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.

 

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

I know there’s a lot of you out there that are working with a traditional property manager because you want them to take care of your housekeeping.

And I know that sounds like a big relief, but the reality is a lot of these property managers are not doing a good job.

If you missed our last episode, we broke down almost 6,000 different properties, not one by one, but we looked at the averages across five different rental markets.

And we saw that the average review score for these larger property managers, like Vekasa, for example, was between 4.02 and 4.62.

That is really bad.

And if you have those types of review scores, that means that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

We talked about how maintenance was affecting those review scores.

But another really large component of that is housekeeping.

And so this week, we’re going to break down why working with one of these large property managers and using their housekeeping is actually really hurting you.

We’re going to jump into the benefits of hiring your own.

And there are a lot.

Stay tuned.

Let’s jump right in.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

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

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

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

We recently broke down thousands of different properties among some of the nation’s largest property managers, and we found that the review scores were really bad.

We looked at markets like Phoenix, and Gulf Shores, and Gatlinburg, and we can see time and time again that these reviews are bad because these large property managers are not doing a good job of cleaning the property.

And so there’s some specific reasons.

Let’s go ahead and just jump into it.

One of them is that they’re working with large companies.

And now not to say that these large housekeeping companies are always bad.

We work with a few that do a really good job, but there are some limitations.

One of the biggest challenges with working with a larger housekeeping company is that you’re very likely going to have different housekeepers showing up to clean your property week in and week out.

And so what does this mean?

This means they’re not that familiar with your property.

And so if a lamp goes missing, or there is a stain on the couch, or if there’s a watermark on your coffee table, if this is the first time your housekeeper has been in your property, then they don’t know if that was already there.

So that’s one of the biggest issues.

It’s just new to your housekeepers.

They’re not familiar with your property.

And because they’re not necessarily going to be cleaning your property on a regular basis, they also don’t have a sense of ownership.

When they’re cleaning your property regularly, they start to feel a sense of ownership.

And this is exactly what we want, right?

We’re partnered with our housekeepers to make sure that they do a really good job cleaning our properties so that we can continue to have guests, we can continue to have work for them, and the circle just continues creating really good guest experiences.

Another thing you might find is that your professional housekeeping company, if they’re working with a really big team, might not guarantee that they’re going to be able to clean your property on the same day.

We recently had a partner join us.

He’s over in Scottsdale area, and we were reviewing his housekeeping contract, which explicitly said they could not guarantee same day turnaround.

And now, this wasn’t the first time we’ve seen this.

We see this with a lot of professional housekeeping companies, where they require a buffer.

They require 24 hours, for example.

And if you have 24 hours between all of your reservations, well, that really limits your calendar.

We know that these OTAs do not like when we’re blocking our calendar, and so it’s not good for your pocketbook, right?

It really hurts your revenue.

It’s not good for the search algorithms, because you’re showing up as a blocked property frequently.

And it’s also not good for your actual property, because if a housekeeper shows up a day late, and maybe someone did cause a little bit of damage, or maybe there was an issue with the property, well, then we’re getting to that late, and then the whole process of reaching out to the guests, reaching out to support becomes delayed.

There’s also the possibility that the guests could say, hey, I checked out on Friday.

You guys cleaned my property on Saturday.

I don’t know what happened in between that time.

So not to say that this happens a lot, but the reality is we wanna always keep our schedule open.

Part of the reason these housekeeping companies have this in their contract is that, let’s just say they’re managing 100 vacation rentals, and what are the busiest checkout days?

Well, those are almost always Sunday and Monday.

And so if they’re managing 100 different vacation rental properties, and maybe they have 50 housekeepers, well, that means they have to get to all these different properties in the same day, and it’s just not physically possible sometimes.

And so they have these terms in their agreement to help protect them in the case that they can’t show up.

Now, of course, having that buffer in there is better than a guest turning up and seeing a dirty unit, right, that hasn’t been turned over.

But ideally, you’re working with your own housekeeper, you have a personal relationship with them, and they have their own backups in case they’re unable to make it.

Now, I’m speaking from personal experience here.

So, if you’ve been following along to the show for a while, then you know that I’ve been building my portfolio for the last decade, and I’ve worked with a lot of housekeepers.

I’ve also worked with some housekeeping companies, and I know those personal relationships that I have are almost always more accommodating.

And if they’re not able to show up on a Sunday, they actually have their own backups, right?

That’s one of the other great things about it.

Maybe it’s their sister, maybe it’s their brother, and they’ve helped train them for the rare occasion where they can’t actually make it to your property.

So, it’s staying within your circle.

It’s made things a lot easier.

And again, it kind of goes back to that sense of ownership, right?

We’re talking individual housekeeper that you’ve contracted with versus a housekeeping company.

Now, let’s talk about the actual costs or potential money that you’re leaving on the table here, right?

We’ve already talked about reviews.

We know that the lower your review score is, the less money your property is going to make.

But a lot of times, these property managers are charging quite a lot for the housekeeping fee, but then they also market up themselves, right?

So, let’s just say the housekeeping fee was $200.

Maybe they charge you $240, and they use this as a profit center, right?

It’s one other area where they’re trying to earn more money.

Now, if you were to take this property over on your own, one of the other side benefits to hiring your own housekeeper is that oftentimes, they’ll help you out with some other tasks.

Maybe they know a handyman.

Maybe they know a maintenance person.

Maybe they’re open to helping you with guest communication or check-in or any of those sorts of things.

You have the ability to work that out if you’ve worked up a direct relationship, right?

Versus a housekeeping company.

And I’m speaking from personal experience here.

I have lots of housekeepers that have stepped in and helped with some of these other responsibilities.

We’ve talked about this before.

I sort of just want to recap it today and highlight some of these benefits that you may have overlooked if you’re hiring your housekeeper directly.

If you go way back to episode 44 and 45, we talk about the different housekeeping options.

We also talk about where and how to find them and how to hire them.

Of course, we have a lot of resources for free that you can find on our website at strriches.com.

So if you’re out there and you’re having challenges with your large property manager, well, you have other options, right?

If your reviews are being affected because of cleanliness, then you’re making less money.

So you can hire your own.

We’ve talked about a number of ways to find your own housekeeper.

You can go on thumbtack.com.

You can go on Nextdoor.

You can go on Turno, formerly known as Turnover B&B, a network just for housekeepers where you can see the reviews.

If you’re switching from a property manager, well, then you can certainly afford to pay a housekeeper a little bit more money, right?

And then they’re going to be much more motivated to make sure that they’re doing a really good job for your property.

Again, if you’re working with someone directly, they’re going to get a sense of ownership with your property.

They’re showing up to the same property each and every week, whereas these large housekeeping companies, they just physically can’t do that because they’re covering too many properties.

Of course, there’s lots of tools to help you manage the housekeeping.

And so we use one called Breezeway.

We’ve talked about that before.

But you’ll want to create custom checklists.

You can include photos in there.

You can include requirements.

Lots and lots of tools to make sure that the turnover is done properly.

Some of the other things that our housekeepers we work directly with have been a really big help with is leaving personalized messages for our guests, leaving some beer or snacks in the fridge, buying our supplies on our behalf, making sure that our amenities are stocked and ready to go, keeping an eye on your surveillance cameras.

If you have cameras there at the property, you know, during that housekeeping turnover, sometimes our guests don’t check out on time.

And if you’ve given your housekeeper access to the camera, well, then they don’t have to leave their home early to show up there.

They can just monitor the camera.

So you have a lot more flexibility if you’re working with someone directly.

We know that these large property managers, unfortunately, working with really large housekeeping companies, they’re just dropping the ball.

So I just wanted to highlight a couple of those benefits of working with someone directly this week.

I hope that gave you a little bit more insight.

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

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

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

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

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

If you’ve been in the short term rental world for a while, you know there’s a lot of moving pieces, and it’s hard for us to manage all of those pieces by ourselves.

So I’ve very often recommended hiring a virtual assistant.

But one of the challenges that’s come up recently, or more recently, is that a lot of virtual assistants are working multiple jobs.

So I want to give you three signs that they may be working another job and how you can handle it.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

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

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

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back, I’m glad you’re here again.

We’ve talked a lot about virtual assistants in the past.

We’ve got quite a few episodes on it.

If you go to strriches.com, you can go back and find all those old episodes that have great interviewing tips, they have the places to go to, which we’ve hired a lot of people off online jobs, and another site called Job Rack that is more in Eastern Europe.

I received an email recently from the CEO of Online Jobs.

I actually was out on his newsletter, so he didn’t send it to me personally.

But it did have some good information, and it did have something that’s very relevant with our business, and that is that a lot of virtual assistants are working multiple jobs these days.

And so before we jump into this, before we jump into some of the signs that maybe your virtual assistant is working another job and how you might handle that, I want to just lay this out there.

It’s not that having multiple jobs is bad.

In fact, I think that’s great.

If you’re hustling and you want to earn more money and multiple jobs is the best way to do that, then that’s great.

The problem is, if you’re working another job on someone else’s dime, it’s essentially stealing, right?

It’s dishonest for sure.

You’re taking up resources from your employer, from the company, the person that hired you, and worse yet, if you’re working on a team, you’re really taking away resources from the rest of your team members.

And so it’s dishonest in our company.

Honesty is one of our core values, and it’s something we’re really, really strict about.

So unfortunately, we have let a few people go recently because of this.

So before we get into the signs, let’s just jump into why a virtual assistant might do this.

Well, it’s pretty obvious, right?

Instead of just making one stream of income, they could make two or three or four.

Who knows?

It really just depends on the type of work that that person’s doing.

And if they’re able to do that in a way that sort of drags their employers along, thinking that they’re fully engaged, well, then they might make three or four times more than they would if they were just dedicated to the one position.

So where is this happening?

Well, we know that it’s easier than ever to hire people virtually, which is fantastic.

And don’t get me wrong, we have some amazing people on our team that have been with us for years.

And I’m excited to work with them for a long, long time into the future.

It’s just that this has gotten a little more challenging.

And so we need to keep an eye out for some of these signs.

And when something’s not working out, we need to make some decisions.

So this is really happening all over the world, right?

But if we look at some of the places that are more renowned for having virtual assistant work, like the Philippines, I would say in my experience, from hiring in South America, from hiring in the Philippines, and from hiring in Eastern Europe, that we are seeing more of this in the Philippines.

A part of their culture for a long time now has been virtual work, right?

There’s lots of call centers set up, but people prefer to work from home, and so this is just one of those challenges that comes with a little more freedom in the workplace working from home.

There are tools out there, I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, that allow you to track someone’s time, they allow you to track someone’s engagement, actually monitor their screen by taking random screenshots.

The challenge with these tools is that it’s really easy for someone to get around them if they want to.

They could just have another monitor, right?

They could have another computer, they could be working off their phone and be working on another job on the other computer.

So that’s not really a solution for solving it, right?

And I do have a solution, I’m going to get to it, but we’ve used these time trackers before.

They do help us occasionally, you know, if we see productivity drop and we have found people on our team, unfortunately, that we’re working on things or other jobs.

And needless to say, those people are no longer on our team.

So how do you know if one of your virtual assistants is working another job?

Well, it’s really hard to say with 100% certainty, but there’s some very clear signs, right?

So one of them is just delayed responses.

Another one would be just excuses, right?

And so if the way you set up your position with that virtual assistant was for a fixed schedule, which most of our team members are like that, and that’s the way I really recommend that you do hire someone.

We got to remember, right?

A lot of times people are hiring virtual assistants for their short-term rentals, thinking that they’re going to be on call 24 hours, but that’s not the case, right?

That’s not a long-term solution.

No one wants to be on call 24 hours.

And so the way we do it with our company is to hire eight-hour shifts, and we expect the people on our team to be available during those eight-hour shifts.

In fact, we put it right in our work agreement that you are not allowed to work for someone else while you’re working for us.

What you do outside of that time is totally up to you, but while you’re working for us, we are your sole employer.

So delayed response times are pretty easy clue.

One of the rules that we have with our receptionist team is a five-minute response time or less.

So all of the messages that we get from our guests, they have to be responded to within five minutes.

And so if someone is continuously not responding, well, then there’s something going on, right?

