Today we’re gonna tackle something that comes up quite a bit in our world. If a bad guest checks out of your property, should you leave that guest a bad review? The answer is a little more nuanced than you might think. I’ve got some information for you for both sides of the question.

Stay tuned as we jump on all that on today’s episode of the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

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

Before we get into the details of exactly how you should be responding, let’s just talk first about how Airbnb’s review system actually works

First off, neither the host or the guest is going to see the other side’s review until both of them have left a review or the 14-day window has passed

This is intentionally set up this way, of course, by Airbnb. It’s a blind review system so that when someone leaves a review, the other person can’t see it and retaliate

This blind review system isn’t perfect, but it is better than a lot of review systems out there. Essentially, neither side can leave a review that’s retaliating. Yes, some guests could do this in advance of what they think the host might write, but the reality is it’s actually a pretty fair system. It makes it so that each side is leaving a review independent to what the other person is writing

And so when it comes to leaving a review for a guest that was less than ideal, maybe they just really ticked you off, maybe they broke stuff, maybe they were incredibly difficult to deal with, all of those things are frustrating.

What do you actually do though when you have a bad guest stay at your property? There’s really two sides. Do you just be fully transparent and tell it like it is? Or do you kinda clean it up a little bit? Let’s talk about the first case, the case for the host community.

Of course, the most obvious one here is that if you’re fully transparent in that review of your guest, then it warns all future hosts, let them know, “Hey, you need to be really careful about letting this person stay at your property.”

Reviews travel with guests. Whatever you say in your guest review is going to live with that guest profile for the life of that profile. Of course, this really helps out the community

And this isn’t retaliation, this is just being transparent, just being honest so that you can warn future hosts

The reality is though, a lot of hosts don’t do this, or maybe they just don’t leave a review at all

We’re gonna talk about the best way to write your guest review in a second, and really a framework for whether you should even write it or not. But before we do that, let’s talk about the other side

If you leave a negative review for your guest, well, it shows up on your profile and future potential guests can read your profile. So you gotta be really careful about how you explain the situation, how you talked about that bad guest

We gotta put ourselves in the guest’s shoes and just read through the lines here. If we see a bunch of negative reviews about other guests, then we might be concerned that we’re gonna stay at your property, be perfectly clean, follow all the rules, but we might not just fit with your perfect guest profile, and that’s really not going to lead me to wanna book your property

So this isn’t a reason not to leave a bad review for a guest, but it is definitely a reason to make sure you know the best way to leave a review for a prior guest.

So what’s the best way to make sure that we can still leave a review but also have one that doesn’t jeopardize future bookings? Well, the first rule is just be factual

Don’t have generalizations in there like, “This guest was terrible,” or, “They were awful to deal with,” or, “They never stopped complaining,” or whatever it happens to be. Just be factual.

Maybe you got a noise complaint from the neighbor at 11:00 PM. Just tell the facts. Just be transparent

Of course, we wanna stay professional, so there is no excuse for writing a bad message these days. With ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, pick your favorite AI tool. They can recreate any message you want in a really nice way that’s not going to jeopardize your profile

Focus on what future hosts need to know. Maybe they brought too many guests, maybe they brought pets when they weren’t supposed to, and don’t make it personal

And just another note on this, I know it’s not easy to not make it personal. If you are managing your property yourself and you put in a lot of love into getting your property ready and someone doesn’t treat it the way you want them to, which is bound to happen, believe me, then it becomes personal and you really need to just take a second.

Don’t respond when you are upset because if it doesn’t come out right, you’re not gonna have the chance to edit it.

If that’s something you just can’t do and you want a little help with it, well, our team at Corsi would love to be that support for you. We’re working in over 50 cities now with hundreds of properties. We’ve managed over 100,000 guests. We’ve learned a lot, and we can be that barrier between you and a potentially bad guest.

We’re also gonna be that person that helps prevent that bad guest in the first place. That’s the real way to go about it. So a couple tips on writing your review, and remember, this isn’t the review response.

This isn’t a response to a review your guest left. We actually have a full separate episode on that. I’ll give you the brief summary. We always recommend having the sandwich method. What is a sandwich method? Well, if a guest left not… a not so great review about your property, you again wanna address the facts, but you wanna start on a positive tone.

