There is a lot of craziness going on in the economy. Right now, it’s more important than it’s ever been for us to manage our short-term rentals better than we’ve ever manage them. And so, this week we’re going to talk about what landlords need to know to best manage their properties. Or if they have someone managing their property for them, the questions they need to be asking their property manager.

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, it’s like Armageddon out there, isn’t it? We’ve got Banks failing, a whole bunch of craziness going on. The economy is not in good condition as it and The Federal Reserve is Raising interest rates again and they’re going to continue raising them. And what does that mean? Well, it means that less people are going to be able to afford to buy properties, which is going to put downward pressure on real estate prices, which means property prices are going to go down. Now every Market is different, of course, but it’s just a little crazy out there, right? And so, if we have a short-term rental or for planning on having a short-term rental, we need to make extra Ascertain that it’s managed professionally and we’re not missing any step.

So, welcome back. This week were breaking into part two on our management Series. So, if you missed last week, we talked about why I think virtual management is a future of all property management. But whether you’re managing your property virtually or you’re working with professional property manager this week, we’re going to talk about all the things that you should be doing before a guest actually checks into your property. So, these are things like advertising Pricing like the communication with our guests and all in the episode with just a quick checklist at our receptionist are reviewing for each and every guest that checks in to one of my properties.

The success we have with our short-term rentals really does come down to our property management. A lot of mentors of mine or people that I really look up to and the real estate space that have acquired huge portfolios of real estate, they very often say that they would much rather have a be Class Property with a class management. then in A Class Property would B class management. Why? Because if they have poor management and the property sits vacant, well, the property is not going to return very well and that is the same for short term rentals. If we have a vacant short-term rental, it’s not going to be a good investment for us.

So today is all about the things that we need to be doing before guess even checks in and it starts with our advertising. So of course, we know that we need to have professional photos for our short-term rental, but we need to have those professional photos on multiple places online. Not just Airbnb, especially in a more competitive market five, six, seven, eight years ago, you could throw up an Airbnb and pretty much anywhere in the US and someone is probably going to book it, but it’s not necessarily the case. Again, all markets are different, but it really comes down to management. So, we want to be on as many platforms as possible. I suggest at least for starters that try Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com, you will get a lot of reservations from but there are a few management pieces that go into that and I recommend you have your own direct booking website as well. The more exposure you have, the more places’ people can find you the better your property should rent.

So, I’m just going to go through Rapid Fire. A lot of the other things that you need to be doing with your short-term rental or that your property manager should be doing for your short-term rental. And if you’re not Quite sure if they are, well, you will want to make sure that you ask some. So I’m just going to go through kind of Rapid Fire. We know, we need to be on lots of OTAs. Lots of different travel agencies but we need a way to manage that easily. So, I recommend using a channel manager or property management software platform that channel manager is going to make sure that all those calendars integrate properly but we also need to make sure that all of our cancellation policies are aligned with all the different OTAs and they’re not all the same. We need to know that we have deposits in place.

So, if a guest does make a reservation that are properties protected, we need to go into all those different online, travel agencies and make sure we have all our amenities checked. Our listings need to be perfect and they need to be Revisited very often. I recommend once a month to make sure any additional feature, the one of these sites added doesn’t get missed and that you check it off for your property if it’s applicable because it will help. So, that’s first piece, we need to have our property properly advertise.

The next piece is if we do get a reservation, we need to make sure that the guest is going to be a good guest. So, there’s a whole process and making sure that they don’t have bad reviews. If they do, we need to make sure that we get there reservation canceled and there are ways to do that. I’m going to run through our checklist at the end of today’s episode, just to give you again some quick ideas. Some things you want to make sure that you are doing or your property manager is doing for you. Another way to verify our guests is to get additional information from them. So, after they made a reservation, we require a check-in form for all of our reservations outside of Airbnb. So, for booking.com, direct booking, VRBO anything outside of your being be, we get a check in form, we have them update their ID, we make sure that they verify the reservation dates and that they know that we’re going to charge them a deposit. So that is an important step as well if your guest booked a long-term reservation or a medium-term reservation, you could say over 30 days, well, we make sure that we get Lisa’s for all of those guests. Something we do digitally. So, it doesn’t take a lot of time, but it is a step that you don’t want to miss. Because if you have a guest, staying in one of your properties and you’re in a state, that’s not very landlord friendly. Well, that guess could stay in your property for a long, long time. If they know how to beat the system.

Quick news flash.
If you’re looking for a passive short-term rental investment. The reality is, you will never have one if you are always involved. It’s not a passive investment if you are the one communicating with guests, coordinating operations and issues just to name a few. So, what do you do? You can (one) hire a property manager, but traditional commissions can really hurt your profits. You can (two) hire your own team, but this comes with its own challenges and it doesn’t make financial sense for most people. I’ve dedicated years and hundreds of thousands of dollars through trial and error to figuring out how to manage my personal portfolio remotely, and it wasn’t always easy. And it took a long time but now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me and good news. Our team can also manage yours. Let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an Industry Low Fee. To find out more about partnering with us head to strriches.com hit the property management button answer couple quick questions and meet with me personally that’s strriches.com. Rest easy, knowing that with my team, your properties will be in excellent hands.

So, there’s a lot of steps goes into advertising. There’s a lot of steps to go into vetting our guests before vetting our guests. So, we got to make sure that we have the right pricing in place because if we don’t have the right price in place, well, you better believe no one’s going to book your property, unless you happen to be the only short-term rental in town. And that is just not a reality anymore. So, I always recommend using a dynamic pricing tool. I use Price Labs personally, but it doesn’t stop there. You need to know your Market. You need to know your Market data and competitive rentals and make sure that you’re pricing properly. So, if you don’t know this, if you’re working with a property manager, you want to make sure that this is something that they’re checking out as well.

