There’s no question that OTAs like Airbnb and VRBO are cracking down on you getting your guests’ information so that they can book with you directly

And they take extreme measures if they catch you doing this. They will remove your account. They will even go as far as blacklisting your address so new accounts cannot be added to that address

But there’s a lot of legitimate ways that don’t violate any policies that you should be doing with each and every reservation to capture as much guest information as possible

So today we’ll be breaking down all of those options. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast

Let’s just get right into it. The number one rule, the thing that you absolutely cannot do, is solicit your guest information directly through the OTA channel, so directly through the message platform on Airbnb or VRBO or booking.com. This gets flagged right away.

Of course, the OTAs already know this, right? And they’ve put measures in place to make sure that you do not get your guest’s contact information. Let’s start with Airbnb. They currently mask any email that you receive on behalf of the guest, and they also create a temporary phone number that is not the actual phone number of your guest

Both of those expire after the guest’s reservation, and if you didn’t collect their information in another legitimate way, then you don’t have their contact info

vRBOBooking.com do share the guest’s name and email after the booking, but you gotta make sure that you save it

Now we’re gonna go through all the steps pre-booking, during the booking, post-booking to capture as much guest information as possible. But we’ve also put together a little handy guide.

You can grab it in the link down below

So before you can get any value out of having your guest’s direct contact info, you need to have a direct booking website, right? We’ve talked about that a lot on this channel. If you’re new here, we’ve been running for over six years, quick actionable episodes to help you with your short-term rentals or your portfolio.

My team and I manage two hundred and fifty-plus properties in over forty cities and quite a few different countries now, so we’ve learned a lot over the years, and I hope you find all of our insight helpful

You can catch all of our prior episodes at strriches.com. Okay, so in order to capture some value from this guest contact list, you need a place for them to book.

A direct booking website is a requirement. Most PMS programs luckily have this built in where you can create at least a easy template version really in just a few minutes. But if you wanna take it a step further, well, then you can go to a third-party company, there’s lots of those these days, that will integrate with your property management software, but create you a much more custom website

I was recently interviewed on another podcast, Book Solid, with Gil Chen, and he runs a company called Crafted Stays. This is all they do, is create custom websites for all their customers that integrate with the property management software that they’re already using There’s another company out there called Host AI that are making some really cool direct booking websites.

So if you’re not happy with your existing one, I’d suggest reaching out, seeing what’s currently available

All right, so there’s really three times, three places where you can get your guest’s contact info. The first place is before they actually make a booking, when they’re visiting your direct booking website. So you wanna make sure you have a pop-up on there, for example, something that pops up. Maybe you’re offering a discount.

You capture their email and their phone number. I know Host AI, the website company I mentioned, even has a way for their potential guests to bid on future reservations if they didn’t like the price that was showing up. So there’s some really clever ways out there to capture guest information before they actually make a decision to book with you at your property

Now, your direct booking website’s not gonna create demand on its own, right? So oftentimes this is the place where repeat guests go back to, but you can also drive that demand by doing your own social media

People browsing on Google, I hope that you have your properties listed on Google now. You can also include your website on Google so it shows up on Google Maps. And again, make sure your website has something that you can offer the potential guest, like a guidebook or some sort of future value

okay, so that’s step one. You got a direct booking website. You have some creative ways to capture guest contact info or potential guest contact info. Really, the big one is when you have guests at your property, you wanna make sure you’re capturing all that, and there’s several ways to do that The first one is you can have a pre-arrival or check-in form.

We highly suggest having a rental agreement for every property where your guest is signing, maybe they’re entering their name and their email, and then you simply capture it on the back end

Most of the industry leading PMS tools now, like Hostway or Guesty or OwnerRez have these rental agreements built in. So make sure you’re taking advantage of that if you’re not already

We use another company on the back end called Charge Automation that creates our guidebooks. It also handles our payment processing. Another note on that in a second. But we use this for our guidebooks and our rental agreement, so it’s a really easy way for us to capture all of our guest contact info

A lot of you out there have probably heard of guest verification tools. So these are biometrics or running some additional security on the back end

Companies like Truvy, which was previously Superhog, or Enso Connect or Safely, these companies can all do some additional security pre-check-in requirements that protect your property a little bit more, but also get that guest’s info for you

All right, now for a big one that I think most people probably overlook is that every time you process a payment through Stripe, you’re capturing that guest’s email and their name, and you should be saving that contact list

We recently brought on some really luxurious properties. One of them actually has 23 bedrooms. Yeah, way past Airbnb’s guest limit. They can sleep over 100 people, and so they have these massive corporate events, weddings, you name it. But you better believe that adds up to a lot of guest contacts, and luckily they were collecting them because

and they were able to use that list really easily. So their calendar wasn’t looking quite as full. They sent out some mass messaging using a company called Quo or previously OpenPhone. They got a whole bunch of responses, and they booked up their calendar. Of course, if they didn’t have devices in the property or ways to capture that guest info, that would not be an option

So if you’re operating a luxury property or any sort of vacation rental, especially where you have guests coming back time and time again, it’s really essential that you are collecting their info. Now with AI and the tools that we have available, it’s a lot easier to reach guests or potential guests as well, But we have to have their contact info to have the option

So those are a few options before the guests actually check in. You have a rental agreement, you have some sort of additional background check that you might be doing, or you’re processing that payment and capturing the contact info on the back end

Now, once the guest is already at your property, we’ve talked about StayFi a lot. This is what creates a splash page in your property. So it’s a device that connects to your internet router, and when the guest shows up for the first time, what’s one of the first things they do? They connect to the internet.

This basically creates a splash screen between your guest and the internet. They need to put in their contact info first, and then they have internet for the whole time they’re there at the property. The beauty behind this is that you get to collect not just the person making the reservation, but essentially everyone there at the property, or at least everyone that connects to the internet

But you wanna go a couple steps further. You wanna make sure that you have some printed documents in your property. You wanna make sure you have a QR code printed out that links to your digital guidebook. Again, when that digital guidebook opens, you can ask for their email

We like to put magnets right on the fridge. Most people end up seeing the fridge, right? It’s also a reminder that they can book with you directly and also book with you at the best rates

So there’s a few options during the stay, and lastly, we have some options after the stay, after our guests have checked out

Remember, you don’t wanna be soliciting their contact info directly through the message platforms, but you can send links through the platform. So after a guest has checked out, you wanna of course send a message and say you hope that they had an amazing time

Now you have one last opportunity after your guests check out, and that’s in a post follow-up message. So you should be just checking in with your guests regardless to say, “Hey, I hope you had a really good time.” Maybe you want to mention something about the review process or let them know that you’ve already left them a five-star review

You have to be really careful again about asking for any sort of contact information in any message that goes through the platform

But you might do something a little bit more subtle and just remind them that the guidebook is theirs to keep, and next time they’re back in town, they’re welcome to use it again. Of course, that guidebook’s going to have links to your direct booking website, right?

So the OTAs are tremendously helpful, right? They spend millions of dollars to help us market our properties, but it’s our obligation to make sure that we get our guests’ contact info so we can build that relationship. And like our newest partners that just joined us, it creates an opportunity to help fill those calendars if they’re not looking as occupied as you want them to.

I hope that this episode gave you a couple other ideas and some good insights. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week

Today we’re tackling something that most Airbnb hosts have an opinion on, and that is their Air Cover program. The marketing sounds great, right? Three million dollars in coverage. But the reality is a lot of hosts don’t know the right way to actually file claims. A lot of hosts lose claims even on the ones that they should definitely be winning.

There’s a big gap between what’s advertised and what actually gets paid out. So in this episode, we’re gonna break down everything you need to know. Welcome back to the “Short Term Rental Riches” podcast.

So what exactly is Airbnb’s- Air Cover program and not to be confused with their resolutions. I’ll get to that in just a second. Their Air Cover program is three million dollars in property protection and one million dollars in liability protection. Now, this is potential limits, right?

It’s included with every Airbnb booking, no additional signups, no additional costs. It is definitely not, though, a replacement for your property insurance.

So the standard flow is really to request a resolution first, but if the guest denies this or they just don’t respond, then it’s gonna get escalated to an Air Cover claim, And then you’ll have fourteen days to close that Air Cover process.

So what’s actually covered with Air Cover? Well, property damage. That’s good news, right? Theft, if anything goes missing in your property and you have proof of it. Extra cleaning costs, so sometimes a guest might leave the place a little bit too dirty. Any sort of structural damage, any sort of just real damage to your property.

Most hosts don’t know, though, that it can actually cover lost income. So if you have to cancel specific reservations due to that guest’s damage, then that can potentially be reimbursed

Now, what does it not cover? Well, most of these things are pretty obvious. It doesn’t cover the normal wear and tear of your property.

It wouldn’t cover potential loss of revenue, and so if you have damage and you end up blocking your calendar because you’re repairing it, but you never had a reservation during that calendar block, then they’re not going to pay you out for what could have been a potential reservation.

Now, they’re also not gonna cover items that you can’t accurately document. If you can’t prove that the item was there at your property beforehand, then they’re not going to cover it.

Quick suggestion there, if you haven’t already, take a video of your property, a walkthrough, and talk into an audio clip as you’re doing it. So you can use an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude to organize all the items that you have in your property. Of course

these details with photos can help, but it’s not gonna guarantee that you’re going to win the claim. Ultimately, if push comes to shove, you’re going to need a receipt and proper documentation for these items. So if you just furnished a property and you have all those receipts, make sure they’re organized in a nice clean place.

And again, you can use your AI tools to sift through all those receipts for you if you need them for an AirCover claim.

Now we’re gonna break down exactly the way our team handles Air Cover claims with all the little details that you’ll need to know. There’s actually quite a few steps there too, so we’ve also put together a quick guide for you. You can grab it in the link down below.

Before we do, I wanna break down just a personal story from a large Air Cover claim that I had not too long ago, almost seven thousand dollars worth. And so again, you gotta make sure you get this process nailed down because you could potentially have some big damage. Now, if you’ve been listening to this show for a long time, you know my team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests now in over fifty cities and multiple countries.

It’s been an amazing journey. We’ve certainly learned a lot, and so I hope this podcast has provided some value through our hard lessons. Some of those hard lessons in the early days were damage claims. We now have a lot of processes in place to prevent those, but sometimes accidents just happen. And so I recently had someone drive their car into a brand-new air conditioning unit.

It was actually a packaged unit, so it was the heater and the AC, almost seven thousand dollars. And unfortunately, it was basically brand new. It had been installed just a few weeks prior.

Now, we had messages from the guest telling us that they accidentally did it. We had it on our camera footage. We had documentation for the actual unit and cost. And so this one we won without too much struggle.

Airbnb paid us out six thousand seven hundred and twenty-three dollars within just seven days, and now we’re actually able to recoup some loss of income, not through Airbnb’s Air Cover program, but through the guest’s insurance policy.

They happened to be using Progressive Insurance, and we did have to block the calendar for a couple weeks to get the new equipment in to make the changes, and we did recoup some potential loss of income. If you don’t already have this in your existing insurance policy, well, I’d recommend talking with your agent.

If you’re relying heavily on your income from your short-term rental and you have some sort of big maintenance issue or maybe there’s a natural disaster and you get stuck without income potentially for months at a time, that could be really challenging, right? And so insurance… And so there is an option to include on your insurance policy loss of business income.

You get to choose the amount you wanna put on there, and you get to choose how far in the future you can go. Of course, within the insurance company’s limits, but oftentimes this might be six months or so.

So fortunately, that HVAC claim was pretty easy for us to win. The guest was totally honest, and we had all the documentation. But not all claims are that easy, and so let’s run through the exact process that our team has been using to win hundreds, if not thousands, of air cover claims.

Here’s our policy, and I’m just gonna read through the steps here because we’ve got quite a lot of them. So a lot of times these air cover claims happen after a guest has left, right? And so our first step when a guest leaves is to immediately inspect that property. Uh, everything needs to be checked after checkout.

Are there any missing items? Are there any damage? Anything like that. We have these all built into our custom housekeeping checklist. It makes it really easy for our housekeeper to take notes, to take pictures, to provide any evidence that we might need

If we do uncover some sort of damage or something was missing or broken, well then we’re gonna proceed directly with filing a claim. We used to not do this in fear of getting a bad review, but I’ve got a note on that in just a second. So we’re actually not gonna contact the guest if they’ve already checked out.

We’re just gonna go right to the AirCover claim process and involve Airbnb.

Any future guest communication is going to occur within that AirCover process with Airbnb’s help.

Now, if there is some sort of damage or smoking or something that happened while your guest was actually staying in the property, well then that’s a little different. You need to reach out immediately and communicate with the guest. Of course, you want the communication to be professional and clear and documented.

The idea is that you’re able to capture that conversation and use it as evidence if you discover that there is in fact damage.

So let’s imagine that there was actually some damage at your property or something was missing. We have four documentation standards that we use every time we submit a claim. We wanna make sure that we have some sort of timestamped visual. So either that’s a photo our housekeeper took, maybe that’s timestamped footage from a video.

We wanna use our cleaner or inspection checklist that’s already been completed.

We need some sort of cost validation, so we’re going to include either ideally the original invoice or a comparable item on Amazon, something like that. Uh, and then we also many times take it a step further and create an invoice directly underneath our company name. So you can do this as well using ChatGPT or one of the AI tools.

Just create an invoice. This could include things like the time it takes to swap that out, to find the new item, shipping, whatever it happens to be.

