In the short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate with a specific focus on short term rentals quick actionable items to wire. Scale your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard. Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast probably the biggest hesitation I’d say from people are the biggest question I get. Is around having bad gas and the fear of having someone destroy your property or stealing everything but the reality is this like never happens I mean it can be eliminated it can be preemptively screened so that it basically never happens so with the huge returns we can make a short term rentals I don’t want this to be freaking you out today we’re gonna talk about 5 different ways we can screen our gas before they even book our property to eliminate some of what I call red flag reservations so there’s some reservations that you need to be a little more weary of they’re not all created equal some you can tell right off the bat going to be a little more risky I’m gonna break down 5 of those situations the first one so essentially if it’s a last minute booking if someone books a few hours before your property well then you have less time to communicate with them you have less time to sort of check the reviews and quite a few different things and so it’s more likely that you could get a bad or potential bad gas if they’re booking last minute so one easy way you can prevent that is just by shortening your booking window so if you don’t allow same day bookings for example and they’re all at least one day out or further well then you have a little more time to review communicate with the gas find out why they want to stage a rental just ask a few questions so one of the other things that goes along with last minute bookings is that if you’re using a pricing tool which I highly suggest that use price labs a lot of times our last minute bookings are at a discounted rate right we’re trying to fill our calendar we’re trying to get our occupancy up and so if your rate is lower and it’s a last minute booking that could be a bad combination but only really if your rate is too low to the point where maybe some. And we’ll book your property and they don’t care about the money it’s costing them so just to give an example let’s say you have a home that runs for $200 a night and it’s got 4 bedrooms well managing for people maybe wanting to have a party last minute potentially Friday night your properties available and they say all we can book this place in 2:00 hours we can be there it’s only $50 for each of us if you think about it that way that’s not very much money and it might be it money that people just don’t really care about their willing to lose so consider that the last minute bookings longtime have our lowest prices we need to make sure that our lowest prices the level that we’re comfortable with and it doesn’t attract maybe a bad gas. Hey just want to ask you guys real quick favor if you haven’t already left this review if you wouldn’t mind heading over to iTunes or Spotify wherever you’re listening to the podcast and just leave us a quick review we really really appreciate it and if you know someone that you think would find value in any of the episodes that you’ve listened to you could just take a screen shot send it over to that’ll help them but it’s also going to help us grow a little bit too and lastly we’re on YouTube so if you prefer you to you can head over to short term rental riches and you can find us there as well thanks for listening and thanks for all your great. Let’s jump back in. So the second one was talked a lot about this in the past and that’s accepting locals the red flag but not always not always I don’t want to say that these reasons were talking about. Are always going to be red flags but if someone’s local and they’re booking your property you just simply want to find out why why are they booking a profit in the same town where they live it’s a good question to ask because sometimes those can be potential parties and R. as we used to never allow local reservations we do now after code because during covert a lot of people just weren’t traveling from far away and now I’m happy that we’ve discovered ways to to better gas a little bit better because we do have lots of local reservations and a lot of them are really good so easy way is just to ask them why they’re coming into town we do have some house rules go back and check that episode out if you haven’t already that’s another good way to make sure that you’re covering your bases and you have a good contract with your guest you can actually download it my 12 house rules that I think can protect you in almost every situation we’ll leave a link in the show notes for you here so number one last minute bookings also with a low cost per night one make sure that cost isn’t too low second as locals the third one is no communication and especially if these things are being combined out say it’s last minute booking that’s local and you’re not getting a response or communication problem that’s definitely a red flag so the more of these 5 items you have the more concerned you might want to be but communications an easy one and we’re in the hospitality business we like to communicate with our guests right it’s good to know why they’re coming to town for example and if they don’t respond to you at all and then maybe try calling their phone number and you can’t get through to him well that’s a red flag it’s actually one of Airbnb is rules to they have to have a valid phone number their phone number does not work you call it goes you know big damp hair goes to hide a dead number of Google voice number something like that well that might be risky and you wanna let Airbnb now. Number 4 a fourth reason that reservation might potentially be risky that is if you have someone booking your property let’s say one person books your 6 bedroom home. It doesn’t really add up right one person doesn’t need a 6 bedroom home so you’ll simply want to ask them yeah I notice you only have one guess on your reservation can you please provide us the rest of the guest names they don’t respond to you again then that’s going to get a little more risky again if this is a last minute booking that’s Camille more risky and if your cost is lower so the more these things are combined the more risky it’ll be but normally one person doesn’t book a 6 bedroom home right something’s not adding up there so double check that make sure you check your reservations when they’re coming through and this last one is if someone’s already stayed with you and and you you notify Airbnb there weren’t a great gas and they try to book with you again well hopefully you’ve already warned Airbnb and you can put him on your your blacklist but you want to check prior reviews with gas to self if a potential gas doesn’t have any reviews it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s it’s a red flag because lots of people are discovering Airbnb still right and we don’t want to eliminate all those bad gas but we do want to check the reviews if they happen and if they’ve got one that’s a little iffy you can simply let Airbnb now that you don’t feel really comfortable with this reservation let him know why and they can help you cancel without a penalty so check these 5 things carefully when you get reservations the best way to handle this is just through communication and again this is just one step added eliminating potentially bad gas so we’ve got our house rules check those out you can grab or link in the show notes. So there’s a whole bunch of other things that we can do to protect our properties right this is just one step this is a preemptive step we’ve got our house rules and and not shell a few other ideas we’ve got security cameras we’ve got noise monitoring devices we’ve got additional check in or sign up forms there’s lots of things that we can do we talk about those another podcast but in this episode I just want to give you guys 5 potential red flags from reservations when you get a new reservation just to check it out and make sure nothing’s little fish in there now this is by no means a comprehensive list but these are some of the more common things to look out for so don’t be discouraged by bad gas I swear it is very minimal especially if you’re taking all these steps so jump benefit harmony short term rentals yet if you do make sure you are ready guess. And until next time I hope you have a wonderful day. There’s so much money to be made the short term rentals but it all starts by having the right property if you guys haven’t yet seen my free ebook on our website rest methods.com head over there and get a copy it’s going to break down what I look for in a property and some great short cuts so that you don’t have to spend hours and hours researching at over rest methods.com and you can grab your free copy there if you want a crash course in everything I’ve really learned to short term rentals in over 5 years managing over 15000 Gasol recorded on our last live event and I’m happy to say we broke it down really nicely into a bunch of different modules that you can watch at your own pace it takes you from start to finish finding a property we talk about analyzing the property but then also some of the more important pieces how to find your team and how to set up everything so that you can run your operation is passively as possible and free up your time you can find that it rests methods.com forward slash virtual.

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 108: Red Flag Reservations (Bad Guests)
• Episode 98: 8 Issues You Cannot Avoid Forever
• Episode 53: 5 Steps to Combat Smoking in Your Unit
• Episode 30: 3rd Party Bookings is Good or Bad‪?
• Episode 24: Essential House Rules For Your STR