What Landlords Need to Know Before Choosing a Short-Term Rental Property Manager

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 managed 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 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 terminal riches podcast it's like Armageddon out there isn't it we've got uh Banks failing a whole bunch of craziness going on the economy is not in good condition is 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 if we're planning on having a short-term rental we need to make extra certain that it's managed professionally and we're not missing any steps so welcome back this week we're breaking into part two on our management Series so if you missed last week we talked about

why I think virtual management is the future of all property management but whether you're managing your property virtually or you're working with a 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 like pricing like the communication with our guests and all in the episode with just a quick checklist at our receptionists 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 in the real estate space that have acquired huge portfolios of real estate they very often say that they would much rather have a b-class property with a class management then an A-Class property with b-class management why because if they have poor management the property sits vacant well the property's 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 guests 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 U.S 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 you're on 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 well 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 them 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 to manage that easily so I recommend using a channel manager or a 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 our property is 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 that 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 property advertised 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 in making sure that they don't have bad reviews if they do we need to make sure that we get their 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 guess is to get additional information from them so after they've 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 Airbnb 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 leases 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 stain in one of your properties and you're in a state that's not very landlord friendly well that guest could stay in your property for a

long long time if they know how to beat the system so there's a lot of steps goes into advertising and there's a lot of steps that 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 pricing 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 10 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 can also do this manually by just looking up listings on Airbnb or VRBO checking 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 too 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 churning through our short-term rental machines so we have

to put some Personal Touch in place a good quote that I heard at a short terminal conference at some point in the last I don't know five ten years was that our guests are not always right but it is our job to make them 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 happened 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 property's 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 things that we're 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 proper property manager first thing is we're going to verify what channel the guests 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 welcome welcoming them back we're going to 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 we're on and that you should be on as well we're going to check with stripe to make sure we actually received our payment we're 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 the episode we did on our red flag reservation requests we'll go back and check that out and if you missed our episode on the top 15 questions that you will get asked before a guest checks in your 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 episode's all about I'm not going to Spill the Beans here you're gonna 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 so 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 guest communication we're going to be responding in 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 code 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 went out okay the beautiful thing about having a unique door code for every guest is we can send their checking instructions right away we're going to confirm that we got their check-in 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 their cleaning is scheduled after their checkout 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 am 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 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 guest 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 in to 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 Series this is the second part is helping you to make sure you don't skip any steps and 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 guest is staying at your property and then we'll finish the series off with everything that happens and everything that you should do after a guess checks out and during the checkout process so there's a lot that goes into it we've got it broken down for you and until next time I hope you have a fabulous week I've dedicated years 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 str-riches.com hit the property management button answer a couple quick questions and meet with me personally that's striches.com rest easy knowing that with my team your properties will be in excellent hands