We wanna double-check that there was no platform communication, so no messages that are relevant were coming through Airbnb.

And then with all that, you’re going to get a claim reference or transaction ID for your AirCover claim.

Now, of course, if you’re missing any of that information, your chances of winning the claim are going to go down. We used to file our AirCover claims basically at the end of the allowable window in fear that we might get a bad review. But we flip that around now, and we submit everything as soon as we find it.

We do do this before posting our review, but if the guest ends up leaving a bad review and there was some sort of retaliation or something in there that had to do with your AirCover claim, well, then that is grounds to have that review removed.

You will have to escalate that with Airbnb. Getting reviews removed is not as easy as it once was, but it is still certainly possible.

And then you’re always gonna wanna leave a public response to those reviews too. And of course, you wanna make sure that it’s a professional response,

You want to make sure it’s free of accusations or any sort of assumptions.

So that’s really the process, and it’s great that Airbnb has this. Booking.com has just released their equivalent damage program, and our team is filing claims over there as well, and we are winning them as well. And so we’ll have to do a separate episode on that process as we really perfect it. But in a nutshell, AirCover, great to have.

The more documentation you have, the better, but this is not a replacement for your insurance policy.

We’ve talked about insurance a lot on this channel before. You can check out policies with proper insurance. They’re one of the leading insurance companies for short-term rentals. There’s also a lot of other ones out there these days, like Safely or Generali. And there’s also other ways to protect your property, like using damage waivers or collecting deposits.

Remember, we’ve got our full guide with all the details in the link down below if you want to just copy our process or give our process over to one of your team members helping with your properties. Remember, AirCover is not a replacement for insurance, although it can help as long as you’re filing those claims correctly.

I hope this gave you a little bit more insight, and until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Cameras at your short-term rental property do a lot more than help you just prevent damage. They can also help you recoup costs or charge guests that are maybe trying to get around your rules. But there are a lot of camera options out there, and so today I’m gonna give you four that I think are worth taking a look at, the one that I actually use, the features that you must have, and all the things in between.

Stay tuned as we dive into all the details.

Welcome back to the show. I’m happy you’re here again.

There are a lot of camera options out on the market today, more than there have ever been, and there’s also a lot of features that come with those cameras.

But the reality is, most of those features don’t really do that much, and so let’s talk about the ones that actually matter, and then I’ll give you my camera recommendations. So the first one is you need some way to have cloud storage, right? We can’t rely on a security camera at our property that runs on an SD card that we need to manually download.

That’s just very old school, right? Fortunately, most options these days have that, but you also don’t want it to be recording twenty-four/seven because then you got a whole bunch of footage to go through. So you wanna make sure that your camera has a good motion activation feature in place where it only records when it needs to.

You also wanna double-check how far that motion activation goes. One of the cameras we installed recently at a new property was just too far away from the front door, so even though the guests were showing up, it wasn’t picking them up on the video.

You also want a camera that’s easy to connect to other cameras and has a nice online dashboard.

When it comes to installation, wireless is always going to be better, but I know a lot of you have some tricky installation spots. And so the camera that we recommend does have a wireless option. That can go a long way, but again, make sure that it’s not mounted too far away from where it’s going to be picking up motion.

Before we get into my top four camera picks, just a side note, if you have cameras at your property, which you 100% should, make sure that they don’t face on the interior of any of your property. This includes having one near your front door that looks in when the front door is actually open. That’s a big no-no.

We, of course, have to mark- or disclose this when we create a listing on Airbnb or the different platforms these days. But just double-check because that can get your property banned or delisted online.

Okay, top four cameras. You’ve probably heard about most of these, but the one that we like to use is actually a little less common. So we of course have the Ring camera. We of course have the Google Nest camera.

And these are great because they probably connect to your existing Google account if you have one already. Most people do, and so the actual setup is really easy.

And they do have various options these days, but I would say that their cloud storage online is quite expensive compared to some other options.

The Arlo camera is also a good option. This is one you can find at places like Costco. It’s one that can easily be expanded, so if you have a really large luxury property and you need five or six cameras to cover all the entry doors, which I highly recommend you have a camera covering every entry door at your property.

If that’s the case, well then the Arlo cameras can be a good option for you. What is the camera that my team and I refer to almost everyone? That is the Reolink camera.

What we like most about it is that it’s easy to install and it’s affordable, and we’ve had good results with it. And so we’ve got literally dozens of these things connected all in one nice little simple dashboard where we can see them. It’s got all the things we talked about, like the motion activation.

It has infrared at night. It also can pick up sound

And it has a really inexpensive online storage option, just a few dollars per camera. And so if you got a whole bunch of these, you’re not gonna be racking up a big bill. I also like that there’s the wireless option with the solar panel. That’s the Reolink Argus Pro model, and you can put it around a tree.

You can put it basically wherever you want, not have to worry about all the wiring. Now, one caveat, if you are in a cold place where it’s very seasonal and it’s very dark, then you’re gonna wanna find a wired option because it’s probably not gonna hold up that well.

Luckily, the Reolink cameras also have the wired options, so just grab the one that fits best for you.

So a lot of reasons for having the camera are obvious, right? We wanna try to prevent any sort of party or unwanted guests or unwanted pets, but what a lot of hosts are not doing is handling the backside of that. A lot of times guests show up with maybe one extra guest. Maybe they show up with their dog, and they weren’t supposed to.

This is when your camera can truly shine and help you earn some additional revenue with your property. It’s really quite simple. If your property accommodates six people and eight people show up, you can charge for those extra guests if, and this is an important if, you have it in your house rules or your rental agreement.

If you wanna just copy our house rules, which we have all of these things in place, well, you can grab a copy of that in the link down below.

We also have a quick STR camera checklist you can grab down below. It’s got links to the cameras that we’ve mentioned, but also those really important reminders on camera placement, how to set it up for your team, all that good stuff.

So with the camera in place, there are certain things that you want to check, right? You always want to verify your guest count. You always want to verify if guests are showing up with pets when they shouldn’t be.

There’s some other benefits, though. You get to know when your guests actually check in, and you get to know when they’re actually checking out. We always ask our guests what time they think they’ll be leaving, so we can help accommodate the cleaning schedules. Of course, they don’t always tell us, and a lot of times they tell us, but it doesn’t actually end up being the time that they’re checking out.

But when you see them walking out the front door with their luggage and getting in the car and driving away, well, it’s a pretty good sign that they’ve just left your property.

So make sure you have your house rules set up properly. Make sure it accounts for pets if you don’t allow pets. If you do allow pets, well, we highly encourage charging a pet fee, and not everyone always discloses that they have a pet. So again, use the cameras to verify that. Use them to verify the guest count, and then if you do have some sort of issue at the property, well, you can handle it as soon as possible. You can also use the footage to send to the OTAs like Airbnb or VRBO to help your case.

Let’s recap just a couple quick tips

the more properties you have, the more likely people are gonna be sneaking by, and the more potential revenue you can recoup from having these cameras, but you gotta make sure you have a good system on the back end.

If you’ve got a property up already and you’ve been letting some of these things just sort of slide by because you don’t want to do it yourself or you don’t have the time, well, our team at Corsi would love to help you with your property.

We work with hundreds of properties in dozens of different markets. You can reach out to us. Just go to scrriches.com. There’s a little partner with us button, or you can check out our company website at Corsi, C-O-R-Z-L-Y.com.

Okay, some last things to remember just to recap. Make sure that your cameras cover every entry point. Make sure if it is a wireless camera that it’s not too far from the entry points so that it still picks up the motion. Consider your region. If you’re in a place that’s very seasonal, dark, and cold, then you want to make sure you have a wired option.

Actually, that’s always the first option if you can is make sure that it’s wired.

Make sure that the recording starts when there’s motion detected and it’s not just recording 24-7. Make sure that your cameras are disclosed on all the rental platforms like Airbnb. That is a requirement.

And lastly, don’t put cameras in any place which invade privacy. Again, a big requirement and a reason that your listing can get taken down and deleted. I hope that gave you a couple tips. Remember, we’ve got our getting started checklist down below. We’ve also got a copy of our house rules where you can just duplicate them and adjust them the way that works best for your property.

Until next time, I hope that gave you some good insight and I hope you have a fabulous week.

​Most STR owners, operators, investors focus a lot on the photos of their property, the design, the amenities, their pricing, hopefully. And their housekeeping connection, but they don’t focus on the housekeeping organization and the actual operation as much as they should. And we all know that you can have the best property in the neighborhood, but if you start getting bad reviews because of cleanliness, well your revenue will certainly drop.

So today we’re diving more into housekeeping, how you can stay organized and the things that you need to consider working with any housekeeper.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Richest podcast. I’m happy you’re here again.

After all these years in the short-term rental industry, one thing remains the biggest predictor of your guest reviews. That is housekeeping and your property’s cleanliness.

Small changes in your cleanliness score or your review score translate into massive differences in your revenue. I’ve gotta say that again. Small changes in your review score because of cleanliness, the number one culprit. They translate into massive changes for your short term rentals, potential and revenue.

We see in markets across the nation that the worst performing property can be earning three times less than the highest performing property with the same size property, the same size amenities, and most of that is attributed to reviews.

Now a lot of you have good housekeepers or you have good help that have the potential of ensuring that you never have bad cleanliness reviews, but you’re maybe lacking some of the organization or you maybe haven’t set the right expectations upfront with your housekeeper.

So we’ve talked about finding housekeepers before. Actually, that’s been a recurring theme throughout the last six years of this podcast because we know just how important it is. If you go back to episode 243. We have some great ways for you to find a housekeeper, but I’ve also got a new one for you because I just found a new housekeeper for one of my personal properties, and I gotta tell you, it didn’t take more than just a few minutes.

So here’s what I did. I went to Perplexity. Perplexity is an AI tool similar to chat GPT, or similar to Claude or Gemini. But it does a really good job at sifting through online websites. And I simply asked, where can I find a housekeeper in Davenport, Florida? That result.

Pulled up a Facebook forum, great place to find housekeepers and referrals. There was already a post there, someone looking for a housekeeper in Davenport, Florida. I simply copied it and reposted it with my contact information, and I got so many leads, I just couldn’t believe it. I actually had to take that post down later in the day.

Instead of include my contact information, , I included a Google form on there with some really important questions that you always need to be asking your housekeepers.

We’ll make sure you have a link to that Google form in the show notes here. But we’ll also be reviewing it in just a few minutes.

I wanna make a case for hiring your own housekeeper versus using a company. Now, this isn’t across the board. This isn’t a hundred percent, but there is a correlation in cleanliness, reviews, working with smaller providers. Versus working with bigger companies. And I’ll give you just one big example. If you are working with a property management company, a large national property management company, they exclusively work with large companies, right?

If it’s not in-house, because they need more staff, they need more backups.

But a couple challenges that come up working with companies is one, if it’s not the same person going back to your property each time, then they don’t really know if some little details are outta place. If the copy. If the coffee table was supposed to be on that side of the couch versus that side of the couch, they don’t have that eye like a individual housekeeper or a small team would have if they’re the one consistently seeing your property, and they also don’t feel as strongly about your property.

When we work with smaller housekeeping companies or individuals, they actually grow a, a sense of ownership with our property, right? They’re there, they’re the ones cleaning it, and they take pride in that.

So if you have a different person going back each time, that level of detail is a lot of times just not there.

The other thing that happens with large companies is that some of their housekeeping team. Maybe it gets overworked. If we think about it. We’ve got, most of our checkouts across the nation are usually on Sundays. Mondays, you know, people staying on the week. And of course, it really depends on the type of property.

If you have a business property, for example, well then it could be all during the week.

But the more units a property manager adds, the more housekeepers they need to add and the more systems they need to have in place to be able to coordinate that. Now we’re gonna talk about some of those systems, and I don’t wanna say that this isn’t doable, but I just want to give you the reality, the the correlation between negative reviews.

And really large housekeeping teams, and I think we can see that pretty easily if we go to tools like Air DNA and we look at some of the nation’s largest property managers, uh, like Evolve Vacation Rentals, or Red Awning, or Vac Casa, what now is Cago, right? They have really bad reviews across the board.

And as we mentioned in the beginning of this episode, the number one culprit for bad review is cleanliness.

So I already made the case for hiring smaller housekeeping teams. Or individuals, of course with the backup, they take more pride in their work, they notice more of those small little details if something is outta place, and that all leads to better reviews and it also leads to a better relationship with that person, right?

You’re in communication with them much more often than you would be a larger housekeeping company that’s got various people coming in and out. And I’m happy to say that one of the very first housekeepers I ever hired over a decade ago, over 11 years ago, is still working with me today. She still helps clean some of my short-term rentals, but she also manages all the other housekeepers for my portfolio in various cities.

And so if you’re working with an individual, you have these sorts of opportunities as well.

So if you don’t have your housekeeper yet, make sure you go back and check out episode 2 43 if you’re in the process of hiring them. Well, I promised I would give you my questions off the Google form, so here we go. This is certainly not a hundred percent comprehensive. I didn’t wanna scare people off by having too many questions, but these are the most important ones.

The first one is their preferred method of contact. So sometimes that’s on WhatsApp. A lot of times it’s just normal text message. Phone call, whatever it happens to be. Our team uses Slack on the backend. You want to ask them how big their team is, or is it just them? Are they just an individual? Do they have backup?

