Technology is pretty awesome, isn’t it?

More specifically, entertainment has come a long way.

Remember the days of Blockbuster, driving to a Blockbuster location, renting a movie, and then having to return it, and then of course, paying the late fees because we never returned it on time?

For those of you out there in our younger audience, you might not even remember this, but this was the reality not too long ago.

But today, we have amazing streaming services like Netflix, and Disney, and Hulu, and YouTube TV.

Are our guests still expecting that we should have these services?

Stay tuned, I want to give you some insight to help you decide whether you should keep the streaming services in your short-term rental or just cut those subscriptions.

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.

I’m happy you’re here again.

Today, we’re talking about a fun topic, I would say, because streaming services have opened our eyes to all of the entertainment throughout the world at our fingertips, right?

Like YouTube has done, but watching movies on Netflix and Disney, this has made things so accessible.

It’s really, really awesome.

We can watch them on our tablet devices, even on our phones, whatever it happens to be.

And of course, we can watch them in our short term rentals as well as our guests.

But do we actually need these services?

That’s what I wanna tackle today.

First thing is let’s kinda just talk about these services in general overview.

What are the options?

What might people want in your property?

The first one, and by far the most popular, at least in my opinion, is Netflix.

And Netflix has come a long way, right?

And they actually have multiple subscription costs now too.

So we’ll get to that in just a second.

But Netflix itself, if you haven’t already seen, has quite a few series on short term rentals.

So go check those out.

We can never learn too much, right?

So there’s one called Stay Here.

There’s another one called World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals.

You can just simply search in the search bar Netflix and find a few of those for some good entertainment.

We also have Hulu, definitely less popular than Netflix.

We have Disney, definitely more popular among our younger crowd and our families, right?

Families that have children, and they also have a ton of good entertainment on there.

They also have all the Marvel and the Pixel movies, so they do a really good job.

We also have YouTube TV now, which is a little pricier, but that does provide a lot of good options.

We have Apple TV.

So we have quite a few options out there, but should we actually be offering these services anymore?

Well, let’s look at some of the challenges before we sort of decide with this.

And I would say maybe one of the first challenges is that the amount of devices we can use on one of these Netflix services has decreased a lot.

So I remember when I started adding Netflix to a lot of my properties, I think we could have like five people watching simultaneously.

They’ve considerably decreased that.

At the time of this recording, it’s down to like two, which means if you have a large portfolio, you gotta have a lot more subscriptions, or you might have multiple people in your home, multiple TVs, maybe it’s a bigger home with five TVs, and only two of them are going to work.

So that’s sort of the first challenge, is that you might be advertising this, and it’s not actually available when the guest goes to log in, because it’s being used elsewhere.

The second challenge is in regards to prior viewing history.

And so you may not have had this happen to you yet, but my team and I, we’ve managed tens of thousands of reservations on a lot of my properties, and now our partners’ properties, I’m happy to say we’ve been growing our management portfolio a lot, working with a lot of awesome properties and a lot of awesome partners across the nation.

So if you’re interested in chatting with us, see if we might be able to help, you can just go to strriches.com.

There’s a property management button there, and I’d be happy to chat with you personally.

We’ve had an issue come up where we’ve had guests check in, and maybe they have their little ones around, and they open up the TV, and there’s some prior history that shouldn’t be shown to little ones.

So, pornography, this was a claim, honestly, from a guest.

So, of course, we don’t have any pornography subscriptions or anything like that in my properties or in our partners’ properties.

But if we’re advertising these services that we’re offering them, and something inappropriate comes up, it’s possible that your guest could call you out on that, right?

And so, that is one thing.

We all know that we’ve checked into a place, we subscribe with our YouTube subscription or Netflix, and we forget to log out, right?

And so, the next guest that checks in can see your prior history.

Now, I know a lot of those much more graphic things, like pornography, those aren’t available on Netflix and stuff like that, so I don’t know where these comments came from.

But the reality is, is that we do have prior viewing history on there, and if it’s not totally appropriate for the next person checking in, it’s not really a good experience, right?

And it’s not even that it’s not super appropriate, but it might just be something totally different, topics totally different than someone’s used to seeing.

And we don’t want to remind our guests that we had other guests staying in the property.

So when someone checks in, and they’re seeing a bunch of prior history, it’s reminding them of guests that were there before them.

That’s not a good mental experience, right?

We like to think that, oh, this is a clean slate just for us, even though obviously it’s not.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, well, then you know that I love technology, and we can save a ton of time implementing AI artificial intelligence in the right ways.

My team and I have been playing around with this for months, and we’ve written the perfect prompts that you can just plug in to your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT to help you uncover exactly who your guest avatar is, help you write your listing descriptions, help you write your photo captions, and so much more.

It’s a living, breathing document that we’re consistently working on, and I’d love to give it to you for free for being one of our loyal listeners.

You can head over to restmethods.com forward slash AI and get your copy for free.

I hope it helps you along your short-term rental journey.

So that’s one challenge, and that goes right in line with people not logging out of their existing subscriptions, right?

Which also means that you’re going to have more simultaneous devices using it.

Makes it a little harder to track subscriptions sort of across the board.

