Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. Every week we’re trying to give you all quick actionable tips and ideas to help you along your real estate journey but with a specific focus on short-term rentals. And this week I’m going to talk about one that’s been all over the news. You’ve seen it everywhere. You’ve seen it in social media. It is very impressive. We’re talking about artificial intelligence today and seven ways you can use it to help you with your short-term rental portfolio or to help you acquire your next short-term rental property. And we’re also going to give you my five-step structure for making sure you deliver the best prompts possible.

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 show. I’m glad you’re here again. Let’s go ahead and just jump into seven ways I think that you can use AI, artificial intelligence for your short-term rental or for that you’re hoping to acquire. Now don’t let the words artificial intelligence scare you off. I know it’s very techie but I promise you there are some really easy solutions out there and you’re going to love them once you dive into them.

So, the first thing is just AI is coming whether we like it or not. Airbnb has announced actually next May I’m going to read from this article here and this is from their CEO directly. He says in quotes, basically the short answer, this is a question about artificial intelligence, the short answer is next May you’re going to see a whole new Airbnb. AI is going to be the center of it. So, they have some really big changes coming in terms of their actual team structure. I know this firsthand because we’ve just recently hired several people that used to work for Airbnb and so we’ll see what happens in the future but it sounds like there’s going to be a lot more AI going on in regards to Airbnb. There’s another company that I was catching a recent webinar on from Skift. Check out Skift’s research if you haven’t already but there’s a company on their called Plum Guide and Plum Guide’s running a hundred-million-dollar company, a hundred million dollars in annual revenue and they just implemented AI across the board with their solutions. One of those solutions and one of the reasons they’re using it is in regards to listing descriptions and so they’re using AI for that. AI is not new to you; you’ve undoubtedly heard about it before. Let’s jump into the ways that I think it can be really helpful for your short-term rental and ways that I know that it is because we’re already using it.

The first one is market analysis. So, are you looking to invest in a new market but you don’t really know anything about it? Well, you can use an AI software solution like Chat GPT, that’s the one I’m going to refer to most for today’s episode. It’s one of the most common, it’s super easy to use. You can do very simple market research on there. Just to give you a few examples, maybe you decided on a city that you like but you don’t happen to know yet the best neighborhood for tourism or where tax regulations are easier or where short-term rentals are more allowed or people are traveling to.

Well, you can create those prompts right into Chat GPT, have it give you analysis of that market based on your prompt. The prompt is the difficult thing here, this is where a lot of us get hung up and I’m going to give you my five-step solution for that at the end of this. This is what I’ve sort of developed after watching quite a few videos on AI, reading articles and just testing this out myself. So that is the first piece and today I just want to give you the overview because if we jump into each one of these, we could go down a rabbit hole and be on each of these suggestions for quite a long time. So just know you can do some good market analysis with Chat GPT. However, you’ve got to double check your facts, right? Obviously, we don’t want to be investing our hard-earned dollars in a market based off what Chat GPT says but for your initial research, it can be really, really helpful.

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 VA’s 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 piece is discovering who your guest avatar is or who it will be if you were going to purchase a property in a new area. So, our guest avatar, these are the people that are staying in our properties and this is something that we have to know. We have to get right. If we don’t match this up with our property, well then we’re not going to have good reviews and our property is not going to do well. You can do the same thing simply with ChatGPT. You can plug in the location where your property or your future property will be. You can give it the characteristics of your property. Maybe it’s a five-bath next to a lake and ChatGPT can help you uncover who’s most likely going to be traveling to your property. I also suggest having a backup avatar. So, who’s the second most likely person or group that’s going to be showing up to rent your property. So that’s number two.

Number three, this is after we have our property and this is listing copy. So, we know that there’s a lot of OTAs or the online travel agencies like Airbnb ask us to put in our property details. The more the better. They don’t create these sections for nothing. So, the more we fill out, the better our property is going to do, the higher it’s very likely going to rank in their search visibility. So, we want to fill out all these sections, but sometimes it’s hard to craft those messages. Again, we can use ChatGPT for this. We can give it a character limit. Let’s say the Airbnb title only allows for 50 characters. Well, that’s one of the things you want to put into your prompt to help it come up with an answer for you. So of course, we can use it for listing titles, but we can also use it for all of the listing body, our neighborhood description, our interactions with the guests. There’s a lot of different sections they have in there. So, give it a shot on ChatGPT.

Next one up, this is interior design. Yes, artificial intelligence is making its way into everything. We actually talked about interior design quite a while back. If you go to our website, strriches.com, and you search for interior design, you will see some other websites, some other companies that we suggested in the past to help with virtual designing. But if you want to do it all on your own, there are some good AI tools now that allow you to really visualize how your property is going to be laid out. One that you can check out is called Decore AI. So, jump onto Google, type artificial intelligence, interior design, you’re going to see a whole list of them. The reality is there’s a ton of AI programs out there, literally hundreds and more being developed all the time. ChatGPT just happens to be the one that most of us have heard the most about. And so that’s the one I’m mainly focusing on for today.

