The Landlord's Guide to Mid-Term Rental Property Management (Part 3)

welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast here we are on part three of our three-part series for midterm rentals I know that's a lot of parts but there's a lot going on here and there's a lot of opportunity with midterm rentals these are sort of that limbo space between our short-term guests and long-term tenants so we've learned a lot stay tuned I'm excited to share part three where we talk about how to actually manage your tenants or your short-term guest turn tenants while they in

your property the movein the move out process returning the deposits all that fun stuff stay tuned let's jump in 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 Hub welcome back to the short-term Ral riches podcast we're talking about medium-term stays this is a essentially when a guest becomes a tenant and although this varies a little bit state by state most of the

time it's 28 to 30 days or more and that guest becomes a tenant and so there's a lot of things that we need to do differently to protect ourselves and to protect our property so we've talked about a lot of those already if you missed episode 211 and 212 go back and check those out the first one we talked about setting up our listings in the the best way possible attract the most long-term guests where to actually post our properties which sites to post on then

the second piece we talked about all that sort of middle stage piece where we get guest inquiries what do we do with the inquiries how do we vet our guests Where Do We Run the background checks where do we get a lease from how do we get our lease signed all very very important things and in this third piece we're going to assume we already got some great inquiries and we got some great guests turned tenants that are getting ready to check into our property how

do we best manage them so the first thing is the movein before we even do the move in though we want to make sure that our guests or our tenants are fully informed about the property and where they can pay us uh what responsibilities they might have what responsibilities we might have so essentially we want to provide them a summary and in this summary we're going to have quite a few things I want to break them down for you here real quickly the first first thing

is we want to welcome them to our property right this is going to be a longer term relationship we're hoping that they're going to stay there month after month and we also want to get in the habit of welcoming all of our guests or our tenants in this same fashion right so we want to have a nice welcome message we want to let them know where they can reach out to us in case they have maintenance hopefully you've taken these reservations and put them into your

short-term Ral property management software so that you can just use your same message templates if you have team members helping you out virtually then they see the reservation they see the guest or tenant in this case and you can go about your operations pretty much as you would with a shortterm guest now if you happen to have gotten this guest reservation outside of one of the traditional short-term rental sites like Airbnb or vbo that's not linked into your software like furnish finder then you're going to

want to put them in your property management software so most of the time if they have a maintenance issue they can just Reach Out Direct directly to you by email or by phone number and it's going to be linked right in your system so make sure they know where they can contact you and that you're there for them if something does come up second piece we want to remind them where they can pay future rent if it's not already set up automatic hopefully it is remember

we have two options for that so uh we can use stripe which a lot of us in the short-term Rental World are already using to charge reservations we can give them the option to pay for everything up front using a credit card you want to make make sure you charge a credit card fee for that but that is a good option for a lot of people out there the other one is to take a payments and we're recommending that you use apartments.com for that which makes

it pretty easy sends reminders all that fun stuff pretty basic program but it happens to be free and it's also easy on the tenant side remember it's also where you can do their background check uh and it's also where you can store their lease so we want to remind them where they can pay uh and when we're expected to receive that payment and where we're expected to receive it we want to reiterate things like utilities so most of the time we're covering all of our electrical

our gas or water all of these things when we have a short-term rental guess but you may want to consider having some sort of limit on utilities if you have a property that can just get out of control maybe you have some sort of limit uh otherwise you just want to make sure you note that right in there one thing that you very likely are going to want your tenant to take care of is the trash so taking out the trash so you want to remind

them when they come around for that you might want to have a note in there in terms of furniture property updates remember when someone's staying in your property for multiple months they're going to feel like it's their own they might want to paint a wall or they might want to add some plants somewhere or in my case I'm actually staying in an Airbnb right now in Median Columbia I sold my property recently and we're sort of uh in this period where we're developing a small community

