The name of the game with our short-term rentals is having the most exposure, getting the most reservations at the highest dollar amount. We can do that by being on multiple listing sites and not just Airbnb or VRBO, but potentially being on sites that allow us to rent for longer periods of time. This week, we’re diving into Furnish Finder. I know a lot of you’ve heard about it. I want to go a little more in depth, just give you, my insights. And for those of you that are brand new to it, why you might want to incorporate Furnish Finder as yet another listing site where your property can be found. 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.

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast. Here we are again. One more week. There’s always something to talk about, isn’t there? Thank you for tuning in once again. If you’re new to the show, you can find all of our past episodes at strriches.com. We also have our recommended resources on there, which are all the programs I use calls with my CPA, all types of different resources for free for you at strriches.com. So, we’re talking about Furnish Finder today.

What is Furnish Finder? Well, it was initially set up to help traveling nurses find more accommodations. They typically stay for three months, but they often extend their reservations. They happen to be exceptional guests most of the time because they’re working a lot. A lot of times they’re traveling by themselves. Companies they work for are paying all the rent. And so, they can be really good guests. A lot of you have already figured this out. Obviously, Furnish Finder has grown a ton over the last years. They also accept even shorter reservations now. Yes, they do target longer term stays, but they’re also offering shorter ones, too. But their platform is a little different. And unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate with a lot of the tools that us in the short- term rental industry are used to using. So, I want to talk about how you might be able to incorporate it a little bit easier without creating a whole bunch of headaches for yourself. First of all, we’re not going to be plugging our dynamic pricing tool into Furnish Finder, right? So, if you’ve heard me talk about price labs or wheelhouse or beyond pricing, these are all pricing tools that dynamically change our short-term rental prices every day. We’re not going to be doing that with Furnish Finder. We’re going to have more fixed prices. Right. These are monthly prices. So, we’re basically in between what might be a long-term lease and a short term one. And a lot of times the guests or potential guests’ inquiries, they’re going to ask to negotiate on these little bits. So, you should be prepared to have a real quick answer for them and know what’s kind of your bottom line. Of course, you don’t want to give that away right off the bat. You want to ask them maybe what they’re looking for. And you can sort of negotiate from there. The message inquiry, it’s not going to be like instant book like Airbnb. They’re not just going to book it instantly. They’re actually going to send you an inquiry. And the way the Furnish Finder works is a lot of times they’re sending inquiries out to a lot of potential properties. So, the faster you get back to this potential guest or tenant, in this case, the better your odds of securing them for that medium term stay.

Now, while our pricing tools aren’t going to integrate and the message system’s not going to integrate with some of the property management software we’re using or really any of it, there are some ways around this, some things we can do to make our lives a little easier. The first one is we will be able to integrate our calendar. So, we’re going to use what they call an ICAL link. We’re going to take this from Furnish Finder’s website. After we have our listing up, we’re going to paste it in Airbnb. Or if you’re using a property management software, we paste it in our calendar in that software. And then that way, when we have a reservation on this listing site like Furnish Finder, it’s going to block it on this one. Right. We want to avoid those double bookings. So that sounds a little confusing. Just Google ICAL link or check it out on Furnish Finder if you’re considering adding their listing site to your portfolio. The other thing is that we’re going to get messages from them that aren’t going to come through our other software channels. Right. So, I suggest having a centralized email. What we do, reservations at midtownstays.com. Every single one of our email inquiries goes into that email inbox and then our whole team can see that we can forward it to who we need to. And all that kind of happens automatically. Actually, you might want to consider using a tool like Zapier or just your email settings where you can create filters and make sure that you’re not overlooking some of these important inquiries that come through. That’s one suggestion. Have a centralized email where this can all go to.

Now, I also really suggest having a centralized phone number. And this is like really the first step to letting go of your business, to delegating some of the tasks or at least having the option to where your phone’s not getting blown up all the time. You could forward the calls, for example, to someone else helping you after hours without having to change the phone number. So, I suggest having a phone system like Grasshopper. We use phone.com, having a centralized email so that these messages come in, they can go into your same message system. Now, the reality is when we have a medium-term stay, most of the time it’s over 30 days. This is no longer a short-term rental, right? We’re stepping out of the short-term rental world and we’re in the long-term rental which means our guests or in this case, tenants have tenant rights. We need to make sure we get a lease. Definitely make sure you get a lease signed. Fortunately, there’s a lot of tools out there where you can get them digitally signed. Make sure that your lease is specific to your state. As we know, each state is different. Before we have a tenant, one of our properties, we want to make sure that they’re a good tenant. Right. And so, we have to do a background check. This is really important. We are using key check, which is actually just built right into furnished finder. You have the option of having your potential tenant pay for the background check on their end or you as a landlord can pay for it on your end. We’ve opted to just have our guests or our tenants pay for it and that’s going to do things like check their criminal background, history, check their credit score to make sure that they’re a good tenant.