So, let’s get to the next piece here. Communication responses. Sometimes it’s hard to respond to those negative reviews, right? Someone’s really, maybe they’ve been dishonest and you put all your hard sweat and dollars into your property and it’s beautiful and someone didn’t like it for some reason. It’s hard to respond to those reviews. But you know what? One of the nice things about AI is it doesn’t have any emotion. So, we don’t want our emotion to come across when we’re responding on negative reviews. We always want to be understanding and pathetic. And so, these are things that we can allow ChatGPT to do for us and they can do it very, very quickly. Of course, it all depends on the prompts that you give ChatGPT and we’re going to get into that in just one second. Before we get off the communication topic, I just want to say that my property management software already has AI built into it. We’re using HostAway right now, but I imagine a lot of the other programs already have this as well. So, it’s coming, whether we’re ready for it or not. It can be very helpful. It is also a tool, so we have to know the best way to use it.

Next up for our suggestions is marketing. So, if you have your own website where someone can book your short-term rental directly, I hope that you do. Well, you can create a bunch of marketing material, marketing emails, prompts by using ChatGPT. Maybe you want to send out a monthly newsletter. You can again plug in your city where your property happens to be, maybe things to do in that area and have ChatGPT come up with some prompts for you, not only the titles, but also all of the body as well. Now, if you don’t have a website already, well, I got good news for you. The seventh suggestion is actually AI for website development. So, one of the things that AI can do if you didn’t know already is that it can help code websites. It can do all kinds of things, but there are sites out there, literally one called 60 Second Site, where they can build you a website in 60 seconds. You plug in a few prompts, enter a little bit of information, and they’re going to create your webpage. Of course, you’re going to want to make sure that you edit it and double check it and make sure that it fits what you’re actually looking for. One that I would recommend is called Hostinger, H-O-S-T-I-N-G-E-R.com. This will actually build a WordPress website. So, WordPress, for those of you that don’t know, that’s what most websites are built on. That’s the foundation. It’ll create a domain name for you. So www.timsproperty.com, for example. Of course, the different levels of the service have different pricing, so you want to make sure that you choose the one that’s best for you. But if you don’t have a website already, this is a really easy way to create one, a really easy way to get your domain name. And if you’re using a property management software already, most of the time they have what we call a plugin where you can just take the plugin that allows you to copy that code, paste it in your new website, and then someone can book on your website and all that information is going to funnel right through your property management software that you’re already used to using. If you don’t have access to one of those plugins or you’re not using a property management software program yet, first of all, I highly suggest that you do. But if you don’t, you could at least share your Airbnb link on here.

This is a way for you to get started, get your website out there. So, there it is. There’s seven ways that you can use AI to help with your short-term rental business right now. I know there are a million others. We’re experimenting with a lot of those different ways, and so we’ll catch you up in the future on some other ways for doing that. Before we can get the information back from ChatGPT that we actually need, though, we have to give it the best prompts possible. And so, I want to give you my five-step process to where if you use these five steps, you should get pretty good results almost every time.

The first one is you’re going to want to talk to ChatGPT. Again, this is just typing into the chat. You want to give it a persona. So, who is ChatGPT writing on behalf of? Is it Batman? Is it Superman? Is it a short-term rental owner that lives in Pennsylvania or in San Diego? So, give it that persona. Let it know who it’s writing on behalf of. That’s the first thing. The second piece is context. We have to give a little bit of context to ChatGPT so it knows more about our end result, what we’re looking for. So, if you’re a short-term rental host, for example, if that’s your persona, maybe you want to give ChatGPT some more information about your property. It’s a five-bedroom. It’s next to the ocean. Whatever it happens to be, provide a little bit of context so that it can produce a better result for you. The third piece is we need to give it a task. So, this could simply be I need a listing description or please write a listing description for my property. It already knows who it’s writing on behalf. That was persona already has some context, so some context about your property. Give it a task. That could be a listing title. That could be a description. That could be photo captions, whatever it happens to be. Number four, we need to give it a format. So how do you want it to return results? If you’re looking for a listing title, for example, and the max character limit is 50 characters, well, then you need to tell it that. Give me a title in 50 characters that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can ask for a result for listing description with bullet points.

And then lastly, you need to give it a tone. So, what sort of tone do you want chat GPT to have? Do you want it to have a fun tone, a relaxed tone, an empathetic tone if you’re writing a review response? So, make sure that you think that through and play around with this, right? The nice thing is that when we input a request or a prompt, we don’t have to get it right. We can play around with it until we do. I’ve got a couple bonus tips for you. The first one is if you give chat GPT some examples, that’s really going to help it. So maybe you could give it some examples of listing titles that you already like and ask them to rephrase it. The second bonus tip is that sometimes this can be a little bit of work creating these prompts. And sometimes we’re going to want to create the same search results again. And so, one of the things that I’ve been doing is after I get to the bottom, I get to my results. It’s exactly the way I want it. I asked chat GPT to go back through all my previous prompts, summarize them, and give me a template of all those prompts that will produce the same results like the one it just created.

So, there’s a ton of opportunity with AI. It’s making its way into the whole business industry everywhere. Of course, with Airbnb, it’s already happening in a lot of the software programs we use. And the reality is it can make our guest experiences better, right? If we do a better job at crafting messages and knowing who our guests are, and knowing more about our properties and our cities, these things are all helpful. This is a tool, so we need to learn how to use it. I hope these suggestions and these tips gave you a little more insight. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

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 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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