You wanna address the facts in the middle for future guests, so when they’re reading your review, they know that, hey, the AC was fixed or whatever the issue happened to be is not going to be an issue for them. And then you wanna end your review response with something positive again. “We’re glad you really enjoyed the pool,” or, “We’re glad you enjoyed our private lakefront.”

Whatever it happens to be, it leaves it on a positive tone, So future potential guests can envision themselves in a really great space with a really great host

So when should we be leaving a bad review for our guest, and when should we just forget about it? Well, if they broke the rules, if they damaged something, that’s clear grounds, and you wanna make sure that you’re warning future hosts. So if they broke a rule, make sure you leave a response

If they didn’t necessarily break a rule, but there was just maybe they sent a lot of messages or something sort of subtle, well, I’d really recommend that you think that through before you leave a response because again, future guests are going to be looking at your profile and it can affect your bookings

When in doubt, just ask yourself the question, “Would I want to know what I know now after hosting this guest if I was another host?” And if the answer is yes, then help out the community, be transparent, be professional, get a nice message down, but don’t jeopardize your future profile.

Hosting isn’t always easy. Sometimes we have to deal with difficult guests. That’s just part of the job. I hope this episode gave you a little bit of insight. If you’ve been finding value in the channel, I’d really appreciate just a quick thumbs up or subscribe if you haven’t already. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Over the last 10 plus years, I’ve attended well over two dozen industry conferences and spent well over a hundred thousand dollars. At least on these conferences, they really add up. But you know, how many of those conferences were actually worth it? Not all of the ones I attended. But the recent IMN conference that I just got back to delivered, this is my second time attending, and this one packs a punch.

So I’ll be breaking down my top six takeaways for you to help you along your short-term rental journey. Everything from operations to design trends. Stay tuned.

Well, welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. I can’t believe. How fast time is going. I’ve been traveling around a lot and so I know that speeds things up. But we left Brazil and we went to California to visit some of my family. We were there through the new year.

Then we went on a little cruise in the Caribbean, and then we went to Orlando, Florida where I am in contract for a new property. And I know you might be thinking Orlando, Florida, isn’t that the most competitive short-term rental? Space in basically the whole us and yeah, it definitely is one. 

So it’s actually gonna be a really good test for me and our team to manage a property in a market that has thousands of very similar properties. But the property that I’m in contract for, it’s actually a little different. It’s got some unique things to it. I think it’s gonna stand out. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

And of course, I will share all of that with all of you to give you my best insights.

So I left the IMN conference last night and just arrived back here in Meine Columbia. As a lot of you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time here over the last 10 years. We’ve been building a resort hotel, and I’m excited that we’re probably gonna be launching the first five units in just, uh, maybe in the next month.

So, without further ado, what makes the, IM in conference stand out and I’ve been to dozens of these. I spent a lot of money attending short-term rental conferences. The thing that stands out for the Im in is that. The attendees are actual operators. There’s lots of people there that have portfolios and sizable portfolios.

I would say the majority of the people there probably are operating over 20 properties, and many of them operating hundreds of properties. Like my team and I at Cosley, we’re now managing a little over 225. We’re in a whole bunch of cities. If you need some help with your portfolio. Head over to sdr riches.com.

You’ll see a little partner with us button there. I’d be happy to jump on the phone with you, see if your property makes for a good fit.

So what makes this conference different? Well, aside from the fact that tons of the attendees are real serious operators and are doing everything they can to really perfect their operation, and I happen to know a lot of them personally because I’ve been going to a lot of these conferences, so I get a lot of benefit just from these side conversations outside of the big sessions.

But the thing that’s amazing about the way they’ve. Crafted this conference is that all of the sessions are held on a panel and they have chosen operators that are best fit for each of these topics. So everything from AI and technology to design to market trends. You name it, there’s a panel for it.

And the other thing that I like about this conference is it’s actually really quick. It’s only a day and a half or so, and so they really pack it full. Unlike some of the other conferences, VRMA, for example, I have gotten a lot of benefit. Again, I get a lot of benefit from the attendees. Going there. That is the industry’s largest conference.

But a lot of those sessions, to be honest, they’re just kind of repeat stuff that they’ve been doing year after year.

