Property investor Mhlonishwa Winston Kunene used to run 25 Airbnbs at once. He now runs three. On the Entrepreneurs Chat Podcast, he explained why he scaled back, and what he learned about furniture, reviews and reading a full year’s numbers before calling a short-term rental profitable.
Furniture wears out faster than the mortgage
Kunene pushed back on the idea that property only ever rises in value. “By the way, Airbnbs do depreciate your asset,” he said. “Mhm. They always say you never go wrong in property. Your asset always goes up in value. Your equity always goes up in value. Airbnbs depreciate your assets.” Guest turnover wears down paint, furniture and appliances fast enough that some units need repainting every three months, long before a landlord renting to a single tenant would ever face that bill.
Theft is the sharper risk. Early on, someone registered on the platform using another person’s identity document and walked out with a Samsung television worth R32,000. Reporting it to the police went nowhere. Kunene’s fix was a digital keypad lock rather than a spare key left under a mat: “If you just put a key under the carpet, you’re vulnerable. Yeah. Cuz anyone can come and take the key open take the stuff, put in the car and go. Sure. So you need permission from me to open the door.”
A property can look profitable and still lose money
Kunene said the real test is the full year’s figures, not how a bank balance looks on a good month. “There were months where they were so good, I was convinced I was making profit. And there were months where I was not making profit. And I obviously did the calculation. I realized, oh wait, this is now negative 20,000,” for that property over the year, once cleaning, bond, levies, rates and maintenance were all counted against the nightly income. He has since had one unit in Waterfall’s Ellipse estate clear R10,000 to R20,000 profit a month, while a property that performed strongly over the October to December season cleared around R80,000 in profit for the year, swinging from roughly R1,500 to R1,800 a night in the off season up to R3,500 a night when fully booked in peak months.
Reviews decide how often a listing gets shown
Kunene treats guest reviews as the asset that determines everything else. “Your reviews are more valuable. Your currency is your reviews cuz your reviews give you two things. They give you a higher algorithm. It’s like social media. People who know social media, you know social media. You’ve got a lot of followers.” When a water outage hit one of his areas, he blocked the affected dates rather than risk a bad stay: “One would go, ‘No, but I’m missing out on that 1.5 per night.’ But I go I don’t want a bad review cuz that’s what takes me out of business. So it goes back to like you need to treat Airbnb like that.” Consistently high reviews and fast response times can also qualify a host for a platform rewards programme on sites like Booking.com, pushing a listing higher in search without having to pay for placement the way Property24 listings sometimes do.
When a unit stops working as a short stay
Not every property should stay on a nightly platform. One of Kunene’s Airbnbs was in a building whose body corporate did not allow short-term letting, and the owner found out and told him to stop. Rather than lose the unit, he relisted it as a standard rental: “So, I then put it as an as an advert to P24. I advertised it. It’s I’m looking for a tenant, fully finished house. It was vacant for two months. First month I paid sharp. I’ll take the burn. I found a tenant the second month and I made fixed profit of 4K,” every month after that. Sectional title owners are legally required to tell their body corporate when a unit is being let out at all, and a scheme’s conduct rules, once approved by the Community Schemes Ombud Service, can set a minimum lease term or ban short-term letting outright, as a recent legal review of sectional title rules sets out. Cape Town has gone a step further and started billing Airbnb hosts at commercial property rates rather than residential ones.
Picking where to buy matters more than how many units
Kunene’s profitable properties sit in established, high-demand nodes: Waterfall’s Ellipse estate and a lagoon estate in Pretoria among them. He was blunt that the same strategy does not travel to smaller or more remote towns, where bookings are seasonal and sparse and an owner can end up simply covering costs with no guests at all. He has since converted several of his original 25 units into long-term corporate lets for tenants such as relocating professionals and companies housing project staff, keeping only the three Airbnbs that reliably turn a profit. His own screening process for a new tenant or guest, he said, now starts with the same question a bank would ask: can the numbers actually support the property, not just in a good month, but across the full year.