And that’s an easy sign.

If you’re new to the show, by the way, my team and I have managed over 40,000 guests.

We’re in nearly 20 cities now.

We have properties in five countries.

We’re completely virtual.

We would love to work with you to help with your back-end operations, to help with your revenue management, to help with your listing optimization.

Our partners are seeing incredible results.

Our last partner that we just brought on in Costa Rica, we increased his revenue 50% this month in October versus last year.

So we’re seeing some really good results.

If you’re interested in chatting with us, you can head over to strriches.com.

You’ll see a little property management button there.

We can set up a time to chat.

So delayed response times, that’s a pretty good clue.

Excuses or low availability when someone’s supposed to be available is another good sign, but it ultimately comes down to productivity.

A really good friend of mine started an amazing company.

They do a bunch of app development, and they have currently over 750 virtual employees on their team.

They’ve hired from all over the place.

And I was a little frustrated recently, and I reached out to him and I said, Mike, how are you guys handling this issue?

And he just said, productivity.

And he said that they’re not using the time tracking tools.

They’re not using the screen capturing tools.

They basically measure everything off of productivity.

And so there’s some really good apps for that now.

Depending on where you are with your short term rental journey, if you just have one property or you’ve got a couple, then you’re not really gonna need like a project management tool like monday.com.

That’s one that we are currently implementing.

But if you do have a virtual assistant helping with your short term rental, you should have a pretty good idea of how long certain types of tasks are going to take, right?

And if you don’t, then you need to reach out to your assistant and ask and find out a little bit more information.

If you guys are both on the same page that, hey, you know, I have a support call with Airbnb, and this should take X amount of time generally, then if they haven’t responded all day, you know, there’s probably something else going on, right?

If they’re helping with your reception, make sure that those response times are nice and quick.

And if you’re trying to meet up and you keep getting excuses, well, then there’s probably something else going on there as well.

So I don’t want to make this episode just completely negative.

I mean, we have some amazing people on our team that I’m really excited to grow with, and the reality is that we just cannot do this job by ourselves if we plan on scaling, right?

If we have one, two, or a handful of properties, well, we can do a lot of these things ourselves, but it doesn’t mean we have all the time or want to, maybe have another job.

And so hiring someone virtual is an excellent, excellent solution.

But we need to make sure that we have those expectations set up front.

A couple just quick tips on hiring, I would ask for references.

I would be really up front about the fact that you know that people are working multiple jobs and that it’s dishonest and it’s not something that you will tolerate on your team.

It’s not fair to your teammates.

It’s not fair to anyone.

And so I’d be really clear about that.

Ask for references.

Go back and check out some of our other episodes on hiring.

You can go to strriches.com.

We even have a cool little bot right in the bottom corner.

You can just ask it, hey, what are your tips on hiring?

We’ve got some great questions there.

And if you do bring someone on and fortunately these things start to come up, well, I would give them a warning.

Maybe you give them two weeks and you monitor things closely.

And if it happens again, well, I would let them go.

So not a super positive topic out there.

This is just going on more and more.

So I want to bring it to your attention if you’re just getting ready to hire your first assistant.

Make sure that you have some way to measure the productivity, measure the progress, whatever sort of tasks you’re working on, whether you want to use a project management tool or whether you just Google Sheets, you kind of need to have an idea of how much work you expect there to be.

And if they’re handling all that work, that’s fantastic.

But at the end of the day, we want someone on our team that’s actually proactive, right?

And that’s going beyond.

And that results in higher pay, right?

If we’re all growing together and we’re doing a better job, then the pay range that we start at is not what we expect people to work at forever, right?

And so that’s what we’re looking for on our team.

Again, we have an amazing team and I feel really happy and grateful.

I just know that this is more challenging.

And I got that email that the CEO sent out that yes, this is very clearly happening and it’s unfortunate.

So let’s do a better job of hiring.

Let’s make this really upfront.

And hopefully this trend sort of goes in the opposite direction.

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

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

Poor management can crush your investment returns.

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

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

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

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

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

If you’ve had a short-term rental for any time and all, well, then you probably know that housekeeping can be a bit challenging.

And I say can, because if you have an excellent relationship with your housekeeper or with your housekeeping company, then your life and your property and your investment will be much, much easier.

So this week, we’re going to break down hiring a new housekeeper, seven steps with everything in between, things that you need to know to make sure that you establish a great relationship that you can have for years and years to come.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals, quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Hey there, short-term rental owners.

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Welcome back to the show.

If you’re just joining us for the first time, I’m glad you found us.

My team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests in nearly 20 cities now.

We’ve learned a lot about housekeeping.

It is one of the biggest pieces when it comes to managing our short term rentals.

One of the biggest pieces, biggest operational pieces.

And so we’re going to break down seven steps this week, where to find them, setting the right expectations, and really just establishing a great relationship.

It’s been some time since I’ve hired my own housekeeper.

In fact, I’ve had a housekeeping manager that’s helped me with my personal portfolio for over eight years.

It’s been an amazing relationship.

And now I’m establishing a new one down here in Brazil.

Yes, most of my properties are in the US and most of the properties we manage for partners.

But I do spend a lot of time down here and I did start investing down here.

And so we just hired our first Brazilian housekeeper, and the process is exactly the same as it is in the US or anywhere in the world.

Setting the expectations are the same.

All of it’s pretty much the same except for the language, of course.

And that’s because the way we operate a short term rental in one country versus the other, it’s the same.

So let’s go ahead and get into it.

Step number one, we’ve got to find a great housekeeper.

And so there’s multiple places to do that, but I always recommend starting with referrals for any trade, really.

So whether you’re looking for a plumber, electrician, a housekeeper, starting with referrals is the best place to go.

But we don’t always have a referral, right?

So where do we go if we’re just starting from scratch?

You may be familiar with a few new software tools that popped up.

Over the years, one is called Turno, used to be called Turnover BNB.

They have a network of over 50,000 housekeepers inside their platform.

And so I would highly suggest take a look at that program.

There’s another one called Properly that also has their own network of housekeepers.

But if you’re not using one of these software tools, you don’t plan on using one, well, then you can also go to places like Facebook groups, any social media groups around short term rentals.

You could even go as far as reaching out to co-hosts in your area where your Airbnb or your property is located.

How do you do that?

Well, you can simply look up other properties, find the ones that have co-hosts.

So if you scroll down, you’ll see the host information.

If there’s a co-host, you’ll see that there’s someone there helping that property owner.

And many times those co-hosts might have a housekeeping company or they might work with one.

They would be open to sharing with you.

Not all the time, but it’s worth a shot.

You can simply send them a message.

There’s a little contact, the host button on Airbnb, so you can send them a message and just reach out.

It never hurts to try, right?

So several options there, always starting with referrals.

So once we found our housekeeper, there’s really two different approaches here.

We can hire someone independently or we can hire a company where there’s going to be multiple people working for that company.

So we’re going to go with the scenario here that you’re hiring an individual because this is where you’re going to have to set a little more expectations than you might working with a housekeeping company that has been doing this for a while and that has lots of housekeepers.

So let’s say you got a great reference from a friend of yours.

The first thing to ask yourself is, is this person really familiar working with short term rentals?

Because remember, a traditional housekeeper that may come once a week and help you clean your home versus someone that works specifically with short term rentals?

Well, those are quite different.

And so that’s the first thing we want to ask.

If this person’s new to housekeeping for short term rentals, then we’re gonna have to do an extra good job at setting these expectations.

One of the first expectations you can set right off the bat with your new housekeeper is how many turns do you expect?

So how often do you expect a guest to be checking out of your property?

If it’s a brand new property, well, you can use programs like AirDNA or Price Labs to get an idea of the market to see what the average reservation length is and what the average occupancy is.

If you’ve had your property for a while, well, then you already have a pretty good idea, right?

Starting off with just that is a great expectation, because let’s say you have 60 checkouts a year and you’re hiring an individual.

Is she or he going to be available for all those times?

If not, we wanna make sure we have a backup.

We always wanna have backups, but I’ll get to that a little bit later.

Next expectation, of course, we wanna establish a price for the turnover, right?

But sometimes that’s not always cut and dry.

Is your price going to include laundry?

Are there machines on the property that can handle all the laundry?

Is it a really large home where maybe the checkout window or the time between your guests checking out and the next one checking in isn’t long enough to actually do all the laundry there?

Well, then you very likely are probably gonna have to pay more for some offsite laundry or some things like that.

We did actually do a whole episode just dedicated to laundry because it can be a bit challenging depending on your property and your setup.

That was episode 185, so make sure you go back and check that one out if you missed it.

Again, you can see all of our past episodes at strriches.com.

We also have a real handy little bot there in the bottom right corner where you can just ask it, hey, what do you recommend in regards to laundry options?

And it knows all of the content we’ve been producing for almost five years now.

So back to expectations, we wanna establish how much work this housekeeper, housekeeping company could expect from us, what the cost per turn would be, and whether they’re going to be doing laundry on site or if they’re doing it offsite, if there’s an additional cost to that.

We want to set the expectations around pets.

Does your property allow pets?

Well, some housekeepers aren’t too fond of cleaning up after our furry friends.

Others have no problem at all.

But again, it’s one other thing that you wanna discuss up front.

How are you going to handle supplies?

So if you’re working with a professional housekeeping company, one of the benefits is that they’re pretty much across the board going to be purchasing all of their own supplies, which makes that part a little bit easier.

But if you’re working with an individual, well, are you gonna be shipping supplies to them?

Are they gonna be purchasing them, and you’re reimbursing them?

One other thing that you wanna make sure you get squared away up front.

What happens if someone shows up your property and maybe they wanted a little extra cleaning, or they thought the property wasn’t that clean?

Is your housekeeper or the company you’re working with, are they willing to go back out to the property?

Or is there gonna be some other fee associated around that?

One other thing that you wanna bring up, because this is also an excellent opportunity to see how much time or how willing your housekeeper is to help you out with some of those little management tasks, not necessarily managing the guests, but going back to check up on the property and how much notice do they need, another expectation that we’ll need to know.

Depending on how you accept reservations, you may have a buffer before a reservation, so you could let your housekeeper know, hey, you always have at least one or two days notice, but if you’re really trying to squeeze all the revenue out of the property, then you wanna make sure your calendar’s fully open, and you’re gonna need a housekeeper that’s available last minute, or if they’re not available last minute, they have someone that can help them out.

So those are some of the basic expectations you’re gonna wanna set, regardless whether you’re working with a housekeeping company or with an individual.

Step three, we need to know about our linens, and this step is actually, there’s quite a bit to it, so we did a whole episode on it last week, that was episode 242.

Go back and check that one out if you missed it.

Basically, in a nutshell, we need to know where we’re keeping extra linens, what happens if they get stained, so on and so on.

So again, another expectation, you’re gonna need to set up front.

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

My team and I have managed thousands of guests, we’ve learned a ton, and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made.

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

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

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

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

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

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

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

Okay, step number four in the process is discussing potential issues that can come up with your housekeeper.

Not necessarily with your housekeeper in terms of their work.

We’ll get to that later on.

But your housekeeper’s showing up, and maybe the guest is still there.

Maybe your housekeeper shows up, and the guest answers the door naked.

Yes, we’ve had this happen, and lots of crazy stuff happened, so it’s good to get it out there.

If your housekeeper’s brand new to the industry, this is gonna be brand new to them, right?

Hopefully, you’ve found a housekeeper that’s already experienced in the industry, because all of these expectations and things will be a little bit easier.

That’s not our case down here in Brazil, so we’re working with the housekeeper that is new to short-term rentals, so we have to talk about these things, right?

Because we don’t want them to be a surprise, and we need to have a way to handle that.

If she shows up or he shows up, and the guest is still there, what do they do?

Another potential thing that will happen when your housekeeper show up your property is that they’re gonna discover that the prior guest left something there, and they’re gonna need to know what to do with that, right?

And so just one other thing to mention, sometimes they’re gonna show up, and your property might have a little bit of damage.

How are they gonna report that back to you?

Sometimes the guests that show up are gonna say the property was dirty.

Your housekeeper is gonna say, no way, I spent hours cleaning that, it was spotless, and it’s really just gonna be a, he said, she said thing.