So I like the IMN because I think it’s fresh. It’s real world data, and it’s actually pretty small, so there’s like maybe 300 people that attend. So it’s a little bit more intimate, and you get a lot more of those little side conversations going on.

so let’s jump into some trends. What’s actually happening in the short term rental world in 2026? Well, there’s a lot of things happening behind the scenes that I guarantee you do not know about. Or the average listener to this podcast that does have a smaller portfolio.

There are venture capital funds out there acquiring tons, thousands of units of individual property management companies.

Now this new wave of venture capital is doing it behind the scenes, whereas before we had companies like Vac Casa, as you may be aware. They went out of business. They were the nation’s largest property manager. They got bought by Cago, which their CEO was there, and I’ve got some great notes that he shared during the conference.

I will share those in just a second. But there’s this big trend where people are just chasing higher returns, and so these venture capital companies are coming in. They’re identifying smaller property management companies, usually around the a hundred to 200 unit size. They’re purchasing them because they’ve got a proven model.

They’ve been doing a good job, and those returns that they’re getting are better than they can get in other places. Now you would think that they’re going in and just centralizing all the operations, uh, adding a whole bunch of technology behind the scenes, and I’m sure that there are some doing that.

But the gist of what I got speaking to some of these actual acquisition companies is that they’re kind of just keeping things how they are.

So we know that investors are always going to chase the highest returns, and over the last few years, it’s just not really possible to get cash flow from long-term rentals. And people recognize that. And they’re coming in and they’re coming in quickly.

So a lot of acquisition happening. Cago who purchased Vac Casa actually flipped the whole business, thousands, tens of thousands of units. And what they did is they realized that these large national managers were not doing a good job. On the ground with their local teams. Reviews suffered and they started churning, started losing lots and lots of properties.

We’ve talked about that a lot on this channel before, how you have to have the local operations in place, but you also need. Centralized operations in the back to really make that possible. If you’re new to the channel, we can go to st riches.com, check out all of our prior episodes. Our team and I have managed well over 60,000 guests in a whole bunch of different places, so we’ve got some eBooks put together with some real world advice to help you along your journey.

So Cago flipped Vac Casa basically in a year where they were taking all of these markets that had existing management in place and selling it off to other operators that they think could do a good job as a franchise model. So Vac Casa went from acquiring a whole bunch of companies. And realizing that that wasn’t a good model.

Things fell apart. They got bad reviews. They got purchased by Cago, who then broke up that huge conglomerate into a franchise model. Again, separating out all of those properties into individual markets where they know that they had good operators on the ground.

Along those lines of chasing higher returns, we are seeing a lot of people go into the luxury and ultra luxury market. The commodity type properties have really. Seen a lot of competition and their prices and their ADRs have suffered, although most people at the conference agree that they don’t really see a big drop in ADRs coming across the board because supply is not increasing like it was after COVID 2122.

So people are finding that the luxury market and creating those truly unique experiences, again, just differentiating your property is where the highest returns are coming. And there were also people here at the conference, venture capitalists, chasing these types of properties and building them theirselves.

So I would say we will see a little bit more supply coming down in the luxury segment,

 because of barriers of entry to these really luxury type properties, uh, you know, given the, the amount of money they cost, uh, the location, the time to build them or build them out, I don’t see this supply segment growing extremely quickly.

But you do want to keep an eye on it, and you can keep an eye on it by using tools like Air DNA you wanna filter out for properties that sleep maybe over 20, maybe over 30 people.

 All right. Let’s talk a little bit about operations, because of course you can have the most beautiful properties in the world, but if you’re not doing a good job at operating them, you get bad reviews and then your guests will not book your property because you’re not going to show up on the platforms.

And so, uh, there was a really interesting segment on service and what actually makes for that good guest experience. Uh, and this was a stat that came from Disney, but if we break the experience of a guest down to people, the places. And the process. Three areas where a potential experience could go wrong.

What do you think is the most important piece of that? It could be places, people, or processes. Well, 80% of that according to Disney depends on your processes. That means you could have the best team, you could have the property in the best place, but if you don’t have those processes in place. Well, then things fall apart.

You don’t know how to handle guest situations when they come up, and that will lead to bad reviews.

Now, one other thing to add to this that’s really interesting, you can actually create a better experience for your guests if something goes wrong. And now I know that sounds totally crazy, but things do go wrong, right? And so when something goes wrong. People’s expectations go down. And this is your opportunity to really jump in there and serve them and show that you care.