The next challenge that might come up is if you advertise, yes, we have Netflix, we have YouTube TV, we have Hulu, but the guest shows up and it’s not actually working or it’s not logged in, well, this just creates another operational piece, right?

You have to share the username and password with them.

If they plug it in and it’s still not working, it’s possible that maybe that got shared on other devices.

And now you just kind of have this back and forth operational piece, which isn’t a huge, huge deal, but as you’re building your portfolio, if you’re managing lots of properties, it does become a bit of another operational piece, and it’s not a good experience for the guests.

And so if we don’t advertise any of that, knowing that a lot of people have these services already, and they just simply log in with their own, sort of takes that piece out of the puzzle.

So the next challenge that, a bit of a challenge, although the subscription cost for these services are really, really, they’re very reasonable.

Of course, if you’re using a whole bunch of them at each property and you have a whole bunch of properties, they can certainly add up.

So the financial cost, now that these services have decreased the amount of devices you could use, that could be a serious consideration as well.

Before we get to whether or not you should consider keeping these services in your property, or just go ahead and get rid of them, I just want to bring up a couple more points.

And that is that most people have these services, right?

Or at least one of them, or if they’re traveling with a group of people, someone in that group is very likely to have one.

And the bigger our property is, the more guests at sleep.

If we have a property that sleeps 15 people, for example, I guarantee you that one of those guests has a subscription to these services so they can simply log in with theirs while they’re there.

So I don’t think it’s really expected anymore.

Even in hotels, they ask us to log in with their own subscriptions.

I think a lot of people have them.

The costs have come down considerably.

And the more guests staying at a property, very likely that someone already has one.

With that said, the nicer your property is, the more luxurious it is, the more expectations a guest is going to have.

So this is one situation where I might just consider leaving it.

If your nightly rate is $1,000 a night, and all of these services cost you just a few hundred dollars a year, then you definitely don’t have the financial worry there, right?

You still have the operational one, but if you only have one property, for example, that operational piece is much easier, right?

And we just have to make sure that our housekeepers are hopefully checking to make sure that those services are activated and they’re logged in so when your guest shows up, they don’t have to do that part themselves.

So the bigger, the nicer, the more expensive your property is, the more people are going to expect.

This does bring up the question of sports, too.

So a lot of times people are asking if you have or offer sports.

Again, this is an amenity.

This is something that not all properties need, but the nicer your property is, the more these things that you should be providing your guests.

So with all that said, it really depends whether you want to keep this subscription or not.

If you’re concerned about keeping it and it’s not a big financial issue for you at all, then definitely just keep it.

But I would guarantee that the more time that passes, the less and less we’re actually going to need these services.

So in fact, I’ve taken them out of most all of my properties.

Now I’ve kept a few Disney subscriptions in some of my larger homes, but Netflix have pretty much taken out for a lot of the reasons that we just mentioned.

One last point before we jump off, whether you decide to keep the services or not, we still have to do a really good job at setting our guests’ expectations.

So if we’re not keeping the services, we can simply inform our guests in our listing copy, so online, in our digital guidebook, in our photo caption.

So this is an important one where you have a living room and there’s a nice big screen TV.

Probably want to add in your little photo caption there that it’s set up for you to stream your streaming service, but ours is not included.

You decide on how you want to word that.

Remember, chat CBT can definitely help us reword things.

We’re struggling to come up with how we want to actually explain to a guest.

So just make sure that it’s very clear that your guests are either not going to have these services available or that they do have them.

One last place that you might want to include it is in a simple one page in your property.

We’ve talked about these in the past, having what we call a one pager has your most important information, your house rules about your property.

You may have a little note in there that says, we do not provide traditional TV or cable services, or yes, we do, and it should be logged in automatically for you on all the devices.

But if you have any challenges, just send us a quick message.

So in a nutshell, streaming services are amazing.

That’s exactly why most of us have our personal subscription already.

There are a few challenges offering them in our properties.

One is viewing history might be the financial cost, although I don’t think that’s a big burden for most of us.

The actual logging in is probably one of the more important pieces that sometimes it gets logged out prior viewing history.

So I just don’t think it’s as important anymore.

As I mentioned, we’ve taken out of most all my properties, aside from maybe Disney and a few of my bigger properties.

And you might want to consider some of these subscriptions that people don’t have anymore.

Most people have Netflix, but maybe they don’t have Disney.

So that could be a benefit.

The nicer your property is, the more amenities you need, the more expectations your guests are going to have.

But either way, whether we’re offering it or not, we just want to make sure that we’re really clear with our guests.

So I hope that gave you a little more insight.

I hope you’ve been enjoying all of your favorite Netflix series.

I know that I go down a rabbit hole from time to time.

And until next week, I hope you have a fabulous week.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I’ve been managing my properties virtually for years and years.

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

We’ve learned a ton, and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made.

In fact, we’re now big enough to help manage your properties as well.

Our team has a ton of experience from the inner city apartment to the large lakeside retreat.

We’ve worked with all types of properties across the nation.

We’ll help to take the management workload off your plate while earning top revenue and excellent guest reviews, all while charging an industry low fee.

If you’d like to find out if your property fits with our program, just head to strriches.com.

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

Just click on the property management button, and we look forward to chatting with you soon.