Well, welcome back everyone to the short-term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy to be seated here virtually with yet another founder, a tech founder, uh, and a company we actually personally use in our portfolio. Uh, today we’ve got Thomas t Wald with us, and he is the co and founder of Charge Automation.

Welcome to the show, Thomas. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. And, uh, thank you for supporting Charge Automation, trusting in charge automation being a customer. So happy to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. And we’ve been happy. I know, uh, we’ve given you a few shout outs, uh, on the podcast Before, you know, the, the podcast is really just about how we’ve been operating our personal portfolio and growing and, you know, changing with the times.

And technology is one of those pieces that’s always changing, especially today. I mean, it’s at like warp speed. Um, but would love to hear a little bit about your background and, and, and how you got to be where you’re today. Um, so I think my background is very similar to a lot of people, how they end up in this industry.

Uh, almost accidental when I’ve discovered that, um, you know, um, renting a property short term is way more profitable than long term. Um, I used to be a real estate agent prior to that, so I’ve had some, uh, property and real estate experience and this is, um, way back in 2011. So Airbnb was just a year or two years old, so it was new industry.

Most people didn’t understand or they have never heard of Airbnb, the word. Um, and I, um, had some investment properties that I started doing short-term rental on, uh, quite early. And once I kinda discovered that it was a good profitable, um. Business. I scaled it up, um, doing, uh, rent arbitrage model. Um, and we’ve scaled to as much as, uh, 200 properties, um, very rapidly.

Um, and would scale comes, uh, bottlenecks and processes and the, the disadvantage that we have as property managers. Is that we don’t, we’re not like hotels where we have everything in one building. We have scattered, um, locations. So you can’t meet all your guests all at once when they’re checking in, uh, or different times of the day.

It’s just not scalable. And one of the biggest challenges that, uh, we were having at the time, um, was Airbnb was growing, but um, booking.com was already established and I was, I put my properties on booking.com, um, and we start getting a lot of reservations. So unlike Airbnb, but with booking com, you do have to process the guest credit card yourself.

Mm-hmm. Um, so. Uh, that I, and with pushing the credit card also comes a lot of, uh, frauds and chargebacks, things that you’re not really exposed to, uh, primary with, uh, Airbnb. Right. And given that I’m a software engineer by education, I built a, a tool to help me, uh, collect the payment automatically for my guests, and at the same time do an extra authentication verification process when collecting the payment.

Um, and that kind of eliminated our fraud chargeback. And we, we literally, and at scale, we were doing about $20,000 that we’re losing chargebacks, uh, a year. Wow. And it literally went down to, to, to zero. Um, and we’ve added a little more, um, you know, guest verification process along the way. So that kind of reduced a lot of our issues that we’re having with our guests and frauds.

Um, and that was pretty much the beginning. Um, and when other hosts in the community kind of discovered about my tool that was having the same issue, Hey, you know, can I use your, your, your, your software? Uh, ’cause I’ll have the same issue. And funny enough as, uh, our first client or person that reached out to me was all the way from Australia.

Uh, I’m in Canada. Mm-hmm. And they had 600 properties. And far was the biggest issue, uh, they had and they said, I want your software like yesterday. Um mm-hmm. So there a bit of modification for them to be able to use it. And we did that. Um, and the revenue, you know, from that customer was about 10,000 a month.

Um mm-hmm. Which was pretty, uh, exciting. And I, I realized that, okay, there’s something here that people need and want. Um, and I start really to focus on the software component of it building, you know, there. What started as a payments and verification component that, but then, um, the customers start saying, Hey, since you already have the credit card on file, since you already have, you know, doing all these things, can I also have ability to sell extra services?

Like, you know, airport pickup, uh, early check in, late checkout services. Um, and then we’ve added that component. And then they say, Hey, you’re already doing this. Can I also ask them a little more questions about why they come into my property before they arrive? Then we added ability to add some custom questions as a part of the check-in process, and then they said, okay, you’ve got all of this.

It’s amazing. But once they do all of that, can I have like a guidebook where they can read the checking instruction and get the access code, and then we added a guest portal or guidebook. And there was no definition of what we’re building at the time was brand new, but it is what’s known as right now, guest experience software.

So we kind of built it accidental, but also, you know, uh, product led growth where our customers are requesting, um, for, for, you know, what, what they want software to be. And, and they built it. And this is what it is now. It’s a full guest experience solution that handles everything from checking to checkout once the guest makes a reservation.

Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, you built it first for your own portfolio, solved some problems. Uh, obviously lots of other people in the industry have the same problems and now here you are, you’re a software company. Exactly. It is software company. So yeah. Such a long answer for short question, but yeah. No, but, but your guys’ tool really does a great job at, you know, facilitating all of that.

Um, and you mentioned, you know, one of the big things, chargebacks and maybe, you know, for the operators out there that are just getting started or they maybe have one or two properties and haven’t made it onto booking.com, or they haven’t made it onto these direct booking platforms where we always take the payments.

Maybe chargebacks doesn’t seem like a big thing, but once you get to that stage and if you’re planning on growing your portfolio, I mean, they are. Dramatic. You know, someone stays at your property and essentially the chargeback is they go to the credit card company and say, Hey, this was fraudulent, or whatever.

They dispute the charge and the credit card co company gives ’em the money back and you’re out. You, you had someone stay at your property potentially, and uh, they stayed there for free, so. It is a massive Im, it, it’s, it makes a massive impact. It is, and I, I mean, I’ve had many, many stories. Um, and it’s not just a chargeback.

I mean, that’s one component of it. So one is obviously the guests, uh, you know, stayed enjoy their estate and then they filed a chargeback. Now you lost our money. But then typically those kind of guests are also trouble. So they will smoke in the unit, right? They’ll throw a part in the unit. They will, they will, yeah.

Destroy the place. Um, so your cost is not even the chargeback, it’s the whole process. And you have to block the property for a certain period of time. You’ve gotta cancel the next booking. It is extremely painful. Um, so if you can prevent it, uh, prevent it. And most people think that if I can just, um, have all the evidence, I have pictures that this person stated in my.

Property, I’m gonna win this chargeback. Um, unfortunately, you know, 99% of the times you don’t win those chargebacks. Um, right. And they’re fraud. It’s a hundred percent you don’t win. So, um, it’s better to avoid than trying to win it back. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. They often are not sure most favorite guests.

Yeah. So having that go guest authentication upfront, uh, really goes a long way. Mm-hmm. Um. Let’s see here. So where do we wanna take this next? I know there’s a lot of different ways we can go. Uh, chargebacks is definitely a big one. Um, you know, payment gateways and sort of automating that. I think the reality is, is that the.

There isn’t unfortunately a single tool out there that does everything perfectly or everything in the most efficient way. Uh, and so one of the reasons we came to charge automation also is for your just payment gateway, um, you know, to have a, a more reasonable fee for processing charge, uh, charges with Stripe.

Can, can you talk about kind of what that payment gateway is for those of our audience? Probably don’t know. Yeah. I’m glad you touched on that point. So. I think most, uh, PMSs typically support one or two payment processors, usually Stripe plus somebody else. Um, and. If you’re using Stripe, obviously you could use charge automation to be able to be able to collect the payment and avoid fraud chargebacks, um, and save some fee along the way.

Uh mm-hmm. But let’s say you are in a country where Stripe is not operating or you’re in a country where, uh, you know where Stripe has banned the, or, you know, close your account for whatever reason that may be. So now you’re stuck. Now you, you need to work with another payment processor, but the problem is that does that payment processor that you want to work with does not work with your PMS.

And this is almost accidental also how we we, how we got into this Because the customer came to us and said, Hey, Stripe closed my account. Here’s the payment processor I want to use. Here’s the PMs I want to use. You know, can you do this for me? Connect. Connect this two. And then we’ve pretty much been able to integrate that new payment processor where we connect the PMS and the payment processor with the bridge and the logic in there.

Um, yeah. And pretty much every customer that came in requested for another one and for another one, and for another one, before we know it, we have over 120 payment processor integrations. So now anybody from any PMS can use pretty much any payment processor in the globe, um, which is wow. Uh, like I said, it’s accidental, but it opens a lot of, um, opportunity for people to be able to choose the PMs they want to use and the payment process they want to use without having to compromise either one of them.

Yeah. That’s amazing. Wow. So you guys work with 130 payment processors? Yes. Under 30 plus now at the stage. Wow. That, that seems like a lot to keep track of. Uh, I’m sure some of them are more commonly used than others, but how, how do you guys manage all of that? You know, it, it, it’s when you’re building it, you don’t realize it.

And then when we have to maintain, update the APIs and changes, it’s really, it becomes, um, a handful I would say. Um, and we’ve kind of, I mean, after building so many, you, you do have a process. And some of them are just one-offs. ’cause, you know, one customer with a large number of portfolio properties wants to use it and some of them are like concentrated where a lot of people use it in certain countries.

Yeah. Um, so, um, we, we don’t keep and maintain all of them. We, we see that the activity, the usage, and there, there’s still customers using it. Then we continue to, to make updates. But some of them customers don’t use them anymore. They just, you know, staying there. So those ones we just kind of. Keep them, um, off the shelf until a customer wants to use it, then we may have to, you know, update some of their content.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Well, most of our audience is in the US and most of the short-term rental operators, owners, investors are using Stripe. Curious to hear from you. What are maybe like the top three payment processors that you see out there in terms of functionality, flexibility, and, and maybe pricing, you know, what are the best ones?

Well, I would say. I think, like I said, Stripe is a default one because it’s, it’s already available in the PMS. It is the easiest one to get an account with. Um, but it’s also not the cheapest. Um, so most, most people, um, go with that at the default. But once you scale up and once you start doing. Some serious volume.

Um, then that extra, you know, 1%, that extra half a percent, uh, you’re paying, uh, becomes significant. Uh, when you, when you do the total. And that’s where then people start evaluating. What other options, you know, are there? Um, and this is where, I mean, um, in us, you know, obviously authorize.net is a, you know, a second probably most popular one, um, in the industry.

Uh, but also a lot of like, um, big payment processors, whether it’s Chase Payments, um, or there’s Elon, um, a handful. Um, I mean, a quick Google search will probably give you those ones, but, uh, these are some of the popular ones. Um, that, that, that we work with. And most people usually switch, uh, from Stripe if they, if, if cost saving becomes an important factor.

Mm-hmm. Um, and, and, and we’re the, and we’re the pretty much, I would say, the only company in the industry that’s solving that problem at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the more properties you add and the more direct bookings you do, or the more you know bookings you do outside of Airbnb, or if you’re taking payments directly on booking.com, the, the more important these, these little percentages, uh, become, um, right.

You know, and that’s just another way for us in the industry to be more efficient and to have more net profit. And I think a lot of people out in the industry right now are, there’s a lot of buzz about upsells, you know? Mm-hmm. Uh, I think just because the industry’s gotten so competitive and people are trying to find ways to, you know, squeeze a few extra dollars out.

Uh, but this is one of the things that charge automation does really well. Uh, and helps facilitate. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, what you guys have built and, you know, chargebacks in general, or not chargebacks, I’m sorry, but, uh, ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a general shift in the industry, uh, because it’s gotten very competitive and now the old school way is, you know, let me maximize, um, my A DR, right?

Um, and average daily rate, right? But I think how you have to think about the new way of thinking is not about, you know, how much you’re making, uh, for that booking, but it’s how much you’re making for that stay. So, so you may be competitive on the rate, but then you have all the additional ancillary revenue opportunities where you maximize that booking.

So that booking might have been a $2,000 booking, but by the end, that stay end up become a $3,000 stay because the guest has spent on a few different I items, so. Mm-hmm. Whereas you might have lost a customer if you had priced your daily rate at very high, but not have any upsells. So it is a competitive strategy and it is, uh, the modern way of competing in, in the, in the competitive SDR industry, uh, even the hotel space.

Um, so having said that, um, that’s where then you wanna see, you wanna optimize your upsells, you know, how do you drive maximum conversion, upsell. And one of the biggest, uh, friction point in upsells is when you present the guests, uh, an opportunity to buy upsells. A, you don’t wanna bombard them with hundreds of upsells or like some third party website where you just load up everything.

It has to be very curated. Um, and then from the curated point of view, once they wanna select, you want to show the credit card that they already use with the reservation on at the same level. So you give the Amazon experience where when they see the payment methods already attached, it becomes a one click up.

So where you just add and complete the payment. Right. But if you ask the guest to pull out their card and enter the numbers again to complete that payment. Now, statistically, uh, and this is a, a data, um, that was on done on research is it’s about, uh, 17% loss when you don’t have the payment method on file in the conversion received.

Yeah, so, so now if you have the card on file, you’re converting 17% more, um, which is, which is huge. So you’re giving the Amazon checkout experience. Um, and then the second part is. D you have guests coming from different parts of the world and they’re used to paying the way they, they pay locally. So you want to give that local payment experience.