And that’s the biggest reason for someone to leave a bad review is not the the people or the place. Yes, it’s the processes, but inherent in that process is showing whether you care or not. And so if someone thinks that they’re just a number on the scoreboard. And you don’t care about them at all, that’s when they’re gonna leave you a bad review.

And so this is something that’s been a little challenging for those of you out there that are renting very short lengths of stay. If you have someone stay with you for one night, for example, you don’t get a lot of opportunity to to, to show them that you care.

There was actually a funny example they gave of a pet services company that provided, you know, pet supplies and things like that that would intentionally mess up their for first order with their customers so that they could make up for it and win that customer over for life. And they had data to show that their lifetime value of those customers was higher when they messed something up and fixed it.

Now, of course, I’m not recommending that you mess anything up with your guest experience, right? And that’s probably not even now, of course, I’m not recommending that you mess anything up with your guest experience. Uh, but just remember that, uh, when things go wrong, it’s your opportunity to show that you actually care.

But coming back to the main reason for a bad guest experience, you have to have those processes in place.

There was a lot of talk at this conference about scaling, and again, that comes back to processes You cannot scale if you do not have things in place, if you do not have standard operating procedures.

And as your team’s growing, as you’re adding more properties to portfolio, there’s way more to handle, right? And that’s again why we’ve developed Cores Lease. So we can be that core operating center on the back end of your short term rentals.

Because we know it takes a lot of time and experience to set up a lot of these processes, but one thing that you can do right now is if you’re managing your properties yourself, if look at your communication, whether you’re communicating with your vendors, your housekeeper, uh, your maintenance people, are you doing it on standard old?

SMS text message. Are you using WhatsApp? Are you using a system like Slack? Well, a lot of times we’re over communicating if we have group messages set up, especially, a lot of times we’re sending messages to people that don’t really need to see them, and that’s sort of just bogs everything down. So that’s something you can do right now if you’ve got a lot of communication going on.

The more properties you have, the more communication you’re gonna have. Just do a quick revamp of that. Make sure that there aren’t people in groups or shared message threads or email copies, all those types of things that don’t actually need to be there. ’cause that just bogs everything down makes it more difficult for you to offer that great guest experie.

Another interesting KPI that you might consider monitoring, especially for those of you that are growing your portfolios, is your messages per guest. Now, I know that sounds a little weird, but if we think about it. We want to answer all of our guest questions before they actually show up to the property or before they ask us something.

We want to anticipate all of those questions. And so if our average message per guest is very high, like maybe it’s 20 or 30 or something like that, that means there’s way more communication going on. That’s, that means there’s way more things that they didn’t know, uh, or things that we didn’t answer upfront.

So the lower that number is, the better you’re likely doing with your guests and the better your operation.

All right, let’s jump into technology. So of course there were a lot of vendors there sponsoring the event, and a lot of them are talking about ai. And there’s so many ways to use this in our short-term rental business, but probably the most common one that people are approaching first is automated messages for our guests.

The guest communication piece of it, although there were financial companies there helping with, uh, automating your finances with ai. So you name it, if you are a technology provider in the short-term rental space and you’re not using ai, well, you are getting left behind very, very quickly. Uh, and you’re gonna go out of business. That’s just, that’s just the plain, simple truth.

One of the new AI programs out there that’s creating quite a bit of buzz is called Boom, and this is based off an AI platform in the back. But you know, I mentioned going to these conferences year in and year out, meeting a lot of people.

It’s really interesting to talk to people actually using these products. The reality is that there is no single product out there that’s going to handle your whole short-term rental operation. It does take a team combined with the best technology. And what’s happening is because technology’s so much easier to create today than it ever has been.

Everyone’s trying to do everything. Uh, and we know after managing so many guests and so many properties in a lot of different markets, that not every technology piece of technology is as good as the other one. Dynamic pricing tools, for example. Price Labs and Wheelhouse. They have been hard at work for over a decade, whereas we have property management software platforms like Guest and Hostway now offering these dynamic pricing tools.

But they’re way behind. They’re not focused on this. They’re basically offering, trying to offer everything so that customers use everything through them, right? But we know that they’re not doing as good a job as the people that are s. Specifically focused on that one item, but we know that they got a lot of catching up to do and they’re probably never going to catch up.

