Setting Up Your Mid-Term Rental Listing for Success (Part 1)

in the world of short-term rentals we're kind of in this weird limbo space where some of us are renting really shortterm and some of us are stretching it out months and months at a time in the form of medium-term reservations and so unfortunately there's not a software provider to help us accommodate all of these different types of reservations so I put together a three-part series to let you know what our team is doing to manage these reservations in my own personal portfolio as you know if

you've listened to podcast for a while we've managed tens of thousands of guests and we've managed a lot of medium-term guests as well so stay tuned as we break down the first part of our medium-term rental strategy for those of you that are maybe renting short-term and maybe want some medium-term or those of you that just want medium-term this first part we're going to talk about making sure we have the right listing on the right listing websites and how we can streamline some of these policies

that aren't sinking with our property management software 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 hubt welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast for some of us our short-term rentals are no longer just doing short-term term reservations myself included guilty as charged a lot of my properties were now accepting guests for 1 month two months 3 months at a

time and this brings up a lot of different policies a lot of different procedures some risks some opportunities some pros some cons so I've actually talked about these before uh if you go back and check out episode 140 podcast episode 140 we talk about the pros and cons of medium-term rentals so I'm actually not going to break that down in this episode we're going to talk about actually setting up our listings the right way to make sure we're attracting the most medium-term guests and then how

we can streamline some of these procedures and policies because they're not integrating with our property management software this is the first part of a three-part series on medium term rentals there was just way too much to break it into one podcast and I try to keep these quick actionable episodes uh as short as possible I know I've gone a little overboard on a few and I know we've had some long interviews so if you don't like the long episodes please let us know you can send

an email to info@ rest methods.com or you can jump on our website strr riches.com there's a nice little handy dandy feedback form there so having medium-term reservations starts with advertising them on the right platforms but also in the right way so remember before we can attract a medium-term state guest and for the purposes of this series and this podcast we're going to call a medium-term guest someone who's staying 28 days or more because remember sometimes the tax regulations are changing sometimes the tenant landlord laws are

changing and they're shifting from being a guest to a tenant so we talked about those before in episode 140 go back and check those out if you're curious about jumping in the medium-term rental space so once we've decided we want to do that though we need to attract the right types of guests right and so we need to have things in our properties like laundry uh it's very unlikely you're going to find someone that wants to stain your property for a month that doesn't have their

own laundry or doesn't have access to laundry so that's a big one having a workspace of someone's staying in your property for a month they're probably going to be working but again you need to know the types of guests that your property are attracting cuz yeah we have lots of guests staying in nice luxury Mansions now for months at a time too not quite as common as the smaller properties but it is happening so we really need to know our guest and we need to know

the amenities and things that want but the pretty standard ones are having a workspace having a washer and dryer or some sort of laundry service that you could offer to the guest being near to a grocery store uh or having some sort of food delivery available having a parking spot uh not in all places but a lot of people are taking Uber now of course but having parking is going to attract more guests and then of course having really solid internet right so and we also

need to have a lot of copy in our listing that talks about long-term guests right the perfect place for you to stay uh and escape the snow season or you know perfect place for snowbirds coming down to enjoy the beach for a couple months or whatever it happens to be so first of all we need to know our guest and we need to set our listing up to attract those types of guests that are going to want to stay longer so the second piece is where

do we want to actually list our property so if you've been listening to the podcast for well you probably have a short-term rental and you've probably got it listed on the big ones right like so Airbnb VRBO booking.com hopefully you have your own booking website these are all the platforms that our property management software hopefully are using a property management software allows us to control and manage really easily the calendar syn together our message system sync together and it's just a lot easier to take reservations

from all these different channels but when we step into the World Of medium-term Rentals we go outside of these a little bit there's other websites like furnish finder for example we did a whole episode on that one if you don't know what furnish finder is go back check out episode 203 there's also listing sites like apartments.com or Zillow and these both do homes they do all types of rental accommodations and these are sites where people are looking as well but unfortunately they're not connected into our