So if they’re used to paying by Apple Pay, give them an Apple Pay option. Uh, Google Pay, uh, if they’re from Brazil, let’s say they, they don’t wanna pay by picks if they’re from, um, mm-hmm. Uh, let’s say someplace in Europe, um, like Holland, uh, it’s, they pay by ideal. That’s the way of people have people pay.

So not everybody takes just raw credit card numbers as a way of payment. So adding that, and I can’t remember the conversion, but I think it gives you another seven, 8% better conversion. Um, so, and that’s what we do. We charge automation, is that we give the guest ability to pay. You could be using Stripe, you could be using any payment processor, would give the guests a chance to pay through all.

Preferred payment methods and based on where they are and based on their browsers and location, we’ll load up the payment method that is used by the guest, so he’s more likely to convert and pay that upsell. Uh, and with that, uh, what we looked at is so far our customers are paying, spending over $180 per reservation in additional upsell revenue.

Um, mm-hmm. Uh, which is huge. And if it, you know, so if a property is taking, uh, four or five reservations for the month and you’re already at, at a thousand plus, uh, an upsell income, but all these little optimizations is where you maximize not having, Hey, I have an upsell. I could sell it. But it’s how you sell it.

How you convert it is, is, um, is the most important part and. You know, we’ve spent years and years, you know, optimizing those things and looking at the data and what’s working, what’s not working, AB testing to say this is how customers are converting. So, um, using professional tools is what helps you convert more upsells.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Some excellent points there. I, I know there’s. Just over the years, over the last decade, there’s been so many guidebook options that have come out and, you know, they’re all helpful for the guests and the guests like to see extra information, but removing those steps, basically, you know, making it easier for someone to, to add things on.

I, I think getting the reservation in the first place. Is one thing, you know? And yes, you’ve gotta have competitive pricing and make sure you know, you know what you’re doing with your revenue management, know what your market’s doing. But then it does create a whole bunch of opportunity after you already have someone, and I’m sure, you know, depending on your market, you, you could come up with some data on, you know, how likely it is for people to purchase the airport transfer, how likely it is for people to, to purchase the chef service or whatever it happens to be.

Mm-hmm. Um, to really raise the overall net income. Right. Yes. Uh, go ahead. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, making that easy is, uh, is a big part. I know before we were with charge automation, we, we tried a lot of different things. You know, the PMSs have their own versions of upsells. Uh, there’s other options out there.

But storing the credit card information, like you said, making it easy goes a long way. Goes a long way. Indeed, indeed. Um, and also, uh, when, uh, people are on vacation or on a business trip, I know they’re not there to read paragraphs of your, your guide or, you know, along information. Um, and the old way of doing it was like, you know, when once a guest books, you know, they will receive five messages, you know, and it will be like, Hey, here’s a link to complete your check-in.

Um, here’s a link to do, uh, ID verification. That’s a separate one. Oh, and if you wanna read our, our, about our, about property, here’s a link for it. Um, and if you wanna buy some services, here’s another link. So now you gimme four or five different links, uh, as a and as a guest, I, I don’t want to think, I just wanna, you know, know, do what I have to do, uh, without much thinking.

So. Of combining all that, you know, fragmented experience for the guests into like one smooth process where they don’t think, they just click, click, click, and, and they’re done with it, uh, is the way. Um, and like I said, the last component of the, the check-in is once they complete that process, they do, I know online checking.

Um, and they pay the secure deposit or the balance. They buy some extra services. Um, and then the last step is, uh, give them access to the guidebook where they can see the information without. Changing the links without going somewhere else. Just keep it in in the same journey. Yeah. Well that’s, it’s a big part of the guest journey.

What you guys have tackled, you know, from payment to, to upsells, to guidebooks. What do you, what’s next for charge automation? I mean, what’s the next big, uh, thing to tackle? Good question. Uh, so, uh, I mean, we have a lot of exciting stuff that, that we’re working on. I can’t just talk about yet. Um, but. In terms of, uh, the product, um, you know, we’ve been at it for quite some time.

Um, you know, I think almost, almost, uh, almost 10 years now. So it is very mature product from that point of view. Um, but at the same time, you know, we are still a company that’s working, like we’re an early startup. Um, we add, um, I think on, in every sprint, which is our sprints about, you know, uh, about a month or so, uh, in every sprint we know we we’re adding about.

50 60 improvements or features, uh, to our product. And it’s changing, uh, drastically, uh, every time. And this, at this point, it’s more, it’s not more one of the big things, but it’s more like on the micro little things that really impact the guest experience. How do you make everything extremely smooth without, you know.

And it’s every, any friction at all. Um, yeah, and it’s just, yeah. So it’s a, it’s a micro fine tuning. Uh, our solution is what we’re focusing on because we’ve tackled all the big important items and then making it to work very seamlessly with your PMS. So, you know, you’re not spending too much time switching tabs.

Everything is, you know, readily available to you. Um, so all this little increments, incremental improvements that we’re doing is our focus.

Yeah. Um, well, I know. Software has just gotten easier to make now, you know what I mean? It’s exciting. We can use AI to help us code and, and do things much faster. I’m not a developer, but, uh, I, I do like technology and I, I try to stay up to date with things. How do you see our industry playing out? As someone who’s been in the software side of things for the last 10 years, knowing that there’s lots of operators out there, especially the larger operators trying to do some of these things in-house, you know, or maybe they’re just like you have done over the last 10 years have have solved one little problem and then that turns into two or three.

How do you see that, uh, changing just the software landscape, I guess, in our industry? Yeah. And this is, this is. Much bigger question. Um, because we literally we’re talking about like, you know, how does, how’s AI gonna change our industry? Um, ’cause that’s how, you know, things have gotten much easier and faster to build.

Um mm-hmm. And what I’ve, I’ve, I’ve noticed is, you know, and we have some customers have also know, built some aspects of our product, uh, you know, in, in house. Um, so what’s gonna happen with, with our industry is that a lot of hosts. Uh, who built their own little product and they wanna expand it. You might be able to do 80% of the work, uh, fairly quickly, but then for the last 20%, for the all the little incremental changes that you’re going to do, uh, that’s where really, you know, where, where it begins.

And the way, the way to give you, um, an example is like if you’re building a house. You can easily just put up the brick, um, you know, or the concrete very easily. Mm-hmm. But now you gotta do the wirings and, uh, you know, the drainage, um, all the little things, you know, the, the tiling and there’s all this extra finishing.

That is gonna take you a lot more time. So they might kind of save money by doing in house, but in the end they would have to hire someone. They have to maintain it. So I don’t think it will become cheaper. They might have the con the you, you might say, you know, I’m gonna take the house and build it, but I don’t think it will be cheaper necessarily.

So it’s not a cost saving strategy. Yeah. Uh, if you have a plan to sell that product to somebody else. Uh, maybe, you know, there’s a bigger picture, but to build it in house. To continue to maintain it. And remember, I mean, there’s also security issue. There is, you know, maintaining servers, um, you know, DevOps, uh, I mean, it’s a much bigger project, right?

Um, that this is so, uh, companies who are doing it, like, you know, again, if you wanna build software tech company, yeah. You know, you can build things, uh, faster and then keep investing. But I look at it from our side, you know, you know, we use AI in all our developments at the stage. And we’re building things there and doing a lot faster, but I cannot see how it would be cost saving for someone to bring it in house.

Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Not quite there yet. Yes. Lots of, uh, uh, yeah. Well, awesome, Thomas. Um, let’s see. I’d love to hear you have your own personal portfolio that you’ve had, you mentioned, and that’s kind of where things have started. How do you mind talking about your personal portfolio, just for a few minutes and, and kind of how that’s changed and what you’re doing to, to stay competitive?

Yeah, so. I’m, I’m a user first. Um, and, you know, with my own product, uh, we, we use before things get released to the public, you know, we use my own portfolio product. Uh, and it used to be about 200 post COVID, you know, I went down to, to, uh, about, uh, you know, 80 or so. Um, and we use this as, as a testing ground, uh, for from, for a lot what we built.

And I, I really experienced everything firsthand and everything that we, we built it is to, you know, benefit my operation, which means I know by internal I’m benefiting, um, um, other companies, uh, as well because everyone has the same issue. Uh, and. Also, yeah, I’m at the stage where also I’ve been, I’ve been a host, uh, for about, you know, almost 15 years now, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, and I have a lot of deep, deep experience, uh, in, in the operation. And I, I live it every day, so I. To me, uh, optimizing every single component of, of the journey is, is what’s important. And then maximizing the revenue. Um, and it’s gotten very competitive. It’s got, you know, it has, and I realize it will not get easier.

So now you have to think of creatively how to do this. Um, and, and there’s obviously, I mean, there’s the pricing tools. There is. Uh, know in, in the, in the upsells, how do you want to test it out? You know, does it make sense? And then how much did I make? So I’m doing a lot of this research, uh, internally with, with my own, uh, before, you know, concluding if this is a better way to, to do it.

I don’t know if you, if you have any specific questions about how, how, uh, I’m doing anything else, but, uh, generally, uh. I think what I’m building is, uh, you know, what the product charge automation is, is, uh, this direct outcome of my own operation. Yeah. Well, a lot of good points there. I mean, um, yeah, the industry’s definitely gotten harder and, and returns used to be really good, and now they’re getting smaller and smaller, you know, as more people discovered short-term rentals.

And so we have to learn ways to be more efficient. We have to embrace technology and we have to learn ways to create better guest experiences. Um, and then outside of that, I mean. There’s a supply and demand equation, you know, in a lot of these markets have just seen a lot of supply growth. Um, yes. Mm. And you know, my, my philosophy, uh, in my operation is I don’t trust people.

Um, I trust process. Mm-hmm. Um, because I’ve been through a lot of stuff. People, you know, people get sick, people leave, quit. People do different things. So you can’t build a business around people. Um, there has to be a process whether that person is there or not. Business has to keep going. And I’ve built, um, no, the automation is really, does not rely on a person that doesn’t rely on a person’s knowledge, uh, or experience.

It’s really a process and, uh, and my goal is how do I create a business that, uh, can operate? Whether that person’s here or is not there, and how can I operate it with as little people as possible? Uh, because that saves you money, it saves you headache. And in a competitive space, you know, uh, human labor is the most expensive thing.

And if you can save that, then your, you know, then you can com You can stay competitive in, in this, uh, in this tough, uh, in the competitive industry. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, those are, we share a lot of those same ideas. I mean, that’s our idea behind quarterly is, you know, making things more efficient, using more technology, and, uh, excited to see where you take things with, with your, with your software companies and with your portfolio.

And would love to stay connected. Uh, how can, how can people find you and, uh, what’s the best way to get in touch? Uh, so best way to get in touch, uh, again, we have, uh, again, by email. It’s, uh, thomas@chargeautomation.com is, uh, the best way to reach us or our website, charge automation.com, uh, where you can find, learn about our product as well.

Uh, and I really wanna say yeah, and then thank you for giving us this opportunity. Uh, and, you know, it’s, it’s very, very good end. To see a customer that’s using our, our product. Um, and also, you know, to, to discover that you have a podcast and be part of it is, is quite exciting. So, uh, I would like to say thank you for this as well.

Ah, you’re welcome. Thanks for coming on and, and look forward to staying in touch. Thank you. Cheers. Thanks, Thomas. Bye-Bye.

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

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

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

Ditch that for, for YouTube.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s go ahead and jump into it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I would check out any of those.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned. As we jump into those next week

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. 

[00:00:00] Okay. Well, welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m really excited to be sitting here virtually with Sean Shiraz. He is the CEO of a company you’ve undoubtedly heard about lofi. They’re one of the industry’s leading property management software platforms, helping tons and tons of owners and businesses run their short-term rentals.

Sean, I’m really excited to have you on the show today. I know you got a background in technology. We’re gonna dive in some details. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Tim. Appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. Uh, it’s always a pleasure to, to talk with the CEOs, you know, the founders, the people kind of driving the, driving the ships of some of the industry’s largest, uh, largest providers in the technology space.

And let’s see, you have a background in technology. You want to tell us just a [00:01:00] little bit of how you became the CEO of, of Lofi? Yeah, absolutely. Um, I, uh, I joined earlier this year as CEO, and, and before that my career has been in product at a number of, of tech companies. So before lofi, I was Chief Product Officer at Pipedrive, uh, CRM software for those familiar.

Then before that was at Intuit, the financial software company, uh, for a number of years in the US and in Brazil and, and in Europe. Uh, which was an incredible experience, uh, in both of those cases to learn from companies that are incredibly customer obsessed, but also create software that is for the small guys.

