In the world of short-term rentals, there’s a lot going on. It can take a lot of time, unless we’re taking advantage of tools and technology. Technology is something that’s near and dear to my heart. And my team and I have managed over 30,000 guests now, use a lot of different pieces. So, I want to talk about all of those today, tools that can help you with your short-term rental portfolio or your short-term rental property, but also just some general tips in terms of saving time. Stay tuned.

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

Welcome back to the show. I’m glad that you are here again.  This week, we’re talking about technology and how we can do more with less. So, it’s not all about technology.  There is certain questions that we need to be asking ourselves if we’re doing things in a productive fashion.  And a lot of times we’re not.  So, this sort of came to me.  I took a trip to the northeast of Brazil a few months back into a beautiful little beach town called Porto de Galinhas.  And it’s one of those places with the blue water that you can walk out into for, gosh, really, really far, really beautiful place, nice warm, hot weather.  A lot of you know, if you’ve listened to the show for a while, that I spend about half of my life now, half the year in the southern part of Brazil.  So, we took a trip up to the northern part and I knew that I was getting ready to bring some new people on our team to help with my personal portfolio and also help with some of the properties that we’re helping to manage now.  And so, I had some new team members in mind that I wanted to bring on and I went ahead and planned out basically the whole first month of training in just one afternoon. And it got me thinking, gosh, it really does make sense sometimes just to sit down and take some time to really plan things out because just by planning a little bit, we can save a whole lot of time. So, I know we don’t all have that luxury. We have families, we have full time jobs, but it really does help just to take a few minutes out whenever you can to plan some things out, especially those things that you’re doing all the time. So, we’re going to talk about this just kind of in general today.

We’ve all heard the quote by Abraham Lincoln, give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.  So, this is not new.  I know I’m preaching to the choir with some of you out there, but this is the idea, right?  We want to think through what we’re doing, including our short-term rental processes or communications, that whole piece and make sure that we’re actually doing it in the most effective and productive manner. So that’s the first piece. We really just need to think. And there’s a fabulous book out there.  I probably mentioned it on past episodes, but that book is by Gary Keller.  It’s called The One Thing.  The whole principle of the book is deciding what one thing, I’m just going to read the quote here.  What’s the one thing you can do such by doing it?  Everything else will be easier or unnecessary.  So, there’s always one thing that’s going to be more important than the others, right? We have to prioritize things. We need to think about this, not just with our short-term rental portfolios or our properties, but with everything we’re doing every day, right? Because a lot of times we’re not necessarily doing something the easiest way.  And a lot of times we’re doing something that takes much more time and effort than it needs to. So, we need to ask ourselves this all the time, every day, what’s the one thing that you can do such by doing it?  Everything else will be easier or unnecessary. So, this is the first place we need to start, but sometimes we don’t actually know that we’re doing something the wrong way, or we don’t know that we’re doing something and there is another way to make it much easier, to make that process easier.  Whatever it happens to be, I’m talking in general here, not just in regards to our investment portfolios or our properties or our short-term rentals.  I’m just talking in general here.  A lot of times we just do things because we’re stuck in the habit of doing them that way.