of short-term rentals so I'm running a place but I went out and bought a desk because there wasn't a desk that I liked and you know what I'm going to be leaving that desk here instead of putting it in storage so sometimes your longer term guests or your tenants are actually going to add uh nice furniture to your property it's going to feel like their own place it is their home for the next few months so you're going to want to cover any notes around that

you might want to include something real quickly in there about lease extensions we recommend that you just have your lease go to a month-to-month basis but remember you're going to want to make sure that your calendar is open for them to actually stay longer so you really got to plan that out and make sure that you're not blocking your calendar for too much time hoping that they're going to book it I would recommend this depends on the market but I would recommend that you require a

decision from them within 2 weeks of the date of their original lease expiration that way you still have some time to advertise your property if they are not going to be extending so basically we just want a nice summary welcoming our tenants welcoming our guests highlighting the most important facts letting them know where they can reach us or anything that might be specific to our property that wasn't obvious that they need to know so there's one more piece here in regards to the move in and

that is and traditionally in the long-term rental world we get our lease signed we also get a movein document signed to where when the tenant moves into the property they have a certain amount of time to say hey uh the fridge is damaged or it's not working or I saw this hole in the wall wall they basically want to document any damage in the property so that when the time comes for us to return their deposit we're not deducting existing damage now if you've listened to

a podcast for a while then you know we already have a rule like this in our short-term rental house rules which basically says you have 3 hours from the time you check into our property to let us know if there's any sort of damage if the cleaning didn't meet your standards or whatever it happens to be and that actually protects us on the backend if someone made a claim on Airbnb for example and they told this 3 days after the reservation we can go back and

reference that house rule so we're essentially doing the same thing here with our long-term tenants our medium-term reservations but we're taking it a step further we're going to want them to really thoroughly document that property so we're going to require that they take a video of the property and any sort of damage or anything that they see that they want us to know and then we're going to want to receive that video within uh you know you name it but I would say within 24 hours

of checking into the property again this is after our housekeeper or one of our team members has done an inspection on the property prior to their arrival so we're also going to want our version of this too right so it's a really good idea the same thing just go around the property take a video so also helps us remember what furniture we have in there so that nothing kind of gets left out in the end so we want that move out document back from them in

the form of video again this these are messages that we can program in our short- terminal software after we've added these guests as a reservation okay during the reservation Sometimes some things come up don't they just like they do with our short-term rentals so one thing that might come up is in regards to supplies I highly recommend that in your lease you mention that you will have a initial supply of toilet paper and these types of things uh that way there's no confusion on who's paying

for what but let's say something else comes up and you know the the toaster stops working or the blender stops working or something like this you can simply order things on Amazon these days and most markets send it to your tenant very quickly just send it to their address to make it a lot easier on you you don't have to pay a maintenance technician or someone like that to actually go out to the property so that is a convenient way if anything uh that's easily replaceable

comes up during green their stay that you're responsible for just check out Amazon uh and send it right over to them we like to do a medium-term stay clean at about the 15 day mark this allows us to get into the property to have an eye on it make sure that there's not something going on there that we didn't know about so to make sure they didn't have multiple pets in there something like that now this is a fee that we're going to charge to the

guest it's going to come out of their deposit so out of the non-refundable part and this is again something that we're going to have in our lease it's also something that we're going to need to schedule with the tenants so we're going to let them know 24 hours in advance or or hopefully just find a good day that works for them this is also a good opportunity for your housekeeper to make a little more money right so uh you can simply pass your contact over to

your tenant and if they would like to have more Cleanin in the future then they have their contact there and that can be a win-win for both sides now during the reservation sometimes a guest might show up and maybe they're not happy or maybe they don't like your property or maybe it wasn't what they expected and they just SW out of it well what do we recommend in that situation it's never a great situation right we we always want to set the perfect expectations so this

doesn't happen uh but sometimes it might and so I would recommend that you stick with your cancellation policy that's to say if the guest actually does not want to stay there and they're like hey look this place just isn't going to work for me um I would recommend that you stick with your cancellation policy uh another alternative to that is that you may offer to relist the property right away and if you're able to find another guest or another tenant to occupy that space then you