The, the underdogs in the spaces, right. You know, Intuit was all about creating software for those that were going out on their own, that wanted to be their own boss and be their own small business owner to do their taxes on their own. And they, it created incredibly easy to use software, uh, that [00:02:00] is the leader in those categories.

And same thing with Pipedrive. You know, Pipedrive came out when Salesforce and HubSpot were the dominant CRM players. But no one was really focused on how do we create a CRM that a sales team is actually going to use? Uh, and so Pipedrive was as easy to use, you know, just the right amount of features that you need for your use case.

Not anything more than that. Uh, that completely disrupted the CRM space. And so I have always been attracted to working at companies that have a product that’s disrupting, um, the space and in particular serving an end of the market that is underserved and overlooked. The underdogs, right? We all love a good underdog story, the David versus Goliath, and that’s something that has always attracted me to the companies and the products I work on.

And so when the opportunity at Lofi, uh, came about, uh, this was [00:03:00] definitely a core part of their DNA and their origin story. Uh, the company has been exclusively focused on the long tail end of the short term rental market. Again, serving the needs of the independent hosts and the small scale property managers that have been, uh, overserved and underlooked by, uh, software that’s been around historically.

And Lofi was really there, um, to serve their needs and to ultimately help them become independent and independent in the, in the sense of financial independence, independent in the sense of independence from your time. So you, you’re less time managing the day-to-day and independence in the, in the sense of location.

Right. You’re, you’re, mm-hmm. You know, we were just chatting, you’re, you’re, uh, recording this from Brazil, got properties, you know, around the world, which is incredible. You know, and it’s because of software and because of the setup that you’ve set up, that’s probably allowed you to do that. Right? And so we, we try to do the same thing with Lofi to help our our customers [00:04:00] with that.

And, you know, I, um, uh, in my early days when I was living in San Diego, I was an Airbnb host, uh, in the early days of Airbnb. You know, had an incredible experience, uh, doing that. And like meeting strangers. I never thought I would meet, uh, and love that. But you know, now kind of fast forward being on this side of it, uh, seeing, um, uh, the software that we’ve got at lofi, I definitely could have benefited from using that when I was a host.

And so it was that combination of. Uh, you know, working on products and working for companies that are serving the underserved, uh, and the, and the mission of Lofi really helping these hosts and small scale property managers become independent. That drew me, drew me to this opportunity. Yeah. Awesome.

Awesome. Uh, yeah, I think, you know, you’re totally right. Like. A lot of, like, there’s just so [00:05:00] much to do in the short term rental space, and if we’re not using software that helps facilitate all of that, like we’re really at a disadvantage. And so I know you guys have just tons and tons of features and things that Log helps short-term rental operators with.

Uh, but curious, what, what does your user base look like right now, Sean? I mean, how many properties are, are you guys serving? Um, what’s the average user kind of look like? Yeah, sure. You know, one, one of the things, um, as I, as I started earlier this year, one of the things that I’m asking. Um, a lot of external folks that I meet with, you know, like yourself and other folks that have been in the industry, uh, is, you know, what, what do you know about lofi and what, what are what usually come, comes to mind?

And what’s interesting, one of the takeaways that I’ve, I’ve had this year speaking to folks is, um, a lot of people don’t know about lofi, you know, that aren’t really in ingrained in the industry. [00:06:00] Usually they think of a few other brand names in our, in our category that come up. And Lofi is usually further down the list.

Um, and we, we kind of like fly under the radar. And when I start to share some of the stats on the company, I. People are like shocked. They’re like, whoa. Like you, you’re like one of the top three in, in the space, right? When you, when you speak about the customer base that you’re serving. And definitely look, this is a reflection of, uh, we’ve been hard at work for a number of years.

The founders have done an incredible job with the company getting us to this point. But one of the things that we wanna do differently going forward is. To get our name out there much, much more than we have in the past because we’re proud of what we’re building, what we have built, and what we’re building going forward as well.

And we want this, the industry to know about that. And so some of the, the stats to, to answer your question, we have over 25,000 customers. All around the world. And, um, [00:07:00] you know, what’s really unique about us is that although we are born and raised in Barcelona, um, I’m taking this call here from Barcelona, um, we’ve got an incredibly internationally diverse customer base from all around the world.

Uh, you know, whether it be in North America, south America, Europe, uh, or even in, in Southeast Asia. So incredibly diverse from a, a geographic footprint standpoint. And then when we look at the customer segments that we serve, they’re primarily two, two big segments that we serve. They’re the independent hosts, uh, that really have a handful of properties, usually less than three.

Um, and this is our primary segment. And then the, the second segment we serve are the small scale property managers. They have less than 15. Look, they’re, they’re looking to grow, um, but really kind of stay in that small scale range because they wanna maintain their independence. Um, now look, we’ve got customers that have many [00:08:00] more properties than that, uh, and, and don’t fit the mold.

And so they’re, but these are, I would say the, the two primary segments mm-hmm. That we’ve got. Awesome. Awesome. Well, 25,000 uh, users is an awful lot and I think one, one of the exciting things about the industry and as you mentioned is that. It doesn’t matter where the properties are. You know, you guys were founded in Barcelona, but you could have a property in Indonesia, or you could have a property in California, and you still have all of the operation side of running a short-term rental, which we’ve found, you know, from, from our end, working with lots of owners as well.

It’s pretty much the same, you know? I mean, you’ve gotta make sure that you have a really good guest experience. Yeah. Maybe the, the language changes or the market changes, but there’s lots of data now to help us with all that. Uh, so streamlining operations is essential really to success with the short-term rental these days.

Tell us a little bit more about Lofi and, and how [00:09:00] you guys help, uh, owners or investors or managers streamline their operations. Yep. Absolutely. So the, the way we think about everything we do is customer backed, and we think about ultimately there are three primary areas of customer benefit and value that we’re here to provide.

And it ties to that point about independence, right? And the three flavors of independence. So ultimately the financial independence. So what are we doing to help our customers become more financially independent? And that breaks out into a few areas. Number one is their occupancy rate, right? How can we help you?

Increase your occupancy rate. One of the primary ways that we do that obviously, is to, um, help get you cross listed across as many OTAs, predominant OTAs as possible, right? In addition to your own direct booking website and channel as well. The other component of financial independence, in addition [00:10:00] to the occupancy rate is when it comes to price and revenue.

So how can we help you maximize, uh, you know, the, the nightly rate that you’re getting for, for your property? And we do this through a combination of our own kind of, uh, uh, pricing tool that we provide from Lofi. But then also we’ve got a marketplace where you can connect to. Uh, whatever pricing tool that you have the best, you know, experience with, you can do that and connect that with, with Lofi.

So that’s what we do when it comes to helping you with a few examples when it comes to financial independence, when it comes to operations, this really fits into the two other flavors of independence, which is around, you know, independence of your time, and then independence of location. And so on the time piece of it, look, there’s the top areas we know that where our customers are spending the most amount of time when it comes to managing the operations, the number one offender is the guest communications, right?

The back and [00:11:00] forth guest communications that happen. This is a clear one where we’re automating and, and have AI all over helping our customers. Uh, you know, streamline, save a lot of time. The other one is when it comes to task management. Uh, so we’ve got a great. Capability around task management that helps you automate whether that is with you and your cohosts, whether that’s with you and your partner, whether that is with you and external teams that are helping support your property, whether it’s a team of maintenance providers or a team of cleaners as well.

Uh, and then location wise and independence on location. One of the things. That customers love about Lofi is the mobile app. Uh, and, you know, we get really high marks on our MO mobile app from, you know, industry, uh, evaluators out there. And this, it gives you a lot of the same capability and functionality that’s in the web app.

So when it comes to streamlining operations and being independence from location to be in Brazil and manage a property in, in Sacramento, [00:12:00] like our customers are doing this all the time via our mobile app. Uh, and, and that helps ’em quite a bit. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, pretty much everything is going mobile these days, isn’t it?

I mean, people are making the reservations on the mobile platforms versus the desktop, so that’s really important. Uh, we, we’ve used multiple different PMS programs over the years and. I know none of them are perfect. You know what I mean? There’s just so many. Pieces to tackle. Uh, but I’m, I’m curious, you know, and, and some, you know, some programs maybe have a little slight edge on another one in a certain area, but then, you know, you guys have an edge on, on the other company in a certain area.

I’m curious, kinda what do you. What do you think is gonna keep Lofi competitive like three years from now? Or a property management software platform like your guys’? What, where are you, where are you thinking, uh, that you’ll need to be to, to continue to lead the market as one is one of the industry’s top providers.

Yep. It’s a, it’s a [00:13:00] great question. Um, yeah, I, I, there’s basically three things that differentiate us today that are gonna be the, the key things for us going forward as well. Number one is that for the last 13 years, we’ve been exclusively focused on a specific customer group within the short term rental market, as I shared before.

Mm-hmm. And we’re gonna continue to be exclusively focused on that. In the market going forward. Now, why does this give us an advantage versus others that are out there? Because we can obsess about a narrow set of customer use cases, it increases our ability to serve those narrow use cases incredibly well.

We’re not trying to be something for everybody in the market. From a independent host to a large scale property manager. We can’t do either of those things very well, but we can really focus on the segments I mentioned and absolutely knock it out of the park for [00:14:00] that. And so we’re gonna continue to obsess about a narrow set of customer segment profiles.

That’s number one. The second one is around ease of use. You know, we track customer feedback and sentiment in a number of ways. The number one thing that customers love about Lofi, whether they’ve used PMS before, or they haven, uh, or they haven’t. Um, is our ease of use. And, um, you know, this is incredibly important.

It’s an easy thing to say. It’s a simple set of words to say. It’s really hard to execute and deliver on ease of use. And I know from my experience at Intuit working on QuickBooks and TurboTax and pipe drive, it is difficult. But once you have it, it’s incredibly special. And the origin story of, of Lofi and where the name came from was that the founders were inspired by Shopify and what Shopify did to what you can do to create your own website.[00:15:00] 

And they said, we wanna be the Shopify of lodging, hence Lofi. And that like part of our DNA has been there since day one around simplicity, ease of use, and serving the needs again of those that want to do it on their own. And then the last piece that is a core part of our differentiation and will be going forward is the level of service and support that we offer our customers.

This is whether it’s an engagement with our sales team, whether it’s an engagement with our onboarding team if you need it, or an engagement with our support team, we fully recognize that we’re gonna continue to make the product as easy as possible. But there are cases when you’re gonna want that extra like support or that safety net of like, Hey, am I doing this right?

Or, Hey, I’d like to get. Input or advice on this particular area of my direct booking website and how I can maximize SEO on that. You’ve got a team of of experts here at LOFI that you can call on or you can reach out to and [00:16:00] get that level of service and support, which customers love about lo lofi. So these three things are, would differentiate us today and we’ll continue going forward.

Yeah. That’s awesome. And it, that’s such a great point about usability. I mean, you can have the, the most advanced, sophisticated platform in the world, but if people only know how to use 10% of it, it doesn’t really help you a whole lot. You know, and we, we see this all the time working with a lot of different owners.

It’s like a lot of times, uh, they’ll be using software maybe that we use ourselves or, uh, that we’ve used in the past. They’re like, oh, I wish it could do this. And you’re like, oh, it actually can do that, you know? Exactly. Um, so, such an important piece. I’m curious, you know, you guys have access to a lot of data with so many users.

Do you have any interesting insights you could share about your, your users, you know. You know, maybe, uh, we, I met with, um, some of the other PMS, uh, [00:17:00] founders and CEOs recently, and one of ’em just shared the fact that you guys can see what your users are connected to through your, your marketplace. Uh, anything you can share there that you found on, on the back end about your users?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think there’s, um, there’s a ton of insight that we get from, uh, from that, but then also just qualitatively speaking to, to customers and learning what’s, what’s going on. Mm-hmm. Um, I think, you know, one of the, definitely the kind of main takeaways from this past year of, of Insights is that for a lot of our customers that are in urban areas.

The competition competi is, is fierce, right when it comes to the number of, uh, short-term rentals mm-hmm. That are in their, in their neighborhood or in their city. Um, and especially when you’ve got regulation. That has heated up in some of their locations. When you have the [00:18:00] combination of those two, it makes for, um, competition, you know, making it much harder to get the occupancy rate that you were achieving, uh, before.

And so then the, the key question is how do you stand apart, right? In a competitive short term rental market that you’re in, how do you stand apart? Um, and there ultimately. Where we, uh, are looking to support our customers and where we support our customers today is through a combination of things.

Number one is. How are you gonna differentiate yourself and your property in this market? You know, are you wanting to be a premium stay? Are you not? Are you looking to be a discount stay? How do you think about, given the amenities that you have, given the property that you got, the work that you’ve put into it, the investment you put into it, where you wanna stand, you?