Do they allow for same day turnovers? How far do they live from your property? And now I’m not asking this question. To find out how close they are in case there’s an emergency they need to run back, although that’s helpful. But the idea is we have things organized beforehand, so those situations don’t arise. I’m asking this question because I wanna know how realistic it is for a housekeeper to want to come to my property every day if they’re 45 minutes away, but then there’s traffic sometimes and it takes ’em more than an hour to get to my property.

Well, they’re less likely to want to continue working for me than someone down the street, right? So ideally they don’t live too far away. And also, just a side note, most housekeeping salaries are not like the upper echelon. You know, they’re not high income earners, so sometimes they might have car troubles and repairs are really costly. So the closer they are to the property, the less they have to spend on gas, uh, and the more likely it is that they’ll stay with you for a really long time.

Do they include cleaning supplies in their charge? This one is of course, negotiable. If they do, what do they include? Sometimes cleaning companies include everything. Sometimes they include nothing. Do you have a problem cleaning up after pets? So this is important.

Not all housekeepers like to clean up after pets. Uh, if they don’t have a problem, how much more would they be expecting to charge? Now it’s my recommendation, especially if you have a lot of housekeeping options. Maybe you used one of the methods. That we mentioned in the prior episode, or by searching online these days, if you have a lot of options, you can know pretty quickly what the going rates are in your market, and I think it’s better that you set these rates.

You know, if your rate to clean your house was $200 and they say they’re okay with pets, then you say, great, we’ll be happy to pay you an extra $30 per visit. Keep in mind, we don’t allow more than two dogs.

We don’t allow cats and uh, they’re not over this certain weight size. So the more you can offer up front, the better. But of course, it is a little bit of a negotiation.

You of course need to know how much they’re gonna charge for your size of property,

and you’ll want to know how much notice they need in order to clean your property. If you’re someone that gets really last minute bookings and they’re not currently on the schedule, you don’t wanna block your calendar. Because you’re waiting for housekeeping. And so if this person is not available with short notice, then you need to have multiple options and you need to let them know that upfront.

If someone’s not available, then you’re gonna go to someone else, but you would prefer to build a long lasting relationship and work primarily just with them.

Okay. So with a housekeeper in place and with some good expectations in place, it’s really important that we manage the turnover properly. And now there’s a lot of tools out there these days that help you create checklists. There’s one called Turno that a lot of people have used. We personally use breezeway.

We create a custom checklist for every property. We require photos before and after,

and then we also take it a step further. We let them know that if a prior guest mentioned something during their stay or after their stay, or it showed up in the review, we’re gonna grab it from any of those resources and we’re gonna include that item in their next checklist. And sometimes this just pops up in the private feedback, right?

Maybe the guest checked out and they said, Hey. Love the property, but you might want to check under that guest bedroom one more time. There’s a couple little dust bunnies there. Well, we’re gonna transfer that over to our housekeepers so that they know the next time they need to double check on that. And again, this goes back to working with smaller companies or individuals versus larger companies.

Uh, of course this is helpful for anyone, but if it’s a smaller individual, they’re gonna take a little bit more pride in that and they’re not going to forget those dust bunnies again. The other thing that we do is we let them know upfront that we’re really transparent with all of the reviews, both good and bad.

So it’s always nice to receive positive feedback, right? We want to show them that we want to send it over to ’em and we do. So if there’s something that mentioned cleanliness specifically, we’re gonna send it over. Uh, and that is a feel good opportunity, but we’re also gonna send the negative feedback, which is really crucial.

And I would say if you have a housekeeper that has the same issue three times, then you need to start looking for another housekeeper.

Of course, it depends on how long they’ve been working with you, right? Uh, if there were three times back to back, that’s much different than three times over the course of three years, right?

But the more often these issues are happening, even with all the feedback, then the quicker you need to be looking for a new team member.

Remember, poor cleanliness is the number one culprit for a bad guest review, and you cannot afford to have negative reviews back to back because of cleanliness. It will lead to a massive loss in your revenue, and it could even lead to you needing to redo your listings entirely and start from scratch.

So make sure to set these expectations up front. I know a lot of housekeepers don’t like technology, but the reality is it’s not hard to use these applications. If we go back to my manager that’s been with me for over a decade, she was very resistant to using breezeway, which we currently.

But I would tell you that now she could not live without it. It shows them the schedule very cleanly. It keeps everything organized, and it really only takes a few minutes for them to understand how to use it. Uh, breezeway also has different languages, you know, so if you’re working with someone that speaks Spanish.

Then you could do that as well. So highly recommend using a tool like that. If you don’t want to handle any of this, well our team at Cosley would be happy to do it for you. We already have all these processes in place.

You can reach out to us@strriches.com. There’s a little partner with us Button, and everyone on the team at Corley would love to partner with you.

Okay, just a few more expectations. So you’ve already negotiated your rate with your housekeeper. You’ve included other potential rates for a pet, for example. Or maybe if the property is really dirty, then you pay them an extra amount. But I would leave those to a case by case basis because the reality is sometimes guests leave the property really clean, uh, and then sometimes they’re not so clean.

So it really does average out. In the middle, right? And you don’t wanna set the expectation up front that you’re gonna be paying more for every little thing.

Another thing in regards to payment is the actual time timing of your payment. So how often are you going to pay your housekeeper? How are you going to pay them? There’s lots of easy a CH transfer options available with online banks today. We use a bank called Mercury. There’s another one set up for real estate called Base Lane.

If you’re using Turno, well then they’ve got that built into their system. They do charge a little bit more for that, and turnout does require that you’re only working with housekeepers in their network. Right? And so it can be a little bit more expensive, but it can be a good option as well.

So how often are you paying them? I personally pay all of my housekeepers every other Friday

how are the supplies handled on the property? If you’re responsible for that, do you have a locked cabinet? That’s what I would suggest. They sell these little digital door locks now that just replace the knob. It’s not like a deadbolt, like the sage lock, but it has a little code right on the doorknob that you can easily set for your housekeeper to get in and out.

That way, no one needs to hold any keys or potentially lose keys. Another option these days is Amazon and Amazon ships really quickly. Now, depending on where you’re at, you could either ship directly to the property, have it ready when your housekeeper shows up, or it’s usually a little easier just to send to the housekeeper in advance and they bring it to the property for you.

Another benefit to working with smaller teams or an individual is that they can keep an eye a lot of times on the little maintenance. So maybe that’s just changing light bulbs, for example, or changing batteries in your door lock.

A lot of times they also have a preferred maintenance person that they like working with, or maybe their husband or maybe someone in their network is a handyman and they can do some of that communication for you.

So those are my suggestions for now. I hope that gave you some insight, and I hope that helps you out a little bit. I can’t stress enough the importance of having good reviews because it really affects your revenue. And again, the number one culprit for not having a good review is bad housekeeping or poor cleanliness,

and there’s multiple things that lead to that, right? It’s not just the housekeeper, but it’s also the organization and the expectations that you’ve set up front.

Your housekeeping team isn’t just cleaning. They’re protecting your reputation. They’re growing your revenue, and they’re helping you scale.

So take some action today. Audit your cleaning process and decide whether a direct hire housekeeper could be the best thing you do for your short-term rental this year.

Until next time, I hope you have a fab this week.

I just got back from the Level Up Your listing summit in Phoenix, Arizona. Some of the brightest minds in our short term rental industry space, some people doing exceptionally well. A lot of common themes throughout the week.

In this episode, I’m unpacking everything. The boldest strategies, the biggest themes, and the one theme in particular that kept coming up no matter which workshop I went into are which person I talked. In between sessions,

let’s jump into what people are actually doing at the highest level. Quick tips for you and your short-term rental portfolio. Let’s get into it.

The Level Up. Your listing is hosted by Natalie and her partner, Tatiana. Between them, they’ve got a lot of experience and different experience. One of them is a designer. One of them is an. Operator, an investor raising funds and operating some really successful short-term rentals. If you missed my episode with Natalie, you can go to her podcast, which is the No Vacancy podcast.

It was episode 1 76. There we talk about Corley, our company, and all of the things that we’re doing to operate are over 230 properties now in over 40 cities.

And if you miss the episode where I interviewed her, well, you can go back to episode 3 28 on the short-term Rental richest podcast, and you can hear more about the properties that they’re acquiring for three to 400,000 that earn annually $150,000. Make sure you check it out.

So between Tatiana and Natalie, they have an amazing following. They attracted a lot of really great speakers and sponsors and just attendance in general. There were over 300 people actively working in the industry, and as always, there’s lots of little good conversations that come up even outside the session.

So we’re gonna break all those down today.

This conference was set up a little bit differently than most the ones I attend. It was very designed forward and we know how important design is in our short-term. Rentals just happens that one of the hosts is actually a designer, so there were lots of presentations on the way people are currently designing today.

The outcomes that they’re getting with their short term rentals.

But let’s take a step back first and just talk about some of the big themes in the industry today. We’ve talked about ’em on the show before, but every time I go to a conference, it just cements them in and makes them more.

A lot of people out there today are earning less with their short-term rentals than they were a couple years ago.

There’s, of course, a lot of reasons for this. There’s way more supply than there has ever been, and competition is higher than it’s ever been. At the same time, guests expectations are higher than they’ve ever been.

But nonetheless, there are still operators that are doing very, very well owners and investors that consistently exceed the market. In fact, if we look at the numbers for any given market, there’s usually up to or even more, a 300% difference between the bottom earning property and the top earning property.

And I’m not just talking about a small, one bedroom versus a five bedroom. I’m talking about equal properties, competitive properties in the same style, same space that are performing drastically different than the others.

So that’s a major theme. There’s a lot of question marks with you out there just in terms of revenue management. We’re gonna get into that a little bit, but the reality is people are searching for ways to earn more with their properties, and that’s led a lot of people into creating. Properties that really are the destination instead of having a property that’s already in a destination.

And a lot of that requires some really good design helping you stand out. A lot of people have also taken it a few steps further and actually gone into the development arena where they’re building boutique resorts, Airbnb, resorts, glamping, you name it. It’s very trendy right now. Uh, and I would say that you gotta be careful with that because there’s just like a lot of people added short term rentals.

Well, there’s a lot of people adding these boutique type resorts, but they can be a really good opportunity.

And one of the opportunities that they have more so than sort of your typical vacation rental is they have more opportunity for branding because they are unique. And if you can build your brand, which again is one of the industry’s leading topics right now, how do we get more direct bookings and go away from Airbnb or VRBO and bring everything onto R Turf. It’s a, it’s a major, major theme today, and that’s one of the things that these boutique type experience properties have an upper hand on.

Okay, so we’re gonna jump into more depth in each of those topics, but before we do, I want to talk about how to find the best opportunities out there.

For those of you who haven’t quite taken the leap and jumped into your first short term rental, well, I’ve got a five step framework to help you get a little bit more clarity on that, and this was put together by Matt Sanderson, who runs STR iq. I’m excited to have him on an upcoming podcast in the near future, but what they do is basically break down all of your short-term rental options across the nation.

And help you identify which ones could potentially cash flow the most. Now, you don’t have to use their software. There’s lots of data sources out there, but theirs is specifically designed to help you uncover that property. But before you can even use one of these tools, you really need some clarity in your mind.

So five quick steps for you to help you find your next property or to find your first one. The first one is you need to ask yourself whether this is a hundred percent investment or if there’s going to be a personal. Component to it. Do you plan at staying at the property? Well, if you do, then that changes things drastically.

If it’s just going to be an investment, then really it comes down to the numbers, right? We look at all the numbers, we analyze them, and the numbers tell us where the best returns will be.

So number two, you need to define what Matt would call your buy box. There’s a few elements that go into this. One would be your cash on cash return. There are some markets that the purchase price is simply much too high to have a cash on cash return. The other would be your budget.

How much can you actually spend on this property? How much will you need to invest in the property to get it ready as a short-term rental?

A third element would be how far away are you comfortable operating this property? If you’ve been tuning in this show for a while, then hopefully that’s not something that discourages you. As you know, our team manages over 220 properties in over 40 cities and in multiple countries, and we’ve been doing it.

For years and years. So I hope this show has helped provide some of those tips for you to give you the confidence.

If you have been tuning in for a while and you haven’t yet left us a review on the podcast or a like or a subscribe on YouTube, if you’re finding the content helpful. Well, that really goes a long way, and I would really appreciate it.

So step number three. Hmm. Step number three, we need to verify with comps. And now we don’t want to just look at what the most potential in the market is, right? We need to be realistic. So the best way to do that is to pull comps, not just at the top tier, what we call like the 90th percentile. The properties are running better than all the others, but also at the 75th, and then the 50th percentile.

And the 50th percentile would be your average, right? If you had a hundred properties in the market. And you average out all their annual revenues, 50 percent’s gonna land you right in the middle.

Number four, you need to run the pro forma. If you haven’t heard this term before, it’s basically an analysis of the property and that accounts for everything, right? That accounts for what your mortgage will be, what your property taxes are, your insurance, your housekeeping fee, how often you expect to have turnover, your supplies, your utilities, all of the normal expenses and income that go into your short-term rental.

We’ve talked about this quite a few times. In fact, we have an episode specifically on proformas.

If you go all the way back to episode number 60 a long time ago, I know we talked about proformas and these types of analysis. You can also find a lot of helpful information on our website, attr riches.com.

So after you’ve run your analysis, the last step is to execute on the property, right? But we want to do this with confidence and one way to be more confident about a purchase is to talk with trusted advisors and talk with local professionals. So this includes your real estate broker.

This includes people in the area, property managers.

Your lenders, you need to know that, first of all, you’re able to close on the property, so always a good idea to talk to your lenders beforehand,

and I highly suggest that you find a broker that has some experience with the investment side of things versus a traditional long term. Versus a residential only broker.

