Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. Normally on this show, we talk about things that you should be doing to help your short-term rental, to build your property management portfolio, to create better guest experiences, all these things that you should be doing.

But I have the luxury of talking to property managers like you and owners, investors almost every day across the nation. And there’s a lot of things that you should not be doing, and so today I wanna break down eight things that I find a lot of you are doing, which isn’t just holding you back, but it’s also leading a lot of times to a worse guest experience.

So let’s go ahead and jump into it. The first thing that I find a lot of growing property managers, anywhere from a couple units to several dozen are not doing is that they’re not properly screening their guests. If you are taking reservations on booking.com or direct bookings, well then you’ve gotta be careful.

You want to make sure that you’re matching the IDs. To the credit card payments, you wanna make sure that you have really good house rules in place.

If you missed one of our recent episodes on House Rules, it’s episode three 15. You can go back and check that out. We break down in detail all of our recommended house rules, but we’ll also leave a link in the show notes here so you can just download our copy and adjust it however you need to.

So doing some proper screening before your guest checking your property. It’s going to save you in the long run, and I know a lot of you might be thinking, well, I have really great properties and I get really great guests all the time, but believe me, after managing O over 60,000 guests with my team.

One day some guest is gonna check on your property that you could have identified beforehand, and they’re going to cause a lot of headaches. They might even cause some damage and maybe even worse than that, they might create a terrible time for you as a host or an owner.

And then leave you a really bad review. And we know how difficult bad reviews have gotten to get removed from the platforms. And some platforms, it’s not even possible. So by being diligent upfront, you can save yourself a lot of headache, but also protect your properties more.

The second thing that you need to stop doing is stop prioritizing one channel. Over the others. A lot of you are only on Airbnb or you’re only on VRBO.

And while your calendar may be staying full, it’s maybe not optimized in terms of your average daily rates. We know for a fact that the more visibility a property has, the more opportunity for someone to book your property. In other words, the more demand for your property and the higher you should be able to charge for that property.

There’s also a bit of risk when it comes to prioritizing one channel over the other. Most commonly, that’s Airbnb for most of you, and it’s Airbnb for most of you, because that’s the easiest channel to go on. But you gotta think if that’s the easiest channel to go on, at least in the United States, then there’s probably more people on it, unlike channels like booking.com, which yes, it takes a little more work to get set up.

And yes, there’s some other policies and things that you really need to be aware of. But it’s a whole bunch more opportunity to get your property booked at higher rates. So just because a channel is easier to go on doesn’t mean that it’s better. And lastly, I’ll just say this allows you to keep your portfolio diversified. If you go way back to one of the episodes I did a long time ago, I actually had one of my Airbnb accounts.

Taken down. This was for a discrimination issue. We had a housekeeper that denied a pet, which happened to be a service animal, and Airbnb just disconnected our calendar. Now, we’ve since resolved that. That’s a long time ago, and we’re fully aware of that, But we see all the time listings getting taken down. Maybe it’s just temporarily, and a lot of times it’s not necessarily for a valid reason. So if your property gets taken down and you’re only on one channel, you could have a big hole in your calendar.

Okay. The third thing that you should stop doing is stop buying cheap furniture where you need quality furniture. Where do you need quality furniture? Well, you definitely need a quality bed frame because there’s gonna be a lot of people staying on there. They might be doing some things that, uh, shake the bed up a little bit, you could say.

And if you’re working with a cheap bed frame, it’s gonna loosen up, it’s going to start to squeak, it’s going to rock back and forth, and your guests are not going to like that.

So make sure that you’re not skimping out and buying cheap furniture where it really matters. This also includes your sofa, and you want a sofa that you can clean easily where you don’t need to be spending an arm and a leg might be on items like art, for example. Someone’s not going to appreciate that Picasso art piece or the replica or whatever it happens to be, maybe as much as you will.

And if you’re spining, an arm and a leg on it. You’re not really getting more bookings from that.

Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t have a great design in your property that really helps it stand out, but this point number three, has to do with furniture. And if you’re setting higher expectations online with great photos and someone shows up to your property and what seemed like a luxurious property, just feels sort of shaky and not well put together.