Are you gonna be a premium brand or not? And it’s [00:19:00] okay either way, right? There’s no right or wrong, but you need to be intentional about it because then ultimately from there. Everything flows. Your pricing decisions flow from there. The type of guest experience that you want to, uh, provide flows from there.

And so if you are have made the conscious choice where it’s like, Hey, you know what? I’m gonna be a discount play. Nothing against like the Walmarts of the world, but I’m a a Walmart, right? I’m a discount play. You know, when you come in here, it’s gonna be a like no frills. You got a bed, you’ve got everything you need, right?

It’s gonna be in good condition, but you’re gonna get the best price. And that’s my conscious decision. I’m gonna make a choice of on. And my pricing is gonna reflect that. And then everything from there is gonna reflect that as well. And so this is the key thing. And so our customers are looking at, you know, their guest reviews to, to provide insights on where they can improve relative to.[00:20:00] 

Strategy that they’ve, they’ve lined up on this. They’re looking at their pricing to understand when they’re above and below market to calibrate that versus this, this decision that they’re making on premium versus discount play. Um, so these are a few areas that we’re seeing as just competition, especially in the urban areas and intensifying.

Yeah. And so the need to differentiate, uh, is even, even more important. Yeah. Great points, great points. And we’ve, we’ve definitely seen that as well. Um, I, I actually started my short-term rental journey in a lot of urban areas and some of them have become very, very, uh. Competitive for sure. Um, and, but one of the things that lets you stand out as you said, is really understanding your guests, knowing who you’re marketing, just as you guys do with Lofi.

You know exactly who your, your user, your, your ideal customer is. The guest experience is crucial and, and we see just the massive difference [00:21:00] in revenue potential between a property that’s operating well and has good reviews and one that doesn’t. I mean, it really is, is is, it’s just crazy sometimes. Uh, you mentioned AI and we love ai, you know, uh, for so many reasons, but one is because it can make the guest experience a lot better.

Um, can you tell us a little bit more about AI and how you guys at Logier are incorporating that? Yeah, absolutely. We, we’ve got ai, um, throughout the end-to-end customer experience right now. You know, one example of AI that’s there today is when you sign up for lofi, we offer you the ability to speak to an AI agent, to give an overview of the product experience.

’cause we know a majority of our trialists and new signups have not used. Property management software before. And so the terminology, the orientation of the user experience, these are all things that you kinda want somebody to walk you through it. At the same time. [00:22:00] You don’t wanna wait for an onboarding call with somebody.

You want it like right then and there. So we offer the ability to right then and there, speak to an AI agent that fully understands your needs and what you’re looking to get out of the software. And then we will give you a personalized overview of the software based off of that. Cool. Uh, we’re seeing a ton of great engagement from that.

We’ve got AI helping you when it comes to guest messaging, which we know is obviously a hot area we spoke about earlier. Uh, helping you save time when it comes to crafting messages, which is incredibly important. We have AI in the product today when it comes to. Hey, how do I do this in Lofi? Or I’ve got a question on this, how do I get this answered?

Um, we’ve got AI to, to help you with, with that as well. And then a number of areas that, uh, are in the pipeline to help in these customer benefit areas. I mentioned earlier. Where, you know, again, we, everything we do is customer backed technology is a means to an end. Uh, and AI is [00:23:00] one of those hows of how we can solve those customer problems in magical ways.

But there are other ways that we can solve that as well. And I’ll give one, one, you know, short example on this. This is from, uh, a customer of ours in Florida. Dominic, who’s an amazing, amazing guy, um, who’s actually building, uh, an app. Uh, to support short term rental owners. That’s gonna be in our marketplace as well called host, host iq.

But, um, Dominic was telling me, you know, one of the things that stands out about him is the guest experience he provides. And so I wanted to understand from him, like, what, what does he do? What is the, how does he. And he was sharing a story about, um, a family that was staying with him. It was the mother and the two kids, and they had an incredible stay and the kids.

Left him a handwritten note, uh, when they left and he, he joked about it. He was like, [00:24:00] one of these, like, the letters were all like in different font sizes and it almost felt like a ransom note that you see in the movies like that the kids had done. And they talked about how. They had such an amazing stay, and they wanted to, when they grew up, they wanted this to be like their dream house, and they had just the best time.

And so he was just like blown away by this to get these notes from these kids. Um, and so the family had booked a, a repeat visit, and so he asked the mom, he said, Hey, what are the favorite sports teams of the kids? And so she told ’em and she said, Hey, they’re really big into soccer and these are the teams that they’re into.

So the next day they came, he had a goal set up in his backyard so they could shoot the soccer ball, and then he had put the mascot and all this, um, like posters and stickers of the favorite sports teams in the kids’ [00:25:00] rooms. So when they stayed, they could have that, you know, much better of an experience.

Wow. So if you think about like, what did Dominic do that separated that experience, that made it magical. He listened. He was empathetic, and he kept that in mind, right? For the next time we did. You don’t need AI for that, you know? Yeah. Yes. AI could help you keep track of these things, and we’ve got things in the works that are gonna.

Help you with this, but ultimately asking a simple question like that, listening to, to your guests, understanding where they’re coming from, their stories is, is can separate you right now today without ai. Yeah, for sure. Listening such a powerful skill, right? Yeah. Um, yeah. And that, I mean, you can, you can win guests over for the rest of the life as you mentioned, you know, come back.

That’s how you fill up your direct booking, uh, calendar [00:26:00] and, um, that’s awesome. Yeah. Well, let’s see. The other thing, you know Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say the other thing I’ll, I’ll say on the, on the, a Ai, AI front as far as how we think about it, um. You know, we’re in this incredible shift right now, um, as a tech industry and in particular for us in the short term rental industry.

What’s so exciting about what’s going on around us is we are moving from a world of software as a service. To a world of service as a software. Right? Right. If you think about the products and companies that were started the last 10, 20 years mm-hmm. We created products and tools where customers and users had to come to, to do a bunch of work in, to get benefit outta.

We’re moving to a world where. The software is gonna do the work for you in a lot [00:27:00] of those major workflows, right? So we go from this kind of system of record to the system of action. We were in a world where you had these user experiences and menu driven UX where you had to learn how to navigate, and it was sometimes unnatural.

To a world where the experience with software is gonna be just like, as if you were talking to a friend like we’re experiencing today, which IGBT, right? Mm-hmm. It’s multimodal, it’s conversational. Um, and then the other big area that is changing is, is the kind of value exchange, right? Software as a service was traditionally a monthly subscription or annual subscription type of business model.

It was, it was like a utility. You, I, you paid. You pay to get access to a software, to a tool. Mm-hmm. That is shifting to a world where you’re gonna be paying for outcomes. Right, because if I am providing a service, which is to increase your occupancy rate, to increase your, you know, [00:28:00] your revenue, to help you save time, then I’m going to charge for those outcomes achieved, not necessarily just access to a software.

And so this is a massive shift that’s happening around us, which is so exciting for us in this space to think about not only pushing. The boundaries on what we can do to deliver those benefits, but then ultimately completely shifting what software experience is gonna look like in the next five, 10 years.

Yeah. Such great points. And exciting too. You know, uh, I mean that’s similar to, to what we’re doing at Cosley here is, uh, we’re offering the service, you know, um, so with, given that I’m. You know, I’d love to hear what does that look like for you guys in Lofi like five years from now? Do, can you give us some insights?

I mean, where, where do you guys see yourselves with that service model, [00:29:00] um, in the future? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know what, what you doing at Cosley is, it’s a great point on this, right? And what we see, um, from property managers and property management companies that are out there is in a way. You all are the gold standard, right?

So if a, if a, if an owner says, I don’t wanna do it on my own. They’re most likely coming to a service like yourselves or a property independent kind of property manager, uh, to outsource the work ’cause they don’t wanna deal with it. Right? And it makes sense for, for many, for many hosts and owners that are out there today, uh, because the technology’s not where it’s at because they just have decided this is not an area they wanna invest any time in.

Which is all good. I think over time as the technology gets better, as software gets better, there’s more of those workflows that can, um, be much more automated, can [00:30:00] deliver much greater benefit than they’re able to deliver today. And, and so what that looks like for Lofi is. Today, something as simple as what may seem as simple as, you know, connecting to multiple channels and figuring out what is the pricing that you want to, um, charge for your property.

Is not that simple. Right? Right. There’s a lot of steps. There’s a lot of steps in that and, and you know, it should be. It should be. And that’s the, that’s why, you know, companies like yourself and property managers, you know, do incredible work. ’cause there’s value, there’s service, there’s benefit there.

There’s a lot of pain. And you all solve that. And you know, we’re trying to do that from, obviously from the software side, but there’s more that we can do. And so as the technology gets better and better, then our ability to deliver benefit in these areas will increase. And so you [00:31:00] can look to solidify in the future to be, you know, your co-host when it comes to your virtual.

Co-host when it comes to mm-hmm. Providing you services, um, that are like a property manager, but via technology now, you know, we’re never gonna get to the level in the, in the short and medium term to the level that you all are, are providing or property manager is providing. But you know, definitely significantly better than where we’re at today.

Uh, but the great thing is you all are the gold standard. And so there’s a bar that’s been set in the industry on the kind of like, get it off my, get it off my mind, get it off my chest. And so our, our job now in the, in this category that’s do it yourself. Is, how do we continue to make that as easy as possible, uh, so that those are thinking about, Hey, I wanna do this on my own.

I can do it. Then they’ve got a, a service partner in Inify that can help them with that. [00:32:00] Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. If you, you know, if there’s a hundred steps and the, the more steps you help your user eliminate, the easier it is for ’em, the happier they are, and the happier everyone is. Right. Um, absolutely.

I think there’s, there’s, you know, a benefit for, for, for you all as well, and, and the property managers, right? Like in, in, um, the analogy for me was in like with QuickBooks and in the accountant space of small business, right. For when QuickBooks came out. Uh, there was all this fear that accountants jobs would be displaced, right?

Like, hey, now all of a sudden, all the small businesses are gonna do their tax, do their taxes, and do their finances all on their own. And what ended up happening was like accountants didn’t go to school to do data entry. Accountants went to school to be business business advisors. What ended up happening [00:33:00] was they were spending a lot of their time on manual work because the technology and the software wasn’t great.

Uh, and so they were having to do a lot of that like low value work for small businesses at the trade off of higher value. Work. Work that they did go to school to go to school for, right. And so the way I view that in our industry is like we as a software and as a future, as a service are gonna take a lot of that work off of our customer’s shoulders.

But there’s still gonna be a lot of high value advisory needs that are gonna be there for these owners that, you know, folks like yourself and other property managers can provide. Uh, because ultimately, you know, the channel management, the pricing decisions, uh, a lot of the automation should be fully auto, auto automatized in, in the future, right?

Mm-hmm. Uh, and in that way, the, the value of work. Can [00:34:00] be at a different level for, for those involved. Yeah. Excellent point. And I totally agree. Um, well, Sean, I, we have limited time. I know, uh, there’s always so many questions I want to ask, but limited time. So, um, lofi is helping. Tens of thousands of users out there, you guys are at the leading the pack, you know, in the industry.

How does, how does someone get started with Lofi? Uh, what’s the easiest way to do that? Absolutely. So, um, go to lofi.com, L-O-D-G-I-F y.com. Uh, you can sign up for a free trial and, and, you know, play around with it yourself. There’s no better way than to jump into the product. Uh, you see, you can start connecting your channels, uh, in the free trial, uh, to see what it’s like and you can experience the AI agent, uh, giving you an overview or if you wanna speak to human.

Uh, one [00:35:00] of our, our people from our, from our team. Uh, you can get that overview as well. Uh, if you’ve got any questions at all, if you do that and you’ve got questions, please reach out to me directly. Uh, my email is sean dot ian@lofi.com. I read every piece of email. I read every piece of customer feedback that comes in through our channels.

We’ve got a Slack channel. I’m reading it all the time. Team knows this. And so I care a lot about what you think, uh, where we’re doing well, where we’ve got room for improvement. Uh, so that’s what, that’s what I recommend. Awesome. Well, thanks Sean. It’s been a pleasure having you on. I’m really excited to see where you, where you take things and uh, to stay in touch and we’ll touch base soon, hopefully.

Thank you so much, Tim. Appreciate you having me on board.

If you’re looking at taking direct bookings or just moving away from the high commission structures of Airbnb or booking.com or VRBO. Or all the main OTAs, then you’re going to need what they call a payment processor for your short-term rental. Most of us use Stripe, but what most of us don’t understand are all the little nuances and fees that can get tagged on.

To each and every transaction. And so this week we’re gonna break down everything you need to know about Stripe, when you need to use it, and also how you can save some serious money if you are connecting your Stripe through a PMS program, like Host Away or guesty. Stay tuned.

