Iamb&b wants to take the hassle out of renting your place on Airbnb

Each week we’re profiling one company that has been selected for Boost – our early-stage startup growth program. Catch up with these companies in person at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on May 26-27.

If you rent out your place on Airbnb – or any other online house rental service – you’ll know there’s a lot more involved than simply handing over the keys and raking in the cash. You have to repair anything that gets broken, change the sheets, clean the bathroom and vacuum the place ready for the next temporary tenants. You also have to be around to let them in.

Enter Iamb&b – a new service that manages the entire renting process for you. They keep in touch with the guests, exchange the keys, do the check-in and check-out and make sure the house is clean and stays clean.

The team is also on call so you don’t have to worry about receiving a phone call while your thousands of miles away. The company claims you can earn up to 40 percent more on your rental than doing it alone.

The service is currently available in Amsterdam, but the team plans to expand quickly.

Ahead of Iamb&b’s participation in our Boost program at TNW Conference Europe 2016 this May, we asked the company’s founder, Dirk Minnebo, to tell us more…

Tell us what you do in two sentences

We are the set and forget service for renting out your home when you’re away or have a spare room. We’re taking the peer-peer sharing market to a peer-business-peer market where we take care of all the hassle that home sharing brings.

How did the company come about? What’s your background?

I started the business with Jorrit Stracke, a long-time friend and real estate agent in Amsterdam. Our company came out of popular demand. As a real estate agent, more and more people asked if he could rent out their apartment for example for one or two months.

So we came up with Iamb&b – and to complete the team we’ve added Jorg van der Ham to the team who is actually a very skilled developer. So where Jorrit brings knowledge from the real estate market and operational skills, I bring legal knowledge and my background in sales in and marketing. Jorg completes that with his technical skills

Who are your biggest rivals, and why are you different?

We have two types of rivals. The first are local players. You can start this company easy, just get the keys of your neighbor when they’re on holiday and you’re in business. We differentiate from them by adding extra services.

We get more bookings and revenue with our pricing algorithm and excellent service, we can work more efficiently, making us cheaper because of our scale.

The other kind is the more international players. One of the differences is in software and execution. The operation is kind of complex so execution is key. On the other hand we have built our business in a way that we comply with local regulations. A lot of our competition will get in trouble with local authorities now that local governments are upping their law enforcement illegal renting.

Get rich or change the world? Which would you rather, and why?

We are making our home owners rich so I’ll opt for change the world ;) We never started this for the money although we need money to operate and improve our business. We believe that it’s a waste to let so many pieces of real estate to stand vacant while the owners are away. We like to fix the peer-peer sharing market and take the hassle out of it so more people could share and we use resources more efficiently. Let’s change the world :)

How big is your team? Tell us one weird fact about a member of your team

We have have 11 people in the office, 14 part-time hosts and an in-house cleaning company so it’s already a lot.

If you weren’t working on IamB&B, what would you be doing?

I would probably be hacking growth for another start-up or non governmental organization.

➤ Iamb&b