So that’s a very important step for any long-term rental. I’m excited to say that we just announced the dates for our next virtual event. It’s going to be October 14th. We’re talking about margin mastery, how we can make more money with our properties that we currently own. And there’s a lot of ways to do that. My team and I have been doing that, perfecting that with our properties and other people’s properties. As you know, we’ve managed tens of thousands of guests. We’re always looking at the latest and greatest tools and we’re using them as well. So, if you’re interested in that, head over to restmethods.com. You’ll see it right under events there. We’d love to see you there. It’s going to be jam packed. It comes with tons of our checklists and things like that that we use and we’re going to go deep into pricing. We’re going to go deep into maintenance. We’re going to talk about VAs and how to hire them and best practices and give you the scripts and just going to be jam packed. So, I hope you can make it and I love to hear the questions there live as well.

The next step is we want to have a deposit, but we want a deposit that’s larger than what we might have on VRBO or booking.com for any of you that have deposits on those websites. We want to have one that’s actually substantial. Remember, we have someone staying in our property for multiple months. We want to make sure that we have something to hold them to in case they’re not taking care of our properties. Now if you’re allowing pets, you might want to increase that deposit just a little bit more. We know that pets can do quite a bit of damage, but not all of them. I do like pets, even though I don’t have any yet. Hopefully one day soon I’ll have one. I just got to figure out, I just travel too much still, you know, but there’s got to be a way. I don’t know if that just means getting a small little tiny dog or just traveling less, but one way or another, that’s going to happen sometime in the near future. We got to have a good deposit. We’ve got to do a background check and we got to have our lease signed, which can be facilitated with an online signing service. And then of course, all the other operations we use for our short-term rentals should be the same. We’re going to want to have our digital locks. We can provide that code and we can still do all this virtually, right?

When it comes to taking payments from your tenant, Key check can also facilitate this, which is built into Furnish Finder. But for those of you that already have your direct booking website set up to a credit card merchant processor like Stripe, well, you could just send your tenant right through there. I’m sure they will enjoy paying with a credit card. A lot of them will, and that’s going to make it easier. And then that just goes right into your same system. If you want to take an HCH transaction, there’s a lot of options out there. Again, Key check is the one that’s built right into Furnish Finder. You can also look at other tools like Apartments.com, for example, that has a rent payment tool. And there’s a whole bunch of them if you just Google apartment rent payments, ACH, something like that. A couple more tips here when dealing with medium term stays. And remember, this might be a strategy that you want to use part of the year. If you have a slow season where it’s cold there, but you still have people that want to visit, you might consider changing your pricing and your minimum night policies to entice more people to book longer and use this strategy and sort of some of those slow seasons.

One of the things I found interesting with Furnish Finder is that their average reservation is actually booked only three weeks in advance. So, this is something we’re seeing nationwide. The booking window, as it’s called in the industry, is shrinking the amount of time between someone making the reservation and showing up to the door to check into their sweet little Airbnb or short-term rental or whatever it happens to be. That window is shrinking across the board, across the nation with all property types. I’m sure you’ve seen it with yours. Now if we have some really good marketing in place, we can still get those long-term, far-out bookings a lot of times with families coming back annually. But just in general, that booking window is shrinking. Found it very interesting that for a site that’s catered to medium term stays is only three weeks. That’s that’s really short, in my opinion. So, make sure you schedule more time for cleaning and maintenance after the guest has stayed at your property. If someone’s been there for three months, it’s probably going to require a little bit more work than someone that’s been there for two, three, four nights, right? So, we like to block at least one night. We also have in our lease to allow for additional cleaning mid stay. That allows us to kind of keep an eye on the property when it comes to the listing setup. I suggest just copying most of your information that you already have in Airbnb. They do have slightly different policies like the deposit. So, make sure you double check those. But put your house rules in there, edit them so it fits a longer-term stay. But copy all the other stuff. Copy your photos. Make sure it’s a good-looking listing. You might find that the prices that you’re getting are going to be a little lower than what you might get on Airbnb, for example. But remember, with Furnish Finder, they’re booking directly with you. So, you don’t have a 18 percent charge between you and the guests that Airbnb is charging. A lot of times they’re charging the guests like 14 percent. They’re charging us hosts three to four or vice versa. So, we don’t have that the way Furnish Finder works. You pay per property per year. They do have some larger pricing options for those of you that have multifamily properties with multiple properties in the same building. So, check that out the time this recording. It’s really reasonable. It’s far less than what it would be for a month long stay with an Airbnb reservation, for example. So that’s about it for Furnish Finder. Head over to Furnish Finder dot com. I’m not supported or sponsored or anything by them. I just want to get the best info out to you guys. So, to wrap things up, if you’re looking for a little bit more exposure, check out Furnish Finder. If you’re new to medium term reservations, anything a month or longer, I highly suggest that you check them out. This, in my opinion, is the future. People are signing shorter leases and they’re traveling more. They’re living in short term rentals and there’s a lot of opportunity here. So, check it out until next time. I hope you have a fabulous week. I hope your properties are staying booked and thanks for tuning in.

Whether you’re just getting started with short term rentals or you’ve been in the game for a while, one thing remains the same. Your management can make or break your performance. Our team has learned a lot managing thousands of guests and we’ve put together a handbook just for you with our checklist to cover our exact process. There’s a lot to consider from verifying guests to managing reviews and you don’t want to miss a step. You can get your free copy by going to restmethods.com. There’s no charge. It’s my gift to you for being one of our loyal subscribers. And I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.

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