How do we handle that?

Well, at the end of the day, we are running a hospitality business.

We need to keep that in mind, right?

We need to make sure that our guests have a good experience.

And so sometimes you might have to pay your housekeeper to go out and clean the property again, even though it was already clean.

Again, this is something else we’ll want to discuss with the housekeeper just to set that expectation and let them know, hey, we know that you do an excellent job, but sometimes guests have totally different expectations.

Sometimes they might even be making it up.

We never know, but it’s something that’s going to come up.

You might also show up at the property and sometimes it’s super clean.

It doesn’t even seem like someone’s been there, but then there’s going to be other times where you show up and it’s going to be quite dirty.

Maybe they got a little carried away.

They were drinking and they left all their trash out.

Hopefully you’re doing a good job vetting your guests before they check in.

But the reality is is that we all have different cleanliness standards, right?

If we think about just friends and acquaintances and people that we’ve known throughout our lives, we all live differently, right?

One good way is to just take a look at someone’s car.

How do they treat their car, right?

If you’re hiring a housekeeper and they show up in a car and they open the door and you see soda bottles and stuff like that in their car and their car’s quite dirty, that’s probably not a good sign, right?

You probably want a housekeeper that’s showing up and they’ve got a nice spick and span car.

So just set those expectations.

Sometimes your property is not gonna be in great shape.

Sometimes it’s gonna be nice and spick and span.

Okay, on to step number five.

So we’ve talked about where to find housekeepers.

We’ve talked about setting expectations, getting on the same page in regards to pricing and laundry.

Talked about step three, linens and how those are going to be handled.

Step four, we’re talking to our housekeeper about potential issues that could arise with the guests at our property or them leaving something behind.

Number five, we wanna talk about actually scheduling the cleaning and our communication with the housekeeper and how that’s going to happen on a normal basis.

If you’ve tuned in to the show before, well, you’ve undoubtedly heard us talk about an app called Breezeway.

That’s what our team and I use to manage all the housekeepers that we work with.

It’s really great.

It’s designed for housekeeping and maintenance.

It’s got a great little checklist that our housekeepers can open when they show up to the property.

It can require them to take photos.

You can create a checklist as detailed as you want or as simple as you’d like.

There are other platforms established for this now.

We talked about Turno and Properly.

Those are two others.

So you really have three great options now for scheduling your housekeeping with your housekeeper that takes a lot of the legwork out of the way, right?

This can be connected to your property management software.

So when you get a reservation, your housekeeper is going to see it automatically.

These tools also help you cover some of those issues that arise, right?

Those checklists, ensuring that your property is clean and that it gets cleaned the same way that the coffee filter gets removed from the coffee machine.

So we like to use technology for this.

Of course, this depends on how many properties you have.

So the more properties you have, the more necessary a tool like this would be.

If you’re just getting started, well, you could simply communicate through text message.

You could simply communicate over the phone.

You could use a program like Slack, which my team and I also use.

I find it’s really, really helpful because it allows us to include multiple people in the same group.

We can share photos there.

We can share documents, whatever we need to.

And as you grow, this can be a really good tool for internal communication.

They also have a free version.

So it’s not an extra expense that you’ll need to incur.

Depending on what property management software you’re using, some of these have built in task related functions like Guesty and WeUseHostAway.

And there’s a lot of programs out there, and a lot of them have this built in.

But remember, those other three programs that I mentioned, Properly, Turno and Breezeway, those are designed specifically for housekeeping.

And so in my opinion, they still do a much better job than a lot of the built in functions you might find with your property management software.

One last note on using Checklist before we jump into step number six, is that remember when you’re starting out with a new housekeeper or new housekeeping company, we really want to be more thorough and then ease up afterwards.

So to give you an example of that, maybe you have a barbecue and your housekeeper forgot to clean it once or maybe twice.

Adding that item into a checklist afterwards is a little more difficult than starting off with a checklist that already has that item in there and then removing it afterwards once your housekeeper has done a great job time and time again.

Really, the more time we work with the housekeeper, the more we trust them, the less we really need to check in and make sure that they’re adding new soap to the soap dispensers in the bathrooms and doing all these little things, right?

So we really want to start off with a more thorough checklist and more thorough sort of guidelines about how we expect our property to be clean and then sort of ease off as we build our relationship together.

Okay, on to step number six.

This is really where we’re going to make it official, and this is to get our agreement in writing.

Now, you don’t have to have a lawyer draw up a contract and send it over to them and make it super, super official and formal, but you do want to have it in writing, right?

So this could be through text message, this could be through email, whatever it happens to be.

Our team does use a contract and an agreement.

Check with your lawyer and your advisor as to whether your housekeeper is technically an employee or you can count them as a 1099 contractor.

Our agreement for hiring our housekeepers is very clear that they’re working for us as a contractor.

And it also has all of these expectations, our rates and potential issues and things that come up right into our agreement.

So it’s one last place for us to review everything we’ve talked about to make sure we’re on the same page.

In your agreement or in your text or in your email or in your written communication, you also want to make sure that you’ve talked about how and when you’re actually going to pay your housekeeper.

So you’re going to pay them after every turn.

The program Turno does a great job.

I know a lot of housekeepers love using it because they get paid automatically right after each turn.

My team and I, we pay our housekeepers for my personal portfolio every other week.

And so you just want to establish that up front, make sure you’re all on the same page, and then send it through in some sort of written communication.

So you can always refer back to it later on if you need to.

Okay, so one last step, but let’s just do a quick recap.

So we talked about where to find your housekeepers.

That was step number one, and whether you’re hiring an individual or a housekeeping company.

We talked about setting expectations in regards to how much you’re going to be paying, how often you expect your property to need cleaning, those sorts of things.

We touched real briefly on linens, but remember we have a full episode on that.

That’s last week’s episode number 242.

So go back and check that one out if you missed it.

In step four, we talked about potential issues or things that come up in regards to your guests staying in your property.

So these were things like them not checking out on time.

In step five, we talked about scheduling and how we are going to be communicating with our housekeeper or the housekeeping company on a regular basis.

Are we going to use an app design for this or are we going to simply use the phone or text message?

And then in step six, we summarized everything that we’ve talked about to make sure we’re on the same page.

And we sent it over in some sort of written form, ideally in a contract for your housekeeper to where they could simply sign.

There’s lots of easy digital sign programs out there these days.

And remember, if you are hiring them on a contract basis, you want to make sure that you get a W9 form filled out with them so that you have that when it comes time for your tax filings.

And the seventh step here is really just a reminder.

It’s a reminder that your housekeeper or the housekeeping company that you’re working with is crucial to your success as a short-term rental owner or investor.

And so we really need to nurture the relationship and do a good job of making sure that we’re both on the same team, right?

If some issues arise, we want to be there to make sure that we can help them.

The reality is that after working just a few times at your property, your new housekeeper is going to understand the whole process.

They’re going to understand your property.

In fact, they’re going to start or learn your property much better than you know it yourself.

Sometimes they’re going to show up to the property, and if it’s not in super great condition, well, it’s going to affect them, right?

Like they’re there at your property cleaning, taking care of it.

It becomes their property essentially.

And so we want to establish this relationship, understand both sides, have everything clearly laid out, understand that it’s going to change too, right?

Inflation is a real thing.

Rates are going to change.

The tools that we might be using could change.

And so we want to just build along good relationship with them.

If they have a maintenance person that they prefer to work with, well, that could be one other way to kind of secure that relationship in, right?

So if something pops up, they just call the maintenance person.

That can help make your life a lot easier.

Are you planning on building your short-term rental portfolio or adding more properties?

Well, that’s a good thing to be very transparent with your housekeeper about, right?

Hopefully, they can help accommodate you.

Maybe they can even bring other people on to work underneath them.

So I hope these seven steps sort of just wrapped it up for you in a nutshell.

Obviously, there are some other things that I’m sure I left out, but we do have a lot of other podcasts or episodes or shows dedicated to housekeeping.

So make sure you go to strriches.com.

You can check those out.

And in a future episode, we are going to be talking about challenges working with your housekeeper.

So let’s say they are dropping the ball when it comes to cleanliness or reliability.

These things pop up.

So we’re going to talk about those, the most common ones that come up, how to handle it, and when to know if it’s time to just find another housekeeper.

So until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week, and we’ll see you back here soon.

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

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

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

You can head over to restmethods.com forward slash AI and get your copy for free.

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

If you’ve tuned in to this show for a while, well, you know there’s a lot of factors that affect our short-term rental.

Duh, yes, things like pricing, how our property is set up, how it’s marketed, all these things.

And I got to thinking the other day, how many factors are there really?

And I was on a flight, that’s when I do a lot of my good thinking, and I just started listing them out.

And so I listed a lot, and I wanna go through them this week just to bring them up.

We’re not gonna dive into each one of them very deeply, but I wanna bring them up just to make you aware of them, and if you don’t recognize them or you haven’t heard of them, well, you should, and hopefully this will be the starting point for you to dig a little bit deeper.

So stay tuned.

Let’s jump through this list.

It’s quite a long list.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals, quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast.

I’m happy you’re here again, and I’m just excited about short term rentals.

I really am.

I know it’s been years and years, but they’re just changing all the time, and there’s so many ways to make them better.

There’s so many ways to improve our management.

If you’ve tuned in for a while, you know that we’ve been managing properties, including my own personal portfolio.

We’ve managed tens of thousands of guests.

We’ve got over 10,000 reviews.

We’ve got super host status.

We’ve got all that good stuff.

We have an amazing team.

That’s at the foundation of it, so I’m really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing team.

But there’s a lot of factors that affect our short terminal.

And so I started listing these out, and I was also thinking about it, because when we try to compare our short terminals to a hotel, for example, we can’t really do that, because hotels, or let’s take all the rooms in one hotel, for example, they’re pretty similar, right?

Maybe they have a suite.

Maybe they have two queens versus one king bed.

Maybe they have a junior suite.

Maybe they have a few different options, but they don’t have a ton of different options.

They’re pretty much the same, and they also don’t have their own individual reviews, right?

So we can’t really compare short term rentals to the way we evaluate hotels, or it’s a lot easier to compare two hotels than it is to compare two short term rentals.

It’s also a lot easier to compare two long term rentals than it is two short term rentals.

Two long term rentals, for example, maybe they’re both two bedrooms, they have two baths, and they rent for $2,000 a month.

They’re similar sizes, but they come vacant.

They don’t have reviews.

All those things.

And so I got to thinking, and I made this list.

It’s really long.

I don’t want to intimidate you, but there are literally endless possibilities and combinations of what is affecting your property, preventing you from comparing it identically to another property.

And just to go back to our high school math class for a second, what we’re talking about are factorials.

And I had to look this up again to refresh my memory.

But if we take just 10 different factors, for example, and we come up with all the different combinations of those factors.

So let’s just say this is a property that offers instant book versus one that doesn’t, versus one that offers pets or allows pets, versus one that’s near the ocean, versus not near the ocean.

But if we just take 10 of these factors, I had to look this up, that creates millions of different combinations.

And just for fun, I did it with 100 factors, and that creates a number, get this, it’s 158 digits, followed by 24 trailing zeros.

I mean, it’s literally impossible to compare two short term rentals that have so many different factors that make them unique.

Okay, so we’re almost there.

Before we get into these factors, keep in mind, these are not your average daily rate or RevPAR.

These are the factors, the levers that you can change with your property that make up those end results, that make up your revenue.

Okay, so here goes 46 different factors affecting your property and your profitability.

And so obviously, I can’t go into each of these in detail, but you can go over to strriches.com.

We’ve got our awesome new bot there that can search all of our past episodes and find these specific topics for you.

All you have to do is ask it.

So the first one, seasonality.

Number two, seasonal profiles.

What do I mean by seasonal profiles?

So on Pricelabs or whatever dynamic pricing tool you’re using, you can create seasonal profiles.

And so if someone has seasonal profiles set up versus someone that doesn’t, and they’re just using the average numbers that the dynamic pricing tool uses, well, that’s gonna differentiate your two properties.

Number three, this is an obvious one, supply changes.

So the number of listings coming into a market, the number of listings stopping, or the amount of new guests coming in.