If you wanna streamline a lot of that process, well you can head over to STR iq. They’ve got a lot of those steps in place for you.

All right. Let’s get into one of the biggest themes, biggest takeaways from the conference, and that was on design. There were probably, gosh, I don’t know, 15 different designers or companies. The whole thing was sponsored by Wayfair. If you haven’t considered Wayfair before for some of your furniture, I just furnished a property recently and we certainly got a lot of things from Wayfair.

So check that out. But before you go into designing your property, you really need to understand your avatar, right? Who’s staying at your property?

Designing for multi-generational families is much different than designing an inner urban city apartment for a business traveler.

You want to focus?

Here’s a few practical tips. If you’re designing your property or if you’re in the furnishing stage, focus on things that actually get used and not so much decor and things that are gonna get broken or maybe get stolen.

Anytime you’re purchasing something, keep in mind is this product going to perform well? So think the bed, the couch chairs, things get used regularly. But also, is this product or is this furniture going to photograph? Well, we know our photographs are really one of the most important pieces of getting reservations, and so it’s a great idea to know in advance what your top five or your heading photos are going to be.

These are the first photos that show up on Airbnb and all the listing sites and really put a little bit more money into what goes into the design for those photos.

Another practical tip, try not to really mix designs. So having an industrial with farmhouse or modern

Try to keep your colors somewhat consistent, maybe focus on three main colors. Of course you can add in accent walls and things like that, but if you’re walking into different rooms and the colors aren’t part of the same theme, then it just seems, it feels a little bit chaotic.

Another practical tip, if you’re going to spend more, spend more on your master bedroom, because we gotta think who’s booking these properties most of the time. Usually the parents, usually the person staying in the master bedroom, right? So make sure your linens are better there. Make sure that it’s more comfortable and that will lead to better reviews.

Another practical tip. I’ve said this a hundred times on the show before, but use white linens. Guests know that they’re clean, you can bleach them. There’s reason most all the hotels in the world are using white linens, and so should we.

Now those are some practical tips for design, but a lot of people at the conference were actually creating experiences with their properties. Versus just furnishing them. And now you gotta be careful with this because your budgets can go up extremely high. You gotta do your due diligence. Uh, and I would say this gets a little riskier.

If you guys have been tuning into the industry shows for a while than you’ve undoubtedly seen Rob Built,

he has one of the largest YouTube channels in the industry. I was fortunate to go to one of the houses that they designed recently in Scottsdale. After the conference, it was a bit of like a house party. It actually reminded me of like my high school days, but they had designed every corner of this property.

Bright walls, an amazing backyard setup. Of course, they did this knowing who their guest avatar is, but these things are not cheap. Right.

So even with an amazing design and truly knowing our guest avatar. There’s some foundational pieces that are gonna help us earn more money with our properties, right? And so let’s get into revenue management. The first thing is you have to set those expectations perfectly, and you have to have a good guest experience, which leads to good guest reviews, so you can continue to have visibility.

But with those things in place, it really becomes a story of pacing. How are you doing against the market? Are you pacing ahead or are you booking ahead of the market? Are you booking after them?

If you’re using a tool like Price Labs or Wheelhouse, then this is data that’s readily available. Of course, you need to be monitoring it closely and you need to be looking at not just this month or next month, but really your whole booking window as far out as you need to go, where people are actively making reservations.

Now if you’re booking up equally with the rest of your market and you’re in a market with lots of data, well

your historic bookings can help act as a guide, but they certainly don’t tell the future, right? We know a lot of markets have seen a lot, a big increase in supply. So the ideal thing is to have a a range in your pacing.

For example, if you’re 5% behind the market or you’re 5% ahead of the market, maybe that’s the range that you look at to decide if you need to adjust your prices or not.

I know this gets a little complicated, and again, we’ve done a lot of episodes on revenue management in the past. If you’re looking for help with your revenue management and all other aspects of your short term rental, well our team would be happy to help you out. You can head to st riches.com.

There’s a partner with US Button. I’d love to jump on a call with you personally, talk about your property and see if it makes a good fit.

All right. Moving on to branding. I know this has been a really trendy topic in the industry lately. Most all of the PMS programs out there today are offering direct booking websites, and they’re also improving them at the same time because people are trying to move away from the heavy commissions of Airbnb and booking.com, the 15 plus percent that you have to pay each time someone makes a reservation.

But getting direct bookings isn’t that simple. The more unique your property is, the easier it should be, but there’s still a strategy to it.

So I’m just gonna run through my notes. This was a presentation done by Ben Wolf who was getting amazing results with his short-term rentals. A lot of them were set up very unique properties again, so they lend themselves a little bit better to social media and capturing demand. His big point was that our direct booking engines are for capturing demand, but social media is actually what creates it. So of course you can do that across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. There’s lots of avenues today,

but it’s not something that happens overnight, and you do need to put in a lot of effort.

You’re going to need to experiment a lot. And there’s lots of other YouTube channels out there that talk about social media marketing.

And it can get really detailed, right? Identifying your conversion rates, how many people are visiting your pages, how many people are going to your direct booking website, seeing it. If they’re not booking, why are they not booking? So all this is is pretty similar to the way it is on Airbnb, right? If you pull up your Airbnb listing, you can see that there are views.

You can see how many people viewed that page. You can see how many people clicked on it. You can see how many people actually converted. And so when we take that off Airbnb, and we do that on our own, there’s a lot that goes into that. Again, the more social media you have, the better the content. The higher the chances, you’ll drive more traffic to your website.

And then once you’ve figured that out, depending on your property, you can go as far as creating paid ads. If you have a very high priced a DR or average daily rate with your property, and you’ve figured out some of the social media marketing to drive traffic to your website, well then you can calculate pretty easily.

What your paid ad spend is returning.

So there’s certainly a lot that goes into this. This is something our company is exploring as well, and as we get more deep in the weeds, we’ll surely be back here with more tips for you.

One last little quick section for any of you out there that aren’t in a great position with your short-term rental, another opportunity.

This is actually one we talked about way back on episode 257 and that’s pad split. If you’re in an area that has a ton of competition, you don’t have a way to stand out, or you’ve identified that you can’t invest more into the property and expect to earn a lot more, maybe by creating a really unique experience, or maybe by investing in social media or investing in new photos or whatever it happens to be.

Well, you could look at pad split where you still have your furnished property. Larger homes are gonna do better, six to eight bedrooms.

But this is a way to have midterm reservations. I think their average guest or midterm tenant is staying for six months plus buy the room. Right? Earn more than you would as a long-term rental, and potentially more than your short-term rental is earning right now.

So that’s a wrap for now. I hope this gave you some insight into where the market’s at. Really today. We’ve talked about these things before, but it is the reality. People are. Investing in design. They’re investing in unique experiences. They’re investing in social media marketing to drive more direct bookings and more demand, and they’re really honing in on their revenue management.

Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

If your VRBO bookings have been suffering lately, well, VRBO made a pretty big change on the back end that you might not be aware of. Today’s show. We’re gonna break down all the details.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. I’ve been traveling around again. I know you probably hear me say that quite a bit, but that’s just been my life over the last few years, and I’m not complaining. Lots of cool places out in this big, beautiful world currently in Florida where I’ve got a new property.

I’m excited to share the details with you. In some upcoming episodes, i’ll be going to another conference later this month, and excited to bring back always the latest and greatest for all of you out there.

Ditch that for, for YouTube.

Let’s go ahead and get right into it. VRBO recently changed their premier host status. This is what you could consider the equivalent of Airbnb’s Superhost status, which we know has a really big impact on your listing visibility.

So what changed? Well, they went from a portfolio wide. Status, meaning if you had more than one VRBO listing you and you achieved the status, it went to your whole portfolio. Well, now it’s just listing specific. So while you don’t get the visibility on the portfolio, you do get it on an individual listing.

Now for those of you out there that have portfolios and are thinking, ah, bummer, I no longer have the status, there’s actually a bright side to it too. Uh, if you have a property that you brought on, and unfortunately it got an early review that wasn’t so great. Before this would’ve removed the status from your whole account, but now it’s still going to give you the status on all of those great properties that deserve it.

So as of January, 2026, these changes are in place and there is a process to make sure that each of your listings qualify. We’re gonna break down exactly what those steps are. There’s actually more than one visibility layer,

And so we’ll get to that in a second as well. I’m gonna go ahead and read off my list here. The core requirements for you to achieve the premier host status, again, on the listing level, not on a portfolio level, are a booking acceptance rate of 99% or more. So yeah, basically every single reservation. You need to be accepting.

Uh, you can’t have any cancellations or the owner initiated cancellation rate has to remain zero. There’s a timeline to when they evaluate you for the status. We’ll get to that in a second. The third core component is an average review rating of 4.6 or higher, so that’s not that hard to achieve, right? In fact, if you have a 4.6 average with your properties, you’re probably not getting a lot of visibility.

You’ve probably got some operational things. Going on or some housekeeping things that you really need to get buttoned up because 4.6 in today’s world doesn’t earn you a lot of money.

The fourth core component, you need at least five reviews on VRBO to qualify. And the fifth one, your property has to have at least five bookings or 60 nights booked. So consider if you have a property that maybe has a week long rental period, you might consider shortening.

Shortening that minimum stay so you can get some more reservations up front, get the status, maintain those good reviews, and then you’ve got this status for the long run versus drying the process out for a long time and maybe earning less on the reservations. Because they had less visibility.

Now, you don’t need to meet each of these five core components every quarter. You don’t need 60 days booked. For example, every quarter VRBO is going to evaluate you every quarter, so every three months. And they’re going to look at the last 12 month period.

So you do need 60 days booked out of the last 12 month period, for example, to make sure that you get the premier host badge.

it’s pretty easy to find out if you have this badge already, if you’re looking at your public listing. Well, if you scroll down where your host badge is. It’s gonna have that status right there for you, but if you’re unsure, just log into VRBO.

You can go to the performance page, and there’s a nice little dashboard there that shows you your premier host. 

 for those of you catching the video version, while you can see the screen share that we’re sharing here in the background, real easy to find out if you’re meeting each of these five co.

Now, good news. For those of you out there that maybe don’t have a lot of reservations coming in from VRBO, there are still some milestones that you can achieve that give you more visibility.

All this information is available online, but we get the behind the scenes look sometimes because we do have an account manager now that we’re managing over 220 properties in over 40 cities. Around the us If you’ve got a property and you’re looking for a little help with it, well our team would love to chat with you.

You can go to str riches.com. There’s a little partner with us button. You’ll find some more information. We can book a time. I’d love to jump on a call with you personally to see if your property makes for a good fit.

So there’s actually three milestones. The first one gives you sort of this good status, whatever that means. It’s a little bit arbitrary, but it’s better than nothing, right? And so if you’ve met some of the core components, you do get a little bit of visibility. The second milestone is actually achieving the premier host status, but there is a third one that gives you extra visibility and you stand out more on the listings.

The way that VRBO displays these isn’t a hundred percent crystal clear, and even coming from our account manager, but for this third milestone, essentially, if you are in the top 1%, well you’re getting much more visibility and you’re going to be standing out.

All right, so let’s talk about some of the benefits. One of ’em I’ve been rattling on about already, and that’s that you get a little bit more visibility, but there are some other benefits. A very big one is that when people search on VR B’s platform, just like they search on Airbnb and filter out Superhost status.

They can now filter out Premier host status. And so if someone’s used to using the platform, they prefer VRBO and they know that they want to stay with a really good quality host and a good property, well, they can simply filter you out if you do not have the premier host status.

Another side benefit is that you do get priority support, and as much as we’d like to think that a hundred percent of all of our guests experiences are perfect and top-notch, we know that especially if you’ve been doing this for a while, that there’s going to come a time where you do need to involve support 

And getting on the phone with Airbnb or VRBO or especially booking.com is not the most pleasant experience. 

 So you do get a little bit of priority support if you are a premier host.

Now one last one, and this is a little subtle, hard to say how much impact this actually has. But VRBO does do promotions. Remember the OTAs, the online travel agencies, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do their best to market your properties so that they get booked and they earn a commission.

And so from time to time, they’ll be sending out email promotions, things like that. They can be targeted based on cities. And if you do qualify as a premier host, then you’re much more likely to be included in some of these email and marketing efforts.

Now, let’s talk about an actual takeaway for most of you that maybe don’t have the premier host status, but you are heavily on Airbnb, well, you could snooze your Airbnb calendar. For a short period of time to get this status on VRBO helping you to balance out your property across the OTAs.

Now, this might sound like a crazy thing, and obviously you don’t wanna snooze your calendar to the very last second if you’re not getting reservations. But let’s say you’re booking window, the amount of time before someone books your property is quite long and you have a longer grace period. Well, you might consider just snoozing your listing on Airbnb again, if you’re already doing well on Airbnb so that you get more visibility on VRBO 

Because what happens is if you’re primarily booked on one channel. Then you’re very likely gonna continue to stay, booked more on that channel, and you may be missing out on some big opportunities if your calendar’s always booked, which is a great thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t leave any opportunity to get bookings on other platforms.

So just a quick tip for any of you out there that are looking for a little more diversification and remember, VRBO isn’t an amazing OTA in every market. It started as vacation rental by owners, so it is predominantly in vacation rental areas.

