Unlocking Success in Short-Term Rentals, Your Burning Questions Answered | Part 2 Q&A

you guys have a lot of great questions out there and I love answering them this is part two of our q a series if you missed the first one head back it was just a few weeks ago so we're gonna go ahead and just jump right back in welcome back to the short terminal riches podcast as you know this industry is changing so so quickly there's so many new tools there's so many new ideas there's so many resources out there telling us so we should be

investing here or that we shouldn't be investing at all the best way to find these things out is just to ask questions right for us to dig deeper and once we do that that helps us eliminate uncertainty it helps us eliminate fear so no question is a dumb question thank you for submitting yours I want to go just through a few of them today so the question says great video key question is what tasks do I give to a VA in Str management so VA virtual

assistant as many of you know our team has team members from your Europe from Mexico from the Philippines we have people in the US obviously but there's so much talent out there everywhere and so the world is our oyster we shouldn't be limiting ourselves to our backyards or to our local area when so much of management can be done virtually so it's a great great question um what tasks should we give to them the answer is depends we can Outsource whatever tasks we want so our

team is virtual and we've managed almost 30 000 guests now we handle every step of the way but that doesn't mean that if you're starting out you're looking for your first virtual assistant that they're going to be helping with everything like pricing for example so where I would start I would start with Communications and guest support that's usually the first place that people look and that's one of the biggest work pieces of it right we get a lot of questions and we don't always want to

be answering them ourselves especially if it's two in the morning and someone's calling about a clogged toilet that's not why a lot of us got into to real estate right but luckily working with people virtually there's people in other time zones and we can use that to our advantage so that we have people working around the clock depending on what time zone they're in so the next task that I would Outsource after guest Communications would be your support calls with Airbnb with VRBO with booking.com whoever

it happens to be maybe you need to file an air cover case or a resolution those things take time and that's a task that can be easily outsourced to your VA for example so I'd start with communication I'd then move to support I would also have them manage your reviews we know how important reviews are right and so I would make sure that those reviews are being responded to that any negative reviews are you know have extra attention paid to them why they were negative monitoring

the private feedback and if someone leaves a review that wasn't totally honest then I would have them try to remove that for you as well um which we definitely can do now if it's breaking one of the rules the next thing that's really important is updating your actual listing so we know that these listing sites are changing all the time right they add new amenities they add new uh discount option features they add new policies or rules or they change the existing ones and this takes

quite a bit of time to monitor maybe not as much if you just have one property but when you start to add more and more properties this can become very time consuming and it's still very important to make sure that you're doing it so that you're always staying fresh on those OTAs they like that of course when their properties that they're advertising are up to date and so that's why they add a lot of these features and that's exactly why you or your VA in this

situation should be updating those for you the next task that I would Outsource to your VA and this one's a little more complicated they have to have a little more skill set but it's very very easily done repetition is the mother of all skill right and that's your pricing so pricing luckily we can learn as much as we need to from anywhere we're managing properties all over the place now if you didn't know that already you can head over to Str riches.com and you'll see there's

a property management button there we'd love to chat with you to see if your property fits within our portfolio we use the same team with my properties as we would with yours and this is one of the things that our team members help with pricing it's super super important luckily we've got a lot of tools at our fingertips we've talked about a lot of them on this channel like price labs for example the one that we're currently using so that's one of the last things that

I would Outsource because it does take a little more skill level if you get your pricing wrong it can really affect your property performance so it's something you got to pay extra careful attention to but these are just a few ideas in a nutshell we can Outsource everything right the only thing that we can't Outsource virtually is our housekeeping and our maintenance next question is about banking so we did an episode recently talking about new banking options we're in a pretty crazy banking environment right now

where we've already lost more Banks than we did in the last financial crisis in 2008 that's pretty mind-boggling right because we're kind of just getting into this and so banking options are important we want to make sure we're with a secure one we talked about two mainly one was relay bank and one was Mercury bank so the question is can you expand on the big difference between these two Banks they essentially do the same things they offer a lot of easy access to sharing your bookkeeping

so if you have other people helping you then that's really helpful they also make it easy to create virtual cards to add new bank accounts if you're separating between properties so they they do a really good job at that I'm not personally using relay I'm using mercury and it's been working out very well for us so you can just go to relay Dot Com or relay dot Phi thinks website or mercury.com check out some of the differences there uh they're much more feature-rich than our traditional