We have number four, events, number five, holidays.

Number six, day of the week pricing.

So we know that weekends oftentimes are charging more than during the week, and depending on how you have these factors set up, it’s gonna differentiate your property.

Number eight, we have length of stay discounts.

So this is actually something unique to Airbnb.

Some of these factors are unique to specific online travel agencies.

And so that again just adds to the complexity, the number of things that we need to keep an eye on.

But Airbnb has ability to create length of stay discounts.

So you can create a discount for two days, versus three days, versus four days, so on and so on.

Obviously, we can do this on a long-term basis.

We’ve talked about that before, using our dynamic pricing tools.

We can create weekly and monthly discounts pretty easily.

But creating a three-day discount isn’t very regularly available outside of Airbnb.

Number nine, we have short term versus midterm stay algorithms.

What the heck do I mean by that?

Well, we’ve got these dynamic pricing tools that we’re using, and they will adjust your prices based on their algorithms.

But you can tell their algorithm if it’s a short-term rental property, if it’s a midterm rental property, or if it’s more like a hotel, and that will affect your settings.

Number 10, this one’s also unique to Airbnb.

Early bird pricing.

So this is a way for you to add an additional discount to your days in the future, again, only on Airbnb.

So remember, if you have your prices discounted in the future or however you have them set up in your pricing tools, this is gonna get applied on top of that.

Number 11, we have promotions.

This is also unique to Airbnb.

You have the ability to create a promotion for a few days or whatever days you desire and whatever discount you desire.

Obviously, Airbnb wants you to discount everything because they just wanna sell those nights, right?

Number 12, super host status.

Again, unique to Airbnb, but if you have super host status and your next door neighbor’s property does not have super host status, well then, that’s gonna differentiate your two properties, creating one other layer of really complexity in the whole grand scheme of things.

How exactly do you price?

Can you earn more with super host?

Now, we’ve done a lot of these individual topics.

We’ve broken them down on full episodes.

I know this is one we’ve done.

So again, you can head to strriches.com.

There is a little bot that we developed.

I swear, it’s really, really cool.

It’s essentially a clone of myself, and I’m not just saying it’s cool because it’s a clone of myself, but it’s a clone of all of the content that we’ve produced for the last four plus years.

And so, it remembers everything.

It can find any episode, and it’s really cool.

I use it myself, which just seems weird.

So, number 13, Premiere Host Status.

This is unique to VRBO.

So, similar to Airbnb’s Supra status, we have the same sort of recognition on VRBO.

Again, it’s gonna affect your pricing.

Whether you can charge a little bit more, whether you show up more on VRBO’s website, there is a difference between a property that has Premiere Host Status and one that doesn’t.

That is the whole idea of this list.

These things, each one of these 46 factors, gosh, we’re only at 13, change the way your property shows up and the amount of revenue that you can ultimately earn.

Number 14, recency.

What do I mean by this?

How recent was it listed online?

We know when we list a property online that it gets a nice little bump.

Usually it’s like three to five bookings from what I’ve seen.

Number 15, new listing discount.

This one’s also unique to Airbnb again.

They like to put a nice big fat 20% discount on for your first three stays if it’s a brand new listing.

Up to you whether you think it’s a good idea, but it is something that’s obviously gonna affect your reservations.

Number 16, taxes.

So long term versus short term.

We have to think about this.

If we’re managing properties in a market where there’s midterm stays, and it switches from being short term to midterm, then the taxes change, and that allows us to change our pricing, our whole strategy.

So we gotta keep that in mind.

Number 17, channel markups.

So do you wanna favor one listing channel versus another one?

Do you like Airbnb more than booking.com?

Well, if you do, then you could mark booking.com up a lot more than you mark Airbnb up.

One other factor affecting your performance.

Number 18, channel discounts.

So what do I mean by discounts?

Well, if you have your own direct booking website, which I hope you do, you can discount your stays and still earn more than you would on Airbnb or booking.com because your guest isn’t paying all those booking fees.

So again, one other factor affecting your performance.

Number 19, deposit charges.

Are you charging a deposit on websites like VRBO, booking.com or your own direct booking website to protect your property?

Hopefully you’re doing something.

The other alternative is number 20.

Those are deposit waivers where you can purchase deposit insurance on top of each reservation.

Again, this is going to affect the people booking your property.

If it’s charged to them, if it’s charged to them, well, then that’s one other fee that might deter them from making a booking.

Another fee, number 21 is your housekeeping fee.

We’ve talked about this one a lot.

Number 22, pet fees.

Number 23, do you allow pets?

I realize those are kind of similar, but you don’t have to have a pet fee if you allow pets.

Number 24, extra person fees.

Number 25, early check-in fee.

Number 26, late checkout fee.

Some of these fees are usually calculated or programmed through your property management software, not necessarily directly on the OTA like Airbnb, including the next one.

Pool heating fee, number 27.

Number 28, linen fee.

Hopefully, you are not charging for linens.

Hotels don’t charge for linens, right?

We’re all in the same hospitality industry.

I know there’s still properties out there that aren’t doing probably more internationally than in the United States now, but if you’re still charging, go ahead and get rid of that one.

People don’t like fees, right?

And those have been shown to really hurt your conversion rates.

So try to reduce the fees whenever possible.

Number 29, processing fees.

So are you using an integration like Stripe to make your own credit card payments or to allow credit card payments?

Well, they have processing fees, and sometimes these are charged.

That is going to affect your reservations and your overall performance as well.

Again, it’s another cost going into the reservation.

It affects the whole calculation.

Sort of realizing I should have broke this up in a multiple podcast, but we’re just going to keep jumping through it.

Number 30, occupancy pricing adjustments.

So is your dynamic pricing tool adjusting your property based on your occupancy?

That’s another factor.

It could affect your overall performance.

Number 31, portfolio occupancy price adjustments.

I know this sounds like kind of the same thing, but this would be for those of you out there that have multiple properties, especially multiple properties maybe in the same building or that are very similar.

So instead of creating the occupancy discount for one property, it’s creating a discount as a whole, on the whole portfolio.

Number 32, last minute discounts.

This one, I think most of you know about.

Number 33, far out discounts.

So yes, we can discount.

Stays out in the future.

Most of the time, they’re far out premiums.

Number 34, gradual versus fixed discounts.

So if, let’s say, a calendar date’s coming up two weeks from now, are you applying a gradual discount so that when day zero arrives or tomorrow arrives, you have your largest discount, or is it just a flat discount, 15%?

Number 35, gap day discounts.

Those are those orphan days.

We just talked about this one a couple weeks ago.

Again, we’ve talked about most of these things individually in a prior episode out of the hundreds of episodes we’ve done.

So head over to strriches.com and check out our bot, ask them where to find these things.

Number 36, adjacent night discounts.

I think this one’s a little more advanced for most of you, but it’s basically a discount tacked on to the following day after a reservation or before an upcoming reservation.

Number 37, gap day premiums.

So we can have gap day discounts, but we can also have gap day premiums, and those could be adjusted based on one, two, three nights, whatever you consider your gap days to be.

Number 38, we obviously have minimum night settings.

That is crucial.

And if your minimum nights are too strict, too high, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Number 39, minimum reservation value.

So you now have a way in most of your dynamic pricing tools to only accept based on a minimum reservation value.

Number 40, far out minimum night settings.

So these are protecting your calendar, essentially, far out in the future, so you don’t get a one night stay in the middle of a five night super in demand event.

Number 41, base price.

So obviously these aren’t in any sort of order.

Base price is usually where most of us start with our pricing, but that is the price without any other factors affecting it.

Number 42, minimum price.

We all know what that is, the minimum amount that we will allow per night.

Number 43, max price.

And yes, sometimes there should be a max price.

Remember, there’s always a value component to someone’s reservation.

So if they’re paying you $5,000 a night per place that’s normally $1,000 a night, just because demand’s gone through the roof, Taylor Swift is in town, well, they might be really happy to see Taylor Swift, but they’re not gonna be as happy with the value they got.

And that might show in their reviews.

So just keep that in mind.

Number 44, average booking windows.

So these are the length of time before someone usually books your property, and this changes throughout the year.

Again, we did a podcast on this one, breaking it all down.

Number 45, we’re getting there.

Date specific booking windows.

So the booking window changes based on specific dates.

So again, if Taylor Swift’s coming, place is gonna book out years in advance if someone knew years in advance, right?

Number 46, whew, almost there.

I really should have broke this up into more episodes, but hopefully you found some value in it.

Number 46 is owner aggressiveness.

And so what do I mean by that?

Well, we have all these factors.

We went through 46, and this is by no means 100%.

This was just me on the plane kind of brainstorming, really jotting them down to get an overview of a lot of the ones that are out there.

All of these you really should know.

Remember, these are all levers.

The more of these you know, the better you know how to program them, compare them to your market, the better your property is going to do.

But one that we don’t really think about as much is how aggressive do we really wanna be?

Are we conservative?

Do we just wanna meet a certain number each month with our property and we’ll be happy?

Or are we holding out to the last second to get top, top dollar?

Well, that’s what I would call owner aggressiveness.

Okay, so if you don’t recognize any of those, well, do a little bit of research.

They’re all important.

And again, this is by no means 100% comprehensive.

In fact, this didn’t cover any of the factors from our physical property.

So amenities, all those types of things, these were more pricing type factors.

And so I’m gonna have to do another episode on those.

But until then, remember, if you don’t know any of these factors, just find out a little bit more because you could be earning less than you should be.

And if this happens year over year, or if your manager doesn’t know about all these things, ask them about some of these things.

And make sure that you’re not overlooking anything because this is your money we’re talking about.

And especially if you’re scaling, you’re adding more and more properties, then this just multiplies exponentially, right?

If you have 10 properties versus one, and you only know 30 of these 46 metrics or different factors affecting your property, well, then you’re not just leaving money on the table with one property, but you’re leaving it on the table with 10 properties.

So there we have it, 46 items, and there’s more to come.

Hopefully, I didn’t freak you out too much.

Hopefully, I didn’t intimidate you too much.

There’s a lot of opportunity in the short-term rental industry.

And this is just another reason why, because there’s so many little things that we need to uncover and learn.

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

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

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

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

We know there’s a lot of work that goes into managing a short-term rental, and if we’re trying to do it all of ourselves, well, we’re gonna get a little bit exhausted, we’re gonna get frustrated sometimes, we’re really gonna prevent ourselves from scaling.

And so what is the natural progression?

That is to hire people to help us out.

So my team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests across multiple, multiple states, and we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve also hired a lot of people.

And so this week, I wanted to give you some of my favorite questions that we ask anyone that joins our team.

This might be really helpful for you out there.

If you’re looking to hire maybe your first virtual assistant.

So stay tuned.

Let’s jump right in.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

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

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

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the show, I’m really glad that you’re here again.

Today we’re talking about something I think is really exciting because it’s the power to build a team and to build something bigger than we can individually, right?

And with our short term rentals, it definitely helps to have a team.

And so one of the first team members that someone might hire is a virtual receptionist, or someone to help you, a virtual assistant, to help you with so many tasks.

We’ve talked about them a lot on this show before, and this week, I wanted to break down some of the questions that we ask our potential candidates.

So we’re in the hiring mode again, and if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you know that our team works all over the world, really.

So we have people in Mexico, in Europe, in the Philippines, and then, of course, in the US as well.

And I’m down here in Brazil at the moment, although that’s only about half the year.

I’ll be back in Colombia soon enough.

So just a few notes on hiring.

The first thing is, when we get a resume from someone, what is a resume?

A resume is basically a list of the best achievements that that person has made in their whole career, excluding all of their biggest failures and challenges and blemishes.

It’s just the best image of them that they could think of, right?

Because they created it themselves.

So a resume doesn’t really help us much, but questions can help us a lot.

If we’re asking the right questions, that is, and as long as we’re giving them the opportunity to explain and talk, and we get to know them, right?

That’s really how we can uncover if someone could be a good fit.

Now, there’s lots and lots of resources out there on hiring.

You can obviously have your candidates take personality tests, which I really recommend.

The DISC, that’s a very common one.

But we can save personality tests for another episode.

We’re just going to jump into some of these interview questions.