software platforms like our traditional short-term rental listing sites like Airbnb so it does create some complications um but there's some easier ways to streamline the communication I have those tips for you coming up here shortly another excellent place where we can find longer term guests can be with insurance companies it can be with some sort of corporate rental placement company it could be from universities be careful with uh University students though a lot of insurance companies actually ask you specifically if you're renting two students so

you might want to just double check that one uh before you decide to do that but that can be really good option as well right A lot of times are looking for a furnished rental so check out some of these other sources you can also check out things like Facebook for example but remember you do have the work going in to add these listings on the different websites okay so in my mind we have these two different groups of listing sites we have all the ones

that we've been on traditionally that work with all of our software and then we have the other group like apartments.com or furnish finder which is really going back to like traditional Property Management right we don't have a lot of tools to streamline those they're not going to integrate perfectly with our Dynamic software pricing or any of those things uh and so that does bring up pricing I'm going to get to that in just one quick second but we basically have these two groups and so with

the first group with the short-term rental listing sites you have the option to accept instant books I accept instant books on most of those sites but I just don't do it blindly right we have a lease that we're going to want to get we have background checks and these are in our rental agreements which means if we get a guest we're not comfortable with or if they don't sign our lease or complete our background check then we can cancel those reservations penalty free so I'm going

to save the leases and the Tenant background checks the guest background checks the payment processing the deposits that's going to be part two again there's just too much to pack in to a single episode so uh that is the option just remember if you turn off instant book you're going to turn off a lot of visibility right same goes for not allowing pets if you don't allow pets then you're going to have a lot less potential guest pool remember someone's not going to want to stay

in your property for two months if they can't bring the man's best friend right or they can't bring their dog or their cat so remember that uh yes that brings up more cleaning uh potentially and you've got to have a housekeeper that's okay with that we're going to get to that in part three of the series is going to be on actually managing these guests and managing the turn and the checkin and the check out so right now let's get back to these listing sites if

you turn off instant book you're going to turn off visibility now when might you want to keep instant book on well let's say you're transitioning maybe into a medium-term rental maybe your traditional reservation was for three or 4 days if you turn off instant book then you're going to turn off that possibility too maybe you're open to the idea of a medium-term stay if someone books it the way you have everything set up currently right so maybe they're paying normal prices and they just go ahead

and book a whole month well that's great right that's probably that's probably a pretty good reservation so if you're sort of in that limbo space where you still want to accept short-term stays but you're also open to medium-term stays then you're probably going to want to leave insta book on that granted you want to have all the background checks and everything uh in place as well uh the times when you want to turn instant book off completely in my opinion is if you're only doing medium-term

stays because these these are very likely going to be reservations that you're not going to get uh you know someone's usually not booking your property for several months like within the week it's usually going to be a little further out but that is one of the things that you need to know so we're going to talk about pricing here uh in a nutshell in just a second so if you're only doing medium-term stays maybe because of the regulations then I would turn off instant book uh

someone's going to request and that brings up the question how do we handle all of these requests so if it's coming through Airbnb or one of your other platforms it's very likely going through your management software but if it's coming through furnish finder then we've got to have a way to filter all those Communications so what do I suggest first of all I I would use as many resources as you already have so if you have a centralized email I highly recommend that where maybe your

Airbnb support emails are going to the email linked to Airbnb account then I would try to send all of the inquiries to that same account you can filter them out with Gmail filters if you're happen to be using that when it comes to your phone line hopefully you have a virtual phone number set up so that even if you're managing all your properties today that it's someday you can easily pass that number on to maybe a receptionist maybe a manager whoever it happens to be to

help you Communications we use phone.com it's worked pretty well for us so I would forward all of your text messages and your phone calls to that same phone number so we want to use the same email we want to use the same phone number uh and we want to use the same policies too in a nutshell right so you're very likely going to want a longer cancellation policy if someone's booking further out in the future and they're reserving your calendar for a longer period of time

and they cancel last minute well you're going to be in a rush to fill that calendar right so you want to look at having a stricter cancellation policy again take a look at those pet policies if you're at all open to the idea I promise you you you will get more bookings uh because the reality is there's just less listings out there that allow pets so once we get an inquiry from wherever it happens to be so if we turned off instant book on all the