Let’s break that all down.

smart short term rental hosts are quietly saving an extra 30% on top of every single stripe transaction as long as they have their stripe connection set up the right way.

So let’s just start off with the basics. What exactly is Stripe? Well, Stripe is what we call a [00:01:00] payment processor. So they process credit card payments or payments in general, and they’re also a payment gateway. So they are the middleman between a service being charged, which would be your short term rental reservation, and the guest making that reservation.

 But most of us in the short term rental industry are using a different payment gateway to connect with Stripe, and that is our PMS program, our property management software program. So I’ll get to that in just a second.

But in general, Stripe is used more commonly than any other payment processor out there because, well, multiple reasons. Last year alone, they transacted more than $1.4 trillion, trillion with a T. So they are the biggest player in the space for quite a lot of reasons.

They make it easier. They have the protections there. They allow you to charge. Deposits. They help facilitate the whole process. And yes, they also integrate with most of the property management software platforms [00:02:00] that we’re using in the short term rental space.

So even though Stripe can act as the payment processor and the payment gateway, most often we’re using a different payment gateway. And what is a payment gateway? It’s basically the middleman between the processing. And the transaction. Most of us are using a property management software platform. We use Host Away.

With my team, we’ve managed over 50,000 guests, over 200 properties in a lot of different places. So we’ve learned a lot. And one thing I bet you didn’t know, well I’m gonna save that just for a second. It’s gonna save you a lot of money. So even though Stripe can act as a payment gateway, most of us don’t have that setup because that would mean that we need to figure out how to connect our property management software program directly to Stripe. And yes, Stripe does have all these tools for developers to make that a reality.

But that means you need a developer. You have to know some coding. You have to be able to connect with the back end of their software. 

So most of us take the easy road, [00:03:00] including our team, and we use a property management software platform. We personally use Hostway. And so Hostway is now acting as the payment gateway. They’re taking the credit card, but Stripe is processing it. So it’s the connection between our service and the actual processing.

Most of you know that Stripe charges a transaction fee, at least I hope you do, right? 2.9% plus an additional 30 cents per transaction. That is the most common, but your property management software platforms also adding a full additional percent on top of that, meaning that that transaction fee is now.

3.9% and the additional 30 cents per transaction. So 1% basically of all of your gross revenue from Stripe transactions, it’s getting charged by your property management software platform, and they like to call it a application fee. Essentially, this is their charge for doing all that backend programming to connect Stripe.[00:04:00] 

To your property management software platform to make it easy for you to take those direct bookings or easy for you to take bookings from Google or any sort of online travel agency, which requires you to handle your own payments.

Now, I think this is quite sneaky, right? Because if you look at your financial statements, you might see that there’s a. Processing fee per reservation, but you don’t see this application fee unless you actually go into Stripe, open up each individual transaction, and then scroll down and open up the payment fees.

It’s labeled in there.

So I’m gonna come back to that in just a couple minutes. An alternative option that you can use to help save on that application fee and drastically reduce these transaction costs. But before I do, I want to just talk about the proper way to set up a Stripe account because most of your PMS programs, whether you’re using hostfully or guesty or Host Way.

They all provide the option for you to create a Stripe account [00:05:00] directly through that platform, directly through your PMS software, but you don’t wanna do that because that basically limits that account directly to that property management software platform.

 Meaning that if you decided you wanted to switch your property management software in the future? Well, unfortunately you wouldn’t be able to. So it’s just as easy to set it up on Stripe and it doesn’t require a lot of time. You can literally set up an account in just a few minutes.

You log in, you provide some personal details, whether you’re setting up the account under a business or under your personal name. Then you’re going to link it to a bank account. You’re going to end up with a username and password, and that username and password is what you can link directly into your property management software.

And by doing it the stripe route first, that means that you have full flexibility with that account if you decide to change software programs in the future.

 And one other thing that most of you don’t really fully understand when you first get started with Stripe is [00:06:00] that there is the possibility for chargebacks, meaning Stripe might handle a payment on your behalf.

A guest stays at your property. Maybe there’s some sort of issue with it. The guest disputes it, and that’s what’s known as a chargeback, and there’s a right way to handle those. And there’s a wrong way to handle ’em. First of all, you need to know that they exist, right? And you need to make sure that you monitor that.

Now, this isn’t very common. I mean, this is a very, very small percentage, but when it happens, it, it really hurts, right? When someone actually stays at your property and then they dispute it, it really hurts. And so we want to make sure that we’re disputing it in the proper way. There is a dispute charge.

It’s not that big. It’s like $15. But basically there’s this process that you enter into directly with Stripe. So this isn’t gonna be within guest deer, within your property management software platform, but you need to go directly to Stripe and you’re, you’re going to provide evidence for that. So our team, we’ve been managing lots and lots of properties for a really long [00:07:00] time.

We’ve got this dialed in. This is the way that we handle it. First of all, we have an official invoice. It’s got Corley, our business name on there. Uh, we have our rental agreement signed, which we attach. It’s between the guests that reserved our property. We have all of the communications between that guest, including any sort of phone calls.

So all of our phone calls are recorded. They get turned in transcripts, and we use all of that for evidence as well. So even after managing 50,000 guests are probably much more than that now. We only have roughly a 30% success rate. Uh, now I know that doesn’t sound too great, but 

 remember the, these chargebacks aren’t that common, but when they do happen, you wanna make sure that you’re on top of it. There are deadlines. You wanna get all that information in as soon as possible, that’s gonna help boost your chances of winning that dispute.

A couple other quick notes on Stripe. It’s not available in the whole world, even [00:08:00] though they’ve done trillions of dollars in transactions. Uh, it is primarily a US based system. If you’re looking for something outside of the us. There are other options, of course you have PayPal. Go to your property management software’s marketplace, see what payment options are available, and hopefully you have one that integrates with an international payment processor.

Remember, they’re very likely will be exchange fees, uh, and some other little details that you want to take note of.

All right. without further ado, how do we save on this application fee, this additional 1% that our property management software platforms are charging us because they’re acting as is payment gateway. Well, we could simply choose another payment gateway. So our company has decided to go with charge automation, that 1% fee, they’ve dropped all the way down to 0.15%.

Remember, this is on the gross amount of that reservation. And so especially for you property managers out there, if you have [00:09:00] a larger portfolio, this really adds up 1% essentially on top of your whole stripe transactions or on top of all of your Stripe transactions. So again, we’re still using Stripe. We’re still using, in our case host away, but we have a different payment gateway. That’s the connection between our property management software and Stripe, the payment processor. So check out charge automation if you’re curious.

There are other options out there. I’m gonna break down just a few of them for you here. And you might be thinking if Stripe’s done 1.4 trillion in transactions in the last year, they’re the biggest player, why would I choose another payment processor? So we’re talking about payment processors here, and there are several reasons.

So one we already talked about, and that’s if you’re doing a lot of international transactions or if your properties outside of the US, stripe may not even work there. And so you’re gonna need to find an alternative. F. Another reason might be that 2.9% charge [00:10:00] that Stripe is charging Most hosts, now I say most hosts because they are negotiable.

If you’re doing over $250,000 a year in revenue directly with Stripe last time I checked anyways, then they are negotiable and they can work on those rates with you.

Another reason why you might decide to use a different payment processor is based on their payout schedules. So remember strip’s processing the payment, they’re collecting the money. You have a bank account routed to it, which it’s gonna send you, but they may have restrictions on there. Maybe they don’t pay you the same day.

Maybe they require that you have a reserve amount there. Let’s say a guest has. Or ask for a refund? Well, if they, if Stripes already paid the money out to you, then they don’t have any money left to refund the guest. So sometimes there will be requirements in terms of holding a balance in your Stripe account.

You also want to consider how easy it is to integrate that payment processor into your PMS platform. So Stripe, for [00:11:00] example, is really easy. It’s one of the biggest ones out there. And so like I said, you basically just put in some details.

You get a new username, password, and you plug that in. Other ones might not be so easy, they may charge you less of a transaction fee. They may have more protection in terms of chargebacks or fraud. They may. Cover international payments, but they might not integrate so easily. So I’ve got a few suggestions for you to check out if you were shopping around or you just want to get a little bit more detail before connecting a payment processor.

One option would be Braintree. One of the nice things about them is they actually integrate with PayPal as well. There’s another one called authorize.net, and from what I can tell, this one is integrated with most. PMS platforms already. So again, remember, go on your software, check that marketplace, or maybe they’ve labeled it, integrations.

Look for payment processors, see what options you have.

[00:12:00] One other option you might wanna check out would be ascent. And remember, you’re not tied to a payment processor, right? So if you decided that one of these other platforms was gonna work better for you, but then you uncover something like an application fee or some sort of hidden charge that you didn’t know up front, well, you could simply disconnect and you could connect a new one to it.

So it’s not like your payment processor needs to be permanent, but it is a really important piece of your short-term rental operation, right? I mean, this is the way that you’re going to collect payments for a platform that doesn’t collect those for you automatically.

 Airbnb, we know collects payments automatically. booking.com. Can they have their booking.com payments program, but it depends on where your property is, depends on how long you’ve been with them. VRBO also has both options. So they do have their own payment gateway set up, uh, and payment processing, but you can also use Stripe through them as well.

So I hope that gave you a little bit more insight. If you’re using a property management software platform [00:13:00] already, I highly encourage you to jump over to your Stripe account, look at those transaction fees, see if you have that application fee on there.

And if you do well, then check out another program like Charge Automation or one of these other recommendations. 

 I hope that gave you a little more insight and hope you have a fabulous week. 

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, well, you know that I love technology. We’ve talked a little bit about AI before artificial intelligence, but I wanna talk about it again because it is in our industry more than it has ever been. It’s in our world more than it’s ever been, and it can help with all kinds of things in our operation.

From guest check-ins to local recommendations To FAQs and it can do it all automatically without a human being typing out the responses. This episode, breaks down how AI reception is transforming the guest experience, improving consistency, and also cutting expenses. But we’re also gonna jump into when not to use ai,

let’s explore all this together on this episode of the Short-Term Rental Riches Podcast.

If you’re still relying on a hundred percent human interaction for guest experience, well, you’re falling behind. Now, I know that might sound crazy, but the reality is, is that AI will improve the guest experience. It doesn’t get sick. It’s available 24 7. It keeps consistent tones across all your properties and all your portfolios, and it remembers everything.

But there’s also some places where AI definitely should not take over for a human. We’re gonna talk about all that this week.

So let’s just start off at the very beginning. What exactly is AI guest reception? Well think about artificial intelligence trained appropriately to handle your guest communications.

This can include all guest communications, whether it’s a text message, an email, a message on your message platform, or even some companies out there offering voice services.

Assuming the AI is programmed properly, well can handle all those frequently asked questions about your property, about the neighborhood, about the whole guest experience,

1. Guest reception is also something that can operate. Automatically. Now, I said, can, and in today’s world, you don’t wanna set things up on autopilot. We’ve got some considerations for you. But before we do, let’s talk about where we’re seeing this AI pop up. Well, we know that the hotels are using this. Of course, the biggest chains in the world are implementing this for, communication in terms of support.

We’ve seen this with Airbnb and all the big OTAs. They’re bringing AI in to replace a lot of repetitive tasks. We’re also seeing AI make its entrance into a lot of the software programs available in the short term rental industry. So programs like Host Away or guesty, which are property management systems or even.

Designated AI tools like Bestie AI or Conduit, or Host Buddy ai. There are quite a few of them popping up, and they’re popping up faster than ever.

So we have a general sense of what this could do. We have a general sense of who’s using it and where these tools are available. Let’s talk about five reasons why AI guest communication is actually better than human communication. And I would argue that it’s better a hundred percent of the time in these five situations.

The first one is that there are no wait times. So if you have a properly trained AI tool, it can respond immediately. Whereas a human has to look up information, they have to read the messages.it just takes longer, right? It’s not possible to just shoot a message off without even reading something.

So that’s number one. The second piece is that AI allows a larger operation or a team of people to have the exact same consistent professional tone in all of their guest communication.

This means that even if your receptionist was having a bad day, they were sick. The tone is always the same if you’re using an AI tool for these communications.

But it’s not just that the tone is more consistent, it actually can be much better. Right? Imagine if you’ve trained your AI after the best hotels in the world, after the best hospitality practices in the world,

after brands that consistently get five stars always in terms of their communication. Well, once you train it, it will consistently. Respond with that tone, and if you have multiple people on your team, then that’s quite hard to do, right? You have sort of different tones and attitudes and emotions coming into the messaging.

So that’s the second thing. The third thing is that AI remembers. Everything, which means it can go back and find your guest from five years ago that your new receptionist might have never seen or met. And it can bring in personal details to that communication and to that guest experience. There are of course software systems to help you monitor which guests are returning, but still, if someone has to go through and review all those, it’s gonna take longer.

 and it could very easily get overlooked.

