How the Right Virtual Assistants Can Boost Your Short Term Rental Property Performance

I know managing our short-term rentals sometimes can seem like a lot of work and I have sad news the 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 help 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 a guest

checks out 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 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 that 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 it's 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 checking in well of course we won't be able to do it but if we don't then we need to involve Airbnb or if we're taking this reservation directly then we need to make sure that we charge the guests 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 guests extra there is a procedure to making sure that our guests check out on time so again this is the fourth part of our management series if you missed 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 the 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 three 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 gotta say this is probably the most challenging aspect that any short terminal 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 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 use and let them know things are good to go sometimes there's issues though during the checkout 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 a reason we use checklist there's a reason Airlines use checklists because it helps us make sure that we don't skip any steps and so our housekeeping staff our maintenance staff or whatever housekeeping and maintenance staff we're 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 to call up Airbnb we've got to call up

VRBO we have to message back and forth with the guests 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 seizure in place for that so that it's not taking longer than it should take 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'll want to reach out to a property manager whether it's local or virtual so let's assume that we had a nice smooth checkout 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 guests our next guest checks in with no issues hooray 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 our 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 guests that we were chatting with a lot if they haven't already left us one so we do that custom review requests 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 just to review management so 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 through us directly if you don't have your own direct booking website head over to striches.com and search in our episode list we talk 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 guests we already know their great guess helps fill up our calendar a little more in advance so we want to make sure that we have that website set up 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 masks 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 guests information we use our guidebooks 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 has 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 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 me 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 and 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 Str riches.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 your properties make a good fit for us to partner with and use my exact team so I hope this is give giving you some good insight and until next time I hope you have a fabulous day I 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 acquire the right properties

I want to give you my ebook 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 r e s t methods.com