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.

Well, we’re heading into winter and that means that our short-term rental guests are gonna be using our properties a little differently than they do normally. You’re probably going to have fires being burned in your fireplace. Your kitchen’s probably gonna get used much more than it otherwise would.

You maybe have ice on the sidewalks or in your driveway. And so there’s a lot more liability and there’s a lot more expectations that we need to set with our guests to ensure that we continue to get five star reviews. So stay tuned. We’re gonna break down all the details. Your winner checklist, let’s get into it.

Well, when it comes to the winter season, there are some things that we definitely need to be doing, and for most of you in the northern hemisphere, that means your properties are going to be getting colder, which means your guests are gonna be using the heater more, they’re gonna be using the fireplace more, and you’re gonna need to keep them co.

but keeping your place cozy comes with some risks. Let’s start with the fireplace. If you have a cabin or anywhere out in the woods. Fireplace can be a really nice amenity. It really sets that mood, but it’s definitely a liability.

In fact, if you still have a log version of a fireplace, think about swapping it out for a gas version. You can get the really nice gas modern ones now that still show the logs. It still sets that tone and gives that same ambiance, but you don’t have risk of open flames outside of the unit. But if you are still using a traditional fireplace, well then it’s highly recommended that you get your chimney cleaned at least once a year.

Because if it gets a little blocked, that’s when the heat starts to come back down, and that could potentially cause fires. And this is, of course, something that your insurance has noted all across your agreement.

so make sure you’re getting it cleaned regularly. Make sure you have a small fire extinguisher somewhere nearby, and my recommendation would be to swap that out for a gas version.

We stayed at a hotel recently that had the gas version and they actually had a very nice little timer that went right next to it. So instead of someone leaving it on for the whole night, or maybe much more than they need to, you could set it for the time, help you save on gas, and also help you save on those liabilities.

If your central heating system, or your mini splits or whatever you’re using to heat your property doesn’t heat everything adequately. Well of course you wanna make sure that you set that in those guest expectations. Maybe the den can be a little cold and you wanna make sure you’re prepared. Right? And one way we do that is by having space heaters.

Space heaters can be a liability as well though. And this is actually something that your insurance. Will ask you about, and there’s different types of space heaters,

so if you do need to use one, make sure you get one that automatically turns off. If it happens to fall over, check on Amazon. There’s a whole bunch of options these days that can be a potential risk.

Using space heaters also use a lot of electricity. So they could trip your circuit breakers. It’s really advised that you test them out beforehand. If you have two in one location, turn ’em on both at the same time and make sure your circuit breakers don’t trip because if they trip for you, they’re going to trip for your guests.

A really important safety step, and again, something your insurance is going to require you to have in your properties. Something that Airbnb. Wants you to have as a safety item, and it’s highly recommended, is a carbon monoxide detector. So if you’re using gas anywhere in your property, make sure you get some carbon monoxide detectors, uh, and get the version that lasts for like 10 years.

So you don’t have to change the batteries. You don’t hear that annoying beep, beep beep. Or your guests don’t hear that annoying beep, beep beep. I should say, when the batteries are dying.

As far as where to place the carbon monoxide detectors, well, you don’t want to put ’em right next to whatever appliance is using gas. You want to keep at least 10 feet away, and most traditionally, we want to put ’em at eye level,

The second point on our checklist has to do with your kitchen. If you have a property that lends itself well to the holidays, like Thanksgiving or Christmas, well, the family’s going to be nestled around the kitchen and they’re gonna be using all of your appliances.

So you, of course, you wanna make sure that they’re always in good working order. You wanna make sure that your oven doesn’t have all that extra residue that looks nasty when your guest pulls the oven door open for the first time.

And now’s a good time just to recheck all your kitchen utensils and pans and pots and those types of things Because even though that’s something small, it’s something that we get reviews on all the time, it can really affect your review score. If someone likes to cook and they’re cooking and cutting with a dull knife, well.

It’s a bigger part of their experience, right? Because they’ve spent more time in the kitchen. So first of all, just make sure that all your tensiles, everything are in line. You can go great ones on Amazon or Costco. Make sure your appliances are clean and make sure you have a smoke detector somewhere in your kitchen.

Again, this is a safety feature that Airbnb definitely wants you to have, and so does your insurance. Make sure you get one of the newer smoke detectors that lasts for at least 10 years. And again, don’t have that little annoying, uh, battery alarm. Beep, beep, beep.

Okay. Number three on our checklist has to do with slips and falls. And yes, this is the most common reason for a liability lawsuit, and there’s lots of places that can get slippery. It’s not just if you have a snowy driveway or snowy walkway, but for all of you that have pools out there, or maybe in the winter with a hot jacuzzi, you gotta make sure that things aren’t really slippery around it as well.

And a really good way to do that is just to make sure that you have really good doormats. And now of course there’s all types of versions of doormats. You can get some that look nice, you can get some that have good traction. You can get some that work well for outdoors. Right next to the jacuzzi, the idea is that you have these in places.

Where things get slippery, and that could be tile. It could be a sidewalk that had snow on it or that has ice. It’s a really good idea if you are in a snowy area that you keep some salt and you keep some sand around. Just some spare bags for when that snow comes or when things start icing over.

Now, if you’re in a place that gets a lot of snow, you gotta plan accordingly with snow removal. Right? And this should be very clear in your listing description. If you have a guest checking in, it’s possible they could be checking in at a time when it’s snowing.

You should have some really good notes in there on your snow removal process, and maybe this is something that you only do in sort of emergency situations. Maybe it’s something that you do regularly.you wanna make sure it’s in your listing description. Hopefully you have a guidebook where you have some more details going out.

And if a guest is arriving during a stormy time, if you don’t have someone to do the snow blowing, then. You gotta let ’em know, right? Gotta set the right expectations.

A quick little note on your insurance. We know that we need specific insurance for our short-term rentals. I use a company called Properly for a lot of my properties. Uh, but every company’s different and every policy is a little different. I’ve seen some policies that actually hold you liable for trails that are not on your property.

But that you can access from your property, so you gotta make sure that you have the correct signage in these places as well. If there’s a spot that’s always slippery and there’s not really much you can do about it, or if there’s some steep ledges or whatever it happens to be, there’s some sort of safety issue, you know what it is, just take a little bit of time, put up a sign, and that’ll help protect you from the liability standpoint.

Okay. Number four on our checklist has to do with your thermostat. So if you have a central heating and air system, you wanna make sure you have a good thermostat as well, especially if you have a property that’s gonna be vacant for a couple days between guests coming and you don’t have someone to go there before your guests arrives to turn on the heat and make that place cozy.

You can go back to episode 180 4 to see our show on Emerson Sensei thermostat. that’s the one I use personally in a lot of my properties and that we recommend because it has a lot of those unique wifi features, like the ability to set your properties temperature remotely without you being there.

Very, very nifty, especially if you’re in a cold place.

It’s also a good idea to check just your insulation. So this could be in various places throughout your property. This could be as simple as a window sill, uh, insulation to, to stop drafts, but it could be as far as adding more insulation in your attic if you have a property that’s older. I have a lot of older properties in my portfolio.

They weren’t made with insulation, right? And so again, we gotta set the right expectations and you should be staying at your properties. Before a guest stays there so that you know firsthand how comfortable it is. But if you haven’t done that and you have received a message from a guest that said it was a little cold in the bedroom, or the kitchen was freezing, or whatever it happens to be, they’re not the only guest that’s going to think that.

So you gotta make sure that you set aside some time and set aside a little bit of money to fix those problems, or it’s really gonna affect your review score, and we know what that means. That means it’s really gonna affect your overall revenue.

All right. Number five on our checklist has to do with your lighting and visibility. We know in the winter and most places in the Northern hemisphere, it gets dark earlier.

You wanna make sure that your walkways are well lit, your driveways are well lit. Any sort of outdoor area is well lit, and lighting can do a lot for a property. If you’re new to the channel, well you can go to str riches.com. You can find all of our prior episodes. We’ve done an episode specifically on lighting.

The good news is, is that today there are so many options for LED or low voltage lighting. That adds a lot to your property. It adds a lot to the ambiance, but it also makes things safer.

Consider getting a dust to dawn sensor so that you don’t have to change the time that your lights come on throughout the year. That’s getting darker earlier in the winter. Then boom, your lights will come on earlier in the winter.

A lot of guests like to use candles to set the mood. We do not recommend this. In fact, it’s actually in our house rules that you cannot use candles. If you need to update your house rules or you want to just take a look at ours, well, you can get a copy of them for free and the link down below.

The reason we don’t like candles is that they have an open flame, right? It’s a liability. Your insurance company doesn’t want you to use them either. There are again, though. Lots of good alternatives. So you can buy some LED candles off Amazon or wherever you wanna find them. Leave them in the property and you can get something that look really nice.

Now, even with like the flickering flame,

okay. Number six on our checklist is for when accidents actually do happen. Something that you’ll want to have at your property is a first aid kit. Again, this is one of those items that Airbnb asks for. And if you’re not checking these safety items, like the carbon monoxide detector or the smoke detector, or the first aid kit, or the fire extinguisher, well that’s a big no-no for Airbnb.

They don’t want any issues coming up at your property either. Remember, they do offer a certain amount of liability through their air cover program, so make sure that you first buy these safety items. But then also check those boxes on Airbnb, because that’s one of the things that’s gonna help boost your visibility.

If Airbnb was comparing two properties that were completely identical, one didn’t have any of these safety items checked, and the other one had all of them checked, who do you think they’re gonna promote more in the search rankings? The one with the safety items, right.

We talked about fire extinguishers. Highly recommend to have one under your kitchen sink near the kitchen, but if you do have an open fireplace, well, it’s highly recommended that you have one there as well. If you’re running a multi-unit building or anything that has shared areas, always a good idea to have one in the common area.

In fact, that’s actually the law in most states in the us.

And lastly, you wanna make sure that you’re available 24 7. You have emergency contact information readily available in multiple places in case something does happen. I like to put a one pager in all of my properties. That has the most important details on the property. A lot of times I put it right on the back of the entrance store, but we also use a guidebook, and of course you want to have this information in your listing if you don’t have someone available 24 7 or you don’t wanna be available 24 7 for emergencies, well, our team at Corley would love to chat with you.

We’re managing properties in over 40 cities now. We’ve handled tens of thousands of guests. We’ve pretty much come across every sort of emergency and scenario you could imagine, but we don’t just do that. We also help you grow your revenue, optimize your listings, and really handle the whole operation for you.

If you wanna find out more, if you want to chat with us, go to str riches.com. There’s a little property management button there, and our team would love to chat with you.

So make sure you have the most important contact numbers on there. Make sure you have, uh, locations of the nearest hospital, the nearest pharmacy, all of these typical sort of safety things. And lastly, the last point on our winter prep. Checklist is to make sure that your communication with your guests is top-notch.

I’ve talked about expectations quite a few times during this episode, 

And that is the name of the game, that means having different expectations for your property during the winter than during the summer.

If any of your appliances or your heaters, or your furnaces or your gas stoves, if those things are complicated to use, make sure you have some easy to use instructions right next to the appliance.

If you have an area that just doesn’t get warm enough, well make sure that you have extra blankets. Make sure you have space heaters, hopefully a secure one or a fireproof one.

If you have a place that doesn’t get really warm in the winter and you don’t have the insulation and you haven’t been able to update that, well, make sure you have extra blankets or make sure you have space heaters. Hopefully one that’s safe, that’s fireproof, that doesn’t continue to stay on if it falls over, and also one that doesn’t trip your breakers.

Double check all the things we talked about today in terms of lighting and fire and your kitchen and slippery areas. The reality is that these things are not hard to check on if you’re missing a few items here or there. They’re not hard to order off Amazon and have right at your doorstep. If you don’t have the expectations well laid out in your listing description or in your guidebook, make sure that you double check those things.

 it’s gonna go a long way in ensuring that you continue to get really good reviews and that you avoid any sort of crazy accidents with any of your guests or with your property.

If you found this helpful, consider hitting the subscribe button. We release content every single week, and our team is releasing content from real world experience all over the place. If you have a friend or family member that you think needs to hear this well, we’d really appreciate if you could share it with them as well.

Help spread the word.

And if you already have these items knocked off the list and you’re doing an exceptional job and you’re earning five star reviews, but you think you could be earning a little bit more,

well then check out our episode number two 80. That’s how five star hosts can earn even more with a new revenue management strategy. Till next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. 

well welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. Today we’re diving into platform promotions. I know these have been confusing a lot of hosts lately. I’m talking about those Airbnb promotions, the booking.com discounts.

The VRBO promotions that seem to be everywhere, but we don’t know how well they actually work. Well, I’m gonna show you this week how they work, whether they’re worth it, and most importantly, a way that you can use them without slashing your prices or killing your profit margins. Stay tuned. Let’s jump in all that.

let’s go ahead and just start off with Airbnb. One that you may have seen is their early bird discount, this will apply for any of your properties within the next 24 months if you’ve applied a 3% discount or more.

If you’re using Airbnb’s smart pricing, I hope that you’re not, I hope you’re using one of the dynamic pricing tools like Price Labs that we talk about all the time on this channel.

But if you are using Airbnb’s smart pricing, you wanna make sure you turn that off.

 in order for this promotion to show up.

The benefit to adding any of these special promotions is as you get more visibility. So we’re gonna talk about each of these individually. But for the early bird discount, you will get a special call out on your listing on Airbnb.

The next one will be a last minute discount for any discount that you’ve applied for 10% or more. And again, this is going to give you a little more visibility. When a guest is looking at your property on Airbnb, they’re gonna see a slash through your price with the discounted price.

To set it up, you just go to pricing in your Airbnb dashboard and you go to the discount section.

Okay,

next one up is a length of stay discount. So Airbnb gives you the flexibility to discount whatever length of stay you want. And so sometimes this could work well if you have maybe a gap from Tuesday to Thursday that you know isn’t going to get booked well, you can apply that in there. And again, you’re gonna get some more visibility.

When that guest goes to book, you’re gonna see a slash through the price.

Now for any of you starting a brand new listing on an Airbnb, first of all, congratulations, there is a 20% discount that Airbnb will try to automatically apply for your first three reservations. It’s optional, you don’t have to use it, but it does give you a lot of that extra visibility.

And we do know that charging a lower price. For a property that has zero reviews, helps at least with the value component for your property, and a lot of times can help you ensure that you’re gonna get really good reviews right off the bat.

And lastly on Airbnb, we have what they call their special promotions, which is just that you can go into any timeframe you want, any days and add an additional discount to your property.

And if it’s over 15%, then you’re gonna get a lot of increase. Visibility, but does all of this visibility actually help you get more bookings? We’re gonna jump through VRBO and booking.com, and then we will get into that and also a way where you can apply these promotions without actually discounting your prices.

Now let’s jump over to VRBO or HomeAway, and many of you probably don’t know, but they also have this new listing, 20% discount, just like Airbnb. 

We know that all of the OTAs want you to drop your prices, basically as far as you can so that they get more bookings. That’s one of the things that we see with Airbnb’s smart pricing, is that they just drop your prices way too low,

but with a brand new listing, it’s not a bad idea to have slightly lower prices than you normally would have to help build up that solid foundation of reviews and get you off to a really good start.

Next up on VRBO, they have an early booking promotion where if you offer a 5% or more discount for reservations made 60 days or more in the future, then you get some additional visibility.

Most all of the VRBO configurations you’re gonna find by going to calendar, then settings, and then promotions in your dashboard.

That’s where you’re gonna be able to apply these changes directly with VRBO.

And remember that these special promotions, most of the time have to be applied directly on the OTA, directly on VRBO or Airbnb. They’re not going to get applied through your dynamic pricing tools. So if you’re using Price Labs or you’re using Air DNA or Wheelhouse, and you’re using that for all your dynamic pricing, it’s not going to have these options for the special promotions.

Your PMS software, however, may have the ability to do some of these, but from our experience, it’s usually very limited.

So what that means, of course, is that if you’re applying these discounts directly on the channel, your pricing software doesn’t know that, so you could be applying double discounts. We have a way to combat that in just one second. I’ll get to it, I promise.