So the ideal scenario is that you choose the best piece of technology for whatever component of your short-term rental operation that happens to be, whether it’s guest communication, whether it’s integrating your locks and your smart home technology, whether it’s. Your dynamic pricing or your task management, there is no centralized program that’s knocking all of these outta the park.

But the first place to start for most of you is guest communication. Uh, and we know that there’s a lot of things that AI can do that we as humans just can’t do. We can’t remember everything. Uh, we can’t create a tone to match each of our guest profiles. Uh, we’re gonna write the same way, right? And if we have other people helping us, well, they’re gonna write very likely the way that they write.

And so that creates a bit of mismatch communication. Uh, and the reality is, is that we have to think about all these things. We have to remember all these details. And AI can, it can do a better job.

 So always a good idea to keep an eye on technology. But remember, there is no one product out there that can do everything you need it to do for your short-term rental operation. And there’s also a lot of overlap. So if you don’t have the volume of reservations coming in to actually test out this software, well then I hope podcasts like, like this one and other ones out there are providing you some good feedback. But the true, true source of real information is to talk to other operators that are actually using these tools.

Okay. Let’s get over to some design tips, because we know how important this is for our short-term rentals. We have to stand out. Things are more competitive than they’ve ever been before. Right?

A good tip that I picked up this last week was you really want to dedicate the majority of your furniture. To your top five to seven photos. Remember, most people when they’re browsing Airbnb or the OTAs like VRBO, they’re not looking past like five photos. In fact, a recent study showed that 80% of people browsing Airbnb don’t make it past the first five photos.

So that means you want to put your furniture budget. Into those header photos. Maybe it’s your outdoor amenities. Maybe you have a mural wall inside the property, something different that’s gonna get you to stand out compared to all the other properties that are similar to yours.

another quick tip. Choose comfort over design. So yes, you need those design elements so someone will book your property, but once they check in, if they’re sitting in your chairs and they’re squeaking and falling apart. Well, that’s not going to create a good experience. So linens, you don’t want to skimp on linens.

 We actually did a full episode on that, and it’s one of our most popular episodes on YouTube. It’s way back, episode 1 67. So go back and check that out. You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg for your linens, but you do wanna make sure that they’re comfortable and they’re durable. And of course you wanna make sure that they’re all white, right?

That’s what hotels do. It’s easier to wash. You can bleach them, and your guests know that they’re clean.

One area in design that you don’t wanna spend a whole lot of money on is artwork. So you can get some great murals and things like that online now, or wallpaper, for example, that doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You don’t want to be out there spending thousands of dollars on artwork and things like that, that most people, the majority of guests aren’t going to appreciate.

One place you may consider adding a unique touch is what they were calling at the conference. The fifth wall, that would be the ceiling. So most people don’t look at the ceiling, but there are a lot of ceiling treatments that we can add to really make a space pop. And remember, make a space pop for those header photos.

A couple other quick tips I picked up from another friend over dinner is using perplexity. This gets into the ai, but there’s, there’s just so many cool things about it. First of all, it uses multiple AI programs at the same time, so chat, GPT. Claude and Jim and I imagine doing one search. And it goes to all three of those.

And then they have their own browser called Comet, which will allow you to search for things online and it can do the searching for you. Let’s say you wanted to order something from Amazon, for example. You could have Comet do this for you, log into your actual Amazon account and add things to your cart.

So those are just a few of the latest tips and tricks that I picked up at this latest conference, and I’ll of course be going to a lot more so that you do not have to and reporting back to you if you haven’t yet. If you’re finding value in our content, I’d really appreciate if you wouldn’t mind leaving us, uh, like or subscribing on YouTube, or if you’re listening on the audio version, following us on Spotify or on Apple iTunes.

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

In today’s episode, we’re diving into the short term rental crystal ball for 2026. No, I don’t have an exact crystal ball, but I do have a pretty good idea and I’m super excited about some of the changes taking place. Everything from changing markets to technology. To management trends and investment opportunities, especially, I’m diving into why I’m more excited this coming year about the opportunities we have as an STR investor than I have been in years.