will refund them the difference between what your cancellation policy said and the time that it stayed vacant after the reservation so as an example if your cancellation policy is 30 days they check in they say I just don't like the property or whatever is not working out then I think it's fair for you to stick with your cancellation policy remember that calendar is blocked so if they leave that that same day for example you relist it and then 5 days later you're able to secure a

medium-term reservation well then maybe consider giving them a little bit more of a refund uh this brings up another question is that a lot of times when someone's going to stay in a property for a longer period of time they want to see the property first uh I don't recommend offering this it can become a bit of an operational uh I don't want to say fias go it's not that challenging but it's just one additional thing that you're going to have to do and hopefully your

property's occupied already right and so you don't want a new potential guest checking into the property where you already have one there so we don't offer this um we have floor plans for all our properties and to go one step further it's really nice to have an overview video uh that you can provide your your guest or your the person inquiring H to really help them out with the the whole decision most of the time that ends that conver ation right there and most the time

most people are perfectly okay with this okay so we officially listed our property in the perfect places listed in the perfect way we got a great guest and now it's time for them to move out we've come to the end of the road and we need to do the checkout and so this of course is already pre-arranged in your lease they know what day they're ending uh and what time they need to be out by uh we recommend of course you're you're going to go in

and have your housekeeper clean it right we recommend blocking the calendar a couple days after these longer term reservations because you need more time to account for certain things that may have come up during a three months day there's a lot more that can come up than in a three nights day for example especially if you have back-to-back medium-term reservations you've got someone else checking in for 3 months if you don't leave yourself a gap and something comes up maybe they you know maybe they did

have dogs in there or something that's going to take quite a bit of time and that new guest or that new tenant shows up and they don't like your property that really is a bit risky so instead of trying this is my opinion but instead of trying to get every last second occupied it's better to make sure that you have a little bit of buffer in there to make sure the property is perfectly [ __ ] and span and there's no damage you have time to

fix any sort of Maintenance that may have come up at this time it's good for your housekeeper to do the same thing that they did or the person doing your inspection in the beginning to do the same thing and take a video afterwards and this is going to be timestamped so we're going to compare this with the tenant original video see if there's any sort of damage or anything like that most of those things especially if you had a great tenant in there uh are pretty

easy to work out right but when it comes to actually sending the deposit back well if you are using apartments.com it makes it really easy you want to give yourself enough buffer time to make sure You' actually thoroughly inspected the proper uh and then you can easily submit the deposit back from apartments.com in form of a payment uh if you are using some of the new uh fintech type bank accounts out there we actually did an episode on uh relay bank and the one that I'm

using mercury bank at the moment which are really good banking options for paying contractors but also for sending a payments and so that's a place where we could send an a payment back to our tenants for free um in just a a couple days if you do happen to have any sort of damage come up well you're going to want to itemize it and when you send the deposit back you're going to send it back with an itemized invoice of what that damage actually was this

is one of the places that I've seen um I I still have a lot of long-term rentals as well and I used to manage all my own long-term rentals in the past and this is one point where there can be a bit of discussion if if someone doesn't agree with the amount or something like that so make sure that you're just being really transparent and clear honesty is always the best practice right uh midterm rentals can be a fabulous opportunity they can be a great opportunity

for anyone that has a short-term rental that gets a little slower in the offseason or it could be a great opportunity for someone that just doesn't want to have to deal with so many guests checking in and out so I hope you've enjoyed these three parts the three parts of this series we actually combined all of these into a handy dandy ebook book you can get it AR rest methods.com it's totally free it's also something we're probably going to continue to edit and modify as we

learn more and we add new best practices into our own policies so I want to thank you for tuning in again I hope that gave you some good Insight I hope your properties are staying booked and until next time have a fabulous week want to get on the FasTrack 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 write 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