I think I’ve got 13, around 13 for you today.

And the first thing is when you’re doing an interview, a live interview, especially if you’re hiring someone that’s from another country, maybe English isn’t their first language, well, sometimes they’re nervous, right?

Everyone gets nervous.

And the same goes for virtual interviews.

So just remember that.

And you kind of want to break the ice, right?

And ask some questions that aren’t so harsh.

And I do have some, not harsh questions, but some deep diving questions that you’re going to like, that I’ll share here in a second.

So I like to ask just some basic questions like, hey, what do you do for fun?

Or, hey, I noticed that you’re in Albania, or you are in the Philippines.

And then I ask them about where they actually live.

And I’ve traveled a ton, over 80 countries now, I think, and a lot of them I’ve gone back to.

That’s kind of how I got back into short term rentals.

So if you’re new to the channel, I still stay in a whole lot of short term rentals.

But I always kind of start with that because I have that in common.

I can say, oh, yeah, most of the time I’ve been to these places, and it’s kind of fun to bring up those memories.

So I always like to start off easy so that they’re feeling comfortable.

And then I start to get into the questions.

So mind you, we don’t get to the interview stage until we’ve already asked a lot of questions via email.

And we even ask our candidates to send us a video before we get to the live interview.

And the video allows us to really see their English level.

Again, this is if you’re hiring someone that’s in a foreign country where English isn’t their first language.

But I know a lot of you are out there.

So I like to start off just with the background.

Can you tell me again about your work background?

And I know that you already answered a lot of these questions in our emails.

Luckily, we have some really great people on our team now that are doing a lot of the filtering out before I get to the interview.

But I still am interviewing everyone that joins our team.

And I do find it exciting.

We do about like three or four series of emails to see if people can follow directions, to see how serious they are about the position.

So that weeds out a lot of people.

And then there’s some other basic generic questions.

I don’t really like to ask these basic generic ones, but I’m just going to put them in here.

We’ll start off and then we’ll get into some of the juicy questions here in a second.

So what qualities make you a team player?

So we have our core values laid out on our job postings all the time.

If you’ve never thought about your core values or maybe you’re just getting started and you just have one property, it’s important to think about these things.

So these could be things like honesty, really big for us, accountability, really big for us, and teamwork, really big for us as well.

These are this is a team team sport here with short term rentals.

So we also have continuous improvement.

And our last core value, our fifth core value is positive guest experience.

Always, because if our guests don’t have a positive experience, you know what happens?

They don’t leave positive reviews.

And you know what that does to your short term rental?

It really hurts your revenue.

So those are our core values.

Maybe think that through.

If this is your first time hiring someone, what’s really important to you?

And you know, there’s a lot of discussion out there.

Do we hire someone based off the experience they have, or do we hire them based off their values?

And that’s a tough one.

I would say a lot of the things we do in the short-term rental world are much more procedural, right?

So most people can learn them without too much challenge.

So you may want to look at the core values, but that’s up for debate.

So okay, what qualities make a team player?

What do you look for in an employer?

So these are pretty basic questions you’ve heard.

Another really generic question you’re going to hear, tell me about when you had a problem and how you handled it, right?

These are questions that people pretty much prepare for before an interview because they know they get asked all the time.

So let’s get into some more important questions and dig a little bit deeper.

First of all, you’re hiring someone virtually.

You want to ask about their experience working virtually.

What experience do you have working virtually?

How long have you worked virtually?

Do you have distractions at home?

Do you have family members?

You can ask these things, right?

How was their communication at their last position where they worked virtually?

Just keep digging and remember to give them some time to respond, right?

A lot of times we find ourselves, if we see that the other person’s maybe a little uncomfortable, they don’t know quite how to respond or they’re not quite prepared, then we sort of just answer for them or we keep talking.

But you don’t want to do that in an interview.

You want to give them the chance to tell you what’s on their mind.

Here’s another good one.

What benefit of remote work do you value the most?

So a lot of times we hear, well, I don’t have to commute anymore.

And yeah, that’s a great one.

That’s why so many people are working remote now.

Let them explain to you, and this will also get them a little more excited about the position as you go on.

Here’s a good one.

What would your last boss or manager say about you?

Remember to leave that silence in there.

Another good one you’ll want to ask, especially hiring virtually, what tools are you familiar with?

What tools have you used before?

If someone does have short-term rental experience, well, you want to ask them, have you used Price Labs?

Have you used property management programs?

Are you familiar with Airbnb?

I mean, all these things, hopefully, you got out of the way before you even get to the interview.

But give them a chance to let them tell you what tools they’ve used over their career.

If this is a virtual position, then they have to be a little techie, right?

Because everything’s happening online.

Remember to keep digging.

So if they talk about one tool, ask them what their favorite feature was about it.

Ask them if it helped improve their efficiency.

If so, in what way?

Okay, so we want to know about their work background.

We want to know what they’re looking for in this virtual position.

We want to know about the tools.

We want to know about challenges they’ve had.

Here’s another question that probably doesn’t get asked very often.

It’s asking them, who is the most ambitious or driven person you know?

So this isn’t one that’s very common, and they’re going to have to think about it, unless they’re tuning in to this podcast, which we do have people tuning in, and gosh, I don’t know the exact number anymore, but I want to say like over 80 countries.

So thank you for all of you tuning in.

And if you haven’t left us a review yet, well, I would really appreciate that.

It is amazing getting the feedback, and I always love hearing from you.

I read every email, so go to strriches.com, submit a request for a topic, or just let us know what you think, and I will read it, I promise.

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

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

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

Here’s another question.

When was your last passionate debate?

Who was it with?

And what was it about?

How did it turn out?

So we want to pause after all these questions, but this is one that really they’re going to have to think about, and they’re going to pull something up.

It might not be good what they pull up, but hopefully it allows you to uncover just a little bit more kind of what they value and the type of person that they are.

Here’s another one, and this one I haven’t heard very often at all, and this one’s a little harsh, but why shouldn’t I hire you?

What are your biggest weaknesses?

So we hear that one all the time, and someone will turn a weakness into a positive, like I always show up too early.

So yes, we hear that one all the time, but why shouldn’t I hire you?

That’s a pretty good one.

Give it a try if you’re out there looking to bring on a new team member.

Another one that I really like, what motivates you the most?

So I think most people when they respond, they know not to say things like, oh, I’m really motivated to make more and more money or things like that.

And they sort of search for something that’s going to help fulfill the company.

You would hope, believe me, it’s not always that way.

But hopefully, there’s something there that is a little bit outside of money.

Obviously, we all need to make money.

That’s why we get a job.

But maybe someone’s interested in investing in real estate, or maybe someone that loves to travel and they’d love to host guests.

If there’s some sort of underlying attributes to your job or your position or the way you posted it that really has them excited, well, it’s going to be a lot easier to keep them excited and sort of keep that momentum going as you bring them on to your team.

Another question I like to ask, and this one gets asked all the time, but it’s a good one, is tell me where you see yourself in three years.

And sometimes you’ll see people say, you know, well, I plan to become a doctor and have something that has nothing to do with the actual job that we’re posting.

So we know that not everyone maybe wants to stay a guest receptionist or wants to work on support tickets or something like that.

But a good answer is still going to incorporate your business, right?

You know, maybe they say, I want to start an entry level position, but I want to move up.

I want to have people working underneath me.

I want to be part of a company or working with an owner that has plans to grow their portfolio.

Everyone likes to have a sense of direction, right?

So you need to be able to provide that for them, what your future plans are, and hopefully the two of yours match up at least a little bit.

The last one here is also a good one.

It’s just, what questions do you have for me?

And so if you’ve had a series of email questions going back and forth, sometimes people don’t always have a question.

It depends on how good your job posting was, but usually it’s nice for them to have something, right?

It shows that they care.

So that’s it.

That wasn’t in any particular order, and those were some generic questions, but I guarantee there’s some in there that you haven’t asked before.

And if you haven’t hired your first assistant or your first team member to help you with your short term rental or your short term rentals, I highly suggest it.

Luckily, we live in a world that’s super virtual these days.

We can do things from thousands of miles away.

All we need is a good internet connection.

And so if you’re right on the fence, I hope you take the leap, and I hope these questions and I hope our podcast and all of our prior episodes, we’ve talked about this before, including places where you can post your position.

We’ve talked about those in prior episodes.

You can check them all out at strriches.com.

And we also have a really cool tool now that you can use for free on strriches.com that will help you find all these episodes without having to search them.

It’s actually a clone of myself.

I know that sounds crazy, but we’ve been producing content for years and years, tons and tons of hours, and we’re also on YouTube video if you’re listening to the audio version.

And sometimes it’s hard to remember exactly when we talked about a certain thing, but we’ve talked about most things now.

I forget the episode numbers too.

And so this is a way just to go back and really ask it anything.

You can ask it what bed mattress we like to use in our properties.

You can ask it if you should work with an independent housekeeper or a housekeeping company.

Really, sky’s the limit.

It’s trained on all of the content that we’ve produced for years and years.

And it’s got a good sense of humor too.

So go to strriches.com.

Check it out.

There’s a little bot button in the bottom right.

I think you’ll like it.

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

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

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

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

You can head over to restmethods.com forward slash AI and get your copy for free.

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

Welcome back to the Short-term rental riches podcast. If you’re new here, well, we have quick actionable episodes every week with a focus on short-term rentals. This week we’re talking about getting some additional help with our short-term rentals or with our business or with our personal life. We’re talking about hiring a virtual team member and I didn’t use the word assistant because the reality is we have a lot of opportunity at our fingertips.

The world is more virtual than ever and we can hire people virtually for any aspect of a business. So, from marketing to finance to help with our short-term rentals or our guest reception. I’ve talked before about hiring in the Philippines from online jobs and a lot of our team members are from the Philippines and they are amazing and will continue to be hiring people in the Philippines, but I just discovered another job site this time in Eastern Europe and I want to compare and contrast and let you know why it might be a good option for you to hire a team member. I know what you might be thinking if you’re just getting started with your short-term rental is that maybe it doesn’t make financial sense to hire a team member or it seems like too much work or maybe you’re concerned that their language, their English level isn’t going to be where you need. Well, I’m here to tell you that all of those things should not be a concern. We’ve hired a lot of people from all over the place and we’re now Mexico, Philippines, and I just hired someone for our team from Eastern Europe. I’m really excited to have them on our team.

And so, I want to talk about jobrack.eu. This is the website that I’ve used. One of the things I really like about it is that it’s similar to onlinejobs.ph. If you missed that episode, go back and check that out. We talked about just hiring virtual help in general, but how you could outsource your guest communications in that episode, which is episode 143. We talked specifically with online jobs, but there’s also some other good tips and tricks in there. If you missed that one, go back and check it out. Some of the things that I like about jobrack is first of all, it’s in Eastern Europe. So it’s not quite as far as Asia for those of us that are in the United States. And so, the time difference, the time zone difference is a lot easier for some of us. That’s one thing that’s great. The other thing that I like about jobrack.eu is that you can also hire your team members directly. So, a lot of you are familiar with and probably have even used Upwork at some time in the past, or there’s another one called Fiverr. One of the downsides with those platforms is that those platforms take a big commission or a big percentage of whatever payment that you end up sending for help, for assistance or for that virtual team member. Upwork, I’ve heard, 20 % are higher. And so, the great thing with jobrack.eu, again, is that you can hire directly. So, when I talk about Eastern Europe, jobrack publishes jobs in Eastern Europe mainly. And so, these are places like Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo. And these names might not be that familiar to you. These countries, I should say. But don’t let that concern you or alarm you. I’ve visited a lot of these places personally already. And so, I guess for me, it just seems a little more natural just to look for the best talent possible in the whole world as long as they fit what we’re looking for. But if you haven’t heard of these countries, just know that there’s some excellent, excellent talent there, some amazingly talented and experienced candidates. And I’ve just finished a whole bunch of interviews actually just right before this call. And I got to say, I’m really impressed with the experience and from all over the place. So, I’ve met with people from Croatia, from Serbia, from Kosovo, you name it. There’s applications coming in from all these different places and they are experienced. Their English levels are really good. Of course, you want to make sure that your application or your job posting is as clear as possible.

