As short-term rental owners or boutique hotel owners, accommodating guests, we are running a business.

And one of the things that I can guarantee that is going to happen with our business, whether it’s a boutique hotel or whether it’s a short-term rental or vacation rental, is that we’re going to have maintenance.

And so this week, I want to talk about the true cost of big maintenance items, and also just some typical expenses that you might want to revisit, because you might be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Stay tuned.

Let’s jump right in.

Well, welcome back to the show.

I’m happy you’re here again.

If you’re new to the channel, my team and I have managed over 40,000 guests.

We’re in multiple countries.

We’re in nearly 20 cities now.

And so we’ve learned a lot, and I hope our tips help you along your short-term rental journey.

I gave a quick call to our internet company recently, or the internet company where most of my properties are serviced, that is Comcast.

So for all of you in the US, hearing that name might not bring up positive thoughts, but I would say they’ve gotten a little better over the years, and in a lot of places, it has been the only option.

But the one and a half hours that I spent on support with them saved me about $500 a month, $6,000 for the year.

And these are recurring expenses, so not a bad use of time.

And I wanted to just talk a little bit more about some of these reoccurring expenses and what the true cost really is to a major maintenance item.

So before I jump back into those subscriptions, let’s talk about some major maintenance items that can happen with your property.

So these are things like sewer or plumbing backup.

And now your insurance may cover this.

This is one of the things you want to check for when you’re reviewing your insurance for your properties.

Roof damage, if you have properties in Florida or in the Carolinas or anywhere and you were in the recent storms, my heart goes out to you.

I hope you’ve been able to manage okay and that the rebuilding process is coming along smoothly.

Another one that I had recently was actually a gas leak.

So a lot of my properties are historic properties.

They even have a property from the 1800s.

And while our guests love them, there’s a lot of maintenance that can pop up.

And so a gas leak is no joke, right?

You have to block the units, of course.

A lot of times the gas lines are buried way underground.

And so this is something that not only costs a lot of money, but the true cost comes in after you account for all the days that you had to block on your schedule, all those days that you couldn’t rent to a new guest.

If you have a sewer line backup and it costs you $15,000 to fix it, but you also have to block your calendar for a full month, well, then based on whatever you make on a daily rate, let’s just say it’s $150, then that means you actually lost another $4,500.

So we’ve talked about this before.

This is something you can insure against.

It’s called loss of business income.

If you don’t have insurance specifically for a short term rental, well, I highly suggest you talk with a company like Properly or a company like Steadily to see what the insurance would cost for your property because they will cover against these things.

And it is something that I’ve used personally.

So some of these major maintenance items are just pretty obvious, right?

They cost a lot of money, but the less obvious thing is how much we need to block our calendar.

And another place where I see a lot of owners just sort of casually blocking their calendars is when it comes to cleaning.

So imagine that after every checkout, you block a day to make sure that you are prepared.

You’ve got plenty of time to clean before the next guest checks in.

And let’s just say that you have 50 reservations throughout the year, and your average daily rate is $100 a day.

Well, if you’re blocking a day after all those reservations, that’s 50 reservations.

That’s basically six weeks, and that’s $5,000, right?

And so this is something that you really need to take another look at.

If your current cleaner or housekeeper or housekeeping company can’t show up on the same day, well, there’s plenty of other housekeepers and housekeeping companies out there.

In most markets, I realize this can be a little challenging in some places, but the reality is, we have a big industry supporting us now, and there’s way more housekeeping companies and housekeepers than there ever were.

And so if you’re having to block your dates, I highly suggest that you revisit that.

And maybe what you can do is just continue with your current housekeeper, but let them know, hey, I’m running a business here, and if I block all of these days each year, I’m really leaving a lot of money on the table.

And so you find another company that is available last minute, and maybe you have to pay them quite a bit more, but at least you have the opportunity to book these days that you’re currently blocking.

Okay, so major maintenance items.

Those are a big one and a pretty obvious one.

The block days for housekeeping, that’s a little less obvious, and I know a lot of you out there are doing this.

So revisit that.

Another one that sort of just creeps up are recurring subscriptions, right?

So I talked about my Comcast Internet bills.

I’ve got a bunch of Internet bills, and honestly, I have so many software subscriptions.

It’s kind of crazy, and a lot of them are on a monthly basis, and a lot of them are on an annual basis.

The annual ones definitely creep up on you.

And so what I did recently is I just went through all of my software subscriptions.

I put them in a nice little convenient chart, and I calculated how much I was paying.

If you have a lot of bank accounts or loans or credit cards, and you’re managing a larger portfolio, there is a really cool financial tool that it came across recently.

It’s called monarch.com.

Basically, it syncs everything together, and so you could pull up software subscriptions between all of your accounts real easily.

And so I found that tool helpful.

I’m not sponsored by them in any way, but just wanted to let you know.

It’s a pretty cool tool.