Of course, we always recommend that you’ve always got your property on VRBO, especially if you’re in the US South America, not so much Europe and those places, not so much. But if you’re in the us, especially if you’re in a vacation rental market, having the premier host status can go a long way to driving your visibility 

So this might not seem like a really big deal, especially if you’re not getting a lot of bookings on VRBO, but according to our account manager, these Premier host status can significantly boost your visibility, so it’s worth taking a look at. Until next time, I hope that gave you a little bit more insight and have a fab this week.

​Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. If you tuned in last week, you know we dove into some really important questions, questions that we received from you, the audience in over 130 countries now,

I know these are questions that a lot of you are thinking, but you haven’t actually asked them. So today we’re gonna dive into part two of our q and a series. 

stay tuned as we dive into all of that in today’s show.

Well, first off, yeah, I just wanna welcome everyone. Uh, it’s been a really long time since we had some, some group calls like this, and I’m excited to say we’re gonna be doing these more regularly. We actually have a couple of our own partners that have joined Corely on the call. but lots of questions just in regards to everything.

And yeah, we’ll just jump into some of these questions one by one.

Let’s see. Uh, Kelly Addington asked, how are you leveraging ai? Do you have local inspectors? Is every home I inspected by an employee prior to guest arrival? What systems, tools, tech do you use? So yeah, lots of tech. Questions because there’s lots of tools and because it’s changing really quickly. so I mentioned one way that we’re leveraging it already is in guest communication, in terms of inspections.

So we use a program called Breezeway that’s designed for housekeeping turnovers. it allows us to create custom checklists. It also allows us to al to ask or require photos. and now we used to. We really highly encourage all of our car to join us, to take photos of every space of the property, both before and after.

 and I know, yeah, there’s some times where, you know, the photo’s not gonna show the little hair that’s like in the corner behind the bed, under the pillow or whatever. but what it does do is reinforce to the housekeeper. the importance, and there’s a couple other things that we do with housekeepers and terms of technology is, most of the time, our guests leave us great reviews.

Occasionally there’s something that pops up in the private feedback. maybe it is that. There was a little hair under the bed, in the corner or a dust bunny or whatever. and so that doesn’t go out on their public review, but it does go out on their private review. so one of our most recent updates, which I’m really excited about, is sharing that information with our housekeepers, uh, the private feedback.

 and this will be coming through the, the tool that we use in breezeway. and let’s say someone has like a, a portfolio properties, uh. And it just becomes kind of hard to keep track of if, or sending manually. And so instead, we have our housekeepers showing up now and before they go to clean that property, they can see that there were some prior feedback.

 so that’s one of our most recent ways, that we’re excited about again, requiring photos. In the very near future, we’re gonna be using AI to, to actually, monitor the photos. so that’ll be cool. Do you have local inspectors? we work with a lot of different partners in a lot of different places, and everyone has a little bit of a different setup.

Again, Sally, you know, we’re the backend core operations. but our partners have their own on the ground teams. housekeeping and maintenance. some of them do local inspections, some of them do not. some of them do inspections. Randomly, you know, so not every property. and so yeah, I guess that one’s all across the board.

 why would someone need to do an inspection? It’s really because the housekeeper didn’t do a good job, right? Or they, they left something behind or they forgot something. And so if you’re constantly having to do inspections for the same housekeeper and you’re constantly finding things. Then you need to have a talk with your housekeeper.

 and maybe you need to make a change, a change there. so I guess that would be my, my advice. let’s see. What systems tools do you use? Yeah, so we use breezeway for a lot of that coordination. also, yeah, for all housekeeping, checklists, everything like that.

 This is from Justin Warren. How do you find local boots on the ground support? What tools and resources do you use to identify and source local help? So I’m currently in, in Florida, in Orlando, and maybe what you could call the vacation rental capital of the world.

Uh, they have 75 million people visit here every year. Which is, is a lot. Right. Um, and so this is an incredibly competitive market, um, and actually just acquired a property here. Um, well, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Uh, it, our decision was to use it for personal use because we do spend a lot of time in South America, and so this is a bit of a, a stop over for us.

It’s, it’s got a direct flight basically to, to all the places where we spend time. Um, and so we’re in the process of furnishing this property. I’m, I’m, I’m in it today and, uh, we need a housekeeper. And so I used a tool called Perplexity. There’s lots of ways to find housekeepers, right? And the more short-term rentals there are on the market, the more options you’re likely going to have.

And so there’s a lot here. Uh, and I use a tool called Perplexity. Actually. It’s, it’s an AI tool like Chat, GBT or Gemini. And I just asked it. I said, where can I find a housekeeper for Orlando? Uh, and it found a Facebook forum so Perplexity can search websites for you. And on the Facebook forum, it was specifically for housekeepers, and there was a post there of someone that had already asked.

About housekeepers in Orlando. And so there were contacts there. So I sent a few text messages, uh, and then I made my own post and I said, Hey, my name’s Tim. I got a property, you know, message me if, if you’re interested. And I’m not kidding, but my phone just started ringing and ringing and for like, I actually deleted the post at the end of the night.

I edited it, I created a form where they could enter their information if they’re interested, so I could organize everything better. Um, that’s me kind of just being really techie. But, uh, long story short, we have lots of housekeeping contacts and literally a, you know, a day. And I, and it took me five minutes, like from finding that post to posting on Facebook.

Uh, it, it only took that long. And that is a national group. I think there were 160,000 people in it or something like that. So that’s one option. Uh, and you can do that for maintenance also. And, and a good tip is that a lot of housekeepers, um, that are professionals that are doing that for a living have maintenance contacts.

And they often have maintenance contacts that they prefer working with. Uh, and so it’s a really good idea to just ask them. Um, so referrals is a really big one. You know, when I, when we bought this property, uh, I asked my real estate agent, you know, Hey, do you know any local housekeepers? Do you know any local handyman?

And he wants the property to go well for me. And, and, and that’s what he specializes in. So of course he had some contacts as well. Um, so I would say that. Online, you know, finding people is, is, uh, easier than it’s ever been before. Now we’re, we’re gonna do a podcast, uh, in the very near future on finding housekeepers.

So I think I will save a little bit, uh, for that podcast so we can dive in deeper because there’s a lot of questions that you want to ask the housekeepers to make sure that. You’re all aligned, um, and that they’re going to work well for your property. So thanks Justin. Uh, great question. Really important one.

Let’s see. Uh, we’ve kind of gone through ai, uh, we’ve gone through some revenue management. We’ve gone through some task management and, um, some PMS questions. Um, here is. Another one from John Hicks. Thank you, John. Uh, we have had great difficulty obtaining homeowners insurance that covers both fire and liability.

Most insurance carriers were, uh, we’ve spoken to, don’t offer liability insurance because they consider short-term rentals too risky. We ended up getting a separate policy for liability. Um, okay. Sounds like, uh, John’s in California. That’s where I’m from originally. We’ve had. Yeah, so some places are tougher than others.

Uh, you know, California has obviously had lots of of wildfires, uh, and. Similarly, you know, the East Coast, Miami, Southern Florida have had lots of hurricanes, the Gulf area, and that’s made insurance really difficult for those places. There are some primary short-term rental lenders. Proper insurance is one, uh, safely, maybe doing short-term rental insurance.

There’s another one called Generality, uh, that’s been around for a long time. Insurance is one of those ones where you really just have to kind of dig in and research and, and yeah, it has gotten a lot more difficult. So, um, I, I would say that it’s very important that you are doing your due diligence and make sure that your policy coverage, the short-term rental, because there are lots of things, you know, most traditional insurance policies do not cover short-term rentals.

Uh, and even if your agent says that they do. If it’s not in writing, when push comes to shove, they, uh, they’re not going to enforce it. Right. So I think John, maybe for a little bit of help, you could try using an AI browser tool like this tool perplexity, which can search websites for you. And you could put in your exact situation, I have a property in California, this is the address.

Uh, you know, just give it all the context that you’ve given here and. It could help you find some resources. Um, but yeah, I don’t have an easy answer for that one. That that has gotten more, more difficult.

All right, lots of good questions here. Um. Let’s go with Joanna Woods. Uh, she says I’m about to onboard property number five. Awesome. Congrats Joanna. Uh, and the goal is 15 by the end of the year. Wow. Okay. That’s a big, that’s a lot. Uh, I’d like to know what you had to change to cope with more properties and how you go about employing the right people when you get to that point.

Great question. Um, well, if you go from five to 15 properties, you’re increasing all your operat operations by 300%, right? I mean, there’s literally three times more things that you’re going to need to do. Um, they don’t always happen at the same time. Uh, maybe you’re in a seasonal market. And so for part of the year things are quiet, but then the rest of the year they’re not.

Uh, that creates challenges for hiring. Hiring people and Yep. I went through these challenges before and a lot of our partners have, have joined us, uh, for this reason. Uh, because unfortunately at a smaller scale it doesn’t make financial sense most of the time. It depends on your average daily rates. You know, if you have some very luxurious properties, then you can afford it a lot easier, but majority of this make financial sense.

To hire a full team. Now I say a full team. A lot of people’s natural progression is to hire a virtual assistant. It’s a great option. That’s what I did. Um, but we have to set the right expectations. Um, if you’re expecting that virtual assistant to be on call, you know, seven days a week, or, you know. All day long, then it’s not realistic.

And you’ll probably see some churn. You know, they’re, they’re probably not gonna stick with you. The more properties you add, of course, um, the more work they’ll have. If, if, if, uh, you know, it is, it is manageable, but you do have that. You can’t have that churn if you don’t have the right expectations. Um, and then of course you have to train them, right.

There are a lot of VAs now available. You know, we’ve high, our, our team is completely virtual. Um, so we’ve got team members in the Philippines, in Eastern Europe who helps us with our content here right now is in South Africa. We have people in, uh, south America. Um, my partner’s Canadian. I mean, we’re based all over the place.

So that is one of the great things today is that you can. You can find people all over the world now, uh, but you still have to train them, right? Um, and part of training is having the experience to, to train them, you know? So depending on how long you’ve been managing the properties, you’ve got a lot of these things figured out.

But when you’re adding properties really quickly is what we found is there’s, there’s just a lot more to do and sometimes the training gets overlooked. Um, it’s not realistic to expect your VA to also be doing your revenue management. Uh, although a lot of people do this, um. But are their properties actually optimized?

Probably not. You know, uh, not saying that that doesn’t exist, but there’s basically, there’s, there’s quite a few roles to fill there, right? You need multiple receptionists to cover all the different shifts. If, if, you know, depending on how much time you’re still staying involved, um, if you’re working on all the different OTAs, they’ll all have different policies.

And so. There’s quite a bit there, but, uh, I would say the natural progression, Joanna, is to hire a va, uh, or to hire someone on the backend that, that can help with operations like that. Um, you know, like, like Cordley for example. Sorry for the, sorry for the plug there. Um, but great to hear you’re expanding quickly.

That’s awesome. Uh, let’s see here. How much time do we have? Okay. Another 15 minutes or so. Does anyone have any questions on anything that I’ve, that we’ve covered so far?

Be shy. Feel free to speak up. Can you speak more about what Cosley does? Yeah, sure. I love talking about our company. So, um, Cosley, uh, I mean the idea. Behind our name is that we’re this core operating center behind all of our partners properties. Um, and we’re handling the revenue management. We handle the technology, we handle the distribution, putting the properties on different listings, um, and we handle all the guest communications and everything like that.

Um, but we do it under our partner’s accounts, so we don’t actually own your account. You know, if, if things, if you want to sell the future for whatever reason you didn’t like working with us, then you can part ways. And that’s pretty different than a lot of traditional property managers. Uh, and then we are virtual, and so we do all that at a, at a discounted, um, rate.

So that’s kind of in a, in a nutshell, um, happy to jump on with anyone. Um. You can email me at, uh, or go to our website@atcorley.com and we can jump on a call. Uh, let’s see here. We did get quite a few questions on specific. Property scenarios. And so I’m gonna, I’m gonna skip those ones for now. Um, here’s another question from Mark and Jessica, do you still feel that a one to two bedroom property is, is the sweet spot?

So yeah, if Mark and, uh, if you guys have been. Following along the podcast for a long time. That’s where I started with a lot of my short-term rental portfolio. And things have definitely changed. And so yeah, this is, this is good. Why don’t we get into some industry sort of updates where, where things are at with the market.

Um, there was another question from, uh, Al that just says, to be or not to be in the short term rental game today, you know, uh, Airbnb bust. Is that a reality? So when I got started with short term rentals 11 years ago now, um. I was coming over from the long-term rental investment world and I had been focused on long-term rentals, but I realized that a lot of long-term rentals worked well as short-term rentals and they made significantly more revenue.

And so that’s what I did. But a lot of people have done that, uh, and the easiest properties to get into. Are the ones with the lowest barriers, the the ones that are least expensive, the ones that have more financing options, uh, and a lot of times those are the one and two bedrooms. And so what’s happened?

Well, as people discovered the returns with these smaller properties. The returns have gone down, and that’s just how the economy works, right? Uh, people chase higher returns until those returns go, go lower and lower, uh, to the point where someone will only continue renting a short term rental if the ex additional work that they’re putting into the property.

Is justified by the additional income that they’re making versus a long-term rental, which would be a lot less, lot less time. Um, now I don’t wanna lump all one and two bedrooms into a single group, uh, because there are one and two bedroom, uh, luxury cabins that are completely unique. Uh, and then there are the inner city one and two bedrooms, and those are totally different.

I mean, all of it. Really comes back to supply and demand. Like how many options does someone have and how different is your property? And so the, the latest conference I was at had a, um, a session on luxury properties like ultra luxury properties, and they’re doing very well. They’re doing very well. Uh, the one and two bedroom sector.

