Cohost Market Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

Our team firmly believes that finding local co-hosts or property managers is the way to go if you need help with your vacation rentals. However, the challenge then becomes where to find reliable ones. This is where Cohost Market comes in.

Our goal today is to create a Cohost Market review to help short-term rental owners find out if it’s a suitable place to find co-hosts and property managers. Join us as we talk about its features, pricing, and our overall experience of using the platform.

How Hosts Can Use Cohost Market for Their Airbnb

Cohost Market doesn’t really have any additional features that can help you in managing your Airbnb or vacation rental business in general. It’s designed to be a marketplace that connects STR business owners with top-level talent from co-hosts, and property managers, to other professionals offering STR-related services.

If you’ve used a freelance platform like Upwork or Fiverr before, you likely won’t have any trouble using Cohost Market. It has an interface that’s as clean, if not cleaner, than both of the aforementioned sites. If you don’t have experience with other platforms, we’ll guide you through the process.

There are two main ways to find a professional for your short-term rental: posting a job offer and searching for service providers. The first one is a lot like Upwork, you post a job, providing all of the details, like the job description, rates, and location. Professionals registered to Cohost Market can then bid on your job posts and “apply” for the position. This is a quick and easy way to get responses and find a person that fits your budget, needs, and area. The only downside to this is that it requires more screening through the candidates because you really don’t have control over who bids on the project. Its main advantage is that posting a job is free and requires little effort to find suitable candidates.

The second method of searching for service providers is very similar to how Fiverr works. There are thousands of professionals who are already registered on Cohost Market and are simply waiting for job offers. So, instead of waiting for qualified personnel to come to you, you’re going to be the one searching for them. You can see the qualifications, experience, rates, and reviews for each expert, allowing you to handpick the ones you’d like to work with. Honestly, we prefer this method over posting a job offer, simply because of the overall control you have over who you end up talking to. The main downside to this is that can be more costly since you’d need to pay $5 to book an interview with each professional. However, we do recommend narrowing down your options to about 5 candidates to save on interview fees.

Cohost Market Pricing: How Much Does Cohost Market Cost?

As the name suggests, Cohost Market is a platform that makes it easy for rental owners to connect with co-hosts and property managers. Both parties have separate costs involved when signing up for the site, but for the purposes of our Cohost Market review, we’ll only be discussing the owner fees and payments involved. As Superhosts, our point of view will primarily be from the hiring end, allowing us to give opinions based on our perspective.

One of the things we really liked about Cohost Market is that they don’t require a subscription plan if you’re primarily planning on hiring a co-host or property manager from the platform. This makes it stand out from similar services like Turno or TIDY, which are both platforms for connecting with cleaners. The only downside is that Cohost Market doesn’t really have any team management or scheduling features as the previous platforms do. But, it still saves you the extra costs of a subscription.

Instead, Cohost Market charges based on the hires, services, and bookings you consume. Here are the respective charges as follows:

• Interview Booking: You need to pay $5 to unlock contact details and the ability to book interviews with potential candidates. This is a one-time fee that’s charged every time you want to view contact details and schedule an interview with professionals on the platform. However, if they don’t respond or deny the interview request, that fee is refunded to your account.
• One-Time Service Packages: If everything goes well and you want to proceed to book a professional’s services, you’d need to pay 10% in commission charges before proceeding.
• Online Services and Consultations: The final charge is another 10% commission fee for connecting with a HostPro Member. This applies to all jobs whether it’s for Airbnb listing optimization, logo designing, listing creation, direct booking websites, and digital products, among others.

Since Cohost Market doesn’t require any subscriptions for STR owners looking to book professionals, the fees they charge for the usage of the platform go to maintaining it. It includes secure transactions, customer support, and of course, access to high-quality and reliable professionals in an instant. We honestly think that these are fair fees for both parties, especially if it leads to long-term relationships with dependable pros.

Cohost Market User Experience

Our first impression upon opening the Cohost Market website is that it has a clean and eye-pleasing interface. You’re immediately greeted with a “what do you need” and “location” bar, making it easy to go straight into it. A little scrolling leads you to a handful of their featured providers, along with a couple of specialized job listings offering solutions to different STR needs.

You need to create an account to hire from the marketplace, which is pretty standard for these types of platforms. Creating an account is made easy through support for Facebook or Google account connection. Alternatively, users can also provide their preferred email address, name, and password to continue. Once that’s done, you’ll simply need to provide a payment method and you’re good to hire professionals.

Now that you’ve created an account the hard part is over. Our time searching for and hiring professionals was pretty smooth from here on out. There’s a separate section for hiring co-hosts and property managers. You can access it from the “Hire Local Experts” tab. Each professional is cleanly displayed, with their location, response time, rating, and fee. You can also check out their individual profiles to learn more about each person. From there, you can schedule an interview for $5 and contact them directly from the site.

If you aren’t in the market for co-hosts and property managers, you can head over to the “Online Services” tab to find various STR-related professionals. We’ve found offers for Airbnb listing creation/optimization, website creation, virtual assistants, and creating logos/thumbnails, among others. We believe that it’s an excellent venue for finding reliable pros who are experts within their field. While pricing can vary greatly, browsing each expert is made easy through the sorting filters available on the site, allowing you to find someone who fits within your budget range.

Is Cohost Market Legit?

Now, let’s discuss Cohost Market’s legitness and whether it’s a safe platform to use. If you’re going to be trusting professionals from the site to manage or improve your short-term rental business, you’ve got to make sure it’s trustworthy, right? We understand this concern and we believe that it’s a secure site. But, here are a couple of tips that we think should help you find top-tier professionals on Cohost Market.

• Look for the “verified account” badge found on the pro’s profile. This ensures that they’ve gone through Cohost Market’s verification process and that their personal identity, contact number, email, and ID have been checked. This can help you find more reliable pros and reduce the risk of getting scammed.
• Use the reviews and ratings as a hiring basis. While it shouldn’t be your primary method since a lot of pros are elite-level but don’t have many reviews on the site. However, it’s definitely a huge factor when you see multiple good reviews left by other clients. We suggest hiring pros that have a 4.5 star or higher average score.
• Don’t fret about the $5 interview fee. We know that every dollar counts, but spending that $5 to interview all of your prospects and see the qualifications of each one is worth it. We recommend cutting your prospects down to about 3-5 persons and interviewing all of them for the position. You’ll be spending more but it also allows you to get a good feel of not only their experience but also their personality. Remember, you’ll ideally be working with them long-term, so it’s better to find a partner with a great personality. It’s just like hiring someone in person.

Additionally, you don’t need to worry about payments and data breaches since we’ve come to learn that Cohost Market encrypts all financial transactions protecting your data from getting stolen. They are also all processed through secure gateways, so you don’t have to worry about potential payment issues.

They also offer refunds through disputes. We haven’t had the need to dispute a charge yet, but they claim a 95% satisfaction rate while resolving issues swiftly.

Final Thoughts

As a whole, we think Cohost Market offers a solid platform that allows vacation rental owners to easily find and connect with local professionals within their area. However, we do think that your experience will vary depending on your specific location. Most of the big cities will have more experts to choose from, while some smaller ones might have limited or even no options, especially for some of the more niche STR services.

If you’re considering starting out your own Airbnb rental or just looking for a new addition to your portfolio, we suggest checking out our BNBCalc property analysis tool to give you an insight into properties on your radar. It can help you make data-driven decisions, based on what active rentals are already earning, allowing you to get an idea of not only revenue but also expenses, and paint a fuller picture of your potential investment.