other platforms or we're getting an inquiry through the platforms that don't integrate with our software we're going to then need to do some background on them right do they have reviews maybe don't want uh to accept a guess that doesn't have reviews so once we get those inquiries we really need to decide what type of guest we're comfortable renting to so one of the benefits of the traditional short-term rental platforms like Airbnb is that we can see reviews so maybe your rule is uh we don't

want to rent anyone with less than two reviews that's something that you could easily decline if it comes in as an inquiry right but if we're listing on apartments.com or listing on Furnish finder then unfortunately we don't have that so we are going to get in in part two to all the tenant backgrounds the additional things that we want to ask for but just a couple things to sort of keep in mind when you're considering which listing sites you want to be on so the fourth

piece here is on pricing and I actually did a whole episode on pricing so you can go back and check that out it's episode 186 it's essentially the math behind what your long-term discounts should be so in a nutshell a couple things we want to consider when it comes to pricing first of all is is this something that's going to be seasonal right are you in the slow season and you're trying to attract longer guests well we need to know that hopefully you're using tool like

price Labs that's the one we use to analyze markets to analyze pricing to see seasonality Trends there's of course other ones like Beyond pricing and wheelhouse so check those out if you haven't already great information that you need to know especially if you want to go down with this strategy what is your average booking window so are people booking to 2 months in advance or are they traditionally booking one week in advance and remember this changes based on the length of reservation so if someone's booking

a 30 nights day versus a three nights day they're very likely going to book it further out in the future and again that's information that we can filter out by using things like price Labs if we go and we filter minimum night stays to 30 days or more we can see the average booking windows so if you're considering the strategy this is really important information that you need to know one other thing you might be considering or thinking about is that different booking sites charge different

commissions right so Airbnb if you're on their old plan uh you may be paying just 3% versus booking.com you're paying 15% so we want to make sure that we have the correct channel markups in place so at the end of the day we're still earning enough money from these listing sites to make us happy right right so uh and you can also use this to sort of shift your preference on where someone books so maybe you don't like having a Booking.com guest and for people coming

from booking.com you have a $5,000 monthly rental fee for example but on Airbnb maybe it's $4,800 after fees so you're taking a little bit less but you also have a little more comfort knowing that there is a little bit more protection there so you can play around with that but whichever way you do it whichever markups you use I highly suggest that you have a minimum rate that you're open to accepting again we went over this in episode 186 I wish I could cram all this

stuff into just one episode but there really is a lot of minute details that go into these things so go back check out that episode that's the math behind how much and if you should be offering long-term discounts so the fifth piece here to our listing setup we talked about uh having the copy and having the right photos to attract longer term guests we talked about being on the right listing sites we have our traditional short-term rental listing sites and then we also have the non-traditional

ones which we will very likely want to be on as well there's just a little more work that goes into them and those are things like apartments.com and furnish finder then we talked about a couple things to keep in mind when we want to streamline those policies and message communication so using a centralized email where everything goes through uh using the same phone number having the same cancellation policies having the same rental rules and agreement lease and we're going to get into the details on that

in the next section here so after that after we have our listing set up and it's on the right listing sites we need to make sure that we have the right price per channel so remember this can change depending on the channel depending on your preference which ones you prefer to have it on so there we are there's a few of the things that we want to consider uh I'm excited to get into part two that's going to go over our tenant background and screening and

what we need to have in our lease we talked a little bit about the policies and the rules but we're going to go more in depth in part two so stay tuned for that if you are unsure go back and check out episode 140 the pros and cons between a short and long-term guest reservation and then 186 how we should be calculating our pricing for that so I hope that helped um if you've been enjoying the podcast I would really appreciate it if you wouldn't mind

heading over to Spotify or iTunes and leaving us a review it'll help other people find us um you can also head to our website Str strr riches.com you can request anything on there you can search all of our past episodes uh and I'd love to hear from you uh I read all of our feedback and I want to thank you for tuning in and I hope you have a fabulous week 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 rest methods.com that's reest methods.com