For example, there are two popular cities in the area: Jim Thorpe, PA and Lake Harmony. It seems like Lake Harmony is a more searchable term, and Airbnb even runs Google Ads to rank it at the top. See below. Meanwhile, Airbnb does not bid on the Jim Thorpe keyword.

Based on this, my assumption is to optimize the description and title around Lake Harmony.

Instead of the existing title, “Mountain House With Fireplace,” I replaced it with:
“Near Lake Harmony: Mountain House with Fireplace”

Adding a Visual Description to Airbnb Pictures

In addition to providing picture descriptions, I’ve also added visual descriptions—a seemingly new trend. I simply uploaded the pictures to ChatGPT and asked it to generate descriptions in less than 250 words.

The Top 5 Pictures on an Airbnb Listing

This might sound simple, but I wasn’t aware of it until now. In addition to the cover image, your listing should feature four other images that highlight the top features of your house.

I don’t have these ready yet, as some of my pictures are cropped differently, cutting out key elements and making them look odd. Updating these is now on my to-do list.

Professional Airbnb Photography

Here are the pictures from the professional photographer we hired.

The End.

It took me today almost 3+ hours to make all those changes plus wkring this blog post. I am not 100% done but I will end today where I am and continue where we have a new set of pictures.

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