The fourth place where AI is always going to outperform is in terms of. Costs. So I’m not saying to go out and replace receptionists. Our receptionist team is amazing, and I would never imagine a million years getting rid of our team.

The reality is, though they can use their time for some more important tasks, which we’re gonna talk about here in a second. While some of the legwork, the groundwork for some of this guest communication can be created for them in the form of a draft message, for example. So of course if we’re using an AI tool, that’s going to cost less than hiring a human.

And that sort of leads into the fifth piece, which is if you’re building a portfolio and you’re growing a team, you will have less management. We know that hiring a new receptionist. It can be a huge, huge help, but there’s still a lot of training that goes into that, and they take vacation days, they get sick.

They’re not available 24 7. So AI can really help your whole operation, improve the tone, the guest experience, and have a much more solid foundation for you to continue operating your short term rentals and to continue offering really good guest experiences.

Even if you found the. Best person possible, and they’re super nice and pleasant to speak with all the time, and they have a big hospitality background. You’re still going to have to train them on the policies for these different listing sites and everything that has to do with your property. I.

If you’re hiring someone in a different country, well, it’s very possible that they could have an accent, and if they’re making phone calls to your guests, well, sometimes your guests might have a hard time understanding them. Now, our team all speaks amazing English. We are spread out all over the place now.

So we have receptionists in the Philippines and Mexico. We have team members in in Europe and South Africa. I’m in South America. I mean, we’re spread out all over the place. So I don’t wanna say can’t find amazing people with minimal accents, but if English isn’t their first language, well then you have to consider that.

And of course, with ai you don’t have any of that.

If we’re hiring virtual receptionists in other places, then we also have to deal with time zones, right? They’re very likely on a different time zone, and that can be challenging, finding really good help that’s having to work at midnight or different hours. Uh, again, with ai, we won’t have these challenges.

So with any AI tool you want to use, I don’t care if it’s with guest reception or if it’s helping you draft an email. You get what you put into it, so garbage in, garbage out. And if you’re planning on using AI to help you with your short-term rental business, well, you have to make sure a hundred percent sure that the information that the AI is referencing is completely accurate.

You have to make sure that you have a way to update that information. If it changes, and even then, I do not recommend. Turning on AI a hundred percent because it’s not going to cover the whole guest experience, at least today. We know that these tools are developing a lot, and I’ve got some of those caveats.

The things that you wanna make sure your receptionist or whoever’s helping you on your team is handling as a human being to make sure that nothing gets overlooked.

All right. Now let’s talk about why you absolutely need human beings on your team. And I think the first thing is that when we talk about guest communication in the short-term rental world, most people think of just communicating with guests. But the reality is there’s so many other pieces to the whole operation that involve your reception or the people speaking to your guests.

And that could be anything from. Payment issues or collecting payments or damage issues or dealing with support on the phone or emergencies, that’s a really important one. So if someone can’t get in your property, if there’s bad weather, if something’s not right at the property

and it’s not a standard piece of information like, you know, where do I find the charcoal for the barbecue? Well, then AI will have a hard time answering that, right?

And so it’s crucial that we have some really good talent on our team, some really good help to make sure that none of these things get overlooked. We also have things like, uh, guest verification or when maintenance stuff pops up. Now, I’m sure in the future as AI tools get better and better, there will be ways to help coordinate this with less human interaction.

But at the moment, you can’t get by with AI alone. We definitely do not plan on doing that, but we do plan on reorganizing some of the tasks that our receptionists are doing on a regular basis. If we can alleviate some of the general communications, or at least create an auto draft, an autodraft response, then that saves our receptionist team a lot of time to where they can use that to help focus on the guest experience

and to touch on all the other pieces of the operation.

So what does all this mean for the industry? Well, undoubtedly you’re going to see more AI interaction in the short-term rental world and in the hotel world,

it is already here. It’s being perfected and with good reason, right? It’s helping us keep consistency. It’s helping us respond quicker.

It is helping reduce costs. It’s helping with the training and the management overload, and it has a perfect. Memory. I know just from doing this podcast for years and years, if I go back to some of the first few episodes, I don’t remember all the details that were in there, but I know that a lot of those episodes are evergreen.

They’re still as valid today as they were five years ago when I recorded them. So if you’re new to the channel. You can check out all of our prior episodes@sstriches.com. We’ve got tons of free resources for you there, and if you’ve been tuning in for a while and you’ve found a lot of value in our content, I’d really appreciate it.

If you wouldn’t mind giving us a thumbs up or subscribing on Apple or iTunes, wherever you like to tune in.

So AI is here to stay. When done right, it’s going to increase the guest experience. It’s gonna make. Their time better at your property and it’s gonna make your operation easier. I think we’re gonna see a lot of really cool changes just in the near future, and not just in the short-term rental world, but in the hotel and hospitality industry in general.

I hope you found today’s insights helpful. If you haven’t yet, take a peek at some of the tools available. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

 

what do rising tariffs on the Canadian and Mexican borders have to do with your Airbnb?

More than you think, actually. And so in this episode, we’re gonna break down how a 25% tariff could raise your operating costs, raise construction prices, and shrink your profit margins if you’re not prepared.

So why do tariffs actually matter for those of us investing in short-term rentals or operating them or wanting to invest in short-term rentals? Well, it’s essentially a tax. So if we imagine a 25% tariff, that is a tax that ultimately gets passed down to us on imported goods, and now we purchase a lot of imported goods when it comes to our short-term rentals.

But these tariffs aren’t just affecting importing goods. They’re also affecting new construction, which also includes big renovations. We get a lot of our lumber from Canada and in the us. Construction costs are estimated to go up by at least 10% , or more. And now that might not seem like a big deal, but that has a really big, big impact, especially on a space construction that’s already in a bad spot.

They have really high interest rates and construction just takes a long time. We have to go through all this permitting process, so that has a big effect on the overall supply of housing.

So in short, these tariffs basically mean higher prices for a lot of the goods that we’re purchasing in the US 

 the cost of our furnishings and renovations are going up. That means if you have a big renovation planned, well, you’ll just want to double check. The longer your renovation is, the more likely that these tariffs are going to increase those construction costs for you.

If you were planning on adding an A DU to your backyard, or you had some spare space and a lot, well those costs are very likely going to go up.

And then of course, all of the costs that go into furnishing a rental are affected as well. So if we think of things like furniture, appliances, these things are very often imported, which means. They’re going to have a higher price tag. I remember back during the Covid days, I purchased a commercial building to put a laundromat in there.

I’ve talked about it on this channel before. If you’re new here, you can find all of our past episodes, attr riches.com. But anyways, long story short, I demoed the inside of the 6,400 square foot building. Everything was ready to go.

I had plans in place to put in the machinery, and then because of supply issues, those machines were not available for like six or nine months. And then, yes, the construction costs. Went way, way up for the actual build out and the installation.

So unfortunately I didn’t go through with that project, but I still use the building today and my team helps us do all of our laundry in one of the cities where I have a lot of short-term rentals.

So these have real world impacts, right? Covid was a really abrupt change in our supply, whereas these tariffs are gonna be a little bit more gradual, but they are going to have massive, massive impacts. Apple, for example, has already invested. billions of dollars for a new manufacturing plant in the US because they know if they develop these products in the US with these additional tariffs, that they’re going to be better off than if they manufacture those products overseas.

So of course all these things take time to make their way into the market, but they will ultimately make their way into the market, and that’s going to affect the end price for you.

I used to recommend that we had maybe like a hundred dollars per room per month furniture budget for our short term rentals where, you know, like lamps might get broken or little things happen. Doorknob needs to be replaced while of course all those costs go up. 

 assuming a lot of the products that you use to furniture rental are coming from overseas, which they are, then you’re going to wanna up that budget. Remember, the more luxurious your property, the more expensive the item and the bigger the difference and the overall or the absolute price when these tariffs hit.

We of course, have domestic alternatives, right? But many of us were purchasing from suppliers that imported products overseas because they’re less expensive. And as a short-term rental owner, operator, investor, that all impacts our bottom line and our overall profit and our return on investment at the end of the day.

So if we look at tariffs in terms of inflation, the end result is that these higher costs are really getting passed down to us as a consumer, and that means that the overall prices are going to go up.

And if the overall prices to purchase these goods is more, then it means we’re probably going to be purchasing less of them. Right? And so if we’re getting them from a local distributor or a domestic distributor, they’re not going to want to hold as many products as they typically would. Just like that laundry machine example.

If those machines, which are really expensive for an industrial machine. Cost more than the supplier isn’t going to want to purchase more in the beginning and hold them in their inventory because that’s a bigger risk for them.

so what does this mean? This means that some products that we might be used to buying very easily are going to have longer wait times, or they might just not be that readily available.

Again, these tariffs take a little while to just trickle down the chain and really to see the big impacts, but within the next six to 12 months, we’re, we’re clearly going to see a lot of this.

I did a whole nother episode on inflation, actually all the way back in November of 2021. 

In fact, the name of that episode was Why You Need To Refinance Now, and I was referring to mortgage rates. 

So I hope you listened to that episode back then and you locked in a really low rate on your property. But the result of those really low interest rates for years and years is that money was easier to come by, which means there was more of it in the economy, which means there was more inflation.

And we’ve all seen that in our grocery stores and basically in everything that we purchased now, it’s much more expensive than it was just a few short years ago.

So aside from the effects of inflation, because of these tariffs or taxes on the goods that we’re purchasing, they also really affect our spending power, and they will also affect our guest spending power, which means that yes, we may see a pullback in guest travel.

As some everyday supplies and items become a little more expensive, then that cuts down the disposable income for a lot of people, and that means that they may decide to book shorter stays. They may opt for a more affordable short-term rental versus a luxury one.

 Yeah, people may opt to not go to the primary tourist destination. They might go to a neighboring one, which means that your occupancy, if you happen to have a property in one of these highly desirable areas, might go down a little bit. Your ADRs, your average daily rates might go down a little bit.

And so quick tip, you want to be checking these things, right? How can you do that? Well, you can use a dynamic pricing tool. We’ve talked about ’em on this channel a lot like price labs or wheelhouse. Or Air DNA, and you wanna make sure that you’re checking your competition and you’re checking your comp set to see what’s happening with their occupancy, what’s happening with their ADRs, because if it’s happening with their property, well, as much as you may not like it, it’s also happening with your property.

And just a side note on. Actual tourism and the people that are visiting our properties, these tariffs aren’t just having an impact on the us. They’re having an impact on the whole world, right? Uh, and on each country differently, depending on the tariffs that have been imposed. And this undoubtedly affects the disposable income for these countries as well.

If you own a business and wherever it happens to be, and you just lost 25% of your profit margin because there’s now a tariff. On the main place, or there’s a tariff in between your product and the person that was buying it, well then that means that you have less disposable income as a business owner, and that means there’s less money for that business and employees.

And so this could have effect on international travel as well. I know living outside of the US for about eight years now, that these exchange rates have a real impact here in Brazil. The difference between the US dollar and the Brazilian real has changed nine and a half percent just over the last three months.

Now that difference has actually been, that the US dollar has gotten weaker. It’s gotten stronger for Brazil, but this dynamic change has between every country. Brazil’s less reliant on the United States are very. Resource rich country, and so it just really depends on the country. When we start talking about currency exchanges, it gets quite difficult, but just remember that these impacts aren’t just a local thing.

They’re really affecting the whole world.

So what can we do as short-term rental operators or owners or investors? Well, we just need to plan a little bit more ahead. If your property’s already up and running, then you really just need to budget a little bit more for some of that furniture that you may have previously been getting from imported places.

 When it comes to things like linens, a lot of times these are often imported. I know that the, the big distributor we purchase from, I believe all those linens come from India. So these things might take longer to get, you might decide to stock up just a little bit.

Of course, the more properties you’re operating, the more this will impact you. If you’re just running one property, then it’s really probably not gonna make a big impact at this point, aside from the furniture, and aside from the fact that you might decide to renovate the property at some point. And then yes, those renovations could take a little bit longer.

Due to supply chain issues and it could be more expensive. So if you’re planning a big renovation, if you’re planning on building a short-term rental, if you’re planning on adding an A DU, or if you’re planning on refurnishing your property, these tariffs will impact you. Again, we’re going to see this over the next six to 12 months.

 tariffs may feel like distant policy talk, but the impact on you and your short-term rental is real and it’s rising. 

So make sure that you’re staying proactive, you’re analyzing your market so that you can stay ahead of your competition and you don’t get caught off guard.

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

This is something I had to learn to do because of how disorganized I am, and I would tend to forget things. How do you build a stress-free STR business when you have kids a job, and zero time? In today’s episode, we’re breaking down a real life story. We interview Lydia and unpack her journey, her systems, and the lessons she wishes every host knew from the start.

