In the short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate with a specific focus on short term rentals quick action items to wire. Scale your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back everyone to the short-term rental richest podcast happier here as always we’ve got another topic quick actionable advice and this week I’m hoping this saves you from this ever happening to you I I lost thousands of dollars this week it’s actually it’s hard to calculate exactly how much I lost because Airbnb took down all of my listings they didn’t actually take them down per se but they blocked on the calendar so let’s jump right in and I want to tell you what happened I want to tell you how we fixed it and how you can prevent this and then also some diversification strategies so that were not so reliant on Airbnb so this just happened to me and with a little notification whatsoever actually all we received was an email no phone calls no nothing and of course we get hundreds of thousands of emails from Airbnb all the time because of our guest reservations the guest reservations get pulled into our our management system so those aren’t overlooked but a lot of times is supporting mails from Airbnb going to the same boxes and unfortunately we overlooked one email and not one email was responsible for all my lessons coming down in 3 different cities so this is what happened in a nutshell Airbnb has a discrimination policy and that also includes discrimination against service animals. So if someone has a service animal and they have the paperwork for even though you may have a no pet policy at your property if you deny that gas they can file a claim and it can result what just happened to me I unfortunately did not know about it the only way I found out about it was housekeeper messaged me and said Hey I can’t find your listings on Airbnb and S. us weird you know so I pulled up the app I looked in and nice you know everything’s fine I sent her a link here they are and then a couple days later another housekeeper message me in a different city she said your listings are not popping up on Airbnb is analysis to different cities so I looked into a more and it turned out that Airbnb blocked our calendar didn’t notify us on our dashboard didn’t call us they didn’t do anything really other than one email that said you need to respond back did you agree to our discrimination policy otherwise your listings will be removed on this date unfortunately we didn’t see that email and without notice they’re all gone so hard to say actually how much we lost and I hate that I scared our team they didn’t have worked this this the following week is much slower because most of our reservations happen within 7 days and our calendar was blocked for 7 days so huge huge impact I want to make sure this does not happen to you guys so I’ve got some practices and things that we can implement to make sure doesn’t happen first of all we wanna have a good eye on our support emails ours are getting forwarded to a spot which we didn’t do you regularly so we fix that any support emails in the future we will see much much easier and quicker but then the second thing is is this was happening and I wasn’t getting through to Airbnb support that there’s no phone support for this to. Screamin nation section of their support team it’s all done through email so I called and I called you know trying to escalate it and spent hours on the phone really with Airbnb and and like many big companies have big support teams every time you call you get a different answer so it was really frustrating open support tickets and I got close randomly and then ultimately we got an email that said thank you for responding and we unblock to listen so keep an eye on those support emails but one thing that I’ve changed since then and it’s almost kind of good that this happened is that I’m creating multiple Airbnb accounts now so they’re not all the eggs aren’t in one basket our property management’s offer that we use allows us to integrate with multiple Airbnb accounts so it’s not a big deal from an operational standpoint the one downside is if you already have existing listings and you take them off an account and you put them under a new account then you’re gonna lose all your reviews and you got to start over in that sense but I’m taking down properties that didn’t have his great reviews as the other ones cleaning them up a little more merger starting fresh that way you’re gonna be divers find a little bit so that’s one thing you can do well first of all make sure that you’re checking your support emails or they’re getting forwarded to the appropriate place that’s number one number 2 you can have multiple Airbnb accounts and I highly suggest this if you have quite a few properties because who knows one day every being you can shut your countdown and it’s you know has big impacts obviously so that’s number 2 and number 3 is divers find into different channels and now we’re already on VR BO and homeaway but I’ve since this happened I’ve added booking.com and I’m still going through that we talked in the past about having a channel manager and that allows us to manage all of these different calendars at the same time with each. He’s so we don’t have to mark one book to mark on reserves and then block one so it’s not going to be that difficult from an operational standpoint to add a whole nother channel and booking.com gets 10 times the amount of traffic is Airbnb however it is a slightly different guests you just need to monitor it closely as your new gas are coming in to make sure that you’re meeting all their expectations so that’s 3 things one make sure monitoring support emails let’s open multiple accounts if we can if you have a lot of properties I highly highly suggested it would have saved me thousands of dollars in this case just over a week and then number 3 that’s diverse fi make sure we’re on at least those 3 channels. Just one take a real quick second out to talk about our virtual event that we have coming up this weekend it’s this Saturday and Sunday November 14 and 15 and this is in a nutshell everything I’ve learned managing over 15000 gas I’m takin and everything that I can pack into 2 days and you’re going to get my message scripts all the somber pieces I use and how we set him up how I find these properties and what I look for the operational tools that I use the tools that I use to scale housekeeping application short term rental leases I mean you’re gonna get tanda tanda value in here everything I wish that like I had before I started doing all this you know and this is the best way that I found the one it’s it’s through people that are doing this already I’m in mastermind groups and I go to seminars all time and that’s where I learned the most so I hope you can make it if you have a short term rental we’re considering getting one already you’re gonna get a ton of value out of this I promise and if for some reason you don’t underperformed mining back guarantee it’s not expensive it’s a couple nights probably of what you make in your short term rental in the best thing is I’m gonna record so you can go back and you can check out the sections you can re watch it you can revisit it sometimes it takes a little bit more time for us to Grassington so as long as you register by this Friday well make sure you get event recording head to rest methods.com forward slash virtual make sure you sign up it be awesome to see you there especially as one of our loyal podcast subscribers we love seeing all the downloads every week and all of your support it be nice to meet face to face so I hope to see you this weekend now let’s jump back in the episode. If you missed the episode prior we talked about channel managers will put in the show notes I think it was absurd 25 but we’ll talk about that and how we can make it so it’s not cumbersome now let’s get to the actual issue here the discrimination we obviously do not discriminate against anyone we have a no pet policy and one of our housekeepers denied aghast because of allergies and not she doesn’t like cleaning the apartments that have pets in them and that person file the claim and that’s the email that we miss and I was reason for shutting it down but you know after talking to some other hosts. M. B. is no discrimination policy against Pat’s counts for anything I mean if you had a hog or a horse that had a service animal title you have to have a animal in your property we got to be really careful because everybody spends millions tens hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisement that’s why we can get so many bookings through there so we just have to be cognizant of this we definitely can require the service animal papers so that we know it’s an actual service animal but just keep that in mind I don’t want this to happen to you guys it was really stressful I’m glad that it’s over I think it was a great learning lesson to diverse fire Airbnb accounts in the make sure on multiple channels in just to monitor some support emails and things a little more closely so. Please please consider those ideas if you have especially if you have a large portfolio this is one of those things that it’s like insurance you know I mean having multiple air beaming counts we don’t need it until it happens so something happened so just really really consider that hopefully that helps hopefully this is never happened to you and hopefully your listings are stain booked until next time I hope you have a wonderful day. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals what all searching the properties you. You want to make sure that you acquire the right properties to give you my. There is no charge to you for being one of our subscribers just the rest methods. R. E. S. T. methods.com

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 70: Must-Have Photos in Your Listings
• Episode 69: How to Use a “Virtual” Phone Line with Your Airbnb Account
• Episode 55: Insider Tips From a VRBO Account Manager
• Episode 54: Looking for Help Managing Your Properties?
• Episode 08: How to Price Your Short-Term Rental Perfectly – EVERYDAY!