So, the first thing I would recommend is taking a look at what do you spend the most time on? Well, we all spend a lot of time on our phones, right?  Do you know how to use your phone most effectively?  I bet you there’s a few things that you’re missing out.  And so, what I would suggest is jump on YouTube.  There’s so much good information on YouTube.  And so, if you just got a brand-new phone or you have a phone that you’ve used for a couple of years, I would highly suggest just YouTube how to best use my iPhone, whatever it happens to be, or 10 tips for using my iPhone. And you can watch a five-minute video.  I bet you there’s something on there you can do a lot more efficiently than the way you’re currently doing it.  Maybe it’s a shortcut to take pictures.  Maybe it’s saving an icon on your front page of your apps, something that you use all the time.  So, you can just make one click instead of searching for it.  I would suggest doing that for every phone you’re using out there.  The other thing is our software changes all the time, right?  So, we can have the best piece of software available, but if we don’t know how to use it, then it’s not really that effective, right? If you’ve listened to the show for a while,  I know I’ve talked a lot about my prior career working with software.  And what I found working with a lot of different businesses is that a lot of them didn’t take advantage of the software that we were producing. And they would often ask me, Tim, how come we can’t do this with the program? This would be so much easier if we could do it this way.  And a lot of times that feature was already available.  We just have to search.  This is something that we’ve got to kind of revisit.  The second place I would suggest that you spend a little time just kind of poking around, see if you can find a few tips is when you’re searching the internet. So, whether you’re using Google Chrome, whether you’re using Safari, I highly suggest again, just jump on YouTube and looking for 10 tips on using Google Chrome.  I bet you didn’t know a lot of you out there that on Google Chrome, if you type in the search bar, instead of searching for something, you can actually use that as a calculator, whatever formula or calculation you want to put in, you can simply type that in without having to pull up a calculator. I don’t know about you, but as a full-time real estate investor, I’m crunching numbers all the time.  And instead of pulling out that calculator, instead of pulling it up on my computer or pulling up Excel, a lot of times I just type it right into that search bar and boom, I get the answer I’m looking for.

This next recommendation, some of us have a little bit of mixed feelings on.  It’s possible that it is invading our privacy.  Who knows what’s actually being recorded out there.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not trying to hide a whole lot. I don’t really care.  A lot of times I do reach out and I ask the almighty Google, Hey Google, what’s the calculation between Celsius and Fahrenheit to do this?  Boom, I don’t have to search for it. Or hey Siri, if you’re an Apple user.  So, without a doubt, a lot of us are using all these technology solutions already, but we’re probably not using them as best as we could.  So, take a few moments, do some searches, see if you can learn to use them a little more productively and make sure that you revisit this every few months, every six months, because these things change all the time. Of course, we’re not going to be able to learn how to do these things better if we don’t make the time to do that first.  So, one little tip I might suggest is actually putting it in your calendar.  Yes, even if it’s 30 minutes today, I’m going to learn how to use Google Chrome a little bit better. I found that if I don’t put it in my calendar, it’s usually not getting done.  So, we’re going to get to my favorite tools for the short-term rental industry. I’m just going to rapid fire, give them off to the ones that we’re currently using, all the essential ones I think you should be using.  But we’re also going to go through a lot of non-essential ones that I think you could use in your daily life or you could also use as a real estate investor.  So, we’re going to get to that in just one second.  But before we do, a couple more questions for you to help you uncover where you might be spending a little more time than you actually need to.  Are you repeating a lot of tasks?  Something that maybe doesn’t need to be repeated. When we do our virtual events or when we do our live events and we talk about scaling, one of the really important things that we cover is delegating.  And so a lot of times, we can delegate tasks that we’re repeating.  You can use a tool like Loom or a tool like Camtasia to record your screen and pass that off to someone else.  Now, I know not all of you out there have a team helping you with your portfolios, but if your goal is to add more properties, the reality is that we acquire properties the same way. We pay the bills the same way.  We run our analysis on properties the same way.  We set up our operations the same way.  It’s all pretty much the same set of systems.  And so, if you’re planning on growing your portfolio, I highly suggest that you start looking at some of these areas that you’re duplicating and see where you might be able to outsource a few of those tasks.  So that’s a good question to ask.  Are you repeating a lot of tasks and which ones are you repeating?  What tool do you use the most?  So, we already covered this, but take a look at what browser you’re using again or what type of computer or phone you’re using. See if there’s something that you could learn to help improve your efficiency with that.