There’s a lot of gold nuggets, a lot of tips in today’s episode. Things that I never thought of even after. Over a decade in the short-term rental industry and managing lots and lots of properties. So stay tuned. You are not going to wanna miss this one. 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 excited to sit down virtually with Lydia Patel today. She has a fascinating story. She is a busy mother. She has a full-time job, but she is of course also in the real estate world. She has her own short-term rental. She used to have another one.

And so she’s got a lot of things going on. She also has a fantastic YouTube channel. If you haven’t seen it yet, head over there and check it out. Excited to chat with you today. Lydia, welcome to the show. I. Yeah. Thank you for having me, Tim. Good to be here and excited to talk more. Yeah, I’m excited to, to dive into real world stories.

You know, a lot of times on this channel we talk about just pieces of the full operation with short-term rental, you know, whether it’s tools we’re using or how we’re managing things virtually, but we don’t actually sit down that often and just kind of talk about real world. Stories other than my own.

And so I’m excited to have, uh, some other ones on the channel and excited to dig into yours. I think the, the first thing I wanted to ask, so as a content producer, again with great content on your channel, nice work. I know that’s not easy. It takes a lot of time. I wanted to ask you, how do you go about.

Choosing content that you decide to listen to because there’s so much of it out there. How do you decide if it’s credible or not? That is such a great question. I think there is a element of trust that builds over time. For me, I am almost a hundred percent only looking at long form content because I like the nuance and the way someone can go in depth about a specific topic and you can hear their entire thought process.

Like, I don’t want just the list of what to do. I wanna know. How did you arrive on that list? Why do you think this? And then I can decide, do I agree with this person or not? I will also say a lot of the content that I end up choosing to watch, it doesn’t necessarily mean I fully agree with them, and I’ll take everything that they’re saying.

It’s just a good starting point, and I think the more you consume from the same creator, you can start to get an idea of, okay, this is their worldview, this is their perspective, and this is why they might. Think a certain way and kind of have that backstory. And so I’m not necessarily too picky on the type of content that I’m watching.

I’m open to hearing all different ideas. Uh, as I was getting into short-term rental, for example, I consumed content from a variety of people. Like some of them I kind of feel like I don’t love the vibe of, and that might just be a personal preference, but they might still have really good content that really actionable information.

So I would encourage anyone who is trying to decide like. Who to listen to what content to pick. It’s less so about that versus you critically assessing where someone might be coming from and piecing together different items from different people, hearing the different perspectives and forming your own opinion.

Yeah, some, some great points there. I think that you know, one that. Certainly the more we listen to someone, talk to someone, I mean, trust is built over time and consistency basically. Right. The other point there, which I totally agree with is that, yeah, you don’t actually have to really vibe or like the person that you’re learning from, you know?

And if I think back to like I. College days and stuff. There was certainly a lot of professors that I had that maybe didn’t like, you know, the, the personality, but I learned a lot in those, in those classrooms. Well, let’s talk about your, um, how you got into short term rentals. So we have been guests on the Airbnb platform throughout our travels for over a decade.

At the point when we. Started our actual hosting journey. We never really thought to do the hosting side of things, but we happened to actually have a guest house in our backyard that we did not build for Airbnb. It was built for my parents when they come stay for our friends, when they come visit, and this was in 2021.

It was kind of at a time when we just. Started our long-term rental and started getting an interest in real estate and then we, we finally connected the dots, like we could also do short-term rentals in addition to long-term rentals, and we already have a space for it. So we started learning a little bit more of how that might work.

Obviously, top of mind is. The risk, uh, associated with that, like having someone in your general backyard space, how would that feel? What are the ways I can protect myself from liability? Some of the logistical stuff, some of the more operational software type stuff, we were just gathering data. Um, it all sounded like very doable, honestly.

And so we took the plunge. We figured, you know what, we’ll just try it out in this. Backyard format. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t make any money, but we get a great excuse to renovate, put up some pictures. Finally, we’ve lived here for years and just never fully decorated the space. Uh, best case scenario, this is money we can put towards other things.

It provides cashflow. Um, so we put that up on Airbnb. It was a really successful thing. It also kind of coincided with the pandemic. Mm-hmm. Where people couldn’t travel a whole ton, and so just the escaped to a tiny house somewhere, even though it’s in someone’s backyard, was kind of a retreat that people were looking for.

It turned out to be good revenue, and we did it for a few months. Before it was the summertime and we would use the backyard a bit more. We just didn’t want folks infringing on that privacy or we being too loud for guests who were staying there. But that ended up being a really good kind of pilot for mm-hmm.

Exploring more short-term rentals now that we know how to do it and learned some pitfalls of. You know, managing the space sped up some of that initial learning curve with an easy test subject. Then we figured, you know what? Let’s look at different markets. Let’s look at other places that we might want to travel to as a family.

Wouldn’t it be really nice to have a second home, a vacation home that is also funded? Plus maybe offers some additional cash flow and appreciates over time and offers some diversification to the portfolio. So we started looking around to places that we might like to go. Since we’re in Minnesota, we uh, looked at warm places to escape to during the winter.

And so naturally, like Texas, Florida, those came up. Uh, we studied a few different markets and then eventually landed on the northern bits of Florida, kind of by the beach. Mm-hmm. It’s a very family friendly area, less spring break party crowd than parts of Florida. This, this seems suitable for us and we honestly just went with.

What we would enjoy as a family, and when we travel, we bring grandparents, we bring friends. We are usually a giant group. And so that’s kind of how we narrow down our search on like what size of house, what amenities we want, how close to the beach, and also. Kind of helped us identify what our target demographic is.

Ideally someone who has similar needs to us. And yeah, that, that’s kind of how we narrowed down our initial search. Obviously it’s supported by numbers. We analyzed a lot of data on Air DNA and compared it to Price Labs and, and did a lot of that background numbers running. Yeah. After a few months, we got a property, and it’s been three years.

It’s been three years since we’ve done it. And, uh, it’s, it’s been great. Time is quiet. No, I know. I kept, like, after that one we kept saying, oh yeah, we’re gonna get another one. But we haven’t rushed into it quite yet. We just haven’t found another market that we are like really itching to travel to.

Mm-hmm. Because I think for us, the enjoyment of it is such a big thing. I think o obviously as a business, it’s making money. Like that part is nice too, but I found that just personally that. Hasn’t really motivated me to keep looking, you know, it’s mm-hmm. Enjoyment piece that really gets me going and thinking, imagining, you know, what kind of place we can get, um, enjoy.

Mm-hmm. And, and enjoy together with family. That’s awesome. Well, I mean, short-term rentals are really a, an awesome segment of real estate. You know, I was in traditional long-term rentals, I still am today, but when I first got into short-term rentals, like. They’re just more fun, you know? That was part of it, like I was staying in ‘EM traveling.

I know you’ve traveled a ton, so we’re gonna jump into that a little bit as well. I’m curious though, you know, a lot of the places that we want to travel to and that we see ourselves enjoying and with our families and staying there don’t always make for the best investment markets. So you mentioned that you were going through Air DNA and all that.

How much of this. Acquisition was like investment based versus personal based. Yeah. I think jumping back to where I was in picking a DA market, um, the reason. We ruled out a lot of California. We would love to have a place in San Diego, but just from a regulatory standpoint, that’s not a possibility.

Honestly, we love a lot of West Coast. Uh, it just doesn’t work on the numbers. It is maybe initially based on family interest, kind of focus, a vacation focus, but then the final narrowing down of which market to go with that one is, is purely number based, even though we really want a vac, a vacation spot for ourselves.

If it can’t be supporting itself and making money on its own, then that’s not really a business that can’t be supported as a business decision. And at the end of the day, it still needs to be a good investment. Well, um, you mentioned you’re in Minnesota and the property I. Is in Florida, which last time I checked is not very close to Minnesota.

Uh, so, you know, we, we talk about virtual management a lot on this, on this channel, but I’m curious how that has been for you as a mother, as, uh, someone that’s working almost full-time, it sounds like in the pharma industry. How have you found that virtual management process, maybe in the beginning and, and how it is now for you?

Yeah, I think in the beginning we definitely made a bunch of mistakes because we were beginners and even though we did host our tiny house for a little bit and have some of that background knowledge, it was still a lot, uh, learning different things about. Even just different states, right? We’ve never lived in Florida, so I’ll give an example of just even the utilities right here.

We just have public utilities. You plug it in to the service people and it’s all done there. It’s like private gas tank rental companies, which I had never heard of. I didn’t know that that could be a thing that you need to figure out which company owns your gas tank and you’re leasing from them and they come and fill it.

It’s just one of those many. Seemingly small bits of learning curve that we had to figure out. Uh, and it’s a little bit harder from afar to figure out, yo, where is this gas tank? I don’t know. I’m not on the property. Um, what we really relied on is we found a local assistant. Mm-hmm. And we found him through up.

Work and our main thing is just having this available person on call locally and he happens to, you know, be like one of these really responsible dad figures that just like is really handy, knows his way around houses he audits for insurance companies. So there’s that bonus. Yeah, he’s been instrumental in helping figuring out those pieces that really just can’t be managed remotely for anyone who’s looking to do this.

I think this has been really a lifesaver for us. To just for those mistakes that you end up making somehow. Mm-hmm. Otherwise, I’m sure you talk about this all, all the time on your podcast. There’s all sorts of software and really the bulk of the work, like the messaging, the pricing, adjustments, all of it is done remotely anyway.

You’re doing this on your phone, so most of it you really don’t have to do in person, and that aspect has been fine, I think. That has been fairly streamlined and easy. I will also add mm-hmm. Because of our market being in northern Florida in a fairly like vacation rental heavy area that the cleaners, the handyman, they are used to working with.

Short-term rental owners. So just us giving them a door code to enter a place, like no one is freaked out by that. Everyone’s just used to, this is how things are done. When they’re done with their work, they automatically send me messages. It’s not even something I have to communicate. I think if you were to set up shop in a different place where this is less common of a practice, there might be a little bit more of an up ramp, um, in explaining what you need.

Case in point, like here in Minnesota when we did this tiny house, even in person, it was so hard to communicate to a cleaner. Like, no, this is not like a biweekly cleaning thing. I need you. Mm-hmm. Whenever the calendar requires, there’s just a different level of work, depending on your market too. Great points there, and yeah, there, there definitely is a, a difference between long term, you know.

Housekeeping and short term rental housekeeping. You know, there’s a lot more details, A lot more things mm-hmm. That we gotta, uh, to look into. You mentioned that you found your sort of handyman assistant. I. On Upwork. We’ve used Upwork a lot in the past and, you know, a lot of the other virtual places where you can find, uh, contractors and, but I, I never thought of Upwork actually as, as a place to go for someone, I guess in the us maybe.

That sounds crazy, but I, I was kind of thinking that it was more like, uh, international. So you had good success using Upwork? I did, and it’s. Funny you mentioned that. ’cause I also use Upwork for like, uh, an assistant from another country to help with my content, do other things. So yeah, when we tried to look for an assistant locally, it definitely took a lot of filtering out by location and talking to people.

But yeah, it can be done and there’s actually plenty of people up there. I don’t remember exactly. How I found this person. I just kind of posted a gig that says this is, you know, on call, we’ll pay you every week regardless. A bunch of other people applied. I think there’s also general interest in real estate and so perhaps the hope from the applicants is that, hey, this might be one way I can learn a little bit about this business without having, you know, my own risk own property on the line.

I can tell by your videos, uh, and just the fact that you’ve got multiple things going in life that. You seem pretty well organized. Uh, and so I don’t know, it’s a force function here for, for, you know, you mentioned filtering down, you know, candidates and stuff, which, which we definitely need to do. So how do you, how do you stay organized with, with everything you got going on?

Yeah. Um. Multiple ways. I think by default I’m not actually an organized person. I know I come across organized on my videos and that’s what people tell me. But this is, um, this is something I had to learn to do because of how disorganized I am, and I would tend to forget things for general life. There’s this app called Structured App, and it helps me plan out my days.

And the thing I like about it is that once you’ve planned out your day. In advance, like down to like, at this time I’m going to be doing these to-do items. You don’t think about it the next day. It’s set in motion. You get reminders, okay, now you’re gonna getting up to make coffee before you have to go get the kids, or now you’re going to go start recording your video because you have exactly this number of time.

That has been a game changer for me in terms of like as a parent who’s working and has side hustles, there’s just always too much to do and a lot of time is wasted in the deciding of. Which thing to do amongst the 100. And so setting it up in an app has really helped me. And then the other thing I will say for my, um, just for my short term rentals, I have learned throughout.