So, in ours, for example, we clearly state in there that we need a very high English level. And that’s one of the questions that we send out before we even entertain the idea of interviewing someone. We ask them to rate their English level. So, it just simply says, how would you rate your English level from one to ten? We do most of our calls via Zoom. And so, we want to make sure that you’re comfortable speaking in English. So, everyone I met with had excellent, excellent English skills. Again, you can find excellent candidates in Philippines with great English skills as well. But just wanted to give you another option, because a lot of you probably haven’t heard or considered Eastern Europe for some help with your short-term rentals or with your business. Now, just a quick rundown on the cost for jobrack.eu. And this is at the time of this recording. It’s about two hundred and fifty dollars to post a position for a whole month. But if you don’t find a candidate, you get to repost your position. I’ll say we’re going through bringing on our second team member right now. And it really shouldn’t take you more than 30 days, as long as you know exactly what you want. And you need to make sure that you know exactly what you want. So, if you’re looking for some virtual help managing your guest communications, then you might want to include things like familiarity with Airbnb and VRBO, great English skills, great customer service skills, ability to work on this specific schedule. That’s another really important thing that you want to put in your job posting. You want to make sure that whoever you hire, whoever you’re talking to, knows exactly what time zone and what times you need the position for. Now, again, I realize this might not be for everyone. And there’s a lot of you out there probably thinking I can’t afford this right now or this doesn’t really make sense for me. But I’ll tell you what, after you bring on your first team member, you’re going to be really, really happy you did. If you’re just getting started with your short-term rental and you just want some help and you want to take away the majority of the virtual work.

So, messaging and guest management and those types of things. Well, then I always recommend hiring for your busiest schedule. And so, for us, that is Thursday through Monday during check in times and during checkout time. So, it’s not realistic to try to find someone to work 24 7 or be on call 24 7. But if you’re just looking to get rid of the majority of your work, check out jobrack.eu. Make sure you know exactly what you’re looking for. And you’re going to be really happy that you did. OK, so if you’re deciding that it’s about time to bring someone on, I want to give you just a couple quick time saving tips. Things that I do when we’re bringing new team members on to our team. And the first one is we’ve already mentioned is just make sure your job posting is exactly what you’re looking for. So, you’re not attracting the wrong candidates. And it also helps you think through exactly what you need help with, too. And maybe there’s much more than your guest management. Maybe you want help with your finances, with bookkeeping, with managing your email inbox, you name it. You can get help for it. And what I found with myself is that if I’m procrastinating with some sort of my business life or personal life, it’s usually because that’s not something that I want to be doing. And so, I keep putting it off. And the reality is that there’s always someone out there that’s going to enjoy the same thing that you’re putting off and be better at it than you.

And so, if you have the resources, I highly recommend that you think through what some of these things are and you get some help for it. But once you’ve decided you need help, you don’t have to spend hours and hours trying to hire people. So, my real quick, simple little process is just to make sure I’ve thought out in advance all of the questions that I want to ask a potential applicant and I will ask them in person. That takes a lot of time, right? Interviewing and scheduling the interview and doing all that. So, I send out a series of emails, four to five different emails with four to five different questions on each one. And based on that, you can really narrow down your candidates. So, I like to narrow down to five candidates, max. And then I do an interview where you can clarify prior responses that they send out, ask some additional questions. I’ve got a couple quick interview questions for you here coming up in a second, but I don’t do a whole lot of interviews. So basically, once we get to that point, I haven’t really spent too much time. I asked the same questions to the same candidates to see their responses. One of the things that we’re now including in those emails, by the way, is a disk assessment. This is a personality test. And I found this to be really insightful. So actually, everyone on our team has now done this. If you guys haven’t heard of this, we’ll include a link in the description and the show notes where you can go and take it for yourself. We’re just using a free test right now. I’m not sponsored in any way by this company. I’m also not sponsored or affiliate with jobrack. I’m just want to bring more resources to you guys to help you out if you’re feeling overwhelmed and you think it’s about time to hire someone. So, check out the disk assessment. It’s interesting just to know ourselves a little bit better, too. Right. OK. So, you’ve sent out your series of email questions, maybe three, four, five series of emails. And each one of them has several different questions. So, remember, you can just write the questions once you send the same questions. Maybe you need to tailor them slightly before you send them back to your candidates based on any questions they’ve asked you. That is a very good question to always ask, by the way, is what questions do you have about me? Do you have about my property? Do you have about my business? And if someone has no questions, well, maybe they’re not too interested in actually working with you. And they’re just really looking more for a paycheck. So that’s something that you can kind of hone out by crafting your email messages a little better.

Another answer you might see, a very common one now, is if you’re asking someone why they’re interested in working with you, is that they want to work remotely. Don’t we all? Yes, the whole world wants to work remotely now, but not everyone can. And it’s not as easy for everyone to do. And this also shouldn’t be the only reason that they want to work with you, right? Because there’s a lot of remote work opportunities now. And I don’t know where this is going to leave the US or other job markets that are losing potential jobs to other countries. But the reality is for our businesses, for our personal lives, we should be working with whoever it is we find to be the most appropriate for the position, to be the most talented. And if we’re running a business, of course, we need to keep our costs in mind. Right. Just to clear something up to real quickly is that a lot of times people might feel bad about paying a lower salary in a different country. But you shouldn’t. The thing is that the salary you’re paying goes farther in a country if it’s cheaper to live there. So right now, the dollar is at an all-time high. Not to say it’s going to be there forever. And that’s something that you need to consider if you’re paying someone a different country and the exchange rate between their home currency and the currency you’re paying them in. If that changes a lot, well, then the amount of spending power they’re going to have is going to change. That’s one thing you need to consider. But right now, if you’re in the US, the dollar is really high and working virtually is easier than it’s ever been.

And there’s a lot of very talented people out there. So, after you really thought through your questions, you sent them out, you narrowed it down. So, you’re doing one, maybe two interviews. You can always send out a test project. That’s a good idea as well. Once you’ve decided on a candidate, it’s good to send out a formal agreement. You guys both sign it. You can send it with a digital signing program. So, everyone’s always on the same page. You may want to put in there that you want to start out on a test basis just to make sure that things go the way you want. And they’re not too permanent right in the beginning, although that can deter some candidates. Remember this process, this whole process shouldn’t really take more than 30 days to to find candidates. I would suggest one other thing when you’re on jobrack or you’re on onlinejobs. If you’re looking in the Philippines, there are other sites we’ve talked about before, like indeed. When you’re on these sites, it’s good to look at the candidates that are already looking for positions. If you’re looking for a marketing position, for example, type in marketing and see what type of experience you could expect to get that’s already available. So that’s a really good thing to do. And you can also invite people to your job after you’ve posted it. So that’s something I like to do at the very beginning. We’ll post a position. We’ll go through and invite, you know, maybe 10, 20, 30 people. Again, that’s a copied message that says, hey, John or Julie or whatever it happens to be. I saw your profile. I think you might be a great fit for a position. Here’s a link to check it out. Boom. Copy paste, copy paste. Of course, you don’t want to be sending that message to people that you don’t think will be a good fit. We’ve got to remember that these are real people, even though everything’s virtual and they’re looking for a position for a reason. They want to make a change in their career. They’re looking for more growth. These people have families. I mean, just because it’s virtual doesn’t mean you should take anything for granted. We want to make sure that we’re respecting everyone’s time. And for those candidates that don’t work out, it’s good to send them just a short message, letting them know, thanking them for their time and consideration and letting them know that you decide to move forward with another candidate. Maybe it was just based on experience. So just some final thoughts here on on hiring. I think it’s important that we trust our gut. You know, they say our gut is our second brain and it really does seem to just make the right decision for us sometimes. So, make sure you trust your gut. If something’s feeling uneasy or doesn’t feel right or you’re suspicious about something, make sure you bring it up as well. We want to talk about prior challenges and we want to ask any question we have, especially during that interview stage.

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 174: Find out why Virtual management is the future of property management

Welcome to short-term rental riches. Will discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals. Quick, Actionable items to Acquire, Manage and Scale your portfolio. I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. This week, we’re breaking down management fees. Management fees in terms of what a property manager would be charging you for your property to professionally manage it. And they’re all across the board, and I’ve got 19 of them, and we’re gonna just run through them one by one. I’m gonna start with more specific to short-term rentals and then kind a back it out into long-term rentals. And some of them blend together, and some of them are specific to each one. Then we’re also gonna just end with a couple questions that you should be asking yourself in regards to your property management, or before you pick a property manager. And this really started after doing some market research in Destin, Florida, and I was pulling up random reservations just to do a bit of study on the market there. And one of the listings I pulled up had a reservation for around $1 ,000, and when I broke down the detail, it was a lot of fees, and there were some that I hadn’t seen in there.

Now, this was a reservation, a direct booking through a company. I’m not gonna say the name, but I will say it starts with a V, and it ends with an A, and it rhymes with shmashmasha. So maybe that gives you a little insight. They’re one of the biggest property managers in the nation with around 44 ,000 properties under management, I believe. And now I’m sure their fees are different in every market, and I don’t wanna say anything bad. I know that a lot of people out there probably have a really good experience with this company, but I know that there are others that don’t as well.

So, let’s go ahead and just break down some of these fees. I think the most common one, and this is the same whether it’s a short -term rental or it’s a long -term rental, and that’s just a base management fee. Although, this management fee can really range. I mean, anywhere from 10 to 40 to even 50 % in the short -term rental world, especially in some traditional vacation rental markets that are dominated by short -term rentals, and there’s not a lot of traditional housing. Sometimes there’s some management companies in those areas that are really, they have a firm hold on the market, and they’re charging a lot of management fees. Although, if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, then you probably know that I don’t think that’s necessary to be working with one of those companies anymore. So, if you missed our management series we did on virtual management, go back and check that out. Those were episodes 174 through 177. We did four different ones. There’s a lot of things that we do with my personal portfolio, just to give you a little idea there. So that’s the first fee. That’s the management fee, and it ranges across the board. Sometimes if you’re working with a co-host, you might get paid automatically, and then maybe you pay the co-host afterwards. The traditional way that a property manager’s going to collect this fee is to collect all your revenue and then send you a direct deposit. Hopefully it’s a direct deposit. No one’s sending checks or anything these days, but then they’ll take their commission out of that. The next fee, very common on short -term rental listings, is a cleaning fee. Although, if you’ve been doing a lot of study lately, you’ve probably seen that there’s quite a few people recommending not having a cleaning fee. And the cleaning fee is really one of those things that it could be a revenue source for some of us, or might just be pass-through, as in, I pay $100 to my housekeeper and I charge $100 to the guest. But this is one place where you can work with your pricing and strategize a little bit to see if it affects your occupancy. To me, a just rough rule for charging a housekeeping fee is maybe half of the night stay, or the average daily rate. So, if your average daily rate’s $400, you might be able to charge a $200 cleaning fee. Again, it depends on the size of the property, and you really gotta do some more study to kind of break it down.

So, I just wanna talk about the general fees today, just to give a quick overview. The third one is one that’s not always charged on direct booking websites, but most of the big companies are gonna see this. This is what they call their booking or their reservation fees. So of course, Airbnb has this. This can be anywhere from 14 to 18%. VRBO has this. Booking .com has this. And direct booking websites, like the one I referred to earlier without saying their actual name, they charge for this as well, although it’s a little more disguised, and it might come across with the wording guest service fee or something like that, but it’s actually a direct booking fee, just like what Airbnb would charge. So, a lot of times these companies are charging a management fee to manage a property. Maybe it’s 20, maybe it’s 30%. And then they’re also charging another fee on top of that for their direct bookings. And so, you gotta add those up, and just make sure you know what you’re getting. Really, that’s what it comes down to in the end. The next fee you might see, and again, this is gonna be on more of these direct booking sites or with your property manager, not through a direct OTA like Airbnb or VRBO, but it’s an advertising fee. And again, there’s different lingo going around in the industry, so these could be the same thing. You just wanna make sure you check with your property manager to know what they’re charging your guests for your property. But that’s another one. Could be an advertising or some sort of marketing fee on top of a reservation. Next up, number five, we have a technology fee. And again, these might all be the same thing, an advertising, technology fee, guest service fee, but it’s just important that we know what they are and what fees are being charged. I do think it’s very important to have the right technology in place. And of course, you know that if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, we’ve got almost 200 episodes now, I can’t believe it. And if you’ve missed a lot of them, you’re just tuning in, well, welcome. You can head over to strriches.com. We’ve got a ton of resources for you there, and we’ve got a lot of episodes on technology. You can just go to the little handy dandy search box and type in technology, or you can see that we’ve even got it broken down by category. We also have the favorite tech stack that I use with my personal portfolio under a recommended resource. So, make sure you check that out as well. Next up, we might have a furnishing or decor setup fee. So, this is gonna be more in the setup of your listing if your property is not already set up when you start working with a property management company. So just make sure you’re thorough with your questions and you know exactly what the management company is providing you, what they’re charging you, what your contract terms are, and all those types of things. I’m gonna get to a couple more specific questions you wanna make sure you ask in just a second here. Next up, we have a maintenance fee or some sort of coordination fee. And again, this can really range too.

