Should You Still Provide Netflix in Your Short Term Rental?

welcome back to the shortterm riches podcast I'm happy you're here again today we're talking about a a fun topic I would say because streaming services have opened our eyes to all of the entertainment throughout the world at our fingertips right like YouTube has done but watching movies on Netflix and Disney this has made things so accessible it's really really awesome we can watch them on our tablet devices even on our phones whatever it happens to be uh and of course we can watch them in our

short-term rentals as well as our guests but do we actually need these Services that's what I want to tackle today first thing is let's kind of just talk about these services in general overview what are the options what might people want in your property the first one and by far the most popular at least in my opinion is Netflix and Netflix has come a long way right and they actually have multiple subscription costs now too so we'll get to that in just a second but Netflix

itself if you haven't already seen has quite a few series on short-term rental so go check those out uh we can never learn too much right so uh there's one called stay here uh there's another one called uh world's most amazing vacation rentals you can just simply search in the search bar Netflix and find a few of those for some good entertainment we also have Hulu definitely uh less popular than Netflix uh we have Disney definitely more popular among our younger crowd and uh our families

right families that have children and they also have a ton of good entertainment on there they also have all the Marvel and the pixel movies so they do a really good job uh we also have YouTube TV now which is a little price here but that does provide um a lot of good good options we have Apple TV so we have quite a few options out there but should we actually be offering these Services anymore well let's look at some of the the challenges before we

sort of decide with this and I would say maybe one of the first challenges is that the amount of devices we can use on one of these Netflix Services has decreased a lot so I remember when I started adding Netflix to a lot of my properties I think we could have like five people watching simultaneously they've considerably decreased that the time of this recording it's down to like 2 uh which means if you have a larger portfolio you got to have a lot more subscriptions or

you might have multiple people in your home multiple TVs May it's a bigger home with five TVs and only two of them are going to work so that's sort of the first challenge is that you might be advertising this and it's not actually available when the guest goes to log in because it's being used elsewhere the Second Challenge uh is in regards to Prior viewing history and so you may not have had this happen to you yet uh but my team and I we've managed tens

of thousands of reservations and a lot of my properties and now our partners properties I'm happy to say we uh we've been growing our management portfolio lot working with a lot of awesome properties and a lot of awesome Partners Across the Nation so if you're interested in chatting with us see if we might be able to help you can just go to strr riches.com there's a property management button there and I'd be happy to chat with you personally we've had an issue come up where we've

had guests check in and maybe they have their little ones around and they open up the TV and there's some prior history that shouldn't be shown to little ones you know so uh pornography this was a claim honestly from a guest so of course we don't have any pornography subscriptions or anything like that on in in my properties or in our partner's properties but if we're advertising these services that we're offering them and something inappropriate comes up it's possible that your guest could could call you

out on that right and so that is one thing we all know that we've checked into a place we've subscribed with our YouTube subscription or Netflix and and we forget to log out right and so the next guest that checks in can see your prior history now I know a lot of those much more graphic things like pornography those aren't available on Netflix and stuff like that so I don't know where these comments came from but the reality is is that we do have prior viewing

history on there and if it's not totally appropriate for the next person checking in um it's not really a good experience right and it's not even that it's not super appropriate but it might just be something totally different topics totally different than someone's used to seeing and we don't want to remind our guests that we had other guests staying in the property so when someone checks in and they're seeing a bunch of Prior history it's reminding them of guests that were there before them that's not

a good uh mental experience right we like to think that H this is a clean slate just for us even though obviously it's not so that's one Challenge and that goes right in line with people not logging out of their existing subscriptions right which also means that you're going to have more simult anous devices using it makes it a little harder to track subscriptions sort of across the board the next challenge that might come up is if you advertise yes we have Netflix we have YouTube