My hosting journey that there are things I love, like messaging with the guest or interior design elements or studying pricing, doing stuff on the computer. That stuff I’m I like and I’m good at. There are stuff that I’m terrible at, like remembering to change a water filter or like remembering to check in with my cleaners, whether we’re due for deep cleaning, stuff like that is just.

So incredibly boring. And then I, I don’t think about it, and then I miss it. Um, so now I’ve built a dashboard on Clickup and that’s what I rely on. Um, I integrate. All the pieces to automatically send me notifications on my calendar so that if I think about it, once it’s automated, I will be reminded when I need to be reminded.

I don’t get, like, I get to not think about it for the rest of the time. Um, and that has offloaded so much mental space. And then for content, I use a different project management system with Asana to just plan out my ideas, write the scripts, and figure out the content calendar and the cadence. That sort of thing.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What do you use? We use so many things, uh, and my, my team probably hates me. Like, I feel like every week we’re like, Hey, like look at this cool new tool. Uh, we gotta use it. So we use all kinds of things, but I would say from like a productivity or organization standpoint, one of my big go-tos is Notion.

Mm-hmm. Uh, I’m not sure if you’ve used that one ever before, but the way I, I explain it to people, it’s basically like a visual dashboard that connects. All the places you would store notes or store files, so like it’s connected to, to Google. They even connected to your email now. And it’s just got all kinds of connects to Slack.

We use Slack a lot for our, uh, communications and stuff on with our team. But yeah, we use, we use a whole bunch of programs. Well, let’s see here. So you, you mentioned that the assistant that you hired, I’m curious, how’d you go about the housekeeping side of it? Did you also use Upwork for that or did you.

Yeah, for our housekeeper, we actually just got a recommendation from our realtor who also operates short, short-term rentals herself. And so that was kind of our starting point. We interviewed with them. They seemed, you know, very professional. Um, and I think I. Just having experienced, um, the non short-term rental professional housekeepers locally and where you have to explain, like make sure you’re like lint rolling the pillows that no hair is on it.

Um, some of the smaller things like, um, compared to meeting with a professional company that has a team. If one person is sick, they’ll find another person. Even though they were a little bit more expensive, that peace of mind was worth it for us. I know there’s also apps like turnout where you can kind of place your bid and connect your calendar and find a cleaner for each time.

But we also, in just thinking about requiring our cleaner to help us with the inventory restocking, um, having that ongoing communication with the same people has. Been really helpful. Yeah, that’s what we found too. I mean, when you have a good housekeeper, it just makes the whole thing so much easier and there’s lots of great housekeepers out there and a lot of ’em are willing to do these extra sort of tasks.

You know, you mentioned helping you keep inventory, of course. We want to compensate for that. Well, what would you say, let’s see, so this was quite a few years ago when you started, uh, is there any like big change in the way that you’ve managed it versus when you started versus now? Yeah. I think the biggest change is just being a lot more systematic in the beginning.

Everything was new. Like every time I solved a new problem, I kind of treated it as an isolated problem, but then as time went on, I realized these things just kind of recur in a different flavor. So if there is a method where I am documenting how I solve this problem for my future self, or finding a way to prevent this problem from happening in the first place over time.

The operations just get a lot smoother, and that’s not like a mindset I had going in. So now I just kind of built everything into my dashboard. Some of the beginning things that I felt like were, ah, it doesn’t matter, like inventory, who cares about that? Like someone will tell me if it’s low. Thinking back, I wish I kind of started with roughly what inventory we have, like roughly.

I don’t know which remotes would use which batteries. Just to, just to have a general idea. Like honestly nowadays, if a cleaner tells me, Hey, this battery remote isn’t working, I can immediately know, oh yeah, we do have this in the pantry. Just can you please go swap it out? That is so much easier than like asking someone to like, check it and then go buy it.

Like it, it just simplifies the process a lot. Uh, that’s just one example of the many things that I’ve decided, you know? Is worth spending that initial time to make more systematic and have sort of a standard operating procedure around that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, good point. And as a beginner, I think I just probably thought, uh, that’s boring.

It’s all gonna be customizable, things that won’t repeat again, and that’s absolutely not true, even with just one property. Yeah. Great, great points. I mean. We see the same thing. You know, it’s, we’ve built a lot of systems and you mentioned the batteries and yeah, batteries can be tricky. What I heard on, um, another, uh, Jasper Rivers podcast, actually a long time ago, he mentioned, I.

Uh, that’s, uh, get paid for your pad. For anyone out there that hasn’t tuned into a Jasper, we’ve had him on the show as well, so I highly recommend his content, but he, uh, had what they called an ammo box. So it was basically like, you know, a box or, you know. Something that you kind of hide up in a, a cabinet that has all those batteries and it has all those like little things that you might need at some point, and then you just sort of replenish the, the ammo box every once in a while and then that saves you from a guest calling you because they can’t turn the TV on, or, you know, the door locked doesn’t open because the batteries died or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah. Such key, like such important pieces that you probably don’t think about in the beginning. Yeah, and if you, you know, if you think about it, like how many guests do you have in a year, right? Let’s say you get your first short-term rental and you have maybe four guests a month or something like that.

That takes a long time to kinda work its way through all of the potential things that could happen for you to be able to know how to handle them. So having, uh, you know, falling content like yours and tuning into what’s out there to have kind of a game plan going in can, can make the whole process a lot easier.

Tell me, tell me about your travels. How do you, and do you travel with, with your whole family All the time? Yeah. We’ve always, um, even before kids, we would try to take a, a big trip. You know, 3, 3, 3, 4 weeks a year, um, to experience different cultures and just be, be uncomfortable basically. That’s the whole point.

Mm-hmm. There’s a, a special feeling of getting to a place where you don’t know the language, you don’t know the customs, uh, and you’re trying to watch people and adapt. We come back always just so re-energized and so that’s something that we valued. From day one and something that we hope to share with our kids, because I think having that adaptability is such an important skill and you can’t really teach it, um, without exposing just putting them into that situation.

And so, yeah, we’ve taken our kids. To Hong Kong a bunch of times now. Um, it’s a long flight from here. Uh, and now, now they are actually like, and we’ve also done India, uh, for three weeks. And that was also an incredible trip with them. Um, and also just kind of all over the US now they’re just really used to the whole.

Getting on the plane routine, you know, they know exactly what they’re supposed to do. They find their seeds, they’re hanging out, they get their tablets, you know, they’re eating at the right times. Now it’s like so much smoother. And I feel like coming back from India, me and my husband, we were talking like, man, it’s finally paying off all this effort of bringing these people places.

Yeah, it’s fun to share a different world with them, expose ’em to different cultures, try different foods, um, hear different languages. And I think sometimes. Using India as an example, like the concept of time is different. Um, what is normal? Uh, there is different. I feel I found it very family friendly. Um, people are just approaching us and chatting with us and the kids are fully.

Free to be themselves and loud in public, like no one bats an eye. Um, and that’s a very different experience to maybe another country in East Asia where, you know, you can’t be loud in public places. But that would also be a fun, um, thing to be exposed to, to like be on a train, be like, oh wow, this is a completely full train that is quiet.

How do you exist in this world? Like, what are the unspoken rules? I don’t know. That aspect is really fun. And also obviously the food. Food is, yeah, you can’t get that stuff here, so you gotta go get on a plane, um, and get the good stuff a hundred percent. You know, I love traveling for all the reasons that you mentioned there.

I mean, you’re. In a different world, different language, different smells, different, you know, environment all around. I think it’s really good for just learning in general. And the nice thing is that traveling’s easier than it’s ever been. Um, you know, I, I remember way back in the days like showing up somewhere, you know, a d different country maybe, and.

With like a printed out MapQuest guide and not knowing how to get that there, you know, and no cell, no cell phones. And so, uh, it’s a lot easier these days. It’s great to see that you’re out there traveling. You’ve got a whole family and a full job and the short term rental running at the same time. And I know there’s a lot of people out there that think that that is not possible if they.

Acquire property and they set it up, uh, or that it’ll be more challenging than it actually needs to be. So what would you say for some of those people out there that haven’t quite pulled the trigger? They’ve wanted a short-term rental for a while. Maybe they already know exactly where they want it, but they’re just a little, uh, intimidated maybe.

Yeah, and I, and I will encourage anyone, obviously run your numbers, make sure it actually works financially for you, that this is not gonna add stress to your life that like on in a financial sense, because it will mm-hmm. At some level of stress, operationally you are learning something new, you’re going to make mistakes.

It is kind of intimidating. You do have this property that you need to maintain that’s far away. And there are going to be things that you can’t predict, but I think kind of just accepting that that is going to happen. I have definitely, on many occasions, felt like a complete idiot and I’m like, oh my, how did I not know there were two acs in this house and only been maintaining the one.

Like you will have moments like that, but you will also get through them. You’ll learn from them, and you will now figure out, this is how I’m going to prevent this from ever happening again in the future. All these mistakes are recoverable and as far as like the other part of this whole process being intimidating, I have.

Learned all of this, kind of just watching videos and watching other people’s like podcasts and getting information that way. It’s definitely very doable just from a self-learning standpoint. Obviously, you can reach out to people if you need help. There’s other ways you can get additional, uh, assistance in that process as well, but.

Having self-managed this this whole time, it’s very doable. And then lastly, I will add, if you have all these other things going on, like kids and work and you know, you wanna maintain your travel, we haven’t found it to be that big of a deal. I. Like the quantity of hours that you’re actually spending on it is not crazy.

The difficult thing comes with maybe the unpredictable times of when this would happen. Mm-hmm. I think I recently gave an example of like, I don’t know how I’m always getting these guest messages when we’re on like a long road trip and my husband is driving and listening to his podcast and he’s not looking at the messages and I’m in the backseat taking a nap, and that’s like.

A hundred percent when we would get like a random problem coming up. Mm-hmm. So you can’t predict when this will happen, but if you haven’t have systems in place, for example, when we go on a really long trip, we let our local assistant know because we would be on a different time zone, obviously messages would be on a lag.

Um, it’s helpful to have like a backup person. Mm-hmm. Also, it has been really helpful to do it with a business partner. In this case that’s my husband. But if you have another person that can. Offload some of those tasks and maybe they can utilize their strengths where you focus on yours, that that really helps lessen that load and that learning curve a little bit.

Yeah, and as you know, we’re, as much as we’d like to fully disconnect, that is, that is a challenging piece, right? You know, people go on vacation the same times. A lot of times we wanna go on vacation or they do it on the weekend and you just never know. You never know when, when the phone will ring. But having those systems in place, as you mentioned, makes the whole process smoother, ensures the guest experience is better, which we know the better the guest experiences you can offer, the better reviews you’re going to have and the more money you’re gonna make with your property because.

That’s how your property shows up on the listing sites. The more reviews and the better they are, the more visibility you have. Awesome, Lydia. Well hey, thank you so much for coming on the show. I think it is really great. I always like hearing everyone’s stories, you know, and also another story that’s proof that virtually managing your property is very doable.

You’ve been doing it for years. You can still travel to Hong Kong and, and India and all these places without. Things falling through the cracks or, you know, uh, ruining your vacation. Um, I like to ask, uh, everyone that we have on the show, the, the name of the, the podcast is called Short Terminal Riches, but a lot of times when people think of the word riches, they think of it just like in the financial sense.

And so I’m curious if you have any sort of habits or anything you’ve changed in your life recently that’s enriched your life in a, in a non-financial way. I That is such a, that’s a profound question. Um, this, this is gonna sound super cheesy, but it’s like in the day to day, like recently if I’ve scaled back hours from work, um, just from a little bit of help with income from YouTube and from our real estate, and I didn’t realize just the quality of life that I am now able to go drop off my children at school and pick them up from school, just.

Hearing about their day immediately, or even just like getting that sassy, like, I’m getting in the car, I’m dropping my backpack off, and I’m just immediately chatting with my sibling and ignoring mom. Like all of that is like such a precious part of the experience that I didn’t get to have, um, before this.

And so I think that is such a big piece. I think travel we’ve kind of talked at, at length about, but that is another, uh, big thing that I would say is, is. An enrichment, uh, in my life for sure. Yeah. It can be a game changer. A life changer. Mm-hmm. Um, well, awesome. Well, uh, you’ve got an amazing YouTube channel.

What’s the best way for people to find you, follow you on YouTube? I am just Lydia Patel. Uh, and I. On Instagram, I’m at Lydia Patel with like three Ls at the end. Um, and yeah, on Instagram I post mainly like just personal fun stuff that I come across. YouTube is where all of my more educational useful content goes, so yeah.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. I. Great tips today and yep. If you’re out there and you’re not yet tuning in to Lydia, make sure you check out her channel and, uh, hopefully we can do this again some time in the future. Thanks, Lydia. Yeah, it was great chatting with you, Tim. If you got something valuable from today’s episode, I’ve got just one small favor to ask.

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