So, I know some of the long -term property managers I work with, they can charge anywhere from 10 to 20 % to purchase items on my behalf, to coordinate them, to have them delivered to a property, to have them installed, or maybe there’s a bathroom remodel and they don’t have their own in -house contractors and so they outsource it and then they charge 20 % on top. So, you can see this range. I would recommend that you try to negotiate the higher ticket items with a lower rate. So maybe you need to buy a $1 ,000 refrigerator, for example. If you don’t have the time to actually shop that yourself, then I would try to negotiate some of those one -time ticket items down just a little bit. So next up, you might see, this one’s a little more rare, but a seasonal rate adjustment fee. So, a revenue manager, for example, the property manager that’s going in and editing your prices, some companies are charging for this on top of the management fee, on top of guest service fees, and on top of all these other things. Number nine, we have guest communication fee. And this is pretty much what property management is for, especially when it comes to short-term rentals. We’re not hiring a property manager and expecting to do all of the communication ourselves, although there is another company out there managing lots of rentals, almost 30,000. Not gonna say that name either, but I guess it rhymes with Devolve or it has the name in the middle. I’ll let you leave that one to your imagination, but they’re managing almost 30,000 properties. From what I understand, they maybe aren’t handling the communication the whole way through. So, make sure that is something you’re checking on as well. Key exchange fee, this one hopefully is becoming less and less common, but sometimes we have condominiums that don’t allow us to install automatic door locks, or they have a gate, or there’s some sort of common door, and a key actually needs to be exchanged. Number 11, we have an administration fee. Now, this could be another name for management, it could be a name for back-end office work, whatever it happens to be, but sometimes this is showing up on your statement as well. And number 12 is very similar, but I’ve seen this one show up too, and that’s a financial reporting fee, or a monthly statement fee. So, there’s different names for all of these fees. Sometimes something might get lumped into the other one, but they all are in your contract, so make sure they definitely should be. So, we just wanna make sure we’re double checking that. Number 13, and this is a pretty common one for short-term rentals, is a credit card processing fee. As we know, the credit card companies charge us to process payments. We use Stripe, and it’s about 3%. That’s one of the nice things about working with Airbnb is we don’t have that additional credit card processing fee. But this is a very common one that’ll show up on property management statements, something we charge for, because it’s something we have to pay for, and it’s a percentage off of the total amount. Number 14, inventory and inspection fee. So, if you’re working with a full, traditional property manager, hopefully they’re helping you out with some inventory, and they’re checking on your property from time to time, but you might see this show up as an additional fee in there. Number 15, a security deposit management fee. This one’s a little less common, but we need to be taking security deposits depending on the OTA, the listing site we’re using. And it does take some work collecting and managing a deposit and charging a deposit, if it turns out that there is some damage in your unit. So, you might see this showing up in your statements as well. Number 16, late payment fee. Now this is one that’s probably gonna show up more with a long-term rental. One of the nice things about short-term rentals is that we get all of our payment upfront, right? That means we don’t have to evict someone for non -payment. Unless you’re focusing more on medium-term stays, in which case you might be collecting monthly payments, and then you might see this late payment fee show up as well. Remember when a guest stays more than 30 nights, or some cities it’s only 28 nights, they actually become a tenant. So, the laws change, and that’s something you wanna take note of. Number 18, utility management fee. The more properties you add, the more utilities can kind a become a pain in the butt. And sometimes utility company doesn’t let someone work on behalf of your properties without having notarized documents, and we don’t want the lights to go out on a property, do we? So, this is one we definitely have to check. It’s definitely less common, but you could see this one showing up as well. And last but not least, we have some emergency situations sometimes, don’t we? Things out of our control and very common for a property management company to have an after-hours fee, some sort of emergency fee for actually showing up to the property. Sometimes you see this with maintenance technicians where they have a normal rate, and an after -hours rate is twice as much. It can be really, really high. So those are 19 fees that you’re probably gonna be showing up.

Of course, these should all be in your contract, so make sure you double-check that. Make sure you know exactly what you’re getting with the property management company you’re working with. It’s a big decision working with a property manager, so you shouldn’t take it lightly. One of the things that I like to ask, at least in regards to my long-term rentals, which I work with a lot of property managers on, is are you investing in property as well? It’s nice to have a manager that comes from an owner’s perspective. So, with that said, if you guys have been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that we’re managing other properties now, and of course, we’re coming from an owner’s perspective. We’re actually using my team to manage your short-term rentals. So be happy to chat with you about that. If you’re at all interested, you can go to strriches.com. There’s a little property management button there, and we can connect over Zoom, see if your property makes a good fit.

Hope that gave you a little better insight into some of the fees that might be showing up, and maybe there’s some in there that you didn’t know about. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous day.

Want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties. I want to give you my e-book that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge, It’s my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods.com. That’s REST methods.com

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 174: Find out why Virtual management is the future of property management

I know managing our short-term rentals, sometimes can seem like a lot of work and I have sad news that work does not stop when our guest checks out. No, it doesn’t. There are still a lot of things that we need to be doing if we want to be professionally managing our short-term rentals but good news. We can have helped. We don’t have to do these things ourselves. So, I want to talk this week about how virtual assistants can help boost our property performance after guest checks out

Welcome to short-term rental riches will discuss vesting in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale your portfolio. I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast. We’ve been talking a lot about management lately and I hope it’s not scaring you off. If you don’t already have your short-term rental because even though there are a lot of processes and a lot of things that we should be doing to best manage our properties doesn’t mean we have to do them all ourselves and there are lots of systems we can put in place to save us time. I want to talk this week about how having the right virtual assistants can help boost our property performance. All the things You should be doing with your property after and as your guest is checking out or things that your property manager should be doing for you if you’re not managing your property yourself. So, let’s Jump Right In.

So sometimes you get a message right before you think, your guest is checking out and its good news, they’re asking for an extension. A lot of times this happens, it’s something we need to know how to manage. We need to act quickly if we have another guest check in, and we’ll, of course, we won’t be able to do it, but if we don’t, then we need to involve Airbnb or for taking this reservation directly then, we need to make sure that we charge the guest, get that extra money and we’ll keep them on our property. That’s a great scenario, but sometimes our guests don’t check out even when they should, yeah, they stay after the checkout and this can create some issues.

So, we need to know what to do. Sometimes we have to involve support, sometimes we have to charge the guest actress. There is a procedure to making sure that our guest checks out on time. So, again, this is the Fourth part of our management series, if you miss the prior three episodes, go back and check them out. I really do think that virtual management is the future of property management because we can do all these things efficiently from wherever we are. As I record this podcast, I’m thousands of miles away from my property. So that was the first part of our series why I think virtual management is a future of all property management. And then part two, we talked about what we need to be doing before our guests even check-in. There’s a lot that goes into that part 3 was all about what comes up and what we need to be doing while our guests are actually at our property.

And today we’re talking about the very tail end of things when our guests are checking out and what we need to do afterwards. And so sometimes they don’t check out on time. Sometimes they leave items, we need to have a policy in place for storing items. Maybe mailing them back. A lot of times this is just a cell phone charger or cable or something like that, but regardless we want to let our guests know. We want that Personal Touch and we want to let them know that they forgot something. So, you need to have a policy for that. We all do it a little bit differently but it’s something that will come up for sure. So, when it comes to the turnover, the actual housekeeping, turnover, I got to say this is probably the most challenging aspect that any short-term rental operator is going to have now. It’s fantastic to be working with a professional housekeeping company, but sometimes they might miss a step here or there and so we use Software to help manage all of this.

We’ve talked about Breezeway. Breezeway is also going to help you track maintenance. So that is our operational tool how we make sure that nothing gets missed. If we have some sort of issue with our housekeeping, then we will make sure to check our housekeepers list to make sure something wasn’t missed. We can require photos. We can see exactly when our housekeepers finish the job without having to message them and if we have a guest hanging around hoping for an early check-in, well then, we can message them, give them the good news and let them know. Things are good to go. Sometimes there’s issues though, during the check out, this is where we’re going to uncover.

If there was some sort of property damage, if perhaps there’s an item missing, if there’s an issue, with whatever it happens to be a stain on one of our Linens. And so, we have another checklist for this. There’s reason we use checklist. There’s a reason Airlines use checklist because it helps us make sure that we don’t skip any steps and so our housekeeping, being staff, our maintenance staff, or whatever, housekeeping and maintenance staff were working with. They can fill out all these forms and we get those virtually to make sure that our properties are staying in great shape. So, if there is an issue of some sort, well, yep, sometimes we’ve got call up Airbnb. We’ve got a call up VRBO we have to message back and forth to guess. We have to provide invoices to help settle a resolution. If there is some sort of reimbursement that’s due to us. So, it’s good to have a Procedure in place for that. So that it’s not taking longer than it should take. And sometimes, unfortunately, it does take a little bit of time.

Again, I think this is something that you can do yourself, but depending on the size of your portfolio, sometimes it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it doesn’t make financial sense. Sometimes it’s just something that you don’t want to do. And so that is a time when you want to reach out to a property manager, whether it’s local or virtual. Let’s assume that we had a nice smooth, I’ll check out. There were no issues. There were no items left behind. We didn’t have to involve Airbnb. There wasn’t a maintenance issue that we needed to report and our next guest checks in, with no issues, her a good news, that’s what we want. We want a full calendar. Well, we’re not going to have a full calendar if we’re not monitoring our performance. So even though our guests are checking out, we need to be tracking our performance. We need to make sure that our pricing is correct. We need to track Reviews. In fact, review management should be a whole career in itself because it really is the lifeblood of our properties.

If we have bad reviews, they’re not going to get booked. And so, we need to know how to remove reviews that are eligible to be removed. We want to be requesting reviews especially from our best guest that we were chatting with a lot if they haven’t already. Left us one. We do that custom review request to make sure we’re getting as many as possible, and they’re good ones. And if they’re not good, well you better believe. We’re going to bat to try to get all of them removed and it is a process and it is a skill, so it’s nice. We’ve got someone on our team that’s dedicated to just, to review management, having great reviews and making sure our pricing is perfect by having a good grass on our market and our Market data, that’s going to do a lot to bring in more reservations into our properties.

But another thing that we want to be doing always is letting our guests know that they can book through us directly if have your own direct booking website head over to Strriches.com and search in our episode list, we talked about direct bookings and some of the tools you can use to set that up on your own. So the more online travel agencies where we have our properties listed the better, but ultimately, the end goal is just to have all of our reservations coming directly to us. And a lot of times that comes in the form of repeat guest we already know. There are great guest helps fill up our calendar, a little more in advance. So, we want to make sure that we have that website setup. We have marketing materials where our guests know where to find us because we got to be careful here. We can’t just reach out on the Airbnb platform and request their personal information. Asked to book through us directly. Next time, that is a big No-No that could get your listing taken down. So, we need to have another way to collect our guest’s information. We use our guide books and so every time they access one of our digital guidebooks, we capture their email and that goes in our list that we can use for marketing later on.