Stay tuned.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again, and I’m excited to do my outlook, my take on what to expect in 2026. And believe me, we got a lot of good changes coming if you’ve been tuning into the show for a long time. Well, you know, we started. As their real estate podcast, but with a focus on short-term rentals.

I used to talk a lot about real estate investing in general and the fundamentals, but I haven’t done so much of that in the last few years because it just hasn’t been that great of a time to be investing

with interest rates. Higher cash flow was down and with higher property values. Things just got really competitive and so I personally haven’t purchased anything in several years. Yes, I’ve been building a new construction project for quite a while. Excited to share updates on that in the near future, but I haven’t actually acquired any new short-term rentals.

I’ve been focused on managing those properties that already have in my portfolio as best as we possibly can, My team and I have also expanded to manage hundreds of your properties as well, and so that’s been an awesome journey. We have a ton of insight and I’m excited to break down some of those details But let’s take a step back first and let’s talk about the economy in general, because what happens in the long-term rental or residential real estate world really affects short-term rentals, and we have some fundamental changes taking place as we speak.

We talked about interest rates already recently on episode three 18, so if you missed that one, go back and check it out. One of the highlights from that episode was that interest rates are going down, they’ve already gone down, and they’re forecasted to continue going down.

So this is music to my ears. This is also part of the reason why I’ve recently put up several properties for sale. I’m gonna be doing some exchanges and finally moving some things around, because as interest rates come down, that means more people can afford to buy properties, and that means more properties are going to be changing hands.

So we don’t know exactly how far they’re going to come down, but the good news is they’re headed in the right direction. We also had a very significant tax change that happened in 2025, and that is that the return of a hundred percent bonus appreciation came back.

And that is also great news for a real estate investor. That’s also more incentive for someone to purchase real estate.

Because as we know, real estate provides more tax benefits than any other investment class available.

Now, a lot of you have also heard of Trump’s proposal for a 50 year mortgage, and you might think at first that that is just the dumbest thing that you’ve ever heard, because someone will pay twice as much interest as they would with a 30 year loan. But as a real estate investor, this is good news.

The whole idea of real estate investing is cash flow, right? We buy a property expecting to earn more than our expenses, and one of those really big expenses are our loan payment. And so if we can lower our loan payment on a fixed basis, then we have the potential to earn more cash flow. And the best part of the story is that you’re not actually the person paying down that loan, That would be your long-term tenants or your short-term rental guests.

And remember, with an investment loan, you also get to deduct all of your interest off of that loan. And so if you’re paying more interest, you have more deduction. 

So whether you think 50 year mortgages is a great thing or a really stupid thing, the reality is that it’s going to make properties more affordable for people because the monthly payment is going to be lower and the more affordable a property is. The more people will try to buy it. So my prediction for 2026 is that housing prices are gonna continue to go up.

And I know there’s tons of doom and gloomers out there, YouTube channels dedicated to freaking you out, but that’s not my take.

And I actually don’t even see how that’s possible because we are at a historic low for inventory. There’s a roughly 850,000 homes available for sale in the US Now that rates are going down, we have more tax advantages, and we’ll potentially have a longer loan term, that all means more demand , and that simply means that prices should continue to go up.

Now with interest rates being lower and expected to continue to go down, this means that a lot of short-term rental owners out there that maybe weren’t performing that well are gonna list their properties for sale.

And this creates a really good opportunity for any of us savvy, short-term rental investors that really know how to operate a property and optimize its performance, optimize its revenue.

We’re gonna get into a few of the management changes happening nationwide in just a quick second.

So just because things are looking good in the economy doesn’t mean that every market is good for short-term rental investments. Of course, there have been lots of regulations passed. Barcelona just banned short-term rentals, for example. I think that that will continue, but not overwhelmingly.

I think it’ll continue to happen in places that are more dense and that are higher priced. A lot of times, like coastal areas like Los Angeles, like Miami.

Another trend that I see in the short term rental industry that I do not see going away, and I see picking up speed is the trend in midterm rentals. And this in part comes from regulations, right? If you have a market that’s limited your property to a 39 plus stay, well then you’re no longer gonna be a short-term rental host.

You’re gonna be a midterm rental host.

If you missed our episode with the CEO of Furnish finer, go back and check that out. That was episode 3 0 8. 