Banks like Wells Fargo Bank of America for example so I'll just say that next question comes from John Williams he says thanks for the videos so I heard that if we use other platforms to list our rentals that it drives the SEO search engine optimization and the ranking down on the Airbnb platform do you know if this is true or maybe explain this in more detail so I'm understanding correctly so this is a great question John thanks for bringing it up and unfortunately I do not

have the exact answer as much as I would love to know exactly how our properties are ranked on the listing sites like Airbnb and VRBO they don't give that secret away but I would say that one of the things that really drives your performance is constantly updating your properties right right and so if you're using a property management software platform or something that's linking into an OTA those are still updating your listing on the OTA website too and I've got to think that you know Airbnb

for example has special support for property managers on Airbnb and so this is something that they actually want right they want more properties on their platform so if Airbnb is seeing properties come in from a property management software system that's not directly tied into OTA then you've got to think that that might not hurt the listing too much because they're expecting this property to be a little more professionally managed than maybe someone that's just using the Airbnb platform so I wish I had the exact answer

for you but unfortunately I don't if I find out though you better believe that you and everyone that tunes into this podcast are going to be the first ones to know so thanks for tuning in this next question comes from Charlie Gates and he was actually at one of our virtual events in the recent past I'm excited to say that we just announced the dates for our next virtual event it's gonna be October 14th we're talking about margin Mastery how we can make more money with

our properties that we currently own and there's a lot of ways to do that my team and I have been doing that perfecting that with our properties and other people's properties as you know we've managed tens of thousands of guests we're always looking at the latest and greatest tools and we're using them as well so if you're interested in that head over to restmethods.com you'll see right under events there uh we'd love to see you there it's going to be jam-packed it comes with tons of

our checklists and things like that that we use and we're gonna go deep into pricing we're gonna go deep into maintenance which is where this question is leading me to we're going to talk about va's and how to hire them and best practices and give you the scripts and just gonna be jam-packed so I I hope you can make it um and I love to hear the questions there live as well so this question says how much time per week in maintenance do you spend on

your Str portfolio and Charlie quick answer to this one is basically zero but that's me of course I have team members that are helping me so someone is helping with all this maintenance right uh the the only time that I'm really getting involved anymore is if there is a really big you know something breaks down or a massive flood or uh the roof needs to be replaced or some really large capital expenditure uh and then I'm I'm going to want to know about it and just

do a little comparison but all of our minor maintenance we have an excellent team that helps us uh on the ground there and we use Breezeway as well to track maintenance and to organize things so I've talked about that program before so I spend very little time in regards to maintenance but great question also something that we're going to go over in our virtual event coming up so excited for that next question is about review removal and this also came from YouTube it says how long

do you wait before requesting another review removal after your first failed removal attempt and so what this is referring to is if you don't know already we can have negative reviews removed and we did an episode on this and our answer is we submit the next one right after the first one was declined and in fact we will submit that again if that review is breaking one of our house rules we know that it can legitimately be removed well then we're going to continue until it

gets removed the trouble is that a lot of times when you contact Airbnb or you contact VRBO you might be getting a support agent that's totally different than the one that you spoke to the day before the week before or maybe your VA spoke to the day or the week before but the reality is they have rules that allow us to remove our reviews if they're not accurate and as long as we follow those rules they should be removed so keep trying until you get those

actually removed next question comes from Bill he says is a heat lock a good idea to buy a rental property so HELOC is a home equity line of credit and my short answer would be no for a couple reasons the first one is that when we take out a home equity line of credit it's often with a variable interest rate or maybe it's fixed for a year maximum two years to where it could change after that so maybe you borrow some money and again this is

equity that we're pulling out based off our primary residence right a home equity line of credit of credit and so that interest rate can change and as you know we're in an environment right now where interest rates are changing pretty quickly and they've been going up and up I happen to believe that they're going to continue to go up for a little while um not to say they can't go back down but the other challenge with the HELOC is you got to look at the fine

terms on these loans a lot of times these banks have the option to call that loan in and have you pay it off it doesn't happen very often but if you're in a situation where you really need that money and you use it for something and then you're required to pay it back well you could be in a bit of trouble there so we like to invest in properties with long-term fixed debt that allows us to manage our expenses over years 30 years fix for example

with with a normal uh residential loan and so that just makes things a little more conservative so sorry Bill I wouldn't recommend that one one that I might recommend a different financing option for example would be seller financing so if you found a property that you really like the reality is is that a lot of homes in the US are owned out right they don't have any loans on them and you might be able to work something out with that owner especially in today's environment where

less people are able to purchase because of higher interest rates there's still a lot of people that want to sell their homes and so if you come across some properties that are owned out right you could work out a deal directly with that owner and I think that'd be a lot more safe than purchasing a property with it with a HELOC so I hope you found a little bit of value in the in that q a this is just quick rapid fire please write to us

if you have any questions I love getting them I love reading them you can go to Str riches.com and you can just scroll down you can see there's a spot there to ask questions so thanks for writing in thanks for leaving your comments thanks for your reviews if you've been listening to the show for a while and you haven't left a review and you're finding value in it I would really appreciate that and you can always just take a screenshot of an episode if you think

one of your family members might find Value in it or a friend of yours send it over to them I'd really appreciate that it's going to help us grow it's going to help us have more resources for you guys our website Str riches.com we got a ton of free resources on there and if you already own a property and you're interested in fine-tuning your management improving your margins and really learning everything that my team and I do with my personal portfolio and other properties we're managing

come meet up with us at our virtual event on October 14th margin Mastery it's gonna be a lot of fun I'd love to see you there until next time I hope you have a fabulous week want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals well it 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