Doing more with less time, Productivity (Part One)

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

in general 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 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 Puerto gigolinas 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 spent about half of my uh life now half half the year

in Brazil 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 and 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 ax 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 community occasions 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 stop and think and there's a fabulous book out there I've 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 2 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 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 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 so I would suggest doing that for whatever 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 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 you we can't do this with the program or 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 using Google Chrome whether using Safari I highly suggest again just jumping 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 so 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 so 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 so take a look at the browser that you're using online 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 so I don't really care a lot of times I do reach out and I ask the almighty Google hey what's the calculation between Celsius and Fahrenheit to do this boom I don't have to search for it or hey if you're an Apple user so 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 so 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 in my calendar it's usually not getting done so we're gonna get to my favorite tools for the short-term rental industry I'm just gonna rapid fire give them off to you 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 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 asked 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 it's 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 one of those places you really need to consider is this something I want to continue putting my money into so something I want to continue putting my time into in economics we call these sunk costs right we don't want to just continue with something because we've already put so much time and money into it so 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 so 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 so so 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 can 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 an 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 uh some days soon a million properties come in 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 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 inexpensive costs and its impact on hospitality and our guest experience that is 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 guide book 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 it's a lot of you know I I've got about 70 properties spread out around the US and outside 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 scrriches.com there's Property Management button there make sure you check it out so

depending on the size of your portfolio operational software like Breezeway that's the one we use I 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 terminal 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 you can just use in your daily life next up the non-essentials notion 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 uh incredible piece of software and that is free too by the way so check that out the next one up is LastPass or some sort of password saving program him 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 program is 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 we want to track So 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 I 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 and 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 so 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'll 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 picks especially in the short terminal world we have to have really good professional photos so 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 so 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 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't help us save an in-person meeting that can be a lot of time savings right another meeting saving tool or coordination tools 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 our 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 uh and name some of them here we will be doing a follow-up to this on artificial intelligence because there's so much we can do with that and 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 striches.com submit a topic I love hearing from everyone Thanks for tuning in until next time I hope you have a wonderful week 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