VRBO also has a mobile only promotion, a discount that you can apply for anyone booking through their mobile. And we know Airbnb over 50% of all the reservations. Come from mobile. So when you’re setting up your listing online, make sure that you look at it in mobile format. Airbnb, for example, has a set amount of characters that fit on the mobile title versus the desktop version. These are all little things that make a big difference and you want to double check.

And on to booking.com. I know that not all of you are on booking.com, but you really, really should be.

We will find that a lot of their discounts are very similar to what’s on VRBO or Airbnb. But if you really get into the weeds with booking.com, they have way more discounts that you can apply. But some of the ones that are very familiar and early bird discounts, so they have this. VRBO has this where you can apply a discount for guests to make a reservation a certain amount of time in advance.

All these changes with booking.com again are going to happen directly on booking.com are what they call their extra net 

The extra net is essentially your dashboard where you handle all of your listings online. booking.com also has a last minute deal, not surprising, just like VRBO, just like Airbnb,

booking.com also has a mobile only rate. Same deal. You apply a discount for people that book through mobile only. You get a little extra visibility and it’s interesting to see VRBO and booking.com and all of these different OTAs except for Airbnb at the moment, offering this mobile discount. If we think about it, people have their mobile with them, their cell phone.

Basically the whole day, right? Versus being on the computer. So the chances of them making a reservation on booking.com or VRBO is much higher, right?

And so by offering this additional visibility and discount, it’s essentially enticing all of us, all of their users, to move towards the mobile version.

Booking.com has another discount in terms of loyalty. So VRBO Airbnb do not have this yet, but it’s basically rewarding guests for continuing to use booking dot com’s platform and it’s their genius program. Now, I actually use this a lot.

I spend a lot of time outside of the US and the Airbnb. The short term rental options aren’t that great, depending on where you’re at. booking.com is reliable, it’s consistent, and these loyalty programs, they really do give you that extra nudge to book a property. You’ll see right on the listing there’s a 10% discount or 20%.

It can vary with this genius program.

But on the backend, as a host or property owner, this isn’t something that’s gonna be applied automatically. You’d have to opt into the Genius program, and assuming you do, you’ll get more visibility. You’ll show up higher in the search ranking results.

So what do all these promotions do? Well, in a nutshell, they give you more visibility. They promise that you’ll be higher in the search rankings. And ultimately that means that you should be getting more reservations.

Now we don’t actually know with a hundred percent certainty how much impact these promotions have. In fact, we’ve gone through a lot of the data on the backend for partners that have joined us, that have applied a whole lot of special promotions and found that it didn’t really have that much impact.

The more important thing is making sure that your pricing is always perfect, right? And we talk a lot about that on this channel. If you’re new to the show, you can go to str riches.com. You’ll find lots of eBooks for free. All of our past episodes where we really break down anything and everything that has to do with your short term rental.

Now, there is one thing that we know for certain is that there is a psychological component to seeing a discounted property, right? just the same way it is if you’re at the store or the mall or you’re buying a car or whatever it happens to be. If you know that the price that you’re paying is lower than what the price normally is, well you just psychologically are gonna be more inclined to make that book and to make that purchase.

And so how can we get the benefit of these promotions, the visibility, the improved search ranking results, and also not discount our pricing? Well, I saved the best for last. The way that we’re going to do this is we’re gonna use our dynamic pricing tool to send out all of these prices to booking.com and Airbnb and VRBO, but then within our PMS software, our property management software, if you’re not using a PMS program, then unfortunately this would not be an option for you.

But we have what we call markups and we can set specific markups. Per channel. So let’s say that you’ve added an additional 20% of discounts to booking.com. You could come into your PMS software and mark up just that channel by 20%, which means that the channel’s not gonna know, right? They’re discounting your price by 20%, but you’re marking it back up.

So you get the visibility, you get those search ranking increases, and you’re not missing out on any revenue.

Of course the more of these discounts, the more of these promotions that you put in place, the more of a juggling act that becomes, right? If you’re doing this across all the different platforms, then you really gotta make sure you’re monitoring things really closely. And if you don’t mark them up,

But you’re adding promotions on maybe one specific channel. Well, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna start to get more bookings on that channel because your prices are going to be lower and you’re really gonna build a lot more traction there, but you’re gonna be missing out on the other channels.

And we wanna make sure that we stay diversified, right? We know that Airbnb just changed their commission structure and these OTAs have a lot of power over what they can do with our properties. So the more diversified and the more evenly distributed we are across these platforms,

the safer and more secure our properties will be and the more consistent our revenue will be.

So that’s a wrap on promotions. These things are changing all the time. I wish I had the hard, concrete facts to say that this promotion worked better than this one, but I think the safest bet is just to make sure that your pricing is consistent across the different platforms. You can take advantage of these promotions by marking it up afterwards on your PMS.

And believe me, our team is looking at all this data on a regular basis. Trying to come up with the hard concrete facts for you, so when we know for certain that one special promotion is much better than another one, we’ll be the first to let you know.

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

Here’s a stat that will blow your mind. 73% of guests determine whether or not they will book your property within the first 30 seconds.

My team and I have hosted thousands of guests and we have seen a lot, but today we’re doing something different and also a bit more fun. I’m pulling up real Airbnb listings and reacting in real time. We’re not judging the people, just the listings.

And so from cringey decor to crazy photos to. You name it, we’re gonna unpack what went wrong, how to fix it, and if you’re a host out there, this is your chance to learn from the bottom of the barrel, the worst listings out there. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to the show. I’m glad you’re here. Again, if you’re listening to the audio only version, well please know you can jump over to YouTube whenever you want and check us out at Short-Term Rental Riches. We have all of our episodes there as well, and it’ll probably make this one a little bit easier, but I’m gonna do my best just to explain all the changes that I’m going through.

 So here we go. Listing number one. A magnificent title to start things off. Four Kings, four Queens, large house. Obviously this is not the best title, right? 

We know that the way you’ve should be doing your title has changed over the years, but one of the things that hasn’t changed is. Like you shouldn’t have the word house in your title, right? This is valuable landscape. You only have so many words to catch, potential guests, eye or attention. And we know right below looking at the property that it’s clearly a home.

Airbnb will designate your property type right below, so we can see home right here. So no need to have house there. We can also see that it has all of the bedrooms right in there, eight beds. So. I would instead uncover some things that are unique about this property, some amenities, some things that we can’t see right from just looking at the very beginning.

 from Airbnb’s listing description. Your title really should be another place for you to sell your property, things that they can’t see. So let’s look at these photos. Um, the first one is a bedroom. It kind of looks like a living room though, because there’s a fireplace right next to it and there’s all kinds of lights going on here.

We’ve got this like fluorescent blue light that screams late night club, or. Disco. And then right next to that, you have other lights, like some Christmas lights on the fireplace. There’s just a lot of lights going on here. But the picture itself obviously is not professional.

It’s super dark. The second photo here, bedroom two is even darker. There’s like a tiny little lamp in the corner. And that’s it. Like, there’s just, just really bad. I mean, even with a smartphone these days, you can take much better photos than this. so again, another bedroom with some crazy, disco lighting going on.

 yeah, these photos are just. Not inviting. Here’s a nice bathroom shot with a partially used toilet paper roll and a nice wide open toilet seat. We know that we wanna keep those closed. We know we want fresh towels and everything like that in our bathrooms. Here’s a few more shots. We’ve got a nice outdoor shot, and I say nice in a sarcastic way.

This is covered with leaves and 

 an old dirty, artificial turf thing going on here. Bunch of leftover house parts in the garage. The garage really does kind of look like a dungeon, and there’s a laundry machine in there. So I guess the idea was to show that they have laundry. What I would do instead is just take a picture of the laundry machine, and say that it’s down in the basement.

I mean, this was. Just not inviting at all. And then the photo tour ends up with a shot of the initial photo, but those disco lights have changed. Instead of being blue, now they’re red. So obviously we don’t need all the crazy lighting going on. We want professional lighting open. Natural lighting is the best way to go.

Clearly these photos were taken, with someone’s camera and it wasn’t, um, professional at all. We can see by the reviews 27, they’re at a 4.5. Not too great. Is it?

So let’s check out some of the reviews here. Now we know like if you drop the ball somewhere accidentally with your property. You can make that up with really good communication, right? We know that we can have a property that’s not perfect or even the nicest one in town, but you can have excellent reviews as long as you set the right expectations and you respond to things appropriately.

So here we are on the reviews. I’m just gonna read off, just a couple here, for example. So upon arriving there was trash left in the back overflowing from one trash can. And actually a lot of these reviews, I just took a glance before mention the trash. We’ve talked about this before. This can be a challenging piece of the housekeeping operation, right?

If your housekeeper is. Cleaning the property and the trash is only picked up on Wednesdays. Sometimes they leave too much trash out there. So there are other services out there. We talked about one called Can Monkey, that’ll actually pick it up for you. But if that’s not an option, then you can’t leave trash at your property, especially if this is like one of the first things that’s someone’s seen.

So you’ll wanna make sure that you pay someone to go back to take out the trash, right. So there are a lot of bad reviews in here talking about cleanliness and dirtiness. this one says the outside was in horrible disrepair, but no response. 

At least having a response would provide some additional background or context, uh, to help future guests. Right. Uh, you know, like, oh, I’m really sorry. My, my housekeeper was not able to pick up the trash that week. We’ve already set up a new structure to where it gets taken out every Wednesday when it should be there, you know, something just to address future guests.

Okay, so that’s one piece here. The other thing, I mean, we can see there’s not a lot of sections filled out. Like there’s no information on the neighborhood. it’s just not very complete, Not a lot of effort went into this property. Let’s go ahead and jump into the next one.

 This one titled Spacious Beauty Minutes from su. So that must be, uh, the college there in New York. So spacious. Not the best term for a title, right? That’s really just used all over the place. Again, we want to just be selling amenities, so not bad, putting minutes away from su.

They might want to include the exact amount of minutes in the title. This is a new property. It doesn’t have any reviews yet. If we click on the photos, these are a little better. Again, still taken with a camera. That’s really obvious, and a lot of these are pretty empty. Like I’m looking at one of the bathroom right now.

With no towels, no nothing to make it feel inviting. No shower curtain. It just honestly looks like a space that someone was maybe trying to rent on a long-term basis and took a couple quick photos and said, you know what? Maybe I’ll try this on Airbnb and see what happens. I gotta give ’em credit. They added a couple photos of related activities here, and we know that that’s really important, right?

Because when guests are staying at your property, they don’t just choose your property for. Just the property. They also choose it many times because they want to visit some of those local attractions. So it’s good to see those here again, uh, some, some not great nasty, bathroom shots.

Here we can see the mirrors showing the reflection of the ceiling that’s got like light fixtures with no cover on them. 

The linens here. This is one of those easy fixes. Just have all white linens. This is what the hotels do. 

This, let your guests know that the beds are clean, that the towels are clean, because you can see if a white linen or towel is dirty, right? And so a dark comforter like I’m seeing in these photos. It’s just not that inviting. Here’s another bed shot. It looks like someone was just sleeping on this bed, to be honest.

 it’s very wrinkled. That’s a really easy fix. Just, I mean, even if you’re taking these with your own phone, you can do a better job than this, right? Just spend an extra hour to add some table settings to fluff some towels up to make sure that your bed’s not completely wrinkled, to open the blinds and let some light in.

Some of these photos are kind of crooked, right? I mean, they’re showing a whole bunch of the ceiling when they should be showing the living room. You’ll know if you’ve worked with a professional real estate photographer, that they use wide angle lenses to capture the whole space. Imagine if your guest is only.

As we said, spending a few seconds looking at your listing and instead of just showing a piece of your living room, you could show the whole living room, but not multiple photos, just with one photo that happens to be a wide angle lens. 

So again, one of the reasons you gotta make sure you’re working with a professional photographer.

So this is a brand new listing. It’s very obvious, not a lot of thought was put into it. let’s go ahead and jump over to listing number three.

So here we are listing number three. Obviously photos are still not good if you’re watching this on video, but at least they set the table right. Uh, and it looks like a pretty decent renovated space. The title, they use two words out of the full.

Area that we’re given. You want to use all of the space that you have and you want to. front load it with the most important words for your title, which should be adding something to your property. We gotta remember, like half the people that are gonna book your property are looking on the mobile version, and your title will get cut off around 35 characters.

So we could definitely add more than just. Crescent Hideaway, which is the name of this property. One thing really stands out to me on this property. Aside from the really negative review score 4.2, it’s the review responses. So this person came back and left review responses, but in a very argumentative way 

which would basically lead anyone to believe that booking this property in the future, that, you know, if something doesn’t go right or perfect, that this host probably is not gonna be the biggest help. Let me just read a couple of these examples off.

So here is the guest review. It says, first I’d like to say that Alicia was very forthcoming and prompt with her communication. I had some trouble. It’s actually quite a long review response, and I’m gonna save you that time and just jump to the owner’s response. It says, first and foremost, so. This is not a great way to start a conversation, right?

This is very one-sided my way or the highway type of conversation. We have cameras all around the property, and what you’re stating with kids banging on the doors did not happen. I can prove that.

Second, the whole home is brand new. Everything is brand new. So they’re basically just arguing with what this person has said. We know that that doesn’t work. Well never do that. but we also know that it’s really hard for us as owners, as hosts.

To separate ourselves from guest communication. we love taking over for you if you don’t want to do this, and we can be that middle ground where we’re always gonna respond in a very professional way that’s never gonna deter any future guests, But if you’re doing this on your own, give it a little bit of time before you re respond or review.

If you’ve just read a bad one, use chat GBT to make sure that it’s polite like this is not helping this listing at all.

Here’s another reviewIt says, this place was clean and cozy. It felt like it was renovated a week before all ’em new. The only issue was the area felt a little sketchy, and then the owner responds.

 In other words, Nick is referring to the fact that the home is in a culturally diverse neighborhood that is completely safe. We can’t change the world unless we change ourselves. I’m not making this up. This is a real review response. How would that ever help a future guest book your property?

The answer is, it wouldn’t.

 So here we are going through photos on the same listing. They did a good job. They put out some flowers and play settings and things like that, but these are definitely home taken photos. Some of ’em are really crooked. Again, they’re not using white linens.

They do have some freshly rolled towels. Some of these images are really small, like just a shot of lemons, I mean, we could take a bigger shot of the kitchen, so we gotta make sure we’re using those wide angle lenses.

So, yeah, we can laugh about these bad review examples that we just went through, but the sad reality is that. Some of these issues, like not completing your listing descriptions, taking bad photos that aren’t professional, not responding to reviews or responding in the wrong way, having a title that doesn’t help sell your property at all.

These are all too common in the short term rental world. These are easy fixes.

Remember the details matter and great hosting is about making every stay unforgettable. In a good way. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. 

Well, welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

I’m happier here again, and I’m happy to be home in Medellin, Colombia.

I just got back from a nice trip out to California, where I grew up.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know my backstory.

For those of you that are new, my team and I have managed over 40,000 guests in seven countries now.

We’re in about 20 cities, and we’ve learned a lot over the years.

Sacramento was actually where I got started with my short-term rental journey 10 years ago.

Yep, back in 2015.

And I still own those properties there in Sacramento.

And so I went back, took a look at them, and I’ve just learned so much since then.

And so much has happened just in the last year.

So I’m excited to just kind of recap 2024 and also give you my predictions for 2025.

These predictions will be based off of all of our partner properties and also my personal portfolio.

So stay tuned and let’s jump right in.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Well, welcome back to the show.

I’m glad you’re here again.

I listen to a lot of other podcasts, a lot of YouTube channels, and I go to a lot of live events throughout the year.

And 2024 was no different.

I went to quite a few, including the VRMA, the industry’s largest event.

I went to several others, and I learned a lot as I have for the last decade since I started managing my own short-term rentals.

I’m excited to share just some of the recaps for 2024, just real quickly, and then what to expect for 2025, based on my own predictions, but also some of those experts out there that I follow closely.

So let’s just jump right into it.

What could we expect in terms of supply and demand in 2025?