That episode was full of reasons that might lead you to want to go down the midterm rental route. But one of the main ones is, is that it’s just easier to manage midterm rentals than it is short-term rentals, right? Because you have less reservations, it’s much closer to a long-term rental. Maybe your guest is there for a month or three months versus two or three nights.

We also know that a lot of short-term rental markets saw a huge increase in supply. Tons of properties came on the market and, and a lot of the dense urban areas, the midterm rental strategy can become a really good one.

Now, you don’t necessarily need to go full midterm rental, right? Your property may be in an area that’s suited really well for short-term rentals, but during the high season, and then you switch to midterm rentals. So the goal is to optimize revenue with your property. But I do see midterm rentals continuing to grow in popularity, and there’ll be more and more, and there’s also gonna be a lot to figure out.

On the operation side of that because we basically have two different segments, right? We have the long-term rentals and short-term rentals, and they both have really good tools, but those haven’t really merged yet into the midterm rental space. So I’m excited to see what comes out in 2026.

All right, let’s jump into operations and management, and this is really the key success for any investment property. You can have the nicest property in the world, but if you don’t know how to manage it well, it’s not going to do well. Right? 

And we see this over and over again with short-term rentals, where a property that maybe doesn’t look as nice as the one right next door earns way more money. So it really comes down to the operations and we’re seeing some really big trends happen, especially with the national property managers like Vac Casa.

I’ve got some stats right from Air DNA. I’m just gonna go ahead and read them off. From 2019 to 2024, the churn rate for property managers with a 4.7 average review score or higher is around nine to 11% per year. That means they’re losing nine to 11% of their customers, of their owners per year.

Doesn’t mean that they’re not adding properties, it just means that’s how many they’re losing. That’s their churn rate.

Now, if we look at property managers that have a 4.7 or lower, last year in 2024, their turn rate was 24%. Imagine that. Imagine your Vac Casa, and let’s just say they had 10,000 properties. They have much more than that. That means they were losing 2,400 properties per year, and it makes sense why, right? If you don’t have a, at least a 4.7 review score.

You’re not going to earn as much money with your properties,

and we’ve seen that these large property managers do not do a great job locally. Of course, not in all markets, right? They can do a good job in a lot of them, but as a whole, we’re looking at their average review score.

It is going down, and I expect those to continue to go down.

So it’s not looking good for large property managers or nationwide property managers that don’t have a good grasp on their local management.

That’s one of the reasons my team and I have been partnering with owners like you across the nation to work with your local team, but to take all the headache away on the back end.

We help you optimize your properties. We handle all the guest communication, we handle revenue management, listing, setup, everything on the backend, and we’ve been seeing really, really good results. So if you’re interested in chatting with us, you can head to t riches.com. There’s a little partner with us button, and we’d love to jump on a call with you and talk about your properties.

Another trend that we’ve been seeing, and I expect to continue our shorter booking windows.

Guess are booking your properties with less and less time in advance, and that means that your revenue management strategy has to change. If your average booking window used to be four weeks, but now it’s two weeks and you have some last minute discounts set up in there, well, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

So those are things you really need to understand about your specific property and your market. And another thing that we’re seeing is that everyone’s using a dynamic pricing tool now, right?

So if everyone’s using the same dynamic pricing tools, then how can you actually get your property to perform better? Well, you need to look at some things that the pricing tools aren’t accounting for. Those would be things like your specific review score or your channel markups between the different OTAs.

We’re gonna get to the OTAs here in just a second. You want to consider things like promos on those different travel sites,

And of course, you need to know who your ideal guest avatar is and make sure that the marketing on your property speaks exactly to that person.

According to Air, DNA supply has been growing nationwide around 3% per year, but that growth is slowing.

A lot of people got into the short-term rental market, and I think 2026, there’s gonna be quite a few people getting out. They realized it’s just way too hard. Maybe they’re not making as much money as they wanted. So supply and demand is one of those other things that you’re gonna want to keep a very close eye on if your market is losing supply.

Then you should be able to increase your prices.

2026. Your review scores are gonna continue to be more important than ever, and I know I say this all the time, but we can see just the way the OTAs are set up now that they’re really prioritizing their top properties. Airbnb created their guest favorite badge, for example.

Which means they’re no longer looking at the host’s ability to manage a portfolio properties, but they’re breaking it down to specific properties, and we know that the guest favorite badge goes a long way in your visibility.

