Welcome to short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale in your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast we all want our listing to be number one online right but if that was a secret that Airbnb or any of the listing sites were willing to tell us then all of our listings would be there so they don’t tell us this right so I want to give you 5 things this week that’ll help boost your listing online now I don’t know where babies little secret for their perfect search algorithm but I do know the things that they want the things that they’re asking for and let’s just get right into it and we want to break this down right there’s not someone on the other side of the of Airbnb looking out our listing I mean there’s millions of listens there’s not someone saying okay this person didn’t put this photo and they didn’t do this no we’re talking were were adding information the machine is looking at right and the machine uses these algorithms to determine where our property should be ranked and for any of those you don’t know if you’re new to this basically we’re talking about a few open Airbnb and you plug in a city the first properties that pop up that’s where we want to be want to be at the top of Airbnb is list and so these things were gonna talk about are going to help us do that the first one might seem obvious but I see so many people not doing it and it’s just filling out all the sections on your listing so Airbnb has a lot of different sections on the listing a lot of times I see people just put in a quick listing description they leave out the neighborhood they leave out the section that says other things to note another section that says guest access there are quite a few different sections and we just wanna make sure that we’re filling all those out. Now if you think about it if there’s 2 listings that are exactly the same everything’s the same the reviews of the same the property is the same the photos of the same and this machine on the back end is looking at these 2 listings 1 of them 1 of the 2 listings doesn’t have 1 of these fields filled out in other words the machine’s gonna think this property is less complete then this property and who do you think are friendly machine that Airbnb is going to give priority to it’s the 1 that’s more complete right so that’s the first step just make sure that you’re filling out all of the sections on Airbnb or VR BO whatever listing site your using now 1 of the sections is our listing title that is a very important 1 but I already did a whole episode on that that’s absurd 118 so if you haven’t caught that 1 go back and check it out got some real quick tips for you to make sure that you have a good title on your listing so next thing and this is sort of in line with filling out all the sections but this is my second tip and 1 of those sections in my opinion and it to me it seems very obvious is much more important than the other sections and that’s the safety section again if we have this machine a robot looking at 2 properties and 1 of these properties has all the safety items checked these are things like having a first aid kit having a fire extinguisher smoke detector is 1 of them as well but having a fire extinguisher we like put ours in our kitchens carbon monoxide detector and smoke detector so having those 4 items check on your list scene is going to help Airbnb is machines there are of them know that your property is safe and safety is huge right so make sure that you have all the safety features Phil then there’s all. Also spots leave a note under one you might not need a carbon monoxide detector for example if you don’t have gas in your property but you can leave a note that says why you don’t need that carbon monoxide detectors to make sure film about number 3 and this is one that I heard recently I hadn’t really thought about but we all know that our photos are super super important online right I recommend having a professional take professional photos as we talked about photos quite a bit actually have a couple other episodes on photos one is episode 17 which are must have photos again that I don’t see a lot of people’s listings and they’re easy to add to check that one out then up so 91 or things that you shouldn’t do with their photos so photos are really important but this is a different tip for you this week this is having higher quality photos on your listing now it seems very obvious but we can have a high quality photo that is in the large size for example when our professional photographer and one of the cities that are properties and takes our photos he said that to me in 2 versions he sends me a web version which is the same high quality photo but with way less a smaller file size and then he sends me the original file size which often is like 3 times bigger so by uploading a larger file size with your photo can be the same photo but it’s gonna be higher quality if it’s a bigger file size that again if you think about it Airbnb is algorithms are machines are gonna be looking at this thing can. Okay here’s a set of photos that are one megabytes for example that we used to take with our old smartphones you know they’re very low file size now the new smartphones takes a really big ones but if you upload that smaller size photo versus one that say 10 megabytes their machine is very likely going to think this is just a better photo right so make sure you’re using a higher quality images check out those other jobs says if you haven’t pictures are really really important another thing real quick tip before we get to item number 4 to boost your search ranking is make sure you’re putting descriptions in your photos that is another section on the listing site right on the listing set up if you have a bunch of photos and one as description but the other one doesn’t then it’s gonna be less complete and if it’s less complete the algorithms aren’t going to like it as much those listing descriptions are also good spot to share more information with our gas remember gas oftentimes are reading all of our listings but they’re very often looking at all the photos and it’s very easy to see quick descriptions in the photos make sure you’re doing that so one other quick tap on photos is make sure your thumbnail is the best we all know that the first photo that everyone sees the bass but you also have now the way that the listing sites are designed Airbnb M. B. R. BO you see the main photo we also see a couple other photos right next to it title photos so make sure that those are representative of your whole listing you don’t want to have for pictures of your kitchen for example if you have amazing other places in your property because that first section is likely going to be where what your guests are going to use it to determine if they want to spend more time on your listing or not. Hey I hope you’re finding a ton of value in these bite sized actionable podcast episodes if you want to go deeper though much deeper than we can in the few minutes we have each week we can check out my S. T. R. playbook and rest methods.com clearly my guide of my playbook for what I’ve done to acquire multi $0 portfolio of dozens of short terminals and how I currently operate them it’s my best practice guide I know you’ll find a lot of value in it if you want to go deeper thanks for tuning in again and let’s get right back into this week’s episode. Okay so on to item number for that I think I know’s going to help boost your search ranking on Airbnb and why do I know that this one is going to help and that’s