Well, if you’ve been following along, then it’s no surprise that supply has slowed down a lot.

In fact, in some markets, supply has actually gone down a little bit.

And as supply has gone down, demand has stayed relatively strong, which means that your occupancy, if you were pulling all the right levers and you’ve been operating your property well, your occupancy should actually have gone up.

And now these are stats that the founder of Price Labs also talked about on a recent virtual event.

But just to kind of prove it a little bit more, I’ll give you some stats for my personal portfolio.

So for the last year, I had a jump in reservations.

These are for my personal properties.

From 2,617 reservations for the year to 2,682 reservations.

I know that’s a lot of reservations, right?

My team does an amazing job.

That sums up to a 5% increase in occupancy for my personal portfolio.

Now that doesn’t mean that all these properties were necessarily making more money, right?

We have the other side of that equation, which is our average daily rate, our average daily rate and our occupancy, give us our total revenue.

And that is what’s most important, right?

But how do I know that I did a pretty good job?

Well, I compare my properties against the market, and I also compare them year over year.

And a lot of those properties that earn my portfolio did earn more.

There’s a few that kind of straggled behind.

I don’t know if straggled is a word, but you know what I mean?

I’ve had some maintenance issues over the year, and that could be the culprit.

But from my personal portfolio, I’ve seen my properties range from 4% to 9% increase in occupancy, with the majority of those earning more than they did last year.

So if you’re out there and your occupancy did not go up, well, you may be trying to charge last year’s prices.

And that’s one of the other stats that came out of this virtual event, is that the average daily rate has in fact gone down a little bit across the nation.

Now, I’m speaking specifically about the US, but this is pretty much around the world.

We’ve seen ADRs go down a little bit, but occupancy has maintained strong or gone up a little bit as supply is sort of settled down.

People aren’t adding properties like they were after COVID.

Some markets saw huge influx and new supply.

I don’t want to name any names, but there’s some common ones out there like the Smoky Mountains and Destin.

Those are a little more competitive, so you got to make sure you are at the top of your game.

Now, another thing that’s happening already and that’s going to continue happening is that the supply and demand is going to just level itself out.

So if we look at the amount of short term rentals in a market, it doesn’t take a whole lot of months where someone’s operating that property negatively, where they’re losing money month after month, assuming this was an investment property.

Doesn’t take a whole lot of months where that owner might start looking for other options, right?

And maybe that means going back to a long term rental, which is much easier to do in urban areas.

And if we think about it, if we have this as a backup option, where we can just take our short term rental that’s not performing as well as we had hoped and started again as a long term rental, this really only takes about 6 to 12 months for a lot of that oversupply to settle out in some of these areas.

Now, hopefully, you’re not finding yourself in this scenario.

And the good news for those of you that aren’t going back to a long term rental or that are sticking in the game, you’re still doing well, is that you’re gonna do increasingly better, right?

The more reviews you have and the better those reviews are, the more money your property will make.

And that is a fact based off of the stats that we now have available to us through multiple, multiple data sources.

So in a nutshell, what to expect in terms of supply in 2025, most experts out there, including myself from what I’ve seen from our partners’ properties and my own personal portfolio, is that we can expect pretty similar results as to last year, as to 2024.

So potentially a little higher occupancy as less new supply is added.

Remember, there’s still a lot of people discovering short term rentals for the first time.

Short term rentals are unique.

They have a lot of benefits over traditional hotels, depends on the guest type, right?

But if we’re assuming that demand is staying even or even growing slightly and there’s no new supply being added, well, then we should have a pretty similar year as we did to 2024.

Okay, next up, and I’m sure this one will come to no surprise to you.

This is AI, yes, artificial intelligence.

And if you’ve been tuning in to the show for a while, I’ve talked about this quite a few times.

In fact, we have our own list of ChatGPT prompts that we’ve created, and you can get a free copy by going to strriches.com.

These are prompts you can simply plug into ChatGPT to help you analyze reviews, to help you create content for your short term rental.

We spent a lot of time creating them.

It’s sort of a continuous work in progress, but it can save you a lot of times.

So head over to strriches.com, and you can get that copy for free, as well as a whole bunch of other guides that we’ve put together.

So I don’t want to talk about AI in terms of efficiency, how this is going to help us operate our short term rentals a little bit better.

We’ve talked about that in the past.

We know that there’s a lot of tools coming online that can help with reception, for example.

But I want to kind of switch things up a little bit, and we’re talking about the future, right?

2025, what’s going to happen with AI?

And AI is going to be a big source of search results.

So we know now that Airbnb and VRBO and booking.com, they spend millions upon millions and millions of dollars making sure that our properties are visible to potential guests so that they can get bookings, they can make money, and so can we.

But the searches are somewhat limited, right?

You can filter for a lot of different things, but nowhere near what you could do with AI.

For example, you could search on AI and I’m just kind of making something up.

I want a sandy beach destination that’s 150 miles from this major city that has climate between X and X.

I mean, you can literally break down exactly what you’re looking for with AI.

And not only is it going to help you find those destinations, probably much better than Airbnb or VRBO, but it’s going to give you some booking options, right?

It’s going to pull up Airbnb, but it’s very likely going to pull up hotels and independent properties that have done a really good job at marketing their property, where you can book directly with them.

So AI is going to be a big player in just finding short term rentals.

And of course, the big players are no dummy, right?

booking.com, Airbnb, they know this, and they’re curating their own search results.

This is why Airbnb is asking you for a lot more information as a host now.

What are your interests?

I mean, they really want to match you up to the ideal guest.

And that’s also part of the reason they bought an AI company, right?

Airbnb bought an AI company in 2024.

Yes, to help with operational efficiencies, but also to help with everything that AI can do, which is just, you name it.

AI can do basically whatever you can think of these days.

And I’m really excited about that.

To help with personal interests, to help with the business, to help our guests have a better experience.

So stay tuned on that one.

But I guarantee you that AI is going to be a bigger player in helping you find the perfect short term rental to rent, which means you need to make sure that you have a good direct booking website set up.

There is another good place to go to get direct bookings.

And this brings me to my third point, which is Google.

I think that Google is going to have a much bigger presence in the short term rental industry versus 2024.

So we know that we are personally getting a lot of reservations from Google Vacations, but they also have Google Hotels, right?

And the beautiful thing about listing with Google is that they do not charge you any commissions.

Who knows if that will be like that forever, but you definitely want to take advantage of it, why it is available.

Start building those reviews and get more presence.

Now it’s not as easy as just jumping on Google Vacation rentals.

They only work with specific property management software programs.

We use Hostaway, which integrates.

And I know there’s a whole bunch of other ones out there, but if you’re not on Google yet, first of all, you’re going to need a direct booking website, but then you’re also going to need a property management software platform that integrates with them.

So make sure you get on that if you are not already on Google.

Okay, so real quick recap trends for 2025.

You can expect your occupancy to increase slightly if you’re doing a good job because new supply is being limited, right?

Number two, we’re going to see AI just really help out in a lot of different operational places, but also in the way people find your short term rentals.

You want to make sure that you stay ahead of the curve on that one.

And Google is playing catch up, I guess you could say, or maybe they’ve been working a lot of things in the background, but I believe that they’re going to be a big player in the short term rental space.

If you’re not on Google yet, make sure you jump on there.

I’d love to just jump into the economy and give you all of my insights.

I do not have a crystal ball, but I do listen to a lot of people that are much smarter than I am when it comes to the economy.

And a lot of them, I guess the consensus from the people that I pay attention to, is that we can expect a pretty similar 2025 versus 2024.

Yes, consumers are getting a little crunched.

Inflation is still a real thing.

And spending power has dropped, which means people are probably going to be looking for a little more affordable options.

When it comes to interest rates, we know that those play a huge role in investing in property, right?

It really all comes down to the numbers.

And if your borrowing costs are much higher, then there’s probably not going to be as many sales.

And we’ve seen that in 2024, and expect that to be pretty similar in 2025.

I would love to see interest rates go down, but again, I don’t have a crystal ball.

You will find that experts, however, predict that in the future, interest rates will be increasing or decreasing.

Yes, that is what happens, right?

You can listen to a million different people, and there’s a million different answers.

And interest rates are one of those things that we can’t just predict with 100% accuracy.

So with that said, I just want to recap some of the most important pieces and remind you that operating our short term rentals, there’s not just one piece to the puzzle, right?

There’s a whole bunch of different pieces.

And all of these have a compounding effect when it comes to our performance.

So if you’re doing a good job with your revenue management, if you’re doing a good job with your guest experience and you have amazing reception, and you’re doing a good job at listing your property in the right places at the right time for the right prices, and you’re doing a good job of just presenting your property with excellent photos and listing copy, well, all of these things have a compounding effect.

You can definitely outperform your neighbors.

The information is available.

If you don’t want to tackle those things yourself, well, if you’ve listened to the show before, you know that my team and I manage a whole bunch of properties.

We’d love to partner with you.

If you’d like some help, you can reach out to us at strriches.com.

There’s a little property management button there.

And I’d like to speak with you personally to see if we are good fit.

So before we jump off, since it is the beginning of a new year, and I know a lot of you are still out there making some last minute resolutions, a real quick tip that I discovered recently is when it comes to visualization, right?

We know if we can visualize things that they become more real.

If you’re still working on your goals, or if you want to change them up and make them a little spicier, is that you can use some of the AI tools like Gemini, for example, from Google, to create images.

So if you have this visualization of owning a really large portfolio or having a property on the beach or having a penthouse suite in New York, well, you can create exactly what you want in an image.

And then I encourage you to maybe leave that as a desktop background, maybe print it out, the more we see it, the more it will become a reality.

And a quick quote just to finish off the episode, this is from Carl Jung, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Pretty powerful stuff.

I hope you enjoyed all of our content from 2024.

I’m really excited for 2025.

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

Whether you’re just getting started or you have dozens of properties, one thing remains the same.

Poor management can crush your investment returns.

Our team has learned a lot managing over 40,000 guests, and we’ve compiled our biggest takeaways into a handy guidebook to help you better manage your property.

Equipped with checklists for guest verification to pricing strategies, it breaks down our whole process from start to finish.

Best of all, it’s free for you for being one of our loyal subscribers.

You can get your copy by going to strriches.com.

That’s strriches.com and I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.

We all know how important reviews are when it comes to our revenue with our short term rental, but how much of an impact can it really have on your revenue?

I spoke with someone recently, and I was blown away at the difference and how much they’re making this year, working with property manager, that unfortunately had really bad reviews, versus them self managing just a year ago.

So I want to break that down this week, and also just highlight the important pieces that you need to have in place to get good reviews.

Stay tuned, let’s jump right in.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Well, welcome back to the show, I’m glad you’re here again.

There’s really only three pieces that determine how much money we make with our short term rental.

The first one is the actual property itself, how well you did setting it up, how well you did setting the expectations for your guests.

So think things like the copy that you put in there and your photography.

So that stuff’s pretty much a no brainer, right?

We know that we have to have a good property to start with.

The second piece that we talk about a lot on this channel, if you missed last week, go back and check that out.

It was one little metric to help you identify whether you’re pricing your property too high.

And that episode was just one little piece of the bigger picture, which is revenue management.

So there’s a lot, a lot that goes into that.

The third piece is your reviews, how good your reviews are, and how many of them you have.

So I spoke with someone recently who has a great property.

They did a great job setting it up, and for the first year, they were managing it themselves, and they made about $75,000.

They got busy, they have a full-time job, and so they passed off the management to a company you’ve probably heard of, Evol Vacation Rentals.

They’re managing over 35,000 properties in the US, and so they are around, but unfortunately, their reviews are dropping.

Not in all the markets, but you can simply go on AirDNA, and you can look at the nation’s biggest property managers, so Evol Vacation Rentals, Vacasa, Red Awning, and you can see that their average reviews are very, very bad, and unfortunately, they’re getting worse.

And so with this particular person, they saw their revenue drop from 75,000 to year to date, so we’re more than three quarters of the way through.

They’ve only earned 23,000.

And the sad thing is, after looking at the listing, that’s not that surprising to me, because people are not booking properties with a 4.3 or a 4.4 review average, and they’re not really showing up on the listing sites, right?

In fact, Airbnb is taking down a lot of listings that have really poor review scores.

So that is a massive, massive difference in overall revenue.

And I don’t want to beat up on the big box property managers, but the reality is, when someone goes to book one of these properties, and let’s say they’ve heard the name Vacasa, or they’ve heard the name of all vacation rentals before, and they’re not booking it directly with Tim, or with John, or with Sarah, whoever it happens to be, well then, they’re already gonna have a little bit of that mindset, if again, they’re familiar with the property manager, and that’s probably gonna affect their experience, right?

If they’re receiving messages that are really automated, they’re not personalized, there’s no sort of hospitality there, well then, that average review score is just going to keep going down.

And unfortunately, sorry, I hate to beat up on these big property managers, but if your property is with them, and your review score is declining, you’re going to have to start over if you decide to manage it yourself, or you decide to work with someone that’s managing it for you, and allows you to keep your accounts like we do.

So I don’t want to freak anyone out there, but if you’re in this position where you’re seeing your reviews drop, then you might want to consider some other options.

If you are self-managing your property, which is much easier to do today than it’s ever been, if you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you know we’ve talked about a lot of the things can help you do that.

And I hope you’ve found those topics valuable.

My team and I have managed over 40,000 guests these days, and we’re in a lot of different cities.

And all the partners we work with, we do allow them to keep all of their accounts.

And so we’re sort of like a white label management company, you could say.

John Smith adds his listing, and we’re helping out in the background.

So let’s dive into how we earn good reviews just for a quick second.

If I had to choose one thing, the most important piece to earning good reviews, it comes down to communication.

We know that we can have some disaster maintenance happen, our properties, or storms can come through, or we can drop the ball with our property.

Maybe we forgot to leave towels there.

Crazy things like this, you can still earn really good reviews if you have really good communication.

Really, that’s all it comes down to.

And so you’ll notice if you look at a property profile that has really good reviews, it gets mentioned time and time again.

John responded super quickly.

They were super hospitable.

They did a great job with communication.

That is really, in my eyes, the most important piece.

As we know that two properties are pretty much identical.

One can really outperform if they just do a much better job on the communication.

So make sure you’re responding really quickly.

Make sure the words that you’re using are guest-centric, right?

They are the reason that you’re operating your short-term rentals.

So you never want to put the blame on them for anything, accuse them of anything.

A lot of this is just obvious, but we still see it all of the time.

So I just wanted to give you a real quick snapshot, a real glimpse into what I’m seeing these days, talking with owners all over the place.

For a while, I’ve wanted to know how much a review or a bad review score can actually affect a property.

And now we’re seeing some real world data.

So if you’re in the position where you’re managing your property yourself, just make sure that you’re doing these things like we’re in the hospitality business, right?

And if you have gotten some reviews that you think are unfair, well, I would try to get those removed.

Our team’s gotten lots and lots of reviews removed.

There is no time limit on it.

So if you received one two years ago, you can still try to get that one removed as long as it violates one of Airbnb’s policies.

Again, we’ve talked about all this stuff before.

I just kind of want to wrap it up and just remind everyone how important this really is.

So it just comes down to these three pieces we have to make sure that our property, number one, is set up properly, that we’re setting the right expectations.

That doesn’t mean you have to have a super luxurious property.

It just means that what your guess is expecting has to match the way that your property is portrayed and the way it comes across on the online listings.

The second piece is revenue management, and making sure that you’re on top of all this.

Drove into that a lot.

And then the third piece is remembering that it really comes down to communication and hospitality.

We’re in the hospitality industry, and if you don’t get this piece right, it can be a very slippery slope.

You can literally cut your annual revenue in half, and we don’t want that happening to any of you.

So I feel like this was just a bit of a lecture.

I’m sorry if it came off that way, but this is a really, really important topic.

And if you’re in that situation where you’re with a company and the reviews are not good and you don’t actually own your account, well, then you might want to plan your exit strategy because we’re seeing these big companies with tens and thousands of reviews, their actual average is just going down further and further.

And so that’s a bit of a slippery slope.