A good way to check on this is to look up maybe the top ten listings, local or near your property, and see how their performance is doing and then you can weigh your performance against theirs. This is called a comp set in price labs, for example. But you could also do this manually by just looking up listings on Airbnb or VRBO check in their calendars and checking their rates, of course. That’s a lot more work. So, I just recommend using a dynamic pricing tool, just to add one more note on our pricing to, I’ve talked with a lot of Revenue managers recently people that have focused their careers, just on Revenue management, all the big hotels have this, all the big Airlines have this and it is a serious job and you can become very skilled at it. There’s much more that goes into your pricing than just having a minimum price, a base price. A maximum price and maybe some last-minute discounts or seasonal discounts. So, make sure that you are looking into this or your property manager, whoever’s helping you. It has a good grasp on your specific Market.

Okay? So, we’ve advertised our property appropriately, we’ve priced it properly. We’ve vetted any guests that have made reservations. We need to make sure that we are communicating with them in the best manner possible. Hospitality is Key right? We’re not just running a system of short-term rentals and operations although I know if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while might seem like that. But it really does come down to hospitality. Our guests don’t want to feel like they’re just a number turning through our short-term rental machine. So, we have to put some Personal Touch in place.

A good quote that I heard at a short-term rental conference at some point in the last final know, five. Ten years was that our guests are not always right but it is our job to make them feel feel that way. And I know that’s not always easy. It’s easier for some people to communicate that than it is for others, but that is our job and the reality is if our guests don’t feel right? Or if there’s an issue or something happen, well, you’re not going to get a good review likely, right? So, the little things really do matter, adding a personal touch to messages, for example, these things really matter. And remember that our reviews, every single review we get affects our properties performance in the future. So, it’s super important that we have a good approach to our Hospitality with our short-term rentals.

So, here’s just a quick few items thing that were doing things that you should be doing or things that you should make sure that your manager is doing for you, if you’re working with a property manager, first thing is, we’re going to verify what channel the guest made the reservation from. We’re going to verify if they’ve stayed with us before. If they have well, we’re going to send them a nice message, welcoming them back, we’re going Make sure that it’s not a bad. Guess we’re going to check their Past reviews. We’re going to make sure that they’re not on our block list if they are.

We’re going to reach out to Airbnb or VRBO wherever it happens to be. And we’re going to have the reservation canceled penalty-free. If the reservation came outside of Airbnb. So, through one of the other platforms that were on and that you should be on as well, we’re going to check with stripe to make sure we actually received our payment are going to make sure that we received our deposit. We’re going to make sure that we sent the guest an invoice. We’re going to double check if it’s a local guest booking our property. And if it is, we’re going to kindly ask what the purpose of their stay is. We know that there are certain times when a reservation is a little more risky than others, if you missed that episode, we did on our red flag reservation. Request will go back and check that out. And if you miss our episode on the top, 15 questions that you will get a Before a guest check in her property, go back and check that out. That’s episode number 96, we’ve received and sent literally hundreds of thousands of messages and we narrowed all those down to the top questions we got asked before the check-in and so that’s what that episodes all about.

I’m not going to Spill the Beans here. You’re going to have to check it out, but know that there are certain questions you will get asked and you got to be prepared with responses, right? That all comes back to hospitality. We like to have some personalized messages in there. If they’re repeat guests. If they’re a local, we’re going to dig into that. A little further, all of our guests communication, we’re going to be responding and five minutes or less. That is a rule that we have assuming the guest checks out. Okay. Well, we’re going to make sure that their door codes synced properly. So, we use quite a few different smart locks. We want to make sure that they have a unique door code. We use remote lock for that to integrate with all of our software. So, we want to make sure that that That went out. Okay? The beautiful thing about having a unique door code for every guesses we can send their checking instructions right away. We’re going to confirm that.

We got their check and form back that we got their lease sign. If it happens to be a medium term stay or a little longer, we’re going to confirm that they’re cleaning is scheduled after their check out. So, we use another software for that called Breezeway. We’re going to take note of their arrival and departure time, and we’re going to make sure that we adjust any automatic messages. We have to go out at the Proper time and I’ll just give you a quick example. If our guest is checking out at 6 a.m. and our checkout message is scheduled for 8:00 a.m. Well, we’re going to go in and edit that message. So, it goes out before our guest checks out otherwise what’s the purpose of sending it, right? So automated messages are fantastic, but sometimes they need to be altered and we always need a personal touch.

So, there is a lot that goes into managing a short-term rental. This series is designed to to help you make sure you don’t miss any steps. And so today we talked about some of the things that you need to be doing before your guests actually checks in, or if you’re working with a property manager, making sure that these are things that they’re doing as well.

So, there are a lot of things that go into manage our short-term rental but the truth is the better we manage it. The more money we’re going to earn the more efficient it’s going to be the better reviews; we’re going to have. So, I hope this series. This is the second part is helping you to. You make sure you don’t skip any steps and to make sure that whatever property manager you’re working with. If you’re not managing your property, yourself is also doing these things for you.

Coming up. We’re going to talk about all of the things that you should be doing while a guess is staying at your property and then we’ll finish this series off with everything that happens and everything that you should do after a guest checks out and during the checkout process. So, there’s a lot that goes into it. We’ve got a broken down for you and until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

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

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