One last thing you might want to ask yourself is are you doing something in a certain way just because you’ve already invested a lot of time into it? Maybe it’s a program you thought was going to be really helpful, but it turns out it’s not, or maybe someone on your team that’s not really working out. You’ve invested a whole lot of time and no matter what you do, things just aren’t working out. You can’t move them to a new spot.  We need to think about these things.  We need to be realistic.  Same goes for our real estate investments.  Hopefully you ran your numbers really well in the beginning and you eliminated most of the risk and you haven’t found yourself in a deal that doesn’t really have light at the end of the tunnel.  But if you are in those places, you really need to consider, is this something I want to continue putting my money into?  Is this something I want to continue putting my time into?  In economics, we call these sunk costs.  We don’t want to just continue with something because we’ve already put so much time and money into it. Hopefully you’re not in that situation, but that trickles down to the little things we do in our daily life when it comes to software and technology and all that stuff.  Just take a second to think about that as well.  One other word just on technology in general, and you all know this already, but it moves really quickly, right?  We’re not touching on AI, artificial intelligence, in this episode.  We’re going to do a second part.  We’re going to break down all of the things that I believe you could use AI for effectively in your short-term rental business. There’s a lot of tools out there.  We’re using quite a few of them already and we’re going to save that for another episode because it’s a whole episode on its own.  But we know technology changes all the time. So just keep your ears open, talk to people.  This is why conferences are really good.  If you’re really in the industry and you want to grow, we can get the latest and greatest at conferences all in one quick swoop. And we can also talk to a lot of people that are using these programs there at those conferences.

Okay, without further ado,  I’m just going to jump into the software that I think  is essential for your short-term rental business,  no matter what,  whether you have one property or whether you have a million properties.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?  Some day soon, a million properties coming soon.  Okay, the essential pieces for your short-term rental.  The first one, and I’ve talked about this a lot, is a property management software platform, often referred to as a PMS software. Google short-term rental property management software. You’re going to see a whole bunch of options coming up.  The next one is a pricing software, something that feeds in to your property management software so that our pricing changes all the time and so that we can adjust our prices in lots of different ways that we might not be able to on the OTAs like Airbnb.  The next piece, which I think is essential just because of its low and expensive cost and its impact on hospitality and our guest experience, that is a digital guidebook. So, if you’re only using a printed guidebook still, we got to get out of the old ages, get a digital one. We use Hostfully, but there’s a lot of them out there.  Make sure you get a digital guidebook.  Your guests are going to love you for it. And I do think it is an essential piece.  The next piece, I would not say is essential, but it depends on the size of your portfolio.  So, we go through sort of growing pains as we’re building a portfolio.  As a lot of you know, I got about 70 properties spread out around the US and outside of the US now in Colombia and Brazil. Not all of them short-term rentals, but about 40, 45 short-term rentals in my personal portfolio.  And then of course, we manage a lot now too.  If you’re interested in us managing your properties virtually, we’ve got a unique approach on it.  You can check it out at strriches.com.  There’s a property management button there.  So, depending on the size of your portfolio, operational software like Breezeway, that’s the one we use, I think is essential.  Yes, I do think it’s essential depending on the amount of properties you have that helps coordinate the housekeeping, turnover, maintenance, all of those things.  So, I would say those are the essential software programs.  But of course, there is a whole lot more we can use in the short-term rental world.  We use a whole lot more on my team and I want to just rapid fire go through those ones as well, as well as some programs that you can just use in your I’ve talked about Notion before.  I think this program is amazing. I don’t know how many times I use it every single day, but it’s basically a program for organizing all kinds of notes and data and sharing it with teams.  Check it out.  We actually did an episode on it, number 63.  And I know I need to do a new one because there’s so many other ways to do it.  And it’s a really, really incredible piece of software that is free too, by the way.  So, check that out.