And if I could leave you with just one last thought, and that is, yes, there’s a lot of things that go into these review scores and making sure that the average is high, but it doesn’t mean that you actually have to be doing all of that communication, or you have to be doing all of that work, right?

I know it’s hard for some of us that want to scale.

I went through this myself, bringing someone else on and trusting them.

But the reality is, whatever happens during that guest day isn’t really going to affect your revenue.

The only thing that does is the review.

That’s it.

So even if the guest didn’t have a great time, of course we don’t want that to be our guest, but if something came up and you handle it in a good way, or your team handled it in a good way, it doesn’t really matter what happened.

As long as you got a good review, so we got to put a lot of focus on the reviews.

We’ve got to make sure that we’re asking for reviews.

We’ve got to make sure that we educate our guests on what’s a five star versus what’s a four star.

And if we get a review that we don’t think is fair, well then we definitely want to reach out to the OTAs like Airbnb and try to get that removed.

So sorry for the bit of lecture this time, but I just want to make sure that all of you out there are not going down the slippery slope like the gentleman I just spoke to recently.

I hope that gave you a little bit of insight.

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

I’ve dedicated years and hundreds of thousands of dollars through trial and error to figuring out how to manage my personal portfolio remotely.

And it wasn’t always easy and it took a long time.

But now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me.

And good news, our team can also manage yours.

Let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an industry low fee.

To find out more about partnering with us, head to strriches.com, hit the property management button, answer a couple quick questions, and meet with me personally.

That’s strriches.com.

Rest easy knowing that with my team, your properties will be in excellent hands.

Welcome back to the show. I’m happy you’re here again. Today we’re talking about how to make sure that we launch our new property with success. How do we ensure that we get bookings and how do we ensure that they continue to come in from multiple platforms? Stay tuned. Let’s jump right in. Welcome to Short-Term Rental Riches. We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short-term rentals. Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

 

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard. Hey there, short-term rental owners. Looking to boost your revenue and keep your guests coming back? I know you are. Say hello to Stayfi, the innovative platform that lets you gather guest info and market directly to them. How does it work? Well, we’ve talked about this before. Your guests log into your Wi-Fi via a branded landing page you can easily create,

 

showcasing your guidebook and other commissionable activities. After your guests leave, you can use Stayfi’s email and SMS marketing tools to keep your property top of mind and secure those direct bookings. We’ve built a solid list of subscribers using Stayfi, my personal portfolio. Now we can turn one quick email or automated series into dozens of direct bookings. Use the code RICHES when you sign up for Stayfi. It’s time to start converting first-time visitors into repeat guests with Stayfi.

 

Well, welcome back to the show. I’m glad you’re here again. And today we’re talking about something I think is really exciting, and that is launching a new short-term rental. I know there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there right now, a lot of people talking about Airbnb busts, but the reality is, is that a lot of you are still launching new properties, you’re starting new short-term rentals, and you are having a lot of success with it. Of course, this depends on the market, right? But there’s things that we can do to ensure that success, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

 

First things first, when we start with a new property, it does get a visibility boost, you could say. And so we’re launching new properties all the time, and from what we see, from the patterns that we see, you can typically expect maybe between three to five bookings really within the first few weeks because you’re getting more visibility on the platforms like Airbnb. They want you to be successful, right? If you’re not successful, you take your property off their platform, and then no one makes any money.

 

So we see that to be the case generally between three to five bookings, although there are a few things that might prohibit you from getting those bookings, and we’ll jump into those in just a second. Another feature that we have available to us on Airbnb is to offer a new listing discount. So this is 20%, and it goes for your first three reservations. The upside to this is that you get more visibility,

 

again, remember this is just on Airbnb. We’re going to talk about the strategy for other OTAs here in a second. So if you decide to apply this discount, it is optional, and you don’t always need to apply it, but it does give you more visibility. You may even want to consider raising your prices on Airbnb, and then offering the 20% discount over the top. That way you’re not missing out on a lot of revenue, but you’re still getting some extra visibility. One other thing we want to take into consideration when we’re launching a new property,

 

when we’re just listing it for the first time, is what sort of reservation length we are accepting. So let’s say you launch your property, it’s a brand new one, and you get a three month stay. Well, then that means for the next three months, you’re going to have no reviews coming in, which means you have zero reviews during that whole time. You don’t have the ability to rent it on other platforms. You can’t get reviews on other platforms. And essentially this could delay your success with your property quite a bit.

 

So one thing you might want to consider is accepting shorter stays, even down to one night, so that you can have more guests coming in, you can earn more reviews faster, and you can build that base up. So a couple of quick things there. You have the option to allow the 20% discount with Airbnb. You get a extra boost on all of the platforms when you first launch a property, but many times your properties are just getting booked on Airbnb, maybe because that’s where you started.

 

And so we’ve got to take that into consideration. We’re going to talk about other channels here in just a second, but the next thing I want to dive into is when you’re actually launching your property or when you’re listing your property for rent for the first time. So let’s imagine that you are in a summer vacation rental destination, and you go to start your property to make it live in the winter. Well, obviously you’re past the peak season, right? So there’s going to be less demand and you will need to factor that into your pricing and you need to be even more aggressive because you have no reviews.

 

So if you see that the average nightly rate in your market in the low season is $500 a night, but you have zero reviews, well, people are going to have less confidence to book your property, right? So if you’re not getting booked, you need to monitor your prices very closely and very often in the beginning to make sure that you don’t miss out on some of that extra opportunity and that you pick up momentum, you start getting some reservations and you start building that review base.

 

Now let’s imagine that your property is almost ready and you’re getting ready to launch it and it happens to be peak season. This would be ideal, but if you plan things out, maybe you’re doing a renovation and your plan is to launch your property during the peak season, it’s going to be really good for you because there’s way more demand coming in. So you’re going to get those reservations coming in quicker, but we have to keep our booking windows in mind. So let’s take the same summer vacation rental destination and say that the average booking window is 90 days.

 

In other words, people are making reservations there in the summer 90 days in advance. Well, if you launch your property, the day summer starts, you’re 90 days late, right? People have already been making their reservations. And so you’re going to have to discount your price to catch up. So ideally you launch your property in the peak season within the booking window. So when people are still making those reservations, if this fits well into your timeline, well, then you’re going to ensure that you’re getting bookings faster.

 

You’re getting more of them and you’re going to build that review base quicker than ever. Now let’s talk a little bit about the different channels because we know that we need to list our property on multiple channels. Different channels have different demand in different markets. So Airbnb is global as we all know, but there are some markets where VRBO traditionally outperforms Airbnb. There are some markets or types of properties where booking.com or Expedia are going to work better.

 

Maybe small boutique hotels or urban properties or properties competing with hotels, for example. And so we need to build our review bases on these other channels as well, because if someone goes to book your property and there’s zero reviews there, again, they don’t have a lot of confidence to reserve your property from what we see. It generally takes three to five reviews and good reviews for someone to not have that concern and just to go ahead and reserve your property.

 

So one of the things that a lot of you run into trouble with is getting all of your bookings on one channel. Usually that channel is Airbnb. And so what does this look like? You launch your property, you’re getting lots of reservations, are rolling in on Airbnb, but what happens on the other side of that? You’re not leaving your calendar open for VRBO or for booking.com. And so you’re building a lot of momentum with Airbnb, which is fantastic. You’ve got money rolling in, but you’re making it harder and harder for you to pick up that momentum on other channels.

 

So one thing you might consider doing, and again, this is just a suggestion, but maybe in the beginning, after you’ve picked up a few reviews, let’s say from Airbnb and nothing has come in from VRBO, consider raising your prices on Airbnb, but just Airbnb and leaving your normal prices on VRBO to leave some of those dates open, maybe a little bit longer and to try to get some bookings coming in. Remember, you need to account for the difference in commission you’re paying on these websites.

 

So for us, we pay 3% at Airbnb. This can differ depending on your settings. We pay 5% with VRBO. And so we charge more on VRBO. And in fact, for us and a lot of the markets where we operate and own properties, we earn more per reservation with VRBO because those reservations are often booked further in advance than they are with Airbnb. And if someone’s booking our properties further in advance, depends on the booking windows,

 

they’re usually going to be charged more. So consider that as a strategy. If you’ve got no reservations coming out on your other channels, just remember, if all of your popular dates are already reserved on Airbnb, then there’s no chance for someone to book on these other platforms. And now once you have that three to five review base on each of these channels, you have enough for someone scrolling through the listings to feel confident booking your property. And so if you prefer to get reservations through Airbnb, then by all means make your pricing a little more competitive there.

 

But the idea here is that we have a good base on all of these platforms so that we can spread our risk, so we can fill up our calendar a little bit more. And so we really, we just have more options. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I’ve been managing my properties virtually for years and years. My team and I have managed thousands of guests. We’ve learned a ton and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made. In fact, we’re now big enough to help manage your properties as well.

 

Our team has a ton of experience from the inner city apartment to the large lakeside retreat. We’ve worked with all types of properties across the nation. We’ll help to take the management workload off your plate while earning top revenue and excellent guest reviews, all while charging an industry low fee. If you’d like to find out if your property fits with our program, just head to strriches.com. There you’ll see a property management button. Again, that’s strriches.com. Just click on the property management button and we look forward to chatting with you soon.

 

Okay, so just to recap real quickly, we talked about some of the benefits from launching a brand new property. We get more visibility. We have special options available to us like Airbnb’s 20% discount. We talked about when during the year you’re actually starting your property or making it live. That’s very important. So if it’s happening during the high season, that would be ideal. If it’s during the low season,

 

you need to be extra aggressive with your prices. We talked about ensuring that we get reviews on different channels and that if we’re dominated by one channel, it doesn’t leave a lot of opportunity for the other ones. The next thing I want to just chat about here briefly is that this really is a journey with your short-term rental. And so when you start your short-term rental, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to make more money in the first year than you will in the second year. Again, we’re building up this base of reviews. You’re building up a clientele, people that love your property.

 

And you’re building up the ability to have repeat guests, to have direct bookings where you’re going to be making more per reservation. And you’re really figuring out your revenue management strategy. Because when you start, yes, we can use these great tools like Price Labs and AirDNA and Wheelhouse. And that gives us a really good starting place. But our pricing strategy is something we have to consistently monitor and it changes all of the time. And so generally speaking, the first year we launch our property is not going to have the most net revenue.

 

And I say net revenue because remember these direct bookings can have a much higher profit margin than a booking through Airbnb, for example. And the other reason we really have to look at our short-term rental is more of an investment journey than just a standalone investment. Maybe like a long-term rental where we put it up for rent, rents for $2,000 a month. Then next year we do the same thing is because we have this base of reviews, we have this history and we’re learning as we receive guests and we’re learning more and more as we get more and more data coming in from our property.

 

The more reviews you have and the higher that review score is, generally speaking, the more reservations you will have compared to your competition. Now, I didn’t say the more money you will have compared your competition because we know you might be getting 90% occupancy and your neighbors getting 70% occupancy, but they’re getting those nights booked at a much higher rate.

 

So again, that goes back to your revenue management strategy. We’ve talked about that a lot on this channel. In fact, we’ve talked about pretty much everything on this channel. I can’t believe it’s been nearly five years. If you’re just joining us for the first time, well, welcome to the show. I’m glad you’re here and you’ll find all of our past episodes at strriches.com. We even have a handy dandy little bot where you can ask it questions like, what episodes do you have on boosting my SEO? Which we do have an episode on that.

 

It’s 130. So we’ve pretty much talked about everything. If you’re new, welcome. And if you’re an existing listener, but you haven’t yet left us a review or subscribe to our YouTube channel, I’d really, really appreciate it. If you wouldn’t mind heading over there and hitting the like button and subscribing to us on Spotify or Apple or wherever you prefer to listen and leaving us a review, it would mean a lot to me. Okay. So just to wrap things up here, there’s one last thing that I want to talk about. And again, this speaks to our STR or short-term rental journey.

 

And that’s that after we’ve developed some of these reviews, we have the opportunity to have these different statuses, right? We can have premier host status on VRBO. We can have super host status on Airbnb. We can be listed as a guest favorite on Airbnb, which is also very powerful to the success for your short-term rental. So there’s a lot that goes into this. And it really starts with the day we launch our property, right? And this is assuming that your property is in good shape, that you’ve stayed at your property,

 

that you know, all of the little things that might arise and you have excellent, excellent communication with your guests. We are in the hospitality industry. So if your guests don’t have a good stay, well, then you’re not going to have good reviews and then we know what happens.

 

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Hey there, Short Term Rental Owners.

Looking to boost your revenue and keep your guests coming back?

I know you are.

Say hello to StayFi, the innovative platform that lets you gather guest info and market directly to them.

How does it work?

Well, we’ve talked about this before.

Your guests log in to your Wi-Fi via a branded landing page you can easily create, showcasing your guidebook and other commissionable activities.

After your guests leave, you can use StayFi’s email and SMS marketing tools to keep your property top of mind and secure those direct bookings.

We’ve built a solid list of subscribers using StayFi, my personal portfolio.

Now we can turn one quick email or automated series into dozens of direct bookings.

Use the code RICHES when you sign up for StayFi.

It’s time to start converting first-time visitors into repeat guests with StayFi.

Well, welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches Podcast.

It’s such a pleasure to have been in the short terminal space for several six, seven, eight years now, because I’ve gotten to meet a lot of truly experts in the industry.

And today we have Mark Simpson with us, who is the founder of Boostly.

He’s literally helped thousands of short terminal owners with lots of different things.

He’s the author of the Book Direct Playbook.

Mark, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I’m a fan of this show.

Thanks for having me on.

There must be episode 250 now, is that about right?

Yeah, we’re getting up there every week.

Not many people get past episode 100, so well done.

You’ve got a massive background.

One of the things I just left out there is that you also have a podcast and you’ve got a lot of episodes, don’t you?

Man, we’ve just passed episode 800.

So we’ve been doing this for a long time.

We sort of, not cheated, but the year of COVID, we thought, right, let’s go for it.

We ramped it up and we did a podcast episode every single day for like the big rebound just to give hosts a bit of help and support.

So yeah, in that year 2020 to 2021, we did, yeah, an episode every day.

So that’s where 365 episodes cranked out.

Man, that is a lot of work.

Well, hey, I appreciate it.

I know me personally with my portfolio, I’ve picked up a lot of tips from you and the content that you put out and your book, the Book Direct Playbook, which I read and it’s full of nuggets.

And so I think maybe we could start this off with, we know every business essentially comes down to marketing, right?

If we’re not marketing our business, right?

We don’t get sales and in the case of short term rentals, we don’t get bookings, right?

And you truly dive deep when it comes to marketing in all sorts of different ways.

Can you talk, I guess, a little bit about the book that you wrote and just a little bit of your background?

Yeah, 100%.

So you’re right.

Sales at the end of the day is the lifeblood of every business.

If you aren’t making money, there’s no business to power.

And the whole reason why Boostly started was because I saw in my little community, which is Scarborough in the United Kingdom, this accent is from England.

And in my little community, I could see that there were too many people were over relying on third parties to bring their bookings in.

And this is like 2015, 2016.

And at the time in the UK, that was booking.com and Expedia.

Airbnb was just getting going, but it wasn’t really that popular in England and the United Kingdom that year.

But still with the OTAs and third parties, people were too reliant on them.

And their sales, their marketing was just putting their business on a platform and waiting, hoping, praying for Bookings to come in.

And I was saying to these people back then, and I say it pretty much every single day, every podcast, every webinar I go on, is that we are very lucky in this industry because the career that we’ve jumped into is one where we make memories.

And we make memories because of that, it’s very in demand.

And there’ll be people listening to this, watching this going, oh, well, I’m not in demand.

It’s because the problem is on the back of COVID, is that there is so much competition now.

It’s a bit harder now because regulations and laws are coming in, but back in COVID, there was barely any regulation.

There was no barrier to entry.

It was like a step up from like MLM campaigns, you know, working for the AVA or clean, you know what I mean?

And so because of that, you could literally go down the street, go to a house, get that house, go to the landlord, say, hey, I’ll take this off your hands, pay the rent and by the next day, get it on Airbnb.

That’s how easy it was.