So we know we have all these monthly and annual subscriptions creeping up on us, whether it’s utilities, like the internet, or whether it’s some sort of software subscription.

One quick tip to really determine whether or not you actually need this software subscription would be just to cancel it.

And if you haven’t logged on to try to use it in like a couple of weeks, well, then it’s pretty likely that you don’t really need it.

Of course, we’re not gonna cancel our internet or any utilities, but software subscriptions, maybe you’ve subscribed to 20 of the latest AI tools because you’re experimenting, those things will creep up on you.

So I suggest just going back, taking a real quick look, and some of these utilities that you have been paying on for a long time, it doesn’t mean that that’s the price you need to continue paying.

So in my example, I called Comcast and said, hey, my prices have gone up a lot over the years, and I’m considering looking for other options or canceling.

And so if you go right through to their cancellation line, you usually get someone on the phone, much quicker, and I just said, hey, these expenses have gotten really high, what’s the latest that you guys can offer me?

And I got a really sweet lady on the phone, we chatted for an hour and a half, and yeah, it was a very, very helpful call.

Okay, so major maintenance items, blocked calendar days for housekeeping, annual or monthly subscriptions, and the next one’s probably not going to be relevant for all of you.

But for any of you out there that are building a portfolio, you have multiple properties, and you’ve been hiring other people to help you, well, you might want to reconsider how helpful they’ve been.

And so I know this isn’t a super easy subject.

I talked about it last week, actually, and how to know if people that we’ve hired are actually working for someone else at the same time, virtually.

We’ve grown a lot recently.

And I got to say, I’ve been a little guilty of sort of just, I guess, throwing people at the problems, throwing people into the mix to get them to help.

But the reality is, we actually haven’t been operating as efficiently as we could have been, and we didn’t really know that until we let go of a couple people that were really not being productive.

So I’m not saying to go out to whoever you’re working with and tell them to do three times more work or to let them go or do anything drastic like that.

I’m simply saying you might want to reconsider how much work they’re doing.

If there is some other alternative, we do have a lot of AI tools that have come up.

So if you have someone helping with your social media, if you have someone helping with just some basic data entry, well, there’s some cool tools for that now like Zapier.

There’s another one called make.com, which can link a bunch of programs together.

If you’ve got someone on your team that’s just doing general research, well, we have some really great tools for that, right?

Chat GPT or we have Jim and I from Google.

A lot of really good tools out there.

If you have someone helping you with your marketing, we discovered a cool tool called Gamma recently.

G-A-M-M-A dot A-I, I believe.

Again, I’m not sponsored by any of these companies, but there are a lot of tools out there.

And so I just would challenge you to kind of revisit your business.

We are running a business to look at your maintenance costs, to look at your reoccurring subscriptions, to look at your blocked calendar days, to look at the people that are helping you on your team if you have a little larger operation.

And then the last place that we really want to be diligent is when we’re working with contractors, right?

When we’re getting bids to help us with these big maintenance items, or to help us do a renovation.

I highly suggest getting three bids.

I actually did a whole episode on working with contractors.

That was way back, episode number 42, but still very relevant.

And the reality is that we can get estimates that wildly, wildly vary.

They can have a massive difference.

I was in Sacramento recently where I’m originally from, and I met up with my brother.

He’s got a cool house up in the hills, and he was getting a quote for his sliding patio door, which is just a simple sliding patio door.

$20,000.

I couldn’t believe it.

The quote for his kitchen.

Yes, I realize kitchen remodels are often much more expensive.

$120,000 for his kitchen remodel.

So obviously, there’s some wiggle room in there, but you’re not really going to know unless you get a few other estimates.

And one of the things that’s great about getting other estimates is that you’re also getting other opinions at the same time, and so there may be a piece of information that you didn’t think about that could be really helpful and could sort of change the whole outlook of what you’re trying to do.

A couple last places that you might want to revisit are your insurance.

We know insurance has pretty much gone up across the nation.

I know I got a liability quote for a building that I operate recently that had gone up like $10,000 in the year.

I mean, and it went from a relatively small amount like $4,000 up to like $14,000 in one year.

And so of course, we got out there, we did a little research, and we found another quote for pretty much the same price to what we were paying before.

And so I’d encourage you to make sure that you’re revisiting your insurance.

You’re getting multiple bids if you have some sort of large maintenance item or renovation planned.

You revisit those subscriptions, the annual subscriptions.

You look at your team’s efficiency if you’re working on a team.

And lastly, always a good time to have a rainy day fund, right?

Check out your insurance to see if it covers some of those larger maintenance items, to see if it covers your loss of business income.

So until next time, I hope that you’re able to make a quick call and save a few bucks, revisit some of the things that you’re paying a lot of money for, and really, really be careful with your calendar in all the days that you’re blocking.

I hope you have a fabulous week, and I hope to see you back here soon.