In heavily supplied areas, like bigger cities are not doing well. Uh, and from my personal experience, I, I, I can confirm that, you know, I have a lot of, uh, properties like that, that have seen market increases by 300%. And yes, I’m still operating above the market, but the market’s been going down. So I’m earning less money, but I’m earning more than the market.

Uh, and I have, um. Well, I’m actually selling a property without that short term rental, uh, to roll into some other funds or into some other projects. And so that’s just the nature of the game. Uh, it’s been over a decade and you really gotta make sure that where you’re buying, you’re comfortable with. Now there’s a lot of side benefits to short term rentals, right?

A lot of people are investing today purely because of the tax benefits, um, where you can get bonus depreciation, check with your CPA, of course. Uh, but ways to. Materially participate with your short-term rental, where you can use those deductions against your, your ordinary income. So if you’re W2 earner, airline, pilot, doctor, whatever it happens to be, uh, you can get some really significant tax gains and that could make it worth it by itself, even if the property’s not not cash flowing.

Um, so to get back to your question, yeah, one or two bedrooms still a sweet spot. It depends, uh, but in general, if it’s a commodity type property where they’re very similar, then I would say no. Uh, but that could also, you know, that goes for three, four, or five bedrooms. If there’s lots of them, then I would say I.

Say no. Uh, we can get that data today by going to air DNA and looking at supply and demand. So they have a really handy chart that says you can put in whatever city submarket that you want. You can see how many properties have been added. They go back three years. Uh, and in lots of these places you can see that the markets have added hundreds or thousands of units.

Now, that alone doesn’t mean that it’s a bad place to invest in. You’ve gotta look at one other piece. And the other piece is your average daily rate and your occupancy, or if you combine those two things, that’s what we call RevPAR. Uh, the total revenue, essentially that the property’s earning. And so if we’ve seen a market that’s increased substantially in supply.

It’s also increased in RevPAR then that’s fair game. Uh, and you can also sort that supply chart out by bedroom count. So you could look at one bedrooms, you could look at two bedrooms, uh, and they all operate a little bit differently within a market. Um. It’s interesting. I’m here in Orlando, you know, and I did a fair amount of research, uh, before jumping in here.

Again, this was not a pure investment decision for us. We’re, we’re gonna be staying here personally, and so wasn’t expecting to do, uh, do that well. Um. But there are not a lot of one bedrooms here. You know, Orlando is a place where families come to go to Disney or go to Universal Studios or all these different places, and they want multiple bedrooms and a lot of times multi-generations, you know, uh, multiple families staying in the same property, but there’s not a lot of one bedrooms.

Uh, and so a place here, you know, that could be a good option. Um, and of course, you know, one bedrooms. Two bedrooms are cheaper to furnish, there’s less furniture to put in there. And so all that goes into this equation. Uh, and the numbers ultimately are what, tell us if it’s a good investment or not. So quite a lot there, hopefully that, that, um, helps a little bit.

Uh, and kafa hopefully that helps answer your question, you know, to be or not to be in the short term rental gain. Uh, for me, my personal experience. Long-term rentals do not. I mean, it’s very rare. It’s, it’s much more difficult to find a long-term rental that cash flows versus a short-term rental. Uh, it just, versus, you know, years ago when prices were lower and interest rates were also lower.

Uh, it’s just incredibly challenging now to find long-term rentals. That makes sense. And so, should we be in the short-term rental game? It depends. Um. If you’re chasing higher returns, then there’s more opportunity still. Um, but it doesn’t mean that opportunity’s gonna be there forever. And then of course.

Performance, how we operate the property is a huge, huge driver in how well the property does. I mean, you can literally have, I say this all the time, but you can literally have two properties right next to each other and one the other one, even though they’re pretty much the same as a short-term rental, because one has much better reviews, they’re on all the platforms.

They have an amazing guest experience. Uh. It’s not like that in the long-term rental space, right? And so we do have an opportunity to operate our properties as best possible to o to, to maximize them as best possible. Um, and as long as those things are happening, then I think there’s much more opportunity than there is with traditional long-term rentals.

Hopefully that answers that. Let’s see, I think we got another question in the chat here. Uh. Are your services offered in Tulsa? So, yeah, we’re, we’re virtual Paul, uh, we’re, you know, we can be in any city and we have data and on literally every single property in the world, um, that’s on Airbnb or VRBO. So, uh, we can be in any property that, that, uh, we need to, uh, what is.

Uh, let’s see, here’s one from Lindsay. What is something you cons, Lindsay ar What is something you constantly have to educate your clients on regarding the industry? Um, yeah, good one. Uh, one thing that causes a lot of confusion for someone just getting started is around housekeeping, as we know.

Housekeeping fees used to be charged separately. Uh, looks like we just got four minutes, so we will take this as the last question, but this has been really great. There’s lots of, lots of good questions here and lots that I didn’t get to. So looking forward to doing this again. Um, but some common confusion around housekeeping.

So it used to be that housekeeping piece showed up in our listings when you booked an Airbnb. You had, you know, $500 for the reservation, a hundred dollars and $150 for a housekeeping fee, it was $650. It’s not like that anymore. It’s now just $650. Right? That’s what the guest sees. That’s the total reservation cost.

Exactly the same way the hotel industry works and has always worked. You know, they’ve never charged a separate housekeeping fee. A lot of people, when they get started with a short-term rental, look at their housekeeping expenses and use that. Uh, what they’re going to charge for their housekeeping fee.

Uh, but that can really mess with your potential to get your property booked. Um, and I know housekeeping costs have gone up, you know, costs in general have gone up, right? Inflation, everything’s more expensive than it used to be. Um, but we have to look at the total reservation price. And so we don’t wanna be charging a housekeeping fee again that the guest hasn’t seen, but it’s raising that average reservation price.

To a point where no one’s gonna book your property because maybe your reservation or your total cost for the reservation is now 10% more than your neighbor. And if you’re in a really competitive market, you’re not gonna get booked. That’s just how, how it is. And so that’s something that constantly comes up, at least with, with new owners, uh, that join us, is that unfortunately.

Your costs on the housekeeping, uh, don’t impact what we can charge a guest and expect to get booked. And I’ll add just one quick last one here, um, before we jump off. That’s similar. So a lot of you that have nice vacation rentals or in very typical vacation rental markets. You charge damage waivers, uh, instead of collecting a deposit.

And those damage waivers can range from 50 to a hundred dollars. That’s charged to the guest. If you’re with a company like Evolve Vacation Rentals, for example, they make it mandatory. Uh, and they also collect the fee from what I understand. So, but it does price, uh, and if you’re in a. A copy type property where let’s just say you’re renting for $125 a night.

It’s a low season, the market’s hardly occupied, but then you tack another a hundred dollars on or $75 for a image wave. And so a two night reservation goes from $250 to $325. You just significantly raise the total cost of that reservation. And again, if you’re. In a competitive market, it’s very unlikely that you’re gonna get booked.

Um, so I think that’s a common misconception is our costs, uh, they should drive our investment decisions, but they shouldn’t drive our pricing decisions with our guests. Um, because if they’re not, if they’re not calculated properly, it basically means that your, your property’s not gonna earn, uh, as much money as it should.

So. That was great. Thank you everyone, uh, for joining. I can’t believe I’ve been babbling for an hour already, but, uh, hopefully you found some value in that. Uh, lots of good questions. We’ve got lots still on our list that are saved here. Um, and. Yeah. Thank you for joining and, and look for, we look forward to doing this again, so we will, we’ll send out some reminders and if you do have any questions, please reach out to us.

Uh, you can go to corley.com, CRZ y.com and uh, look forward to seeing everyone next time. Take care.

Well, welcome everyone. I’m glad you’re here today. My name’s Tim Hubbard. I’m the CEO of Cosley. Also the host of the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast, where a lot of you may have found us through. There’s a lot of questions in the short-term rental space and we talk with managers and owners and investors.

Every single day. And we also manage over a couple hundred properties. And so we’ve got a lot of insights and I’m looking forward just to having a casual conversation around the questions that you’ve already submitted.

So let’s go ahead and jump into it.

Well, first off, yeah, I just wanna welcome everyone. Uh, it’s been a really long time since we had some, some group calls like this, and I’m excited to say we’re gonna be doing these more regularly. We actually have a couple of our own partners that have joined Corely on the call. but lots of questions just in regards to everything.

And yeah, we’ll just jump into some of these questions one by one. And I guess, yeah, before we get started, for anyone that I haven’t met before, my name’s Tim Hubbard. I’m the the CEO and Co-founder of Cosley uh Cosley. Our name comes from this idea of being your core operating center on the back end of all your short-term rentals. So I. You know, we’re making the pricing decisions.

Uh, we’re handling the guests, we’re handling task management. Uh, and excited to say we work with a lot of partners now in over 40 cities, which also gives us a lot of really good insight. And so along with our partners properties, uh, my properties, we’ve got some real world advice. Um, and, excited to share that today.

So, why don’t I. Just start off with this first one that has to do with pricing, and this came from Mark, uh, DaVita. Thanks for submitting this. It says, do you have any experience with hospitable Dynamic pricing tool? I currently use Price Labs, so for those of you don’t know, hospitable is a PMS program.

Uh, actually, I think I interviewed their, their founder, uh, not too long ago on the podcast. What is my experience with their dynamic pricing tool? Well, I can’t say that I have personal experience with their tool, um, but I know every PMS essentially has a dynamic pricing tool.

And why do they have it? Because. Dynamic pricing is an essential now, um, and a lot of the property management software companies have realized that their users are not using a dynamic pricing tool. So if you signed up for Hospitable, for example, you can hospitable, can see if you’re connected to Price Labs.

And if you’re not, then they wanna sell you the pricing tool. That’s just how it works. They want to, they want to get more from all their current users. Um. Price Labs only does dynamic pricing and that’s all they’ve ever done. Uh, and so for me, a company that’s focused specifically on one thing and doing that thing very well is usually always gonna have a better outcome at that one thing.

But we also use some other data pricing tools and there’s some. There’s some challenges with dynamic pricing tools. Uh, I also had the founder Price Price Labs on the podcast, so you guys can go back and check that one out.

But some of the main challenges with revenue management that we’ve identified is first of all. The data’s not a hundred percent accurate, so it’s scraped data, uh, meaning that they look at your Airbnb listing or VRBO listing. Most of these platforms are only looking at that data,

So the first thing is that the data’s not a hundred percent scraping means that they’re looking at your calendar, they’re seeing what your price is. They’re scraping that data and if your calendar becomes blocked, then they assume that you rented that night. Uh, but we all know, uh, at least about those that have been in the space.

There are lots of reasons why we block our calendar. Maybe, uh, there was a maintenance issue, maybe, you know, whatever it happens to be. You know, there’s a list of reasons. Maybe we’re using it personally for like two months. Uh, and so. That data is skewed. And, and that’s the same for Price Labs.

That’s the same for Wheelhouse, that’s the same for, um, really any dynamic pricing tool, air DNA. So what we like to do internally is we like to look at all the data we have access to, to make a decision. The more data we have, the more confident we can be with it. So I hope that helped answer that question a little bit, um, while we’re on the pricing topic.

A couple other things that we’ve noticed that are lacking in the dynamic pricing tools. For one, they don’t account for your review scores. I know we got lots of questions today on reviews as well. Uh, and rightly so. They are one of the main points to driving your visibility for your property. Uh, and we know that more visibility with our property means more people are looking at it and more people are booking it, which means the property, should be earning more money.

Um, and so to have a dynamic pricing. Strategy that does not incorporate that is a pretty big, pretty big miss. , Excited at Sly, we’ve got a tech team with us now. We’re, uh, bridging a lot of these gaps, and so that’s one of the things that we incorporate also a brand new property.

If you have a brand new property that just entered a market and it has no reviews and your competition has 55 star reviews, that’s different, right? So your pricing has to constantly be changing. so highly recommend using a pricing tool.

Uh, and then I’ll just leave you with one last. Flaw that we’ve found with revenue management and a lot of the current management practices is that it does a really, it does a good job at adjusting your daily price. Right. You know, just like an airline, if there’s an event in town, uh, if it’s a, a weekend versus the weekday, if someone’s booking five months out from now versus right now, , it’s adjusting all those prices, you know, based on market data and demand, but it’s adjusting.

Based off a base price. That’s what Price Labs calls it, a base price. So you launch a property and you say, yeah, I think my property should earn $200 a night. That is the base price at which the dynamic tool is, is adjusting it every day, uh, either up or down. But if your base price isn’t right. Then that means you’re adjusting off like a faulty base.

Right? And so the way that we account for this is by looking at market data and anyone using Price labs, anyone using their DNA, uh, or the tools out there, you can get access to market data. And if you are getting booked up much faster than your market 

, you’re probably not priced high enough, right? And then the opposite is true. If the market’s getting booked and you’re not getting booked, then your prices are probably too high. Uh, and so we look at those things and we adjust that base price accordingly.

Again, all based off, off market data, um, that is really our. Our benchmark, you know, for how a property is done. And if you’re in a market where there’s not a lot of data, then there’s a lot of testing that goes on, right? But again, you have to be adjusting that base price to truly know if you’re maximizing prices, or not.

Uh, of course if you have historical data, that’s always a big help too.

We’ve got some other pricing questions here. Here’s one from Ann says, how far do you turn on your dynamic pricing? how far out do you turn it on? So our dynamic pricing is turned on for all of our available nights.