And because of that, people were just putting all of their eggs in the Airbnb basket or putting eggs on the booking.com basket, et cetera.

And the problem is when you do that, you become so over reliant on these platforms, what happens if they stop bringing you bookings?

And that is what’s happening now.

And that’s happening in many different ways.

For example, suspensions.

I’ve just seen today a prominent Airbnb fan, somebody used to work there, has had his Airbnb listing suspended.

And it happens all the time.

And that is when people go, oh, my whole thing, my mission is to help every single host have multiple revenue streams into their business, to not over rely on on airbnbbooking.com and to build a business on their own land.

And it does fall down to sales and marketing and to bring it back to the book.

So by 2021, I had done over 500 podcast episodes, done over a hundred hours of videos on YouTube.

And I had amassed this big box and catalog of marketing tactics and tips.

And I was seeing questions in Facebook groups.

I was getting questions in my DMs about X, Y and Z.

I was like, right, it’s time to do a book.

And I’ve always wanted to write a book because I love having multiple revenue streams into Boostly, which is my business.

And Amazon is a revenue stream and it’s an untapped revenue stream.

So many people don’t put, don’t list it on there.

And I thought, right, let me get a book.

I did a book writing course.

I knew the skillet and I knew what I was going to do.

I’m a massive fan of Tim Ferriss.

The Tools of Hiding book is behind me, just over here somewhere.

And the way that that book is laid out is it’s interviews with his most favorite podcast episode.

And it’s not a book that you open up on page one and you read all the way to page 300.

You pick it up and you jump to different chapters, different guests, et cetera.

And I wanted that to be the layout of our book.

And the book that we put together is 101 Tactics and Tips, Market Tactics and Tips and how you can build your business on your own land.

And that was the blueprint behind it, so to speak.

And you write the book, you send it off to the copywriter to check, it goes out and you sort of hope that it will do well, but I’d never anticipated it would do as well as it has done.

It sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

I still get messages to the day two years later in my inbox saying, hey, I’m reading the book, I picked up the book, which is unreal.

And yeah, it was definitely like the launch pad of a lot more people becoming aware of the Book Direct Movement, but obviously Boostly as well.

Yeah, gosh, a lot of work into all that, right?

You can’t just pick up a piece of paper and write a book.

And so a lot of good nuggets in there.

And I really like the layout.

I mean, it’s similar, I think, to the way our show is, we’re quick, actional tips.

I mean, you really just laid out a lot of real world practical things.

And those are all really helpful.

I guess they’re not helpful for direct bookings, though, if we don’t start with sort of step one, which is having a website and a place for someone to actually book first, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, what I was realizing while putting the book together is there was so many people who didn’t even have a property management software tool, you know, Lodgify Guest, the owner, etc.

And there was so many people who didn’t have a direct booking website.

And they were coming to me saying, hey, we want to do direct bookings, we want to book direct.

Where do I get started?

And I was just, you know, I would always ask the question back, well, who’s your PMS?

What’s your website?

And the amount of times people were coming back to me saying that they didn’t have it was crazy.

So that’s why I always say one of the most important things that you can do even before you go and get a direct booking website is you got to get a PMS.

The problem with that is that there are over a thousand to choose from.

There’s loads and 50 new ones every day.

And you can go into any Facebook group out there and you can ask the question, which PMS should I go with?

And out of 10 answers, you’ll get 10 different software solutions, which is a bit of a problem.

I mean, the good news is that consolidation is happening.

They are buying each other out.

They are turning into maybe like the top 30 people.

But even still, what works best for yourself will work different to me because I’ve got maybe different needs.

The best advice that I would give anybody, and we’ve got a free blog on this, is we interviewed over a hundred people, the pros and cons of their PMS provider, and we put a blog post together.

So you can go check that out.

boostly.co.uk, boostly.co.uk/pms.

My main advice would be go and book a demo with them.

A lot of them now give free trials for like a week or two weeks.

So you can have a play with it.

See which one suits you best.

Figure out what your main unique buying issue is.

For example, there’s some people who do the management model and they have to have really accurate reporting tools to give to their homeowners.

That’s going to be a driver for you.

Maybe your driver is you want to have, you know, US customer service reps.

That’s a big one for a lot of people.

Maybe some it’s got to have an app.

People love an app.

So whatever that is, go on that factor alone.

And that’s the main one with that.

And then obviously once you’ve got the PMS, that is the main place.

And then you can have a website on the back of it.

You can take strike payments.

You know, you can link to all of the OTA, so there’s no double bookings.

But yeah, it was crazy how many people didn’t have that.

Yeah, things have changed a lot though.

And I, gosh, it’s like every conference we go to, there’s just so many new tech providers and all.

Yeah, a lot to choose from.

So yeah, check out that blog.

If you’re out there listening, and you haven’t yet used, jumped on a property management software.

I mean, that’s mandatory.

Step one.

So Mark, you’re an expert in marketing.

I’m just gonna say that.

I think you, your whole team knows that.

I mean, you really, really do a good job with that.

And there’s a lot of pieces that go into marketing.

And there’s a lot of pieces that go into getting a lot of direct bookings.

You talk about a lot of them in your book.

And I know you got some new products and stuff coming out that we’ll jump into a little bit later.

But I’m curious if you could just talk a little bit about how you find social media fitting into direct bookings.

Social media is your shopfront, I would say, to your business.

If your website is your business card, then the website is your shopfront.

It is amazing now in 2024, and the recent stats and the surveys have shown exactly how much percentage of your guests are using social media to find a place to stay.

This new generation, this Gen Z generation, Gen Y generation, they are using TikTok and Instagram before they’re doing a Google search to find a place to stay, which I find is crazy.

And that’s not to mean if you’re a host and you’re just getting started, you got to think, you got to create this amazing aesthetic, videography and photography.

You don’t.

All I would recommend everybody starts doing is that you start documenting your journey.

I see it more and more now.

People that are opening up glamping sites and, you know, different properties and locations, boutique hotels, or even just your stand alone short term rentals, documenting the journey as they’re getting going.

And people love to follow a story.

You got to think about social media.

When you open up Amazon, you are opening up that app because you want to buy something.

When you’re about to perform a Google search, you are doing that because you want to take action.

When you open up social media, you are doing it to be social.

You’re not looking to buy.

You’re going on there to, you know, check in with friends, check out what people are doing, et cetera.

So if your content that you post out is last minute availability, buy now, book now, da da da da, you’re instantly just going to pot off the person that is viewing it.

If you can tell a story, document your journey, maybe throw in a couple of memes along the way, then people will really, really appreciate what you’re putting out.

The best example of this, and I think a book that I read a long time ago and I took a lot from it was Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

Perfect example of how to put content out, how to do any sort of marketing out there is give education, education, education, document, document, and then Right Hook is the sale.

So whatever your sale may be, that last minute availability, etc.

And you can take that sort of framework and you can put it on Instagram, TikTok.

You can apply it to Facebook groups.

In the book, I’ve got a whole chapter on Facebook groups and how there is a goldmine of reservations that are just sat there.

The problem is, is that people go for the spray and pray approach.

And when they go into Facebook groups, they’re literally just peppering ads upon ads upon abs in these groups every day.

If you take the approach I put in the book, it will show you how to turn lookers into bookers easily.

Yeah, great advice there.

And I think there’s a lot of avenues with social media, right?

And it can definitely be a lot of work and it is a lot of work.

If you want to get good results, we have AI, of course, that can help assist with a lot of these things.

And if we have time, I’d love to pick your brain on that for a little bit.

But I guess before we get into that, social media can be super, super helpful.

But we are sort of at the mercy of the platforms, right?

Facebook changes their algorithm or something, or Instagram changes their algorithm.

Similar to the way Airbnb can change their algorithm, and then all of a sudden our property is not in a category or it’s not showing up as much.

We’re sort of at the mercy of these big platforms, but there’s another approach to marketing or one that I guess it’s a little more secure.

And you talk about this and you mentioned it earlier, never building your house on someone else’s land.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so my favorite form of marketing without a shadow of a doubt is email.

I know what they were talking about, StayFi and Arthur Colker and what he’s built there.

But you’re right, social media, you are at the beg of the mercy of the algorithms.

One thing I would say about that though, and I think that so many people get caught in the comparison on this is that they’ll go on to Instagram and they’ll see a competitor who has got 200,000 likes on a post and I’ll go, I can never do that.

And I’ll go, well, let me see your social.

And they’ll say, they’ll have like 200 likes on a post.

And I go, right, well, you may feel a bit downhearted, but just imagine right now in front of you, you were 200 people stood in front of you who were wanting to come and find out more about you or stay with you.

You’d feel a little bit differently.

You’d feel a bit overwhelmed, right?

And they’d go, yeah, a hundred percent.

Well, you know, don’t get that comparison.

If you’ve got 200 followers, for example, but you’ve got 200 people that are engaged in you, 200 people that when you post, they are always communicating, always active, et cetera.

Then the social media algorithms actually favor you over a post, over a page that’s got 200,000 followers.

But when they post, only a thousand people engage.

It’s all about quality over quantity.

That’s number one.

Bringing back to email.

Now there’s the slow lane to marketing and there’s the fast lane.

So just imagine now you’re on the highway and you want to go from A to B and you want to get to B as soon as possible.

Slow lane is obviously posting on social media.

Slow lane is doing all of the things that aren’t guaranteed to work.

One of the fast lanes and the fast way of getting there is email.

And the reason being is that when you do a post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you are throwing it out into the void.

Right.

And there’s so much noise.

When you post on Facebook, you’re right.

Algorithm means 0.1% of all posts that gets put out there gets seen on the newsfeed.

It’s so hard to get on the newsfeed unless you’re going to give them money.

Right.

It’s the same with Instagram, same with TikTok, etc.

When you have a listing on Airbnb, even if somebody lands on your listing, there’s still a ton of noise.

Airbnb are going, right, you like this, check out this.

When you send an email and I send an email to you, Tim, right?

You open it up, it’s a one-on-one communication.

As long as you put that email together nicely, you can get someone to open it up and to read all the way down and to take action.

There’s no noise.

An email is unbelievable because for every $1 you invest in it, you get $42 back.

That’s a 4,200% turn of investment, which for everybody who likes numbers, that’s a nice little stat for everybody.

The problem is that I would argue that only 1% of the whole industry actually invest time, money and effort into their email marketing strategy.

I’ll go to a host and I’ll say, right, how many emails they sent in the last year?

They look at me blankly and it’s like, okay, well, this is a problem.

Tools like StayFi are fantastic for helping hosts start to gather an email list.

Then once you’ve got the list, it’s like, well, what are you going to do with it?

That’s all about education.

So that’s what we do at Boostly.

Yeah.

You help take advantage of that and lots of really good ways.

Awesome.

Love that.

Never build your house on someone else’s land.

Start building that email list if you’re out there and you have not, make sure you get started.

If you missed our episode with Arthur Colker, StayFi, which Mark has been mentioning here, that was episode 245.

Really easy way to get started with your email list and it’s essential.

Awesome stuff there, Mark.

Let’s see.

Let’s talk about AI real quick because I think that’s something that you’re quite interested in.

And yeah, what are your thoughts on AI as they relate to our industry?

I absolutely love it.

And one of the reasons being is that small business owners, they always come at you with two reasons why they can’t grow and scale their business.

Number one is time.

Number two is money.

With AI, time, it just goes out the window because you have got, for free, a intern that is 1,000 times cleverer than anybody else on the planet, literally in your pocket 24 7, never complains, never sleeps, doesn’t ask for money, doesn’t ask for time off, it is there.

And I can’t remember the last time that I crafted an email campaign or if I crafted a social media post and I didn’t tap into AI.

It’s been around for over a year now.

It’s getting much more smart and much more clever within every week, with every release.

There’s not just OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there’s now Cloud, X have got their version with Grok, Meta have got their version with Llama and so many more large language models, LLMs, are being created on a daily and weekly basis, it seems.

And because of that, there are now more unique case studies.

For example, there is vendors that have been set up in our industry specifically designed for hospitality and more importantly, specifically designed for customer service.

I would argue that customer service and speaking to your guests is one of the most mind-numbing tasks that you have to do.

And I’ve been in this industry since I was born, right?

I’ve tried my hardest to escape, but it keeps pulling me back in.

And I do have that PTSD of 11 o’clock at night, getting messages from guests that I have to answer, whether they’re asking for Wi-Fi code or the water is not working X, Y, and Z.

So the first use case in this industry is where AI is being brought in to create these chatbots that are very clever, very smart, very receptive, and can have a human conversation with people.

Boom, AI is one.

You’ve got Get Bestie, Host AI, Hello Hosty, Guest Guru.

There’s quite a few.

You can just go and do a bit of Google search.

In fact, I interviewed, I did a big roundtable.

It’s called the AI Roundtable.

And I invited all of the founders of these companies in.

And bearing in mind, it is a very competitive market, but they were all well behaved.

There was no sniping, no bitching about each of his products.

They were very good, very well behaved.

And it was an insightful two-hour conversation because they showed what they’ve done, where they are, but most importantly, what’s coming next.

And at the moment, it’s text.

So text in, text out.

Next is voice.

So for example, a guest will be able to call this AI bot who is acting on your behalf, and they will be able to have a conversation with them in real time, which is fantastic.

And I was talking to you off there about Delphi, D-E-L-P-H-I, which I’ve been using now for six, eight months.

I was one of the first early adopters, and we’re about to add in video, a video clone, which is crazy.

So someone can video message me, have a video conversation with me.

Every question that you ask is trained on Boostly, is trained on this industry, is trained on the book that you were talking about, all the podcasts that we’ve done, the YouTube videos, et cetera.

So you can ask me questions 24 seven in a video as well as voice, which is active now and text.

Yeah, it’s amazing.

Well, good to know in the future, if we want to do a follow up interview and you’re busy, we’ll get your bot video clone on and we’ll go from there.

That would be interesting.

You can just line up.

Yeah, amazing.

We’re excited.

Everything that we’re doing too, we’re really excited with AI.

And I’m kind of a techie guy just at heart too.

I used to work for a software company for a long time and it just has so much efficiencies, with guest communication, with all kinds of things, with building listings, and doing research and marketing too, like you said.

Research as well is untapped.

There was a project that I don’t know how far it got down the line, but it’s called Adept.

And one of the examples they were showing on the site, it was an agent, so agent AI.

And this agent AI, the guy went on the computer, loaded up Zillow, and he was acting as an investor.

He was like, right, I’m looking for a free bed property in Houston, Texas.

It needs to have this, cash on cash, da da da da da da.

And he literally hit send, and you could see the computer was doing it on the site for him.

Now, this was the demo, it was a while ago.

I don’t know if you ever get out of a beta stage, but that’s the sort of thing that you’ll be able to do at mass scale.

So it really is exciting.

I feel like we’ve got, what, three, four more big months left of one big quarter left, two big quarter left of 2024.

I feel like we’re about to see the next iteration of ChatGPT.

And then at the start of next year, we’ll probably see GPT-5, which will just ramp it up another notch.

And then who knows where we’ll be.

I think the next sort of level and stage to this where, you know, it starts to get in people’s houses a lot more.

I think we’re going to start seeing more robots being produced.

I think there’s already started rolling those bad boys out.

Amazon have said it, Tesla have said it.

And I think they’re going to be made more mainstream where you’ve got like your AI robots and the house helping you doing little chores and whatnot.

And then who knows from the AGI, ASI, interesting times ahead in that front.

Indeed, indeed.

Sky’s the limit.

It’s coming in from all sides.

As long as it’s not the Skynet.

That’s what I say.

As long as it’s not the Skynet.

And then we’re all right.

Yeah, we actually, we watched the original Terminator the other day.

And it was like when robots take over the world in 2030.

And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s in like five years, you know.

And so many of these things are already happening already.

Well, awesome, Mark.

Let’s see, so we talked about having a direct booking website, super important.

We talked about social media and its importance.

And I loved your perspective on that too.

Or, you know, if 200 people are liking your post or whatever it happens to be, 200 people is a lot of people, you know.

And if you envision them standing in front of you, that’s a great way to look at it and to not get discouraged.