because they’re being B. tells us right and that’s monitoring our listing one of the pieces of monitoring our listing is responding to gas so I’m gonna talk about the inner superhero status superheroes is a big piece as well but just monitoring your listing Airbnb changes things all the time bad features you now you can talk about the type of appliances you have been given very detailed so they add these features all the time or amenities and if you’re not updating them then they’re probably going to think that you’re not. As concerned with your property as maybe should be and when I say they again I’m talking about the machines right they want to see that you are taking advantage of what they are providing on the listing sites again they just wanted to be as complete as possible so a lot of these amenities options that come up on Airbnb don’t ask you for an additional bit of information you don’t want to just leave it on there it’s you can either fill it out yes or no or if it’s something you’re going to be writing but you just want to make sure that you’ve taken care of that question your new option that they have available so Airbnb just. They tell us that if we’re doing certain things if we’re updating our price scene another big one and that’s another piece of monitoring I recommend using price labs are pricing tool that’s going to do that for us automatically but the more you update your pricing that is going to help as well depending on our policies and our descriptions and all these things are all affecting us in Airbnb tells us that right it is a little more difficult to know if by changing these things it’s actually helping our listing we’re gonna talk about that in the very near future conversion rates and and how we can know with a little more certainty if these changes are actually affecting us so that is to come in another episode but for now just remember the more you monitor your listing in and update prices update photos update anything that Airbnb is asking of you the better you’re going to rank on their search algorithm so let’s get to the fifth one and this is a little more obvious this is their super host status if you have superhero status or VR vios version of this is called premier host either of these designations are are going to help your search ranking at something they clearly tell us right how much it actually helps us warm but that one ‘s a little harder to figure out but it definitely will help and that there’s even a search option where when potential gas are going in they can click super hosts so only listings show up that are super house versus ones that don’t have an I know I’ve used that feature myself especially traveling a lot in South America and in Asia and and quite a few places where maybe their Airbnb game missing quite as good as your bin and the U. S. so I’ve used that myself and by checking that’s you bro status button it’s going to eliminate everyone that’s not a super status so we want to achieve that but it can be a little difficult at 5. Usually the more properties we add the more more difficult it gets so they have 4 metrics that they use for that one is response time how quickly are we getting back to our gas and they want to see an average response time or a response 90 percent or more of our messages responded to within 2004 hours so that is one of the metrics reviews we know that reviews are super important they want to see an average review score 4.8 or more out of 5 so that one. His super important as well I would say if we took away all the metrics reviews are probably gonna be the most important rhyme cancellations they don’t want you canceling your gas reservations that’s inconvenient for the gas and while they do have are signed as hosts on a lot of things they have our guest side too as they should and so they don’t want to see a lot of cancellations less than one percent in fact and I think that has a topic number 2 it was like 3 or 5 it’s not very much so there are ways to have your reservations canceled if if you have a gas that you don’t feel comfortable or safe hosting to make sure you contact Airbnb and they can help you get that canceled without being penalized the last one is the amount of stays in this is again like they want to know that you’re active in the tree using Airbnb and you’re staying up to date with things so the more you do that the more reservations you should have rights so they want to see that you’ve had at least 10 stays or 100 nights booked with 3 or more stays so make sure that you’re getting some reservations and hopefully our because we know that. Short term rentals can be so much more profitable than long term rentals right that’s why we have this podcast lab invests in short terminals for a long time and I will continue to if you listen to podcasts from a you know that I still also like long term rentals I just like real state in general but I’ve found short term rentals has been one of the best ways and one last thing some of these tips and some of these things just. Came up because we started a membership group which has been a lot of fun you can check it out resident investor clubhouse.com rest investor clubhouse.com the very entry level group but we meet once a month and one of our last topics brewery viewing listings were reviewed some of our members listings which was awesome and then we all learned a ton I learned a ton and some of these things we mentioned here are not happening on the majority of people’s listings so you can stay ahead of the curve if you make sure you do these 5 things and just to recap make sure you’re filling out all the sections you want your listing to be as complete as possible I wanna make sure that you’ve got all those safety features if you don’t want first aid kit or fire extinguisher make sure you get those monies higher quality images so larger file sizes that is make sure you’re putting in the descriptions and filling out all the photos sections as well we want to monitor our listings all the time make sure we’re adding the new amenities or answering all the questions that Airbnb asks of us and we really want to try to achieve that super host status and that is done by have an average review score 4.8 or more responding to over 90 percent of our gas messages within 2004 hours having a very low almost nonexistent cancellation rate and just a handful cancellations per year or less than one percent and then the last one using the Airbnb and getting reservations with them so they have a minimum review score there so hopefully you guys got some value out of this remember we’re talking to machines and the only way that they know that our property is better than the other is if it’s more complete and we’re doing what they ask so until next time I hope you’re doing really well out there. Thanks for 10 and then again and I’ll say 7 shares. I want to get on the fast track to financial freedom for short term rentals what all searching the properties you acquire you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties I want to give you my you doctor will show you how to do just that there is no charge to my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that’s R E S T methods.com.

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• • Episode 121: Is It Cold In Your City? (Impacts Of Weather On Your Investments)
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  • Episode 111: Add another listing (Airbnb Linked Listing)
  • Episode 93: Should You Use This Tool? (Booking.com)
  • Episode 25: How to Increase Your Listing Exposure