Uh, we wouldn’t wanna have our property open for the next 12 months, for example, and only have dynamic pricing turned on for 10 months. Um, so that’s a pretty easy one. We wanna make sure it’s, it’s turned on. All the time.

, This one’s from Mohammed. Uh, I want to learn about revenue management.

Um, well, it is, uh, it is a bit of a study. Um, you know, it didn’t used to be that way, but it should be that way, you know, in a hotel. It’s the second highest paid position after the general manager, the person that runs the hotel, for example. Um, but we know, like in the airline industry, I mean this, this is where we see dynamic pricing going.

We see it all being run by machines, right? I mean, you don’t have someone at American Airlines that’s like, ah, I’m gonna. I’m gonna add a 5% discount on my Dallas to Charlotte flight today. Uh, it’s all pulled off from data, right? And of course that’s, that’s really, really complex. These dynamic pricing tools are allowing us to do a lot of these things easier.

But at the end of the day, um. Algorithms that can act accurately predict all this based off information is where the, where the industry’s headed. Um, so if you’re not using dynamic price right now, it’s a huge advantage to jump on those tools. Uh, if you do jump on it, uh, there is a lot to learn.

You know, these, these tools have a lot of it built in themselves, but make sure that you’re keeping account for some of the things that those tools don’t, currently incorporate.

Okay, I think that’s, that’s a fair amount on pricing. 

 there are a lot of guest management, uh, questions. Um, so, you know, there’s really three parts to having an optimum property. we have to have a really good listing, one that stands out. we have to have really good pricing, but if we have a really good listing and we have really good pricing, all the things we just talked about, but we don’t have.

Good guest management, then your property’s not gonna do well, unfortunately. So guest management is critical. I think a core component to starting with that is setting the right expectations, right? So we don’t wanna advertise something in our property that’s, that’s not there. if the backyard does not look great.

People are still gonna see the backyard when they check in your property. So, we always encourage everyone to represent their property exactly as it is. Doesn’t mean you need to put the backyard photos like your header photo, of course. but we wanna make sure we have it in there.

 this question came from, Beth Russell. she said she has one property. what if any PMS should I use. Well, that’s a good question. with one property, you know, the, the need for PMS is, is a lot less than, you know, even with two properties. I always highly recommend using technology because it helps us, it helps us create better guest experiences, be more efficient.

I worked my, my prior life, uh, I worked for a software company in a different industry with, um, automotive shops. And w and I sold business management software similar to what you, you would see in A PMS. The software I worked with helped manage the businesses and what I found consistently, the ones that really embraced technology.

they had better customer experiences, so in our case, guest experience, they made more money, and they were less stressed out and everything was more efficient. So I highly recommend using, a tool. Uh, there’s several PMSs that can work really well for smaller amounts of properties. Hospitable is one that’s kind of catered towards, smaller portfolios.

Host away and Guesty are probably two of the biggest ones in the industry right now. Um, there are new ones popping up that promise. A lot of AI technology, which we’ll get to that in a second too. That’s another common theme that came up. but the reality is none of them are perfect. Right. just coming back to the original question on using, hospits dynamic pricing tool, they built that tool to accommodate.

Better tool, basically. And so all of these PMS programs are trying to do that with every, every feature. we internally used to use guestie Great program. we currently use Host Away, which we feel is one of the leading software programs. I mean, they’re valued over a billion dollars. They’ve raised over $500 million.

 and so they’ve got a lot of, Resources to continue adapting their, their software. But any of those would, would be good. And, and the main things that those are helping with are channel management, right? To help you get on all these different OTA platforms, which is a really big piece of your performance with the property,

So I would check out any of those.

 here’s one from Laura Lopez says, are you still using Notion? At your pretty database, please share how it’s used. So, uh, Laura I would imagine is probably a long time podcast listener. ’cause I’ve pretty much talked about everything I was doing in my personal portfolio and, this notion episode came out a long time ago.

The answer is no. we do not use Notion as our property database, although I do think notion, for any of of you that don’t know, it’s essentially a program that allows you to organize all your notes, all your data, your video, your links, your files, everything that you can imagine in, in lots of visually pleasing ways.

 and they’ve branched out to connect with all kinds of other software, but, they’re not designed specifically for short-term rentals. Uh, and because we manage a whole lot of short-term rentals, it’s imperative that we have our information a hundred percent accurate.

And so we currently use a program called Conduit, that houses, Well, we’re building our own internal database, I guess is the, the long story short. we do have developers on our team now, and, the reason that we’re building our own internal database is because we do use multiple programs in the industry.

Which we think that any serious operator has to be doing. That kind of goes back to that idea of using, using the best tools. but those tools don’t all fully integrate all of the information with each other. so Hostway, for example, is a PMS that integrates with the OTAs or the online travel.

Agencies like Airbnb or booking.com. but it doesn’t actually integrate a hundred percent of the information. and then we’re using this tool I mentioned called Conduit, which is an AI tool that helps us with some guest messaging. And, it also stores required information for property, but it’s slightly different than what’s in the property management software.

So hopefully I’m not losing people here. But the idea here is that. Each of these tools has its own data that it needs, and it’s not all the same. So we’re basically building our own central database. and you could do this with notion still, I mean, if you’re managing, a smaller amount of properties, notion has a lot of flexibility, to track information properly.

 so nope, not using that anymore. we’ve brought things in-house, but I still love that program. it’s, I use it every single day.

So let’s see what else we have on guest management. Jenna Jacobson best reservation management system to handle guest communication. Um, so this is something that’s, that’s changing. it’s changing because AI’s entered the space, right? And one of the things that AI is excelling at.

More so in any than any other industry is customer support. and I know a lot of us may have the idea of like really bad chat bots, or entering, you know, customer support with like Comcast and getting an AI agent that asks the same question like 10 times. That’s not the reality today. Reality today is that there are.

Really, really good LLMs or language learning models, that can answer questions a lot of times better than, than humans can more consistently, you know, they don’t forget things. They can access unlimited amounts of data. and so in terms of guest management with messages. It used to be a PMS, so you know, hostway or hospitable you would use to help you manage those messages.

And that’s still a really good tool. But most of those are not as developed with ai, as. Tools built specifically for customer support or guest support. they have what you would call automations, you know, so they have ways to automate check-in instructions, for example. or they could automate, a request for review, but we know that those automations don’t fit every guest equally.

 let’s just say your check-in time is 3:00 PM and. The guest doesn’t arrive till midnight. Maybe they have a late flight or something like that. If you use a programmed automation, maybe it was set to send a follow up at 8:00 PM to say, Hey, Josh, just wanna make sure you checked on the property.

Okay, but they already sent you a message that said they weren’t showing up till midnight. Well, that doesn’t look that great, right? and that’s something that most. PMS programs are still not able to accurately, handle, because they haven’t involved all the AI yet. So with AI it can read the messages and see, oh yeah, Josh said he is coming at midnight.

It ends it at 12:30 AM So there’s just so much more flexibility with ai, uh, to the point where we don’t use our PMS for messaging anymore. the internal tools and host away, we do not feel our nearly as, as good as the ones that we’re using outside.

In a tool called Conduit. and so there are a lot of AI tools being developed specifically for the short-term rental industry.

 one of the big promises that you’ll see is that they automate 95% of all your guest communication. You know, you can set up a property, you turn this thing on, it knows everything. But we know that that’s not the truth. there’s lots of situations where we need humans involved, to.

Handle tougher decisions. maybe there’s information that a guest asks that you don’t have stored in your database, so there’s no way for it actually to answer. all these things we handle on the backend through escalations. You know, we have, we spend hours and hours literally every single day, adjusting this, testing this.

And just the side of testing it is really challenging. So, um, we test with my properties, which is nice. I know not everyone has, test properties around. but we do that. We have quality control, and we’re just constantly, constantly, messing with it. AI programmers have promised that.

Yes, maybe they do a really good job at sending the basic information, like, you know, Hey, what’s the wifi password? Or, what’s the code to get into your property? but where they don’t automate things is. When you have complex workflows, so let’s say just as an example that you wanna allow early check-ins at your property.

We know, basically everyone asks for an early check-in, right? And basically everyone asks for a late checkout. I’m guilty. I do it as well, whether I’m at a hotel or a short-term rental. But there’s a lot that goes into that. first of all, we need to make sure the property’s available, if it’s available.

Has it been cleaned? Did we just have someone check out? how far in advance does the guest actually wanna check in? Maybe it’s like eight hours in advance, where. It’s justified for us to charge them extra and the guests would be willing to pay extra. but then how much do we actually charge the guests?

 do we charge them on as a percentage of what the nightly rate would be? Or do we charge them on like an hourly basis? So you can see how some of these workflows get really, really complex, and these are everyday things like literally everyone asks for, a check-in and, and maybe your process isn’t, isn’t that complex.

 But for a lot of people it is, or you know, for larger portfolios it is. So that’s the part that is not being, that’s not accurate. When you’re looking at AI tools in the market today, when they say that they’re automating 95% or whatever it happens to be, they’re considering just the basic guest messaging.

 So hopefully that gave you a little clarity. I think it’s a super exciting space because, it’s improving the guest experience, you know, assuming we have all of our information accurate, right? and if you are building a portfolio, whereas we had multiple people responding throughout a guest stay, maybe it’s a week long stay, if you have someone helping you, you have multiple people helping you, there’s different.

Tones that maybe were going out, maybe someone gets sick. And so the messages was delayed a little bit. And so there’s all kinds of benefits from, from ai and it’s, it’s getting better by the day. I mean, it is really, really impressive.

Well, we received a ton of really good and important questions. Questions that are undoubtedly on a lot of your minds that didn’t actually ask them as much as I would love to answer all of them in this episode. As you know, most of our episodes are quick and actionable,

so we’re gonna go ahead and save some other important questions for a part two.

Stay tuned. As we jump into those next week

There is a pet friendly debate going on in the short term rental world. Some of you swear by the increases in your bookings, while others are fearing the damage from hosting pets. So today we’re gonna answer the question, should I allow pets in my property? And we’re gonna cover all the bases, what you should be charging, damage considerations, housekeeping considerations.

So stay tuned as we dive into all that in today’s show.

Well, welcome back. We’re gonna break down everything you need to know about allowing pets at your short-term rental property. But before we do, let’s just start off with the big one, the nice one. The positive one is that you will see very. Big boosts in your visibility. If you allow pets at your property, and this is really easy to see, you can simply go to Airbnb, you can pull up your market, you can see how many properties are there, you can select the pet filter, and then you can see how many disappear.

So for those of you catching the audio only version, I’ve got my computer screen pulled up. I put in Destin, Florida, a very popular vacation rental destination in the us. I zoomed in on a map location that’s currently giving me over a thousand homes within that map area. Now, if I go to this little filters button, Airbnb’s filters, and I scroll down just a little bit and I click the Allow pets button.

That thousand homes drops to 484 for this map location that I’ve selected. Now imagine you’re one of those 484, and imagine all the people that love to travel with their furry little friends.

So the visibility boosts are massive, and you can do this across a whole bunch of different markets and see that very often, as many as 70% of the listings in that market do not allow pets

The other bright side of this for you hosts out there allowing pets, is that you can very often charge more. We’re gonna get to that in just a second, but before we do, let’s talk about the housekeeping consideration.

Because I know a lot of you are thinking, I have allergies. I don’t want to accept them. My housekeeper would kill me if I turned on the pet filter. And that is the reality for a lot of you. But if you’re struggling in a market, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. So take a look at your market, see how many properties are not allowing pets.

And decide whether or not you want to, if you’re charging more for that reservation, well, you could also afford to pay your housekeeper a little bit more.

If you are renting a property for a little bit longer, will then our team and I highly recommend that you have a bit of a midterm. Cleaning and you can charge us back to your guests. Make sure it’s in your rental agreement or your house rules. But it’s a way for you to check in on the property. And of course, you want to have a camera at your entrance of your property as well to make sure if your guests said they were showing up with one little Chihuahua, they didn’t show up with four great Danes.

So let’s get to the financial side of things. Yes, you very often can charge more, but it depends. And what does it depend on? It depends on your market and how many other people are already allowing for pets. So you want to use a tool like Price Labs or Air DNA to find this information and you want to build some comp sets of other properties that allow for pets.

And if some top performing properties in your market are allowing for pets and you’re already charging the same rate, then unfortunately you’re probably not going to be able to charge more for allowing pets.

Because when we add a pet fee, it’s really adding to our overall reservation price and people are booking our properties based on the overall reservation price. As you probably know, housekeeping fees, for example, don’t show up in the total price anymore,

so you’ve gotta consider that. But let’s assume that you do have the flexibility because most of the people in that market are not allowing pet. You have some options when it comes to charging for pets, and it does vary a little bit depending on the OTA or the online travel agency. Airbnb, for example,

 allows you to charge a flat rate that spread across the reservation, But that rate cannot exceed your average daily rate. So if you’re charging a hundred dollars per night, you can’t charge a $300 pet fee,

although there is one little workaround you can charge based on what you have in your rental agreement or what Airbnb refers to as their house rules. So let’s say you wanted to charge for two pets. And you allowed up to two pets. Well, you can simply have that in your rental agreement that it’s $50 per night per pet.

And if your guest books your property, they accept those terms and you can charge them via the resolution center for those extra fees.