TV we have Hulu but the guest shows up and it's not actually working or it's not logged in well this just creates another operational piece right you have to share the username and password with them if they plug it in it's still not working it's possible that maybe that got shared on other uh devices and now you just kind of have this back and forth operational piece which isn't a huge huge huge deal but as you're building your portfolio if you're managing lots of properties it

does become a bit of another operational piece and it's not a good experience for the guest and so if we don't advertise any of that knowing that a lot of people have these Services already and they just simply log in with their own sort of takes that piece out of the puzzle so the next challenge that a bit of a challenge although the subscription costs for these services are really really uh they're very reasonable um of course if you're using a whole bunch of them at

each property and you have a whole bunch of properties they can certainly add up so the financial cost now that these Services have decreased the amount of devices you could use that could be a serious consideration as well before we get to whether or not you should consider keeping these services in your property or just go ahead and get rid of them I just want to bring up a couple more points and that is that most people have these Services right or at least one of

them or if they're traveling with a group of people someone in that group is very likely to have one and the bigger our property is the more guests that sleep if we have a property that sleeps 15 people for example I guarantee you that one of those guests has a subscription in these services so they can simply log in with theirs while they're there so I don't think it's really expected anymore uh even in hotels they ask us to log in with our own subscriptions I

think a lot of people have them the costs have come down considerably and the more guests say at a property very likely that some someone already has one with that said the nicer your property is the more luxurious it is the more expectations a guess is going to have so this is one situation where I might just consider leaving it if your nightly rate is $1,000 a night and all of these Services cost you just you know a few hundred a year then you definitely don't

have the financial worry there right you still have the operational one but if you only have one property for example that operational piece is much easier right and we just have to make sure that our housekeepers are hopefully checking to make sure that those services are activated and they're logged in so when your guest shows up they don't have to do that part themselves so the bigger the nicer the more expensive your property is the more people are going to expect uh this does bring up

the question of sports too so a lot of times people are asking um if you have or offer Sports again this is an Amity this is something that not all properties need but the nicer your property is the more of these things that you should be providing your guests so with all that said it really depends whether you want to keep the subscription or not if you're concerned about keeping it and and it's not a big Financial issue for for you at all then definitely just

keep it but I would guarantee that the more time that passes the less and less we're actually going to need these services and so in fact I've taken them out of most all of my properties now I've kept a few Disney subscriptions in some of my larger homes but Netflix have pretty much taken out for a lot of the reasons that we just mentioned one last point before we jump off whether you decide to keep the services or not we still have to do a really

good job at setting Our Guest expectations so if we're not keeping the services we can simply inform our guests in our listing copy so online in our digital guide book in our photo caption so this is an important one where you have a living room and there's a nice big screen TV you probably want to add in your little photo caption there that it's set up for you to stream your streaming service but ours is not included you decide on how you want to word that

remember chat gbt can definitely help us reward things if we're struggling to come up with how we want to uh actually explain to a guest uh so just make sure that these that it's very clear that your guests are either not going to have these services available or that they do have them one last place that you might want to include it is in uh a simple one page in your property we've talked about these in the past having what we call a one pager as

your most important information your house rules about your property you may have a little note in there that says we do not provide traditional TV or cable services or yes we do and it should be logged in automatically for you on all the devices but if you have any challenges just send us a quick message so in a nutshell streaming services are amazing that's exactly why most of us have our personal subscription already there are a few challenges offering them in our properties one is viewing

history might be the financial cost although I don't think that's a big burden for most of us the actual logging in is probably one of the more important pieces that sometimes it gets logged out prior viewing history so I just don't think it's as important anymore as I mentioned we've taken out of most all my properties aside from maybe Disney and a few of my bigger properties uh and you might want to consider some of these subscriptions that people don't have anymore most people have Netflix

but maybe they don't have Disney so that could be a benefit the nicer your property is the more amenities you need the more expectations your guests are going to have but either way whether we're offering it or not we just want to make sure that we're really clear with our guest so I hope that gave you a little more insight I hope you've been enjoying all of your favorite Netflix series I know that I go down a rabbit hole from time to time uh and until

next week 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 rest methods.com that's reest methods.com