So, I hope This series is not intimidated you from managing your own short-term rental. I really do think you can do this effectively with minimal time. If you put the right Tools in place, but if you’re starting to scale, you can’t do it all alone. That is the truth. And so, I really recommend hiring another team member which can definitely be virtual. We’ve talked a lot about how, a lot of our team is from the Philippines and Mexico. The world is your oyster as they say and we can work virtually. Ali more easily than we ever have before. So, look for some help. If you’re finding yourself in a position where you’re just getting overwhelmed and especially if you’re planning on scaling because this can be the bottleneck, this can be the reason why you don’t scale. So, I tried lots of options in the past from Outsourcing Communications to other companies to hiring property managers. And now fortunately, with the scale of my portfolio, I’ve got my own team and it really is Fantastic knowing that, they’re there for our guests because at the end of the day, it comes down to hospitality. So, I know we’ve talked about a ton of different things in this series.

This is the fourth episode now. So, one, two, three four in each one of those. There’s a lot of little things that goes into professionally managing a short-term rental. And so, if you’re missing any of those things and you’re managing your property yourself, make sure to incorporate them, make sure to look into them more. If you’re working with a professional property manager already maybe ask them a few questions and make sure that they are doing all of these things as well, because it’s really going to affect your performance.

And if you’re at a point where you’re managing your properties and you’re just a little overwhelmed and you’re looking for some extra help. Well, we would love to partner with you, you can head over to Strriches.com, same place where you can find all of our episodes that I’ve been recording for the last few years there. You’ll see a property management button where you can connect with us directly to see if you’re Please make a good fit for us to partner with and use my exact team. So, I hope this has given you some good insight and until next time I hope you have a fabulous day.

Want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties, I want to give you my e-book. That will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It’s my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods.com. That’s REST methods.com

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 174: Find out why Virtual management is the future of property management

Welcome to short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale in your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast bottom being bada boom we are back with another topic lots and lots of great things to talk about all the time in the world as short-term rentals one of the things that’s probably most intimidating to people before they jump into short term rentals or as are getting going our guest messages yeah we don’t want to be getting gas messages in the middle of the night we don’t want to be talking with guests that are maybe not pleasant to talk to all of those things can be a little challenging right and they can be a little intimidating and they can keep us from really growing in our short terminal portfolio so until we figure out how to outsource those gas messages we’re gonna be a little limited so that’s what I want talk about this week I want to talk about several ways how we can do that where we can find this help what about some of the challenges to because we just hired our 6 full time virtual receptionist and I’m super super excited we have a lot of other virtual assistants we work with remotely that aren’t necessarily full time but we’ve got 6 in house owner team and they are rock stars and I’m so excited to have them on board so I want to talk a little bit about that but before I jump in hiring our old virtual receptionist I just want to bring up the point that people want to work remotely now right I know we went through the whole condemn make you know that as well and people discovered that they could work remotely a lot of companies discovered that their employees can work remotely yes a lot of those companies are asking employees to come back to the office and we are seen an increase in a work related travel actually a pretty large increase but the fact is if given the option people are going to want the flexibility Airbnb for example back in April. Announced that their whole company is now able to work virtually anywhere they want in the world the company of about 6000 people at the moment but they had within about a month 1000000 people visit their career page imagine that 1000000 people imagine that talent that exists out in the world and we don’t have to be constrained to our borders anymore so I want to talk about that but before I do some other quick options to outsource your gas messages you can hire a manager if that’s an easy one right that’s a no brainer that’s what they do they manage your properties and everything and I’m including the housekeeping of course this is one of the most expensive options so option number 2 you can hire your own housekeepers for example and have them help you with guest communications that can work out really well I would say we want to get to this point though after we’ve automated every possible question we can I talk a lot about automation on this channel the fact is we can automate a lot of it and our guests are used to the automation that’s not a new thing anymore so it’s not like it’s creating a bad experience for them it’s something that’s becoming standard in the hospitality industry so you can hire your manager you can hire or contract a housekeeper or maybe a close to someone that can partially help you would guess messages you can also hire a third party service and that’s dedicated to answering guest questions there’s quite a few talked before on this channel about gas di and I use them for years they used to handle all of my guests communications but I’ll tell you what if you go back to add up to so the reason I left them it was because of the gas communications yeah it gets a little more difficult when you’ve got a company handling who knows how many listings in there change employees all the time and so that was a little tricky unfortunately that’s why I left I see I do really like their software though the fourth option here is to hire our own. Receptionist and that’s what I’ve done and I am so grateful for my team they do an excellent excellent job there’s a few places where we can find our virtual assistants you might have heard of up work or fiber before I wouldn’t necessarily recommend knows all that you can find good people on there but up work for example going to charge a big percentage of between you and the person that you contract a couple of the options I’ve talked about before you can go back to episode at 76 and check those out all my jobs.P. H. that specifically for the Philippines that’s where all of my virtual receptionists are best jobs.PH also from the Philippines virtual staff finder.com we’ll find a receptionist for you so you don’t have to do the work and then there’s another 1 where you can find remote work but it’s not necessarily geared towards remote work and that’s indeed.com so if you’re deciding to hire your own receptions which I highly recommend I often find that this is for people that maybe have added 1234 properties and they start getting more more questions there’s a certain point where you’re just gonna get the questions a matter whether we like it or not some things just pop up and we’ve got to have someone on the other end to answer or you know what’s going to happen you’re going to get a bad review and rightly so we have to be there for gas so those are a few places where you can find a virtual assistants couple things you want to consider when you post your job is the time change so if your listeners in the U. S. you gotta keep your timezone in mind if you’re hiring someone from the Philippines which is basically flipped now we’re also looking out to other options places like Mexico and all of our guests for the most part speak English people speak English all around the world Philippines speak excellent English even though it’s not their first language lots and lots of people in Mexico and South America speak excellent English even though it’s not there. First language that’s all you have to do is make sure when you put your job posting out there did you have English as 1 of the main requirements if that happens to be where your properties are listed in the fearless in the show I would assume that your guys are probably speaking English so we can put these things in our job description another really crucial piece to our job description is making sure that we have the schedule we’re expecting very clear and to expect someone to work for you on call all the time 247. That’s kind of difficult right you’re not gonna tracked a lot of people that want to do that in fact the latest receptions we just hired was working with someone else and that’s the exact reason she decided to resign without person because they were on call all the time and it just wasn’t realistic quick intermission I’m super excited to announce the dates for next live event live and in person in Memphis Tennessee August 19 to 20 first this is our fourth live event and they just keep getting better and better and there’s not a ton a room so I hope you can make it will go through my whole process from start to finish what I look for properties how I find them how I set them up how I manage them how I manage them remotely with my teams and how we can scale the whole operations to retake it from start to finish perhaps one of the most exciting parts we’re gonna get on tour bus and we’re going to visit some of my actual properties in action in the operation really hope you can join us you can check out tickets at rest methods.com and again it’s gonna be a live in person I’ll be flying back from Colombia August 19 through the 20 first I hope to see you there so I understand this can be challenging if you only have a couple properties maybe don’t have the budget to fill 2004 hours 7 days a week but there are times when we receive more questions than others for us that’s Thursday Friday nights and Sunday Monday is when a lot of people checking out the coming in for the weekend and check it out after the weekend so consider hiring just one shift and known again if you listen to this new S. R. dollar is super super strong right now in fact it’s the strongest it’s ever been in my lifetime it just passed the euro I want to do a whole nother episode on this because the whole idea of currency arbitrage is a real thing and I’m living proof of the values of the United States for years now is a lot of you now so that’s a good topic in itself so we have a really strong currency right now in a lot of these other places in the world we can offer. A very fair wage for $345 an hour so consider finding someone if you’re at that point where you’re starting to get too many questions or maybe get intimidating you wanna keep scaling well consider finding just 1 person for reason will shift maybe Thursday through Monday to cover your nights or your 3:00 PM to midnight once a lot of people are checking in you might have issues so consider that I guarantee you after you hire your first virtual sets and if you don’t have 1 already right now you’re gonna wish you did it a long long time ago it’s a great person to have on your team and we can’t do this alone right in fact the last receptionist that we hired was hired partially by 1 of our other receptionist day helped me out tremendously in that search and narrowing down a really large pool of candidates so if you’re at all intimidated with the gas questions don’t hesitate to jump on 1 of those sites and submit a job posting and just see what comes back now you want to make sure that your job posting is is clear as possible I’ve got other tips on that and other videos but 1 thing that you do want to make sure you have in there is the schedule 0 percent you can say things like looking for a gas coordinator for Airbnb you know what sorts of tasks they’re going to be handling that’s things like monitoring reviews accepting reservations declining reservations if you have your own website or own direct booking website maybe they’re processing payments for you maybe they’re processing refunds maybe they’re processing resolutions with Airbnb and following up on those resolutions there are so many little tasks that we can get a lot of help with to make our business machine run a lot more smoothly and make sure our gas are happier so check out some of those sites make sure you proofread your job posting both for you posted on there and do some searches the look. Through some of the mail resumes online to see what people are offering 1 other thing I would suggest when you have your job posting or when you’re doing your interviews by the way I wouldn’t recommend doing interviews right off the bat have a series of questions that you want to send back and forth and see how those responses are before you jump on a call and potentially waste your time in someone else’s that really comes out like the fifth stage I would say in terms of exchanging communication before your scheduling a call but 1 of the things that you want to bring across the person you’re hiring is stability no 1 wants to work for a company or for a person that they don’t see sticking around now for me that’s easy I am a life for when it comes to real estate real estate for a long time now and I don’t see that changing I just like it I find it exciting and interesting short term rentals are just 1 of the little niches in side of real estate right but the 1 that’s growing tremendously and 1 where I think there’s still a ton opportunity and where I found more opportunity than other niches in the last 7 years I guess men doing short term rentals now so you want to talk about stability and talk about the future and where you see things going I guarantee if you’re getting started was for criminals right now and you hire someone at this beginning stage it’s going to help you grow your business and make it a lot easier a lot of us get into real estate because we want things to be bass who want some of our time back that’s exactly why I got into it so that I could travel more and with our our fabulous receptions team that would not be possible at all so once you find your virtual receptionist you’re gonna want to make sure that you track their progress this is important they need to feed back and so you can determine what that is for you but I do have a couple episodes on this before you can check out up so 124 and how I track progress with the rest of my team but another way to track their time and also their times but on the computer. Is to use a program called help staff they clock into it it’s an easy way to track their time but also make sure that they are in fact working for you and you can take random screenshots on the computer you’re gonna need a way to pay someone after international that’s not always very easy but there is a company called pay any year that can process and facilitate these payments for you very easily that’s what I use for all my Filipino team it’s the most cost effective it’s quickest most efficient and we all find that works really really well so a lot of things to consider here I just wanted to give you an overview and hopefully encourage you to hire someone if you haven’t yet you’re at that spot so there is a lot that goes into this I actually created a course on this is called replace yourself challenge you can get tons of free content from this podcast or on our website at S. your riches or rest methods.com but if you want the whole thing scripted out for email questions where to go the work contracts and all that stuff you can check out 3 place yourself challenge at rest methods.com the 4 week program 3 weeks is all takes in my opinion to get someone on board now I’m fully trained in that program we also have all the questions the gas normally now so there’s a ton of free resources but if you want to go really in depth you can check that out and then I’m also really really excited to offer our services we’ve got a 2417 and they are excellent so if you are out there and you’re at all interested in someone else managing the virtual part as your short term rental business give us a shout you can send us an email at contact at rest methods.com this isn’t for everyone but we’re going to manage your properties like I manage of mine so that’s exciting for me and that’s gonna help us build our business while it helps you build your business so if you are interested in that send us an email contact at rest methods.com and until next time I hope you have. A wonderful day I hope you’re out there willing in deland working on your short terminals and producing more revenue than you might otherwise in a different real estate niche until next time take care. I want to get on the fast track to financial freedom for short term rentals what all searching the properties you choir you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties I want to give you my you doctor will show you how to do just that there is no charge to my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that’s R E S T methods.com.

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• Episode 130: 5 listing upgrades to boost your search ranking
• Episode 111: Add another listing (Airbnb Linked Listing)
• Episode 93: Should You Use This Tool? (Booking.com)
• Episode 65: Are You Meeting Your Guests’ Expectations?
• Episode 25: How to Increase Your Listing Exposure