If you’re out there and you’ve been trying forever and you’re not getting a lot of, or as many likes comparing to someone else.

So I guess the lesson there is don’t compare, right?

We talked about not building your home on someone else’s land, so building the email list.

We sort of just dipped our toes in AI there.

This podcast, you know, we’re trying to provide actual tips.

You’ve already provided a lot and your book certainly has a ton, but there’s someone out there and they’re kind of lost in the marketing space.

What would be the place you would recommend starting or maybe the one most important thing that someone could spend a little more time on right now?

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

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

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

If I feel lost and let’s just assume that they’ve got a couple of properties, let’s say, and you’ve got a PMS and you’ve got a website and you’re still 90% plus reliant on Airbnb, safe for your bookings.

One of the best things that you can do right now is you can go into your PMS, go to your reports and just get the last six months worth of bookings with you.

If you’ve got like an average 70% occupancy, let’s just say, then you should have a decent amount of bookings in there.

You should have at least 30 to 40 to 50 people.

What I want for you to do is I want you to pick up the phone and I want you to give them a call.

Now, this is uncomfortable for a lot of people, but the best times in your business growth is when you are uncomfortable, is when you’re out of your comfort zone.

What you want to achieve with those calls is you’re not going to try and sell them.

What you want to do is you want to try and find out, A, why they booked with you, B, where did they go during your stay with you, and C, would they be able to recommend somebody to stay?

Do they have a referral friend, co-worker, et cetera, somebody could stay with you in the future.

Now, the reason for those three things is, number one, if you’ve got a case set of about 30 to 40 people, and let’s just say 10 people pick up, right?

Out of those 10 people you have a conversation with, if seven people are talking about one thing about why they booked to stay with you, let’s just say it’s the view, let’s just say it’s the proximity to an event venue, let’s just say it’s because of your price, right?

Let’s just say because of X, Y and Z, then you’ll have a very good idea of what your avatar is, why the guests come and stay with you, right?

Because for the most part, especially when you’re getting going, you’re guessing, you’re making an estimated guess about why people come and stay with you.

But if you can actually talk to the people who hand over money to come and stay with you, and if you can get six, seven out of 10 people talk about one thing, then that’s something to go all in on and that becomes your niche.

So I would go, let’s just say that you’re near a hospital and there are guests staying with you because they’re visiting sick ones or maybe they’re working at a hospital, et cetera.

But you go, okay, this property is good for this.

And you look at the actual property and go, okay, so what is it about my place?

What am I doing?

Let’s just say that the people who are staying with you are working at a hospital, right?

These are people.

And again, go check out Jesse Vasquez, because he talks about this a lot.

He’s one of the best when he talks about medical stays, etc.

But it’s like, can you get blackout blinds?

How can you make the people who are working at hospitals lives easier?

Can you get bus routes?

Can you have recommended taxi drivers that could come and help and get in to and from the hospital?

What can you do to make that property stand out more to that niche?

And you go all in on that niche.

Now, that is scary for some because they go, well, if I go all in on this niche, I’m ruling out all these other people that could give me money.

But the riches are in the niches.

And my key for everybody moving forward is you got to bury yourself so far down in a niche, there’s not room for anybody else.

And the thing about that is, if you’ve got one property, and let’s just say you’re 70% occupied, and let’s just say your average stay is about seven days, let’s just say, then you’ve only really got to get 20, 30 bookings a year, right?

20, 30 people.

And we talked about this.

You don’t have to get millions of bookings.

You just have to get 20 or 30 people to see your business and go, I want to book and stay with them.

I mean, if it’s a really good one, it could be that you just need one or two bookings.

But to do that, you need to have a niche.

You’ve got to be able to speak to the person who is searching on your listing, right?

That’s the key of that.

The second one is where were they visiting?

Where did they go and check out while they were staying with you?

That’s an opportunity to network.

So if you ask 10 people and seven of them go, Oh, I went to go and visit this restaurant, this coffee shop.

The first thing I’d be doing, I’d be calling, walking into that restaurant or coffee shop and saying, Hey, majority of my guests, I send them to you.

Do you have like a voucher scheme?

What can we do to send more people your way?

Can you do anything you can offer to our guests to give them a bit of a discount?

A, that business owner would be stupid to say no, because you are literally sending in free marking, right?

B, more often than not, we’ll give you a voucher code of some way, shape or form.

So C, the guest absolutely loves it because they’re saving money to go in there.

We did this at our family business and we had like a little map together, pinpointed in the local area of places that they could go and visit, which is around our niche, which was families, that they could go and get 10% off, et cetera, et cetera.

And it was such a win, win, win.

We sent so many people every single year to this open farm, but you could go and visit for the day and ride on tractors and stuff.

They started doing weddings, but they had no accommodation and they had the bride and groom that was saying, listen, we’ve got loads of family coming in from out of town.

Where do you recommend our wedding guests stay?

And who do you think was the first place that they said to go and check out?

It wasn’t booking.com, it wasn’t Airbnb, it wasn’t Expedia, it wasn’t a local big chain, it was us.

And we would get full out weekends, sometimes weeks with these wedding guests, which was only on the back of us picking up the phone and giving a phone call to them and sending people their way.

And then the final one is the referral.

And this is simple, right?

And bearing in mind, every single thing that I’m showing you right now is free to do, costs you absolutely nothing, right?

But the referral, so when you call the guests and you speak to them, you’re not asking them to spend money with you again, because that’s a little bit sleazy.

But if you frame it like this, do you know anyone who is coming to X?

Now, if you pick up the phone and you speak to a business guest, this is unbelievable, because the business world is very ancestral.

He could have people in his company who are actively coming to your town, your city on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, but just don’t know about your property.

He’s never told them, right?

So if you say, hey, Tim, is anybody else from your software company that’s coming to the area at all for any conferences or events?

You go, actually there is.

Let me put you in touch with our manager, our accommodation manager, our accommodation specialist, and you’ll be able to get on to our little black book.

Those sort of things are goldmine.

But even if it’s just your vacation traveler, just say, hey, do you know anybody who’s cool as you, but is looking to come to the area for their next vacation?

And they’ll go, yeah, 100%.

We actually do, this family is looking for a place to stay.

I’ll pass the details on.

You don’t stop there.

You always dangle the carrot.

Just go, oh yeah, Tim, amazing.

So just to let you know, if they booked a stay and they mention you when they’re doing the booking, we’ll send you X as a token of our appreciation.

And X could be anything.

It could be Amazon vouchers, bottle of whiskey, bottle of wine, stick of rock, whatever you want to call it.

You can have it something that’s locally well known or you can just send them hash in the post.

If you dangle the carrot, people will take action.

And those three things there, anybody can do right now, especially if they’re slow on bookings and especially if they’ve had bookings because the data is literally sat on their PMS right now.

Their phone number is there.

The only thing that’s stopping them is them.

Because to pick up that phone and to do a text or do a call, it’s a big sort of hurdle to jump over.

But once you do that first one, it will take you days, weeks to do that first call.

The second call will take minutes after.

Fabulous, fabulous advice, Mark.

And yeah, a lot of you are sitting on little gold mines out there.

And if you’re tweaking your listing title every other day and moving one header photo back to the back and the next one up to the front, and it’s not doing anything for you, just remember what Mark’s saying here.

You’re sitting on a gold mine.

You just got to pick up the phone and put in a little bit of work there.

That is going to become such a redundant tactic very, very soon.

And I’ll tell you for why Airbnb recently purchased an AI company.

And recently they created icons.

And recently they changed the profile section of everybody’s Airbnb account.

Now, the reason why they’re doing all of that is to collect data.

I don’t know if you tried to qualify for one of these free icons where you could stay in the up house or meet Kevin Hart or whatever it is.

To qualify, it was free, but you had to ask and answer a ton of questions.

The only reason they’re doing that is to get your data.

If you log in to your profile now, it asks you what’s your favorite 90s movies, where do you like to go, et cetera.

It’s building its database.

And Airbnb have got one of the biggest data sets probably that is out there.

In my opinion, and it is literally my opinion, the search on Airbnb is going to change rapidly, maybe this year, probably next year, where you will load up the app, you will say, right, I want to go to New York, have your dates in.

You will not see the map.

You will not see listings.

It will be like a Tinder where you’ll swipe left, swipe right, right?

Based on your likes, your wants, and what you’ve told Airbnb in the data set, right?

And so all of these tweaking pitches here and there, doing X, Y and Z to like beat the algorithm, there’s going to be no algorithm, right?

It’s going to be exclusively to the person who is using the app, right?

So if I use the app and my wife is sat next to me and we both search for New York, it’s going to show up different things, right?

So all of these little tweaks is absolutely pointless.

So if you’re wasting hours every week doing that, substitute that for what I talked to you about, which is new business activity.

Do that for 5, 10, 15 minutes every day, consistently for 365 days, and your business will be a lot better come 365 days later.

Yeah.

Fabulous advice, fabulous advice.

And all that work that you put in today or tomorrow or the next year, it’s going to stick with you, right?

Because you’re not building your house on someone else’s land.

You’ve got the emails, you’ve got the contacts, and you’re less reliant on these big companies like Airbnb that can change things all the time and are changing things all the time.

Fabulous advice.

Compound effect is real, man.

I mean, when I first started eight years ago, I heard people talking about the compound effect and whatnot, and I was like, but now eight years on and I’m the other side of this, 800 podcast episodes, over a thousand YouTube videos, there is a compound effect of content that is out there.

So when people are searching more often than not, Boostly comes up and it’s a compound effect of doing the referral tactic, compound effect of talking to customers and networking, et cetera, consistently for all these years.

It’s now come to the point where it’s really having its fruition over the last two years.

So you just got to start.

Literally, that is it.

You start.

Stop watching TikTok at night.

Stop watching the Netflix, Disney, Amazon.

Instead, dedicate an hour to doing new business, just an hour, every single day, and that compound effect will reward you in a year’s time, 110 percent.

Totally agree.

Consistency and hard work, and this is something you guys have been doing for a long time, Mark, like you said, and you’re showing up way more because of all the hard work you put in.

So tell us a little more about Boostly and what you guys are up to these days and where you’re headed.

So for the last eight years, our sort of tagline is the tools.

We give hosts the tools, tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence to increase their direct bookings.

And a big part of that tool has been website design.

I feel like that’s where we really got to be known as what we do.

We aren’t website designers.

We like to call ourselves a transformation company.

We get you from where you are to where you want to be.

And my goal is to get everybody who works with us to 65 percent direct bookings.

Our niche is that one property owner, management company, etc., up to 20, 25.

That’s where we operate mostly in, which is the majority of the market.

Now, the website tool that we have built has really evolved over the years.

We do everything under WordPress.

The reason being is that it’s the best CMS, content manager solution that is out there.

Google love it, and you can do so much more than a free website on.

Insert your PMS.

The problem is that it’s really expensive to put together.

It costs us, it costs the consumer, and yada, yada, yada.

The more that we have grown, the more customers that we get, the more staff we’ve got to get, the more developers we’ve got to get, programmers we’ve got to get.

So our costs go up, and so our prices have had to consistently go up.

It’s been my worry, seeing that we sit in the one to 20 property owner market, this industry, that our prices have priced out a lot of the early people getting going.

Because not only do we do website, we’ve got CRMs, we do trainings, we do all of that combined in this one package.

So the thing that we’re launching in October, in Q3 of this year, is the plugin.

So the plugin sits on any WordPress website.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Boostly website or not.

We’ve had this internal plugin for so long now.

And I’ve started to notice that people are going, well, I don’t want the website, I’ve got a website, I just want that plugin.

Because that plugin is the main connector.

That is what connects to HostAway, Hostfully, Guesty, all of the big PMSs our plugin connects to.

We’re the only ones in the whole industry that have these connections into these PMSs.

And what we’ve decided to do is we decided to turn it from internal to external.

So we’ve rebuilt it from scratch.

You’ll be able to go on to our website just for a small monthly cost of, let’s just say, $80 a month.

And we haven’t decided fully on the price yet.

Instead of paying the six grand to build out your website, it will just be $80 a month.

You can download the plugin, you can have a website up and running within 15, 20 minutes because of this plugin, which is crazy.

Because at the moment, our build time for a website is like 20 hours.

So if you can have a website up and running literally within 20, 30 minutes, it’s going to massively reduce everything.

And anybody, any host, doesn’t matter what the skill level, you’ll be able to be up and running, which is very powerful.

And the second cool thing of this is that we’re able to create it where you can connect to multiple PMSs at once.

So let’s just say, Tim, you’re with Guesty and with HostAway, we’ve got 20 properties in the same area each.

Instead of me just having 20 properties on my site and you having 20 properties on your site combined, we can have 40 properties on our sites.

So it looks like we’ve got more of a portfolio.

So we’ve got more bookable places.

And if I get you a booking from my website, then we can just work out a little cool referral fee and vice versa.

And it doesn’t just stop there with one.

You could create your own little network of hosts.

And let’s just say you get 10 people together and you’ve all got 10 properties each.

That’s 100 properties on your site, creating your own little mini OTAs, your own little mini listing sites, your own little referral networks.

And you’ll be able to mark it and be visible and get more diary bookings that way.

And it’s all powered through this plugin.

And that’s what’s coming in Q4.

So we’re very excited.

It’s gonna massively shake things up.

And yeah, I’m about to go quiet for a couple of weeks.

We’re gonna get in the lab.

We’re gonna finalize it, test it like crazy, launch it and then just go like gangbusters.

That’s awesome.

That’s exciting.

I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Seeing it in action.

I’ll have some demos ready.

Yeah, cool.

I’ve got one other question for you, Mark.

But before we get to that, where’s the best place for people to find out about your new products, to find about your existing ones, to hear you, all those good things?

Yeah, I mean, the best place, Instagram is always good.

Boostly, UK, B-O-O-S-T-L-O-U-K.

Or just grab a copy of the book, the playbook.

It’s literally, you know, the Kindle is like a dollar.

The Audible is like $4.

The print is like $10.

Go there, sign up to the free course that comes part of it.

And then once you’re on the email list, you’ll definitely hear when we’ve got more.

I’m going to plan in Q4, I’m going to plan doing webinars, Zooms, demonstrations, like pretty much every day in Q4, just to really spread the word, because we really want to ramp it up.

You know, my goal is to get to this in front of 10,000 hosts, you know, using this bit of kit.

Awesome.

Well, get out there and grab the book.

I’ve read it myself, like I said, full of nuggets and Mark and his team just have amazing content.

So thanks a bunch, Mark.

Just one last question before we jump off here.

And the title of the podcast is Short Term Rental Riches.

And so a lot of people naturally just associate the word riches with finances.

But we know life is not just about finances.

We can have all the money in the world and we can still be unhappy.

So I’m just wondering if there’s something in your life or some habit or something that you’ve changed or way that you live out your days that enrich your life.

But in a non-financial way.

What I’m saying, and they are all sat on the other side of that door.

I have been in this industry for a long time.

In 2011, when I came back in full time, it was me and my wife and my eldest.

We’re working in the hospitality business with my parents.

And I barely saw my wife or my eldest at all.

It was very much me and my wife, we were working revolving shifts.

And when we came out of that and I started Boostly, we built this whole company to be family first.

And I’ve done that for eight years.

I’ve been very fortunate as this business has grown.

I’ve been able to hire more people that can do more of the work.

That means that I can spend less time doing the work and having more time with the family.

And you’re 100% right.

People associate riches and goals of having as much money as possible.

But for me, I don’t care about that.

I would much rather give all of the money to run Boostly to other people.

And that means that I get paid less, but that means I can have as much time as possible.

I love doing the school runs.

I do like 99.9% of them.

The summer holidays are here now in the UK.

It’s just started.

And as of tomorrow, I’m off for the whole of August.

We’re traveling around in campgrounds around Europe, which is amazing.

And the team doing all of the work behind the scenes.

I’ve been very much impacted by Tim Ferriss’ For Our Work Week, Mike McCallett with his clockwork, Traction by Gino Wickman.

All these books have played such a massive role on me.

And I’ve been able to sort of install that into the team.

So the riches again, not about the money at all.

