Starting at the top, we need all the info about your property.

This is a comprehensive schedule of everything - property descriptions, owner info and tax information, operation info - including the quirks you know about that will help us take care of your property well.

This info is collected in a property survey. It is great to have the owners’ input to this so we can capture your intimate knowledge about your home.

We will provide you with an inventory list. Much of this is mandatory, as it serves for sanitary and safe property use.

The house needs to be clean and presented to a hotel standard. You may choose to prepare your property, or Groundswell can do this for you.

Either way, the Groundswell Property Care team will need to make up the beds with hired linen, and do the final check and set. We will also provision all the guest consumables into the property.

At this point it will be ready for photography.

Images are the key tool to inspire a prospective guest to choose to have their next holiday in your property. We strongly recommend you have the house styled and professional photos taken. Groundswell can help you with that, of course, and if you have existing images, we may be able to use these.

Groundswell reserves the right to approve or reject existing images if your property is listed under our premium brand.

Using all the information and images collected above, Groundswell will create a listing for your home, set the policies for reservations and cancellations.

We’ll also connect this listing to our Property Management and housekeeping task management software.

If you already have your property listed on AirBNB, we will co-host with you for a transtition period so that you don’t lose your existing bookings.

Once rates and calendar restrictions have been set up, we push this listing out to Booking.com and sync the calendars.

Neither AirBNB nor Booking.com allow property listings to change ownership.

As such, we will need to set up new listings under the Groundswell banner. This will mean you will lose your (probably great) reviews, but it does mean you will gain Groundswell’s (also great - 4.84 average over almost 2000) reviews and superhost status.

Existing future bookings can be managed one of two ways.

The first is to contact each guest, request that they cancel and rebook under the new listing. This inherently risks that they may not.

Alternatively, we can set up co-hosting on AirBNB in the transition period. This has the advantage that we don’t need to change the booking with the guests, but it does mean that until this period is over you will need to pay for the tech tools that support two listings. Also, AirBNB will manage your GST on your behalf, rather than Groundswell, and they will use a different pricing model for guests. We really want this to be short term!

To do this, Groundswell will need your AirBNB credentials to log in and authorise the connection of your existing listing to our Property Management Software, and to set the cohost payout to 100% so that we will receive the rental income. From this, costs will be covered and your owner’s payout will be returned to you in the normal payout cycle.

The extra cost of the double listing is $100+gst a month. This covers the PMS, housekeeping management and AI tools.

Choosing the right path forward will depend on the value of your existing bookings and how long you will need to be in this transition phase.

Booking.com have a very basic co-host-type function, but it is our experience that this is very difficult to navigate it and we don’t recommend using it.

Existing direct bookings are easily recreated in Groundswell’s system.

Any bookings that need to be cancelled and rebooked are best done manually, and where possible, directly into our booking engine. This gives us the most control over them, and is also the least expensive platform, thus maximising your ROI.