Now VRBO has a lot more flexibility. You can charge a per stay price. You can charge a per pet price, or you can charge a per night price.

booking.com. Not so easy. Most of you are collecting payments on booking.com through a platform like Stripe, although booking.com does have payments by booking available, depending on the market and depending on your account. But let’s imagine that you are collecting the payments from booking.com, then you do have flexibility similar to putting those arrangements in your house rules.

You put that in your rental agreement on booking.com.

 Next up we wanna make sure that we have some good rules in place. So rules around pets could be size and breed restrictions, could be the number of pets. If you’re on Airbnb, you wanna make sure these are in your house rules. If you’re using a platform outside of that, this is going to be in your rental agreement.

I am gonna go ahead and just read our rules off. I am gonna go ahead and just read our pet rule off to you. You’re more than welcome to copy this, and you’re more than welcome to grab the link in the show notes with all of our house rules that you can use as a template. So ours, if we’re allowing pets in a particular property, it says This is a pet friendly property.

We’re glad if you were able to bring your pet along, but please note we have a few additional rules. Please note that a $50 pet fee will be applied per pet. This helps us get around Airbnb’s flat PET price. Please disclose pets at the time of booking. All pets must be added, your reservation, so the applicable pet fee can be applied.

We are unable to host cats and breeds of dogs deemed aggressive per our insurance policy. No more than two animals. No larger than 20 pounds. Pets are not allowed on furniture. And please clean up after your pets. Do not leave your pet home alone unless crated.

So quite a few potential pet rules in there for you to choose from. Of course, you don’t need to have all of those, but it is good to consider all of them.

Okay, so let’s assume that you decided to allow pets at your property. There’s a couple other things that we want to put in place when it comes to damage protection.

We always recommend having either a damaged waiver, which you can use a company like Wavo or Safely or charging a deposit. Now, if you’re accepting pets, you may want to consider raising that deposit just a little bit. And one of the nice things about a deposit is it’s not raising your total reservation price, right?

So you’re staying more competitive with your local market. But you’re also providing a little bit more protection on the backend.

One last tip. You do wanna make sure that your short-term rental property insurance policy covers pets.

Some policies exclude it entirely, and I know these policies are like a thousand pages these days. So another quick tip, just download that PDF document, give it to chat PT and say, Hey, Mr. Chat PT. Please give me any verbiage that excludes or restricts pets staying at my property.

All right. With those precautions in place, you wanna make sure that you’re marketing your property well online, remember, we wanna stand out. That’s the name of the game because there’s a bajillion short-term rentals out in the world these days, but there’s a lot less. That allow pets. So if that is you, consider adding some photos with pets in your listing.

Consider adding some pet amenities, you know, dog food bowls, all those types of things, doggie, dooo bags and leashes.

 Add the nearest dog park to your local map. Maybe even have a little pet welcome basket.

Those will go a long way, and they will surely help your reviews. Now for all of you out there like, Tim, I don’t care about the visibility or earning more money. I’m just not going to allow pets.

Well, the reality is pets are still going to stay at your property and they will come in the form of a service animal. According to Airbnb’s policies. A service animal doesn’t even necessarily need to be a dog. It could be a cat or a bunny rabbit, or a small horse.Yes, there are no restrictions on service animals, and you are also very limited at what you can and cannot ask someone that’s bringing a service animal.

Now service animals different than emotional support animal. We’ll get to that in just one second. There are only two questions you can ask a guest Bringing a service animal. One is, is if they have the service animal based on a disability.

The first question is. Is a service animal required because of a disability,

and the second is what service task has that animal been trained to do? Now, sometimes by asking these questions, you might filter out some people that are trying to bring a service animal. It’s not actually a service animal, but outside of that, you really don’t have any flexibility, and yes, you’re going to have people staying at your property.

With service animals. Now, what’s the risk of denying them or asking them more questions? Is that your listing can get taken down from Airbnb’s site or any OTA site that has these restrictions, which most of them do it in the form of discrimination. If you don’t allow someone at your property that has a service animal, Airbnb will take you down via their discrimination policy.

so if a guest says they’re coming with a service animal, or you saw them checking into the property on camera and they showed up with a dog and they said, it’s a service animal, you can’t require documentation. You can’t ask for certification. It is very restricted.

Now, where you do have some flexibility is when someone says they’re showing up with an emotional support animal.

Otherwise known as an ESA

with an e, s, a, you do have flexibility. You can ask questions, you can charge. You can’t charge for a service animal.

You can apply your standard pet policies. Now, keep in mind, if you get damage from any type of animal, whether it’s a service animal or emotional support animal, you still have a right to charge for that damage.

If you happen to be in New York or in California, well, I’m sorry, but yeah. Emotional support animals for you are treated just like a service animal. So we wanna make sure we know these little details. To recap, in a nutshell, we want to check our market, see how many properties are actually filtered out. We want to talk to our housekeepers and make sure that they’re comfortable and we’ve worked something out so that they know we’re going to have pets staying at our property.

We need to look at our market data to see how much more we can actually charge. We need to have the right policies in place.

If you want to use our House rules template, just grab them in the link below. We wanna make sure we have some protection in place in case there are damages. So that would be in the form of a deposit or a damage waiver. Of course, you want to check with your insurance. And then lastly, you just want to make sure you or your team or whoever’s helping you out.

Understands the difference between an emotional support animal and a service animal. If you don’t wanna look into all this stuff yourself, well, our team would be happy to help you out with it. We’ve managed properties in over 40 cities, over 60,000 guests now, which you better believe a lot of those showed up with pets.

A lot of them showed up with pets without letting us know. But because we have the right policies in place, we’re able to charge appropriately. You can partner with us by going to st riches.com. There’s a little link there. I’d love to chat with you personally. I hope these insights helped you answer the question, should I or should I not allow pets in my property in 2026? Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. Remember, way back when, over 10 years ago when Airbnb was easy, a lot of people didn’t even know what Airbnb was. If you’re considering getting into short-term rentals in 2026, well, things are way different than it was 10 years ago. So today we’re doing something a little bit fun. We’re taking a trip down memory lane, going all the way back to when I used to stay in Airbnb’s over a decade ago. The way things used to be and the reality the way things are today.

I also have one really counterintuitive reality that you have to follow today to do a good job with your short-term rentals. And it was much, much different back in the past, and actually it’s almost flipped a hundred percent. So stay tuned. Let’s dive in all that as we take a trip down memory lane.

10 years ago on Airbnb, it was all about connection and feeling how it would be to actually live in other people’s properties. So yeah, you saw their personal photos in there. They met you at the door, they gave you a guided tour of the property and their cell phone number, and they were messaging you constantly.

You became friends perhaps.

Having that personal connection with the host led to really great reviews. The reality is today most guests want the opposite.

Most guests are looking for a smart lock so they can check in and not have to talk to anyone. This is the reality. Maybe they’re coming from a long trip. They just want to check in. They want to know that everything is exactly how they imagine it. Everything is exactly how you portrayed. On your Airbnb listing, there is no more exchanging communication with your host 

Nope. Today guests are looking for much what they look for when they stay at a hotel. Now, yes, there’s a couple little caveats here. Maybe you have a extremely luxurious property and you’re acting as a concierge. Well, that is a little bit different, but I’m talking about the majority, the 90% of all short-term rentals out there.

Your guests are looking for some detailed check-in instructions. Timely check-in instructions, really quick responses, but only when they want to talk to you.

So a lot of that personal interaction today is gone. Why has this happened? Well, quite simply, it’s just been a cultural change with Airbnb and the industry.

Early Airbnb guests like myself were looking for adventures. We were looking for unique stays that we couldn’t find anywhere in hotels, and a lot of us were looking for some budget friendly options, 

which we know today is no longer true. There are thousands of Airbnbs out there that rival even the hotel industry’s most luxurious properties.

And yes, guests are now scrutinizing over every single little detail. The Expectation Bar has been raised because there’s way more competition than there used to be. and I’ve got some interesting, really mind blowing stats here for you in just a second.

So the overall culture has changed with Airbnb and along with these higher expectations. We have much more competitive pricing because there are literally millions more Airbnbs than they used to be. Now, of course, every market’s different, every property’s different. But if you’re not using dynamic pricing tools today, like Wheelhouse or price labs, you’re going to get left behind.

Not using dynamic pricing tools today is really not optional. You have to have access to all the data and price your properties accordingly. Imagine Marriott going back to not having dynamic pricing. And I know I’m sort of giggling here, but you just can’t imagine that, right? Or American Airlines charging the same static pricing or adjusting it once every week or two weeks.

That’s just not a reality. So yes, guest expectations are much higher, and for us to compete in the industry, we need to be using a dynamic pricing tool.

 Now let’s take a second and think about reviews. 10 years ago, yes, reviews mattered, but they weren’t this algorithmic gatekeeper the way they are today. If you have a 4.7. Average, for example, you literally can drop off of the search results

In the early days, guests were thinking of their stay more along this sharing economy type of setup. Right. That has definitely changed.

And don’t get me wrong, things are much harder than they were today, but short term rentals are an incredible opportunity. If we compare them to other real estate options around well, you’d be hard pressed to find better returns, assuming you’ve got yourself a good property and assuming that you have great reviews in today’s market, not what would be considered great 10 years ago.

So I went through some of my history, some trips that I’ve taken over the years. I gotta say, it was kind of nice to go back and reflect on these trips as well. I’ve stayed in dozens, I don’t know, at least a hundred or a couple hundred. Airbnbs over the years 

and the properties I stayed at in the early days, yes, I was in a little bit of a different financial position, so they were a little bit more budget friendly, but I left them good reviews and going back and looking at these same properties and seeing their average review scores today, years later.

Well, it’s a little sad. They haven’t kept up with the industry. They haven’t kept up with expectations, and they’ve fallen a little bit behind.

Looking at that Atlanta property, for example, a 4.28 review score. This gentleman happens to have over a thousand reviews on his profile as well, so we know that he’s been doing it for a long time. But if you’re at 4.28, you might as well just start over. I mean, that’s really, really low. If we look at Airbnb, we know that their first page of search results only has something like 18 listings.

Imagine you’re in a market with a thousand listings and you’ve got a 4.28 review score. Guess where you’re going to show up very, very, very far down if you even show up at all.

Okay, let’s just look at some stats today. Yes, we know the cultures change. We know that you need dynamic pricing. We know that reviews are more important than ever. Let’s look at some stats now to see why all this has changed. The reality is that people always chase higher returns.

We’re seeing lots of Wall Street money come in, venture capitalists chasing the short-term rental industry because they’re chasing better returns. And yes, you can still get much better returns with a short term rental in most cases than you can with a lot of other types of real estate assets.

In 2025, Airbnb was valued at almost $90 billion.

And if we go way back 10 years ago or a little more in 2015, they were accommodating around 72 million nights. Per year. Now that sounds like a lot. That is an awful lot. But if we fast forward to today, their latest annual report is not out yet, but 2026. It’s estimated that around 550 million nights will be occupied.

Via an Airbnb reservation that is well over a 600% increase in the last 10 years. So that helps us explain why these guest expectations are higher and a lot of the reason why these things have changed.

But does it still make sense to be investing in short-term rentals in 2026? I absolutely a hundred percent would say yes, but like many things in life. It depends. So I get asked this question all the time. I just spoke with a gentleman yesterday that said, me and my wife are making around $750,000 per year, but we pay a lot of taxes.

And so they’re looking at the tax side. The tax benefits of a short-term rental. We’ve talked about bonus depreciation on this channel before. If you’re new to the show, you can go to st riches.com. You can find all of our prior episodes. We talk about everything from operations to taxes, so find us there.

You’ll also find a lot of free guidebooks and if you are enjoying the content and if you’re finding it helpful, I’d really appreciate a like or a follow on Spotify or Apple, wherever you happen to be tuning in.

So is it still worth it? Yes. And let’s just compare a short-term rental to a long-term rental. When I first got started in real estate over 16 years ago, it was long-term rentals. They made sense. Prices were lower, interest rates were lower, and your cash flow was higher. But a lot of that has disappeared.

I don’t want to say it’s not available because there’s lots of people doing a good job and finding really good opportunities. But in general, short-term rentals, if you choose your property right, have the opportunity to far exceed what you could do with a long-term rental. All right. I promised I’d give you one really important counterintuitive takeaway that’s changed from 10 years ago to where we’re at today, and that is that the hosts that are really excelling and doing well in earning great reviews. Are actually sending fewer messages today. So back in the past, yeah.

You had your, your host cell phone and you guys were chatting and he was following up all the time. Not that following up is not important, but what we want to accomplish today is to set the perfect expectations And answer all of our guest questions before they actually ask them.

So in the past, great hospitality really kind of equaled more communication, but that’s not what our guests are looking for today. And actually, if there’s more communication going on between you and your guests, it probably signals that there’s some sort of issue or something that has gone wrong. Now there are some caveats.

Yes, if you’re acting as a concierge. On behalf of your guests staying at your ultra luxury property, that’s a totally different story, but I’m talking about the majority of properties today. If you have more messages going out, it signals that you either didn’t set the right expectations or your guests were left with a lot of questions requiring them to reach out.

And when our guests are on vacation or taking some time off, they don’t want to have to be searching for answers.

So the Airbnb landscape has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. But tons of opportunity available. You just wanna make sure that you’re taking advantage of the latest technology, dynamic pricing, understanding what guests are looking for today, and where their expectations are at. I hope that gave you a little bit more insight, 

And if you have some awesome stories from staying in Airbnb’s over a decade ago and how that changed for you and your life, we’d love to know. Leave us some comments, shoot us an email. Until next time, I hope you have a fab this week.