The next one up is LastPass or some sort of password saving program.  When we work with short-term rentals, we have a lot of different programs that we’re accessing. And at some point, if not already, we want to be able to share them with our team.  And so LastPass or password type programs going to help us do this.  Next up is Google Drive or Dropbox or some sort of online cloud storage.  When we acquire property, there’s quite a bit of info that we want to keep and that we want to track within our online storage of choice, whether that’s Google Drive or Dropbox.  I’ve got five folders that I set up for every single property. That first one is acquisition.  So that folder is going to house all of the information that went into me acquiring that property. So, my analysis, my appraisal, my inspections, all of those types of things are going to go into that acquisitions folder. And then I can reference that really easy at any time. The next folder I’m going to have is insurance.  I know, I know insurance is just a pain in the butt to have to pay because we hardly ever use it. But when we do use it, it’s really important, right?  We need to make sure that our insurance is adequately covering our property. That’s another folder.  It’s also something that has to be revisited every year when our policy renews.  The next folder I like to set up is banking and lending.  So, this can have your loan documents in there, maybe information on a bank account that you opened up.  You can also house a receipts folder in there.  And the way we do our receipts is with Google Drive. We have a receipts folder and I just take a picture on my phone.  I upload them the receipts folder.  I change the name to the dollar amount.  And then anytime we need to look up a receipt in the future, we can just search that. Of course, I don’t save all of my receipts. These are sort of the bigger type ones that aren’t getting imported, maybe automatically by QuickBooks or something like that. So, the next one’s receipts folder.  And then lastly, we have a media folder. So, this is going to house all of your pics, especially in the short-term rental world. We have to have really good professional photos.  Make sure you get those in there if they need to be updated. If you have renovation pictures, if you have video clips in there or whatever happens to be a media folder is another good one to have within your online storage.

Next up, we’ve got Loom or Camtasia, some sort of screen sharing type software. This can also include just taking snapshots. We know how helpful this is.  It’s really easy to do on our cell phones now.  But a lot of times we just need to send some sort of snippet to someone.  So having a good tool for that is helpful.  Next up is a digital signing software.  We send out rental agreements to all of our guests and they sign it digitally.  We use a program called Sign Now for this, but you might want to take a look at DocuSign or there’s a whole host of them out there if you just type in digital signing.  Of course, there’s a lot of processes that go in on the back end of all this stuff.  If you haven’t heard, we have our next virtual event coming up on October 14th. We’re talking about how to improve our margins with our short-term rentals and it starts with using the right software.  So, head over to strriches.com.  You’ll see under events there we have margin mastery.  That’s our next event coming up. I hope to see you there.

Next up we have Zoom or Google Meetup.  This might be a given for a lot of you that are working virtually remotely all the time, but it is super important. It can help us save an in-person meeting.  That can be a lot of time savings, right?  Another meeting saving tool or coordination tool is Calendly.  This is where you can put your schedule up on your Google calendar, wherever it happens to be, send a link so someone could book a time with you.  So of course, the busier we get, the more important these types of tools become. The next piece of software, and I would call it a piece of software that’s really helpful with real estate businesses, is a smart banking solution.  We talked about that before, but having a way to easily file the receipts and easily send payments to contractors and stuff like that is going to make your life a lot easier.  We’re using Mercury Bank.  You can go back and check out our episode on that.  So, there’s a whole bunch of tools.  I know I missed a whole bunch of them.  I just want to kind of rapid fire go off and name some of them here.  If you want to get the full list and how we go through all of them, make sure you come to our virtual event and then we will be doing a follow-up to this on artificial intelligence because there’s so much, we can do with that. And that can be an amazing time saver.

I just want to leave you with a couple last notes, and that’s that if we want to have our own businesses, if we want to grow our own short term rental portfolios or real estate portfolios or wherever it happens to be, we need to take advantage of technology.  That’s just the world we live in now. And if you just are disgusted by the word technology, well, then you need to have someone that can help you with it because we’re going to get left behind if we don’t stay up to date, if we don’t know how to use these tools efficiently.  One last quote to leave you with David Allen, he says, our brains are for creating ideas and they’re not for storing them.  And so, we got to have a place to store all this info and store it effectively.  I hope this gave you a little bit of insight.  If you want us to talk about anything whatsoever, please head over to strriches.com, submit a topic.  I love hearing from everyone.  Thanks for tuning in. Until next time.  I hope you have a wonderful week.

Whether you’re just getting started with short term rentals or you’ve been in the game for a while, one thing remains the same.  Your management can make or break your performance.  Our team has learned a lot managing thousands of guests and we’ve put together a handbook just for you with our tips and tricks. You can get your free copy by going to restmethods.com. There’s no charge, it’s my gift to you for being one of our loyal subscribers and I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.

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