According to Air DNA, the difference in average RevPAR from a top performing property to an average performing property. Is over 15% and now that is an average. So it’s really hard to bucket all the properties together. And we know that there are some that are earning way more, even twice as much as a similar type property because they’re doing an excellent job at revenue management.

They’re listing set up perfectly and they have excellent, excellent review scores.

So to sum up the operations and management, we’re seeing these national property managers basically lose all their business because they’re not doing a good job.

And on the flip side, it means that if you’re doing a really good job, there’s a lot of opportunity to outperform your competition.

Okay onto technology. I couldn’t do an outlook or a forecast for 2026 without including artificial intelligence. And we’ve done episodes on this in the past, but I believe. A hundred percent. 2026. There’s gonna be way more AI in the short-term rental industry than there has ever been, and for a couple reasons.

First of all, it doesn’t forget anything, and if it knows all the details about your property, then it can respond much faster than you can.

And one of the big ones is its tone, the weight. It actually can, and I say can because it really depends on how you have this set up, but how it can communicate with guests. It’s not going to get upset when it receives a message from a guest that’s mad because maybe the miss or flight or whatever it happens to be.

It’s always gonna respond with the best tone possible.

Humans, for example, we don’t have that luxury. We’re emotional creatures, right? And so if we get a response from a guest that says they didn’t like our property, but we love our property, and we put our heart and soul into it, well, we might be inclined to respond in a way that that’s not perfect. I guess you could say it could be emotionally driven, where AI does not have that downfall.

The other big place that we’re gonna be seeing AI is actually in the way that people find our properties. So I don’t know about you, but I haven’t used Google in a long time. I use chat PT or Claude or Gemini. You pick your favorite to do all of my web browsing these days, and I’m sure you’ve noticed when you search for something, it gives you links to websites.

So SEO, the old search engine optimization is kind of going out the window. Right? And now we have what they’re calling a EO, which is content driven,

and AI is gonna be searching for answers that they can provide all of their users. So having some specific keywords is less important than actually providing a good overall answer. 

Hopefully you have a direct booking website and on that direct booking website, you’re gonna want to have some really good content that a potential guest would be searching for in your market.

One other place that AI is going to affect search is actually directly on the OTAs, like Airbnb or booking.com. You’ve probably noticed that on Airbnb. They ask you for a lot of personal information. Now you don’t have to give it all away, but the idea behind that is that they want to start matching guest profiles with host profiles.

Booking dot com’s doing the same thing. And so the properties that are now showing up on these search results are all driven by some algorithms and AI in the background trying to make the perfect match.

And that leads me to the next trend that we’re already seeing, and that is definitely not going away in 2026. And that is the rise of other OTAs, other online travel agencies, not just Airbnb. booking.com is making a lot of headway. We get tons and tons of really great reservations from booking.com.

So if you’re not on there yet, go to str riches.com, check out our prior episodes. We’ve done lots of episodes just on booking.com and how to get it set up on their platform the right way.

We know that booking dot com’s releasing a damage protection program similar to Airbnb’s, so I expect them to gain a lot more traction in the US in 2026.

But it’s not just booking.com, that’s gonna be growing Google Vacation rentals. Other sites like WIM Stay or Hopper, if you’re not on these platforms yet, well, it’s very likely that your property management software already has a connection with them, and we want to get maximum visibility on all of these OTAs.

Of course, you can have different channel markups between the different channels. We know that Airbnb just changed their host fee. So it’s much higher than it used to be. You wanna make sure that you have those markups in place,

Assuming you have those markups jump on the other platforms, you’re going to get more visibility. And more visibility means more demand. More demand for your property means more bookings.

2025 has been an awesome year. But I’m really excited for 2026, not just because of the real estate fundamentals, allowing us investors to have more opportunity, potential for more cash flow, but also because there’s just gonna be a lot of properties changing hands, right? And so if you’ve been on the sideline and you haven’t quite got your first short term rental yet, 2026 is your year.

But remember, just because you find a good property at a good price doesn’t mean it’s going to perform well. You have to make sure you’ve crossed your T’s and dotted your I’s and you know what you’re doing when it comes to operations.

I hope this show has helped provide you some tips. That is my goal, and until next week, I hope you have a fab this 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.