Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

I’m happier here again.

Here we are five years, over five years later, since we started the show every week, coming at you with some quick, actionable tips to help you with your short term rental, your vacation rental property, or yes, your boutique hotel.

We’ve been working a lot with boutique hotels lately, and it’s been really fun, it’s been exciting.

There’s a lot to learn, and so I’m excited to share a little more about that with you in the future.

But one thing that hasn’t changed over this journey is that all of our properties come with a bit of trash.

They all do, and we have to take it out.

Not necessarily you, but someone on your team, and it’s not always really easy to coordinate.

So this week, I want to give you four ways that you can make your trash operation, maybe just a little more seamless, make it a little easier for you and make sure that there’s no stinky trash laying around or in the cans when your guests show up.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

So yes, all of our properties have trash, don’t they?

And it all has to be disposed of.

How we do that?

Well, there’s several different options.

But one option that I would not recommend, let’s just get this right out of the way, is I wouldn’t ask your guests to do this, right?

We’re in the hospitality industry.

When you show up to a hotel, do they ask you to take out your trash?

No, they don’t.

And so while there are a lot of guests that would probably be happy to do this, and there are a lot of guests that are gonna do it even if you don’t ask them, there’s also a lot of guests that are paying you a cleaning fee, and they don’t want to lift a finger.

And so if you think about it, the time when someone might be taking out their trash is when they’re leaving your property.

And if this isn’t something that they actually wanted to do, and you had it in your house rules, and you asked them a couple of times via messages, however, you got the message across, well, then that’s gonna be one of the last things they remember when they’re leaving your property.

And now I’m not saying that they’re going to leave you a bad review, but if there was anything else that they didn’t really enjoy with your property, or maybe they just thought that your housekeeping fee was high, and then they got this message on the last day that asked them to do part of that job, well, they might not leave you as good a review as they would have otherwise.

Now, if you want to have some labels in your property that says this is recycle and this is trash, well, I think that’s quite all right.

I think most people these days are a little more environmentally conscious, and if they can easily throw their beer bottles in a recycle bin versus a trash bin, then that’s an easy ask.

And I know there’s a few of you out there that are probably thinking, there is just no other way to handle my trash.

The guests have to take it out.

Well, I’ve got a couple potential options for you.

Maybe one of those will help.

But before that, I just want you to ask yourself, or look into your competition, or if you’re in a neighborhood, if you’re in some place that’s not completely rural, then you undoubtedly have options.

And if your competitors or the other options out there that your guests may choose to rent aren’t asking their guests to take out the trash, then I would cross that one off.

Okay, so let’s just go ahead and get into the four options.

So the first one is probably the easiest and the most obvious, and that is to ask your housekeeper, or your housekeeping company that you work with to take the trash out for you.

Now, of course, this isn’t always lining up with the day that your trash is picked up.

And so if you’re operating a vacation rental or a single family home where in most situations, the trash gets left out one day and picked up the next, then you might have to ask your housekeeper to come back.

So we have housekeepers on our team that we pay extra to do this.

They live in the area, and that can be a really easy and great solution since you already work with them.

One thing you might consider if the trash days and your housekeeping checkouts just aren’t aligning really well, maybe you can get an extra trash can, or maybe you can get a couple extra trash cans so where it doesn’t actually have to be taken out every week.

Of course, this depends on the size of your property, right?

If it’s a large home and you’re accommodating 16 guests, well, it’s very likely those bins are going to fill up real quickly.

And nothing worse than showing up to a property, pulling in the garage or pulling next to it in the driveway and seeing an overflowing trash can.

It’s just not a great first impression.

So see if you can get an extra trash can to make things a little more flexible.

See if your housekeeper or the housekeeping company was open to coming back on certain days, and you can pay them extra for that.

If that doesn’t work, well, there is a company that’s popped up that can actually handle this service for you.

Now, they’re not in the whole US., and if you’re listening to this outside of the US., thank you for tuning in.

I can’t believe we have people tuning in from over 100 countries.

Kind of just blows my mind, but we’ve been at this for a while, and so hopefully you found the content helpful.

My team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests.

We’re ourselves operating and owning properties in multiple countries now, in nearly 20 cities, and so we got a lot of experience, and we’re also working with owners like you to help with all your backend operations.

We have an amazing team.

We can handle 24-7 reception.

We can handle your revenue management, your listing optimization.

We can help you make more money with less headache, and so if you’re interested in that, just head over to strriches.com.

You’ll see a little property management button there.

We can set up time to chat and see if it might make sense to partner up.

So this company that I referenced, you may have heard about, it’s called CanMonkey, and it’s really simple.

They charge a service fee.

They program in the day that your trash needs to be taken out.

They come and take your trash out, and then after the trash is picked up, they come and bring your trash cans back in.

Real simple, easy solution.

So check out CanMonkey.

Again, I’m not sponsored by them, but if they’re in your market, you might find that an easy, helpful solution.

Option number three, and now this one’s not gonna work for everyone, but the idea is that we wanna think about who’s helping us with our property on a regular basis, right?

And one of those people may be your landscaper.

And so if they’re coming at the same time each week, well, maybe they’d be totally okay taking out the trash can if it happens to fall on the same day that they’re doing their landscape service.

Now, of course, you can pay them a little extra.

Remember, we don’t want overflowing trash cans.

We don’t want our guests to see that.

And if it doesn’t work with our housekeepers, then we gotta find another option.

So check with your landscaper.

Another really good option would be to ask your neighbors.

So this is assuming that your neighbor is fully comfortable with you operating your short term rental.

Hopefully you have a good relationship with them and you’re not trying to hide anything.

These things are pretty obvious these days, right?

And so if you’re in a neighborhood and you live near someone, you might ask them, or better yet, you might see if they have a young son or daughter that’s open to taking those trash cans out for a little extra money.

If a neighbor came to me when I was younger and offered to pay me to take out their trash cans, I would have been all over that.

So there we go, just a real quick episode this week.

You basically have these four options and whoever else is servicing your property on a regular basis that might fall at the same time when your trash be taken out.

And so number one, the easiest is going to be your housekeeper.

Of course, you can pay them more to come back on another day if they’re open to that.

Number two would be to look at a service like CanMonkey that’s designed to do exactly this.

Number three, see if you’ve got a landscaper, someone that’s servicing the property regularly, that would be open to doing that as well.

Number four, check with your neighbor or multiple neighbors and see if any of them would be open to doing this or their kids or whoever it happens to be.

I’m sure there’s someone out there.

And what is the alternative, right?

The alternative is having trash cans that are overflowing and our guests are seeing them and it just doesn’t look great.

And it’s even more difficult for our housekeeping team, if they’re waiting for that day that lines up perfectly with a checkout to take out the trash and the trash can weighs 500 pounds because you guys have been packing it in for a few weeks, well, that’s not a really good solution either.

So I’m sure you can find a solution out there.

Hopefully some of these quick tips can help you with that.

Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Whether you’re just getting started or you have dozens of properties, one thing remains the same.

Poor management can crush your investment returns.

Our team has learned a lot managing over 40,000 guests.

And we’ve compiled our biggest takeaways into a handy guidebook to help you better manage your property.

Equipped with checklists for guest verification to pricing strategies, it breaks down our whole process from start to finish.

Best of all, it’s free for you for being one of our loyal subscribers.

You can get your copy by going to strriches.com.

That’s strriches.com, and I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.