It’s about spending as much time as possible with these little buggers as they grow up.

Because there’s going to be one day when they’re not going to be here.

They’re not going to be wanting to hang out with us.

And that’s why we do that.

And that’s how I do that.

Great advice and great to hear.

And thank you so much for coming on, Mark.

I know our audience is going to love it.

Full of nuggets, lots to take away.

We would, of course, love to have you back on in the future.

Whether it is you in person or it’s your highly trained AI video bot replica, we’ll take what we can get.

So thanks for coming on and hope to have you on in the future.

My pleasure.

Thank you very much.

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

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

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

You can head over to restmethods.com/ai and get your copy for free.

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

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Well, welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

I’m really excited to have a special guest on today.

He’s the CEO and founder of what I believe is probably the best way to get direct bookings and the best way to build an email list for our short term rentals.

And that is Arthur Colker.

Welcome to the show, Arthur.

Thanks, Tim, for having me.

You’re the CEO of StayFi, and we’ve talked about this on the show.

So I think most of our audience is at least familiar.

They’ve heard the name StayFi before, but I’m really excited to dig into the specifics with you today because it’s powerful.

You guys jam-packed it.

I guess before we do that, though, can you give us just a real quick background and maybe where you started with StayFi?

Yeah, so I actually found the short-term rental industry kind of accidentally.

Prior to StayFi, I managed and ran a marketing agency, primarily focused on digital marketing.

And we had a variety of types of clients, from B2B art sales to D2C fashion brands.

And one of our customers happened to be a short-term rental company called Heirloom, which actually owns and operates vacation rentals with investors.

So kind of a different model for somebody that has 200-plus properties in their portfolio.

And when they hired me, they were completely dependent on Airbnb and Vrbo.

And they wanted us to develop a independent brand and develop a marketing strategy to start driving direct bookings.

And as a marketer, working with a brand, the first thing we always want to look at is what customer data do you have?

Because in this industry in particular, those are the folks who it’s going to be easiest to convince to book directly with you.

Just because most consumers are used to booking through an OTA, like Airbnb or Vrbo.

And maybe they don’t yet have the trust to book with a short-term rental brand because there aren’t that many that are well-known.

And they said, well, in fact, we have almost no guest data because Airbnb and Vrbo don’t share that data with us, and we don’t have the rights to use it, even if they did.

So we really approached them with, let’s first find a way to seamlessly collect data from every guest that stays with you.

Also, one unique aspect in this industry is unlike hotels, you can have many, many guests staying in a property, and so there’s a lot of value in the non-booking guests as well.

And we looked at a ton of different ways to do this.

We kind of settled on, hey, wouldn’t it be nice to put in a system like you see at a Starbucks or a hotel?

Or an airport, where when the guest logs into the Wi-Fi, they have to provide their information.

Because we know that’s part of the journey every guest will go on, is joining the Wi-Fi, as opposed to some other techniques that require the guest to go do something that isn’t the natural part of the stay, like filling out a form or, you know, requesting them to do this extra activity, use some guest guidebook or tablet.

That’s just not the natural part of whatever guest is going to go do during the stay.

And initially, we looked at just purchasing one of these systems from the companies that do it at coffee shops, right?

Because there’s a lot of great companies out there that work in other verticals, but it turned out their solutions didn’t really work in the short-term rental industry, whether from a pricing perspective, capabilities, hardware.

So I thought, hey, this is an interesting niche to explore more.

We could probably build a very basic product for Heirloom that does what we need.

And from there, it really just snowballed as we discovered that Heirloom’s problem was a problem that almost all short-term rental operators face in building a direct booking brand.

And so we developed a product that we could start selling to other short-term rental companies.

And then it just grew from there.

And we kept adding more and more features that our customers were asking for.

Yeah, no, fantastic idea.

You know, you definitely filled that need for a lot of us.

And like you said, it’s pretty seamless.

I mean, someone checks in your property.

Really, the first thing that they do most of the time is connect to the Wi-Fi.

And if that property happens to be a seven-bedroom home and there’s 24 guests there, then you’re probably gonna get 24 emails most of the time, right?

And so the list creation can happen really quickly.

It’s crazy because we have customers that manage three, four, 500 homes.

And over the course of using StayFi, they have lists of hundreds of thousands of guests, which is insane.

And there, you know, a single email message can drive hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue from one email newsletter.

So the way that it can scale, especially for large companies, is just insane.

But it really, we find it works for companies at all stages.

So we were just working with somebody with one listing who only had Airbnb and had 70% occupancy approximately.

And for her to use StayFi, even to get just one incremental booking a year, will pay for StayFi, our subscription service, with a great return on investment.

And she now sees a few bookings come in every few months from repeat guests.

So just the ability to first capture that information, and then of course, now we have all the tools you need to then follow up with guests to actually market your company.

You’ll see, obviously, it starts out slower because you’re starting to build that list, but the effects really magnify once you have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of guests in your database that you can go after and market your properties or other services that you offer, which is a whole other area we could dive into as well.

Yeah, it’s super valuable, you know, and it also decreases our reliance on these OTAs, right?

I did an episode, I don’t know, it’s probably been a few years ago now, when I had a lot of my personal portfolio under one Airbnb account, and we had some housekeepers messaging us like, hey, how come the properties aren’t showing up?

And I’d log in, I’m like, they’re showing up to me, everything looks fine.

And then we had more housekeepers messaging us, I’m like, okay, there’s something weird going on here.

And the calendar was also drying up a little bit.

And then we found out that we had missed a support email somewhere in the hundreds of emails that Airbnb sends us.

And they took our listings down, but they didn’t notify us on the calendar.

And so we lost thousands of dollars that week, probably.

And so ever since that day, we’re like, okay, we’re now on multiple Airbnb accounts, we’re on multiple channels, but the real goal is to get these bookings coming directly.

And so you guys at StayFi, you’re just making that easier for us, for sure.

Yeah, and I’d say the great news is a lot of the other players in the industry are also on the direct booking bandwagon, let’s say, and are also making it easier for folks to have a direct booking website, to accept direct bookings, because a lot of the hesitancy we see around folks who are used to maybe just using one or two channels is how can my bookings be protected?

How am I going to have damage waivers or insurance that covers a direct booking?

How can I have a rental agreement?

How do I process payments?

And just about every property management software out there, which is definitely the first software any operator is going to use if they’re professionalizing, they all offer a direct booking website, and many now offer bundled in services that you can opt in for.

So an example would be Hospitable, which is a PMS.

They have a basic direct booking product, but they have an advanced one that bundles in damage waiver, contracts, insurance, everything, so that your direct bookings are as protected or even more protected than an OTA booking, because that’s the other side.

We can help do marketing, but you also need a system to accept direct bookings in a safe and compliant manner.

And so it’s great to see that all the other tools in the industry have really aligned and are putting focus on this area, so that everything can work together harmoniously so that you can safely accept direct bookings and have all the tools you need to go out and also market to your guests, which we can also talk about those strategies, because I think people also get intimidated there in terms of, I’ve never done marketing, I don’t know how to do emails, right?

It’s actually, I’d say there’s a lot of ways to do it that don’t require any real marketing expertise on the operator side to start driving those direct bookings as well.

Yeah, great points there.

I mean, when I first got started with Short Term Rentals, creating your own direct booking website was like, you had to be a programmer or something.

It was quite difficult.

And now, like you said, you can sign up with Hospitable or you can sign up with pretty much any of the major property management platforms now.

And boom, you click a button, you got direct booking website.

But as you mentioned, sometimes the marketing becomes a little intimidating.

What do I do with these emails?

How do I contact people regularly?

Do I have to go in all the time and do that?

You guys have some great features to help assist with that.

You want to touch on that for a sec?

Yeah, so in StayFi, we have our own email and text marketing tools, but we also integrate with just about every other third party tool out there.

So if you just want to use this for email collection, you can send data to a tool that you maybe already use or love using.

Like a MailChimp is definitely the most common, but there’s 20 or 30 we can integrate with.

I mean, you can use Zapier, which can send data just about anywhere you’d like, you could imagine.

But then, of course, we have our own tools.

One great thing about our email tool is that in addition to the data we source from the Wi-Fi, we also integrate with most property management software, such that if you have any real emails in those tools, we also pull them in.

So if you’ve been getting emails another way, and it’s in your PMS, we also will ingest that data.

So you have all the emails in your universe coming into one tool automatically, and you can do the same thing, for instance, with forms on your website.

Then once the data is there, we have some guides around what to do.

The first type of email we always recommend people set up is an automated email, or emails, or sometimes called a drip campaign, where whenever you collect an email, whether through the Wi-Fi or your website or your PMS, you can then trigger one or a series of emails automatically.

And why that’s great, especially if you’re not that proficient in email marketing or you don’t have the time to do it, is that you can set up emails one time that you know will get sent over a course of a period of time.

So one example would be a Wi-Fi welcome series.

So in StayFi, we collect the email from the Wi-Fi, then it triggers an email that you write in StayFi that can introduce your brand, especially if you have a lot of Airbnb bookings.

They probably don’t know that you exist separately from Airbnb and they think of you as an Airbnb.

You can write an email introducing yourself, explain, give them some recommendations, and you provide a link to a guidebook about this property if you have that, and then let them know you’re available to help them in these ways.

And then in 7 or 10 days, you could send another email saying, hey, hope you enjoyed your stay, just in FYI, if you want to stay here again or at one of our other properties, you can reply to me or go to our website, and then you will get a better rate than booking through a third-party website like Airbnb.

And then you can send an email in 30 days.

And then in 9 months, you could send an email saying, hey, you stay with us 9 months if you want to come back next year, because we have so many operators that operate in these, like very like people travel every year to this destination type of thing, that again, rebooking email for next year is one where we see a ton of conversion.

And then when it comes to the style and design of these emails, we have a ton of templates in our tool.

But if you’re a little hesitant around design, plain text emails are your friend, especially at a smaller scale because you can make those emails appear as if they’re coming from your email inbox, and then people will also naturally reply to those.

So you can set up a simple plain text email with that information that you just write out or have chat TPT write for you, for instance, and then guests will just naturally respond to that, and those have high open rates and engagement rates.

So you don’t even need to design a template of email or what you think of as an email newsletter to have success with emails because you can also send plain text emails and not even worry about design.

And that’s where I think some people don’t realize, you don’t need that design component to have success with email marketing in our industry because a lot of guests actually prefer that one-to-one relationship with the operator that we kind of facilitate or make it look like you’re sending this email spontaneously as opposed to getting an email maybe from what makes sense when you’re a larger brand with more marketing resources where it then looks more like a fancy template of email you would be more accustomed to getting from a hotel or e-commerce brand.

Yeah, some excellent points there.

I think one takeaway here is that people still open their emails, right?

I mean, I guess our physical mail is becoming less and less.

I have a physical mailbox, but it’s virtual, like in another country, and it gets scanned anyways.

But I definitely open my email, and so it still is an effective approach.

And I don’t see that really changing that much, do you?

No, definitely not in the near to medium term.

And we see the, I call them, transactional or kind of emails triggered by, let’s say, a Wi-Fi login.

Those can still get, we see, open rates of 50, 60, 70 percent.

Because when it’s at that point in time, where there’s an activity the guest is doing that’s associated with the email, that drives very high engagement rates.

And then a newsletter will kind of be in the 20, 30 percent open rate range, which is very typical for this industry.

And we see that across all of our customers, and it hasn’t really changed.

You know, an email is still, by marketing standards, considered the highest ROI channel across most industries, because unlike Google ads or Facebook ads, where you have to pay every time you serve an impression with an email tool, once you collect the email, you can email them really as much as you’d like within some parameters.

And the marginal cost to send an email is very low, because like all other tools, we just charge based on how many contacts you have.

So the cost to send this email to a guest or to get that impression is much, much lower than with doing digital marketing, where you have to pay for each impression.

So the ROI through email is still rated number one for all channels.

And it’s where we see our customers drive the bulk of their direct bookings, because emails also has this billboarding effect, right?

So even though the guests may not click through the email to make the booking, because you’ve emailed them consistently every month, your brand is top of mind when they want to book their next day.

And that’s really the most important thing is because most people are not in market to purchase a trip to your destination most of the time.

It’s actually very rare that they’re in the mood to book a trip to Orlando, right?

That may only happen once a year.

But the key thing is that when the guest is ready to go do that, they need to remember your brand so that they also check your website in addition to going to the OTAs because they’re probably going to do comparison searching.

And that’s where it’s if you’ve been consistently messaging the guests, letting them know that booking direct is probably going to be less expensive, they definitely will come to your website and do that search.

Now, whether you have inventory and can service them at the dates that they want, that’s like a different question.

But at least if you’ve been consistently emailing, they most likely will come to check your availability and rates for the dates they’re interested in.

And that’s what we really want to achieve with emails.

Just make sure that brand awareness is there when they’re ready to start researching their next trip.

Yeah, it’s an easy way to stay in touch.

And it’s also easy for us as owners or property managers to offer the lowest prices on our direct booking website, right?

We don’t have, you know, depending on what commission model you have with Airbnb or booking.com.

I mean, these fees can add up to 15 plus percent between the guest and the owner or the property manager.

And so, you know, like with my personal portfolio, we always have the lowest prices for the guests on our direct booking website, but we still make more, right?

And the guest pays less.

So it’s a win-win, and there’s also a lot of value just in the list.

Being able to send an email off, like you said, and have less reliance on the OTAs and stuff like that.

And then, you know, if someone’s building a portfolio, if they ever want to sell their properties in the future, they’ve got an email list where that’s not going to go away.

It’s something that we actually own.

I’ve heard a lot of content creators, you know, recently kind of saying, like, we can work with these algorithms and do everything we can.

And then one day, they can just change the algorithms.

Airbnb can just change the algorithm, right?

But they can’t do that.

I mean, they can’t just take our email lists away, right?

Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point, which is, you know, the list of guests is a really valuable asset for a few reasons.

One, if you ever want to sell your business, right, how your business is going to be valued is what RevPAR are you achieving, right?

So if the list goes with the business, right, if you compare yourself to your competitor and you have a massive email list that you’re driving bookings from, your occupancy rate will be higher than folks that are just using OTAs.

So you will have something real and tangible to sell to a potential acquirer because you have this list of loyal guests that stay with you on a regular basis and want to come back with you and book direct, and then you’re actually purchasing your brand in addition to just the idea of purchasing a bunch of homeowner contracts.

The other side is helping you acquire more properties for your portfolio.

Obviously, if you have a robust direct booking business, you’re going to be able to achieve better results for owners if you are a property manager by getting more bookings for their homes.

And if you go to a new owner and say, hey, in addition to listing your properties on all the channels, which of course everyone else is doing, you can also have the advantage of having this proprietary list that no one else has of guests that you know visit this particular destination, and then you can market their property to those guests.

So it’s a great thing.

StayFi and their related marketing efforts are things we see a lot of people build into their pitch to owners to help them with property acquisition.

And then the other thing is if you also do real estate, which a lot of our short term rental operator customers do, guests are also great potential leads for home purchasers who then will also want their properties managed.

So we do see a lot of folks in both email marketing and some of our other guest engagement tools when the guests log on to the Wi-Fi market, you know, interested in purchasing a home.

Have you thought about buying a home in this area?

Because people that travel frequently to those destinations are often the people that if they can, will end up purchasing a second home.

And so in that way, your list also becomes a lead source for your real estate business.

Yeah, fair point.

Yeah, there’s a lot of, you know, in a nutshell, it’s to get more emails, right?

Get more direct bookings.

But you guys have a there’s like a lot of other value components there.

Well, you create a easy way for someone to create a splash page, right?

That’s the page the guest is going to see when they log in for the first time.

But then you have some ways to sort of sell some commissionable things on top of that.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yep.

So the Wi-Fi login process is two steps.

The first step is the guest joins.

They see the captive portal is what we call it, sometimes called a splash page, where they enter in their name, email, phone number.

They have, you know, you can customize the checkbox to get opt in and have guests agree to other terms if you’d like.

And then after that, it takes them to a page we call the home page.