Well, it’s gonna show up in your reviews.

The fourth thing that you want to stop doing, especially as a growing property manager, is just signing up for all the latest and greatest technology tools. Now I know I’m a bit guilty with this one. If you’ve tuned into the show for quite a while. Well, you know, I’ve tried out a lot of tools.

But we have a lot of properties to try out our tools with and I also know a lot of people in the industry that are personally using these tools. And so we get the insights, we get the things that maybe aren’t so great with some of these tools upfront, and that really helps us make the best decisions when it comes to using the right tools.

So I’d highly recommend if you, if you don’t know a lot of people in the industry, jump on some forums. Go to our website, st riches.com. You can check out all of our past episodes. We also have a whole bunch of guidebooks around these topics, so just make sure you do your due diligence. Before you sign up for a tool that’s helping run a big part of your business, but maybe isn’t helping it run in the most optimal way

You wanna be careful with all the new AI tools coming on board. There are lots of them out there. Believe me, there’s gonna be a lot more coming because people can basically create them. Literally in like a couple days now. So you want to do your due diligence, make sure you’re not expecting some, some AI tool out there to do it all.

You’ve gotta make sure it’s tested first before you pull the trigger. 

All right, number five, and I know that this one is going to get a lot of pushback, so if you disagree with what I’m about to say, please share your opinion down in the comments. I’d love to hear why you think I’m wrong. Here it goes,

Number five, when it comes to revenue management, do not create a revenue management goal. I know most revenue managers out there are still doing this. I just got back from a conference and the panel on revenue management. They all say set a goal, but what does the goal actually have to do with reality with the market?

You know, markets change all of the time and the market. Should be telling us how much our property can earn if you’re setting a goal based on last year’s numbers. Well, we’re not in last year anymore. We’re here today in 2026. If you’re listening to this podcast at the time of this recording and things have changed,

So one of the downsides to setting goals is that you think you might be able to achieve a certain occupancy or a certain A DR, and by putting those a DR rates or your average daily rate in place to achieve that occupancy, you might not get booked when you need to get booked. And most of the time, if we get booked further out in the future, we usually get a little more money for our reservations.

And so this can really just flip the whole thing upside down. So that is my opinion. Again, if you totally disagree, I want to know why. I want some real facts, some real proof, maybe some real tests that you’ve done on your end To prove me wrong, I would love to hear it.

All right. Number six, and I know this is a tough one, especially for you growing property managers, but you need to stop over promising your services to new property owners I am, of course, not saying that you can’t do a good job, but a lot of times we see people promising things that maybe they just haven’t developed yet or they haven’t really figured out, or maybe they don’t have the team to handle. And so make sure when you’re bringing on new owners as a property manager, that you set lower expectations.

You can always go up from there, right.

All right, number seven. This is a big one, and I know this one’s hard to do, especially for a lot of you owners that have been building your own portfolio and that you actually own all these properties is stop trying to do everything yourself. I know this is easier said than done. I was doing everything myself when I first got started with my portfolio, but the reality is there’s too many roles and the more properties you add, the less likely that you can get away doing this, and the less likely it is that your properties are truly optimized 

If you’re trying to do it all yourself, well, at some point things are going to start breaking and it’s very likely things aren’t optimized right now, and at some point you are probably going to see your reviews decline a little bit. According to a recent Disney stat, I just spent quite a bit of time in Orlando where they have Disney World, 80% of negative guest experiences happen because the processes are not set up.

So keep that in mind, and when you come across some sort of issue or some sort of challenge, document it in the best way, you know possible. So that next time you don’t have to recreate that process. 

 and here we go onto the eight point, and maybe this is the most important one, and that is to stop being complacent. In the short term rental industry, guest expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. There’s more supply than there’s ever been, and there’s more information out there than there has ever been, and it’s really important that you’re tuning in to the right information.

I hope this gave you a little bit more insight.

These were just eight friendly reminders to help you continue to grow your property management business the best way possible. Thanks for tuning in again. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.