If you ever use Linktree, it’s a very similar type of product where you can basically just have a bunch of buttons that will advertise different things to the guest.

So some typical things that are advertised on that page would be a guidebook, a link to your website, a link to book this property again.

But then we also have two partners that are integrated and are free to sign up for.

One’s called the HostCo, and the other is called Viator.

The HostCo is essentially a free store for your listing where you can sell both your own goods and services, as well as they have a bunch of third party services that they can sell and you get it commissioned from.

Obviously, the majority of the money is made through selling your own services.

The most popular being early check-in and late check-out are the two biggest money makers we see.

People also offer things like mid-stay cleans, stay extensions, pool heating, and then physical items can be things like firewood, amenity kits, things like that.

What’s great about this homepage where you have all these listings is that it’s a website or a page that you can also link to outside of the Wi-Fi experience.

So that’s when it comes to early check-in.

Obviously, if they are logging in to the Wi-Fi, it’s a little late to buy early check-in, but you can also send the homepage through your property management software’s automated messaging and say, like, hey, if you’d like to purchase early check-in, you can do that here.

And then all of those purchases through the HostCo are request-based.

So you’ll get a request, and it will say, like, so-and-so wants to purchase early check-in for this property, and then you can approve or deny it, and if you approve it, it will go ahead and charge their credit card, and then you typically it could be like $30, $40, $50 to sell that service.

The other partner is called Viator.

They’re owned by TripAdvisor.

They’re the largest tour and activity marketplace in the world, and we sign you up for their affiliate program, where you will earn an 8% commission from any tours or activities that you recommend or sell through that platform.

And so you can feature those in the home page, and of course, obviously, again, sending them in advance of the stay, the home page will also give guests some ideas about things that you love and want to recommend.

And then if guests click on those links and book within 30 days, you get that 8% commission for anything through Viator.

So both of those we see, it definitely varies by how well people market them, but people are making anywhere between $30 and $200 a month per property just through the upsell pieces, especially if they market their own services aggressively, and that would be things like early check-in, late checkout, and things like that, because that’s where you can make the most revenue.

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Yeah, constantly adding new features and changes.

And another thing that came to mind is another sort of side benefit.

Let’s say we have a home that sleeps 10 people, and you have 20 people’s emails come in when the guest checks in, then you know that there’s too many people staying at that property, don’t you?

And sort of a roundabout way, you can also use it as a way to ensure that there’s not too many guests at your property.

Yeah, so we have a few different types.

We have two main Wi-Fi alerting features.

So in StayFi, we have occupancy alerting, which you just talked about.

So we actually, if you connect StayFi with your property management software, the occupancy alerting even becomes dynamic.

So we actually look at your current reservation and we’ll let you know if there’s more guests there than have booked.

And we also don’t do it based on devices.

So if you log on to StayFi or to the Internet with your phone and your computer, we still only count you as one unique guest.

So we do our best to dedupe devices and then let property managers or owners know when there’s more guests than are booked there.

You can also have it be static.

So if you only really care if it’s over some threshold, you can also set it up that way.

The other, of course, obviously, is we do Wi-Fi alerting and we do both going offline and online, because there’s a lot of, now that we see the status of Internet across tens of thousands of properties, mostly in the US, but all we have properties all around the world, it’s very common for Internet to go out for five minutes, seven minutes.

So we have some tools where you can say, hey, alert me if it’s more than 30 minutes, and then when it goes back online.

And that way you can know before guests even arrive what the status of the Internet is.

So you can address whatever that issue is.

Most commonly, guests like to unplug things, so they may have unplugged the Internet.

You may just need to power cycle the modem router, or there could be, in the case we see some property managers where they have 10 properties in an area, and you literally see the Internet go off and all of them at the same time.

It’s pretty easy to tell.

It’s like, okay, this is an Internet service provider outage, or there’s a power outage because Internet is going offline across properties all at the same time.

So you just have a lot more ability to manage the Internet across properties by having all of the status in one dashboard.

Yeah, it’s amazing.

I mean, you guys designed a Wi-Fi system, a marketing system specifically for one industry, right?

And so I’m sure when you first started with the company, you didn’t have all the features you have today, right?

Definitely not.

The first version of StayFi was just, you know, it wasn’t even a user interface.

It was just you told us what you wanted your captive portal to look like, and then we would send the data to MailChimp, right?

So it’s definitely evolved a lot, and we have some really cool things coming over the course of this year, which I’m super excited about, especially on the marketing front, kind of new tools to make marketing even easier and some interesting new integrations on Wi-Fi that will let us service more types of properties and make it easier to set up StayFi, depending on what type of Internet equipment that you have already.

Yeah, awesome.

Well, I’m excited to see the changes.

And you guys were really kind to create a coupon code for all of our listeners.

And so for anyone listening out there, if you’re catching us on YouTube, you can head to stayfi.com forward slash STR riches.

And you can use the coupon code riches when you sign up.

You get three months at 50 percent off.

So I appreciate you guys doing that, Arthur.

Again, that’s stayfi.com forward slash STR riches.

So, yeah, I guess in a nutshell, I mean, we’re using this with my properties.

It’s super easy to use.

You basically, you know, they’re great routers, too.

They have a good reach.

You basically plug them in.

You can create the splash page and get your list building.

The marketing can kind of be handled for you on the back end.

You can add in some of these other sort of cool features.

Is there anything else you want to want to add?

Yeah, I mean, it kind of goes on and on the different possibilities.

So if somebody wants more information or wants to know what they need for their properties, if you go to stayfi.com to our demo page, you can book a one on one demo with one of our reps who will give you a personalized demo of the platform, walk you through all the different features, and answer your questions on the best way to get it set up.

So if you have questions or just want to learn more, that’s really the best way to do it.

And that way you can see everything in the platform firsthand and get a sense for how it all works.

Yeah, awesome.

Well, thanks, Arthur.

I got one more question for you before we wrap up here.

And that is the name of our podcast is Short Term Rental Riches.

A lot of times when people hear the word riches, they sort of associate it with financial riches.

But we know that there’s a lot more meaning to it than just the finance side of it.

Is there something in your life or some sort of habit or something that you’ve picked up recently that’s enriched your life in a non-financial way?

Oh, definitely.

I would say I actually hired recently a business coach, which I think has just added a lot of value to give me because I’m a solo founder, which I think can be very challenging.

You know, most people in at least software have a co-founder, someone to bounce ideas off of.

But as a solo founder, I reached out to a bunch of friends, interviewed some different coaches, and it’s nice to have that outside perspective, someone who’s worked with a lot of different CEOs or founders, especially as you grow a business, because I, you know, in previous jobs, I’d only managed two or three people, and now we have a team of almost 20.

So just making sure that I’m being a good manager and giving people the right opportunities and structures to excel in this environment and make them happy to be a part of this organization is just really important to me and how we establish that culture.

And so hiring that type of help is kind of both a therapist and coach, I would say, has just added a lot of value to my life and made it a lot clearer about, you know, what we’re focused on here at StayFi.

Yeah, that’s a great tip.

I mean, there’s a reason why the best athletes in the world still have coaches, right?

And the biggest businesses have coaches, and so that’s excellent advice.

And to all of you out there, you know, we talk about going to conferences a lot.

I’m sure you will see Arthur and StayFi at your next short-term rental conference.

So get out there.

It’s worth spending a little bit of money to meet people and to hire coaches because it can just help out in so many ways.

So thanks a bunch, Arthur, for coming on.

We really appreciate having you on and great insight.

It’s a great tool.

Again, anyone out there, you guys can head to stayfi.com forward slash strriches and Arthur and their team put together a discount for you for the first three months.

And so looking forward to seeing additional stuff that you guys add on in the future.

I feel like it’s kind of just getting started.

It’s an amazing, amazing project.

So thanks, Arthur.

Thanks so much for having me.

Until next time.

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

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

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

 

When’s the last time you checked how well your property’s converting?

What do I mean by converting?

How many people are actually seeing your property, and what percentage of the people that see it are clicking on it, and what percentage of the people clicking on it are actually booking it?

Well, this week, we’re going to break that down and a couple tips, things you should be thinking about.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

I’m happy you’re here again.

And if you’ve been tuning in year after year, well, hopefully, you’ve set up a lot of the things we’ve talked about, and you’ve built a really good base of reviews that are helping keep your property booked.

It all comes down, really, to how many people are seeing our property and how many of those people that see it are booking it.

And so we know if you have more reviews and you have better reviews, more people will see it.

But that’s not all that goes into the conversion process.

And Airbnb has some metrics on their website I want to talk about this week and just break down in regards to conversions.

So let’s just go ahead and jump into it.

So the first one is just overall search impressions.

And so yes, reviews really help drive your search impressions.

In other words, your visibility, how many people can find you.

But so do things like, do you allow pets?

What are your prices?

Are you charging too much?

Are you charging a competitive price?

That’s a big one on the booking sites, because they want the properties to get booked, right?

Otherwise, they’re not going to make any money.

What are your amenities?

Does your property have three night minimums or four night minimums?

Well, then you’re not going to show up as much in the search results.

That’s just the name of the game.

You have less flexibility, less options for people to book you.

And so of course, all these things go into search impressions.

But how do we know what to do with these impression metrics?

So if you haven’t signed up for Airbnb’s performance tools, most of you probably have it on your listings.

But if not, you can just go to account settings and then click on the option to use professional tools.

And that’s going to give you these conversion metrics.

And so the next conversion metric is first page search impressions.

Everyone always wants to be on the first page, right?

We want to be on the first page of Google, because who’s scrolling to the second page of Google?

Well, fortunately for us in the short-term rental world, people do scroll to the second and third pages of listings.

But obviously, if you’re on the first page, that is better.

Bad news, we can’t control this, right?

We can do all these things to make our property as visible as possible, but the reality is that we can’t always be on the first page.

And so the more competitive your market, the more listings there are in your market, the more difficult it’s going to be to be on that first page more often.

Remember Airbnb and all these booking sites?

They want these properties to get booked, right?

And so they’re going to cycle through the best, the most competitive properties, especially in markets where there’s a lot more listings, to make sure that people are seeing these and to test things out really with their algorithm so they make sure that more properties are getting booked.

So the reality is you can’t always stay on the first page, but you definitely want to be on there as much as possible.

If you’re out there and you’re just getting started with a new listing, well, first of all, congratulations.

It’s an awesome journey.

It’s a fun industry, and I hope you do really well.

Hopefully, you’ll tune in to the show in the future and get some quick, actionable tips from all the things we’ve learned after years and years and lots and lots of guests.

If you are a new listing, you’re probably going to see that your metrics are putting you pretty high up there.

You’re getting a lot of views.

You’re on the first page much more often than a typical property, and this is because you do get a boost when you go on Airbnb.

It’s very easy to see, so monitor your conversions after a month or a couple months of getting your first few reservations and really see what happens.

So again, under Airbnb, you can go to insights and make sure you have the performance tools turned on and then click on conversions, and you’ll see these four metrics.

If you’re catching the YouTube version, we’ll make sure we get a screenshot up for you.

And if you’re listening to the audio version and you haven’t checked out our YouTube channel, we are on YouTube, so we’d love for you to join us over there at Short Term Rental Riches on YouTube.

So let’s talk about a couple of the other metrics that are available to you, and then we’re gonna talk about a really important one, which is how do we know if these metrics are good or not?

So the next one is your search to listing page views.

So what does this mean?

Someone finds you on Airbnb.

Maybe you’re on the first page, maybe you’re on the second, maybe you’re on the fifth page, but they actually click on your property.

This is fantastic, right?

This means your title is really good or your cover photo is really good, or it could mean they just don’t have any options in that market.

But we’ll assume that you did a really good job with your listing, they clicked on it.

And what does this mean?

This means that you now have an opportunity to sell nights at your property, right?

If someone doesn’t click on your listing, then you don’t get that opportunity.

And so we wanna make sure that this number is as high as possible, right?

The higher, the better.

Now, not all of these metrics being higher is necessarily better.

The next one we’re gonna get to, if it’s too high, well, you might be leaving money on the table.

So anyways, back to search listing page views.

So someone found your property, they clicked on it, congrats to you.

They now have an opportunity to book it.

If they don’t book it here, well then one of a few things might be happening.

You might have a lot of fees, and once they get to the actual booking, they see, oh wow, I’ve got eight people coming, but you’re trying to charge me an extra $100 per guest for the extra four, doubling my reservation.

I don’t think so.

So fees from everything that we’ve seen can really hurt your conversion.

If you’re not set up for instant book, that can also really hurt your conversion, right?

If someone has to message you and go back and forth.

Did someone click on your listing and uncover that you’ve got some really strict rules like at the top of your listing description, which has totally deterred them?

So if someone is stopping during this phase, they’ve opened your property and they’re looking at the listing, but they’re not actually converting, they’re not actually reserving, then that’s gonna show up in the next metric, which is your listing to booking conversion.

So if you’re at 75%, 75% of the people coming in that see your property are clicking on and opening it, but you’re listing to booking conversion at zero, then that means something’s going on there, right?

You’re deterring them in one way or another, very likely your photos, something you have in your description, or your fees, or your actual booking process, like maybe it’s not on Instabook.

So play around with those things, right?

That’s how we can improve the listing.

We have to write down what we change, give it a couple weeks, right?

Or I would recommend a month, because if you only give it a couple weeks, you don’t really give yourself a lot of opportunity to book that property, right?

So a month is really probably where we wanna be when we’re making changes to our property to see if these metrics are improving or not.

So that last metric, the listing to booking conversion, really shows you someone’s made it through the process, they booked your property, hopefully they did.

What happens if this number’s too high?

Well, that might mean that people got to your property because your prices were too low, they all clicked on them because your prices were too low, and they all booked them because your prices were too low.

And how do we know what’s too low, right?

This is the ultimate question.

We have to have something to compare our properties to.

Luckily, there is a metric right there in Airbnb that allows you to compare to similar listings for the same date range.

So you wanna just make sure that you select a date range, and you can see, are you 1% or 2% above the rest of the market?

Well, I would argue that’s too much, right?

That’s quite a bit.

Remember, this metric is usually around.5 to 4%.

4% would be really high,.

5 is probably not high enough, but you will know this by comparing your property to similar listings.

And a good tip here is that if you’ve had your property listed for a while, go back a whole year and see what your property is doing compared to the rest of the market.

If you’re 2% over the rest of the market to actual booking conversion, then you’re probably a little bit higher.

So hopefully I’m not losing you here.

Again, you can go to Airbnb Insights, and you’ve got these four metrics right there.

They are very insightful, and they let us know about that booking journey, right?

Who’s seeing your property first of all?

When is it showing up on the first page?

How many people are actually clicking on it?

And then how many people are actually booking it based on those people that click?

So hopefully that gave you a little bit of insight.

Remember, you wanna check out the similar listings in that same section.

There’s a little drop down there.

You wanna check similar listings and see what your market’s doing so you have something to benchmark off of.

If you’re getting stuck at one of these points, people aren’t booking, well, take a good look at your property and try changing some things, but make sure you monitor it and make sure you give yourself ample time, enough time to actually get some other bookings and some other views coming in before you decide, oh, that didn’t work.

This is becoming a bit of a science, isn’t it, with our short-term rentals?

It’s getting more and more competitive.

I know that it is, but hopefully these quick tips have helped you out a little bit.

Remember, our team is also managing other properties now.

We’ve managed a lot of guests and everything from the small little urban apartment to some beautiful lakeside properties that sleep dozens of people.

And so we would love to chat with you.

If you’re interested in working with our team, you can just go to strriches.com.

We’ve got a management services button right there, and we would love to manage your properties the same way that we manage my portfolio.

So until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week, and we’ll see you back soon.

Whether you’re just getting started with Short Term Rentals or you’ve been in the game for a while, one thing remains the same.

Your management can make or break your performance.

Our team has learned a lot managing thousands of guests, and we’ve put together a handbook just for you with our checklist to cover our exact process.

There’s a lot to consider from verifying guests to managing reviews, and you don’t want to miss a step.

You can get your free copy by going to restmethods.com.

There’s no charge.

It’s my gift to you for being one of our loyal subscribers, and I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.