When Your Guest Doesn't Leave And Happens To Be A Felon

welcome back to the short terminal riches podcast today we're just going to get right into it no beating around the bush we're just going to jump right in and after tens of thousands of reservations we got our first squatter or someone you could say that just overextended their stay but in a very ugly way and so I don't want to intimidate you if you're out there and you're just getting started or you haven't quite got your shortterm rental yet remember my team and I have managed

tens of thousands reservations and this is the worst guess overstay experience we've ever had can't really call it a squatter because he he was out pretty soon afterwards but this could lead to someone squatting and all the things we're going to talk about today are things that you should be doing to try to prevent these types of reservations these types of guests from entering your property in the first place so I like to think that my team and I have done a really good job and

that's why this is the first time that it really got a little stressful so let's just go ahead and jump into it what happened here we had a guest checkin we did all of our normal guest checkin procedures so uh the first red flag for us was there a little bit of weirdness going on with the credit card tried to book a property with his mom's credit card and the names didn't match up so of course we didn't accept that and just to back up one

step this is from booking.com and so if you've tuned in the channel for a while you know that we list all of our properties on booking.com and we make a lot of money with booking.com there's a lot of upsides to booking.com but it can be one of the more trickier OTAs or online travel agencies to manage if you don't have some of these steps in place one of the big things is that if you're not using booking by payments or booking.com payments where they're doing it

for you which wouldn't recommend because they don't allow you to take a deposit or the deposit maxes out at a very low amount the only other alternative to that is collecting the payment on your end which is what we do we use stripe and that's what most people in the industry are using and so we have a little more verification we need to do with that so the first red flag for us was that this credit card did not match up for the guest the second

red flag for us was that we usually don't like to accept Loc unless there's some really good reason or the communication's been really good with our guests and while this guest was a local he said that he has been out of state for a long time and he was just coming back so there's a little bit of trickiness going on there and remember we can't actually just decline People based on where they come from that goes against the Discrimination policies with Airbnb so we do have

it in our house rules it says if you're a local you must contact us first that doesn't mean we can enforce that rule but it definitely helps us get a lot of response from our guests and we always ask our guests why they're coming to town first too uh that's a good way to provide them a better experience but it's also a good way to find out a little more information and potentially weed out some bad guests so you should definitely be doing that if you're

not already okay so there was a little bit of weirdness going on with this credit card but we got that sorted out we got his payment up front before giving them the check-in code that's always a good idea and we got their deposit or we had an authorized hold on their credit card for a deposit in case something got damaged in the property we have time to check them uh after their checkout we got a rental agreement signed with a signature highly highly suggested and no

I'm not referring to just the house rules that you might have an Airbnb but we sent out an actual rental agreement it's a contract to rent the property they sign sign it digitally it has the dates of the reservation it's one thing that you definitely want to have in a situation like this so you can provide it to the police if you need to so we got a rental agreement signed we got a credit card payment we got a deposit hold we got a selfie from

the guest so this is another thing that our team does to match up the photo with the ID so we also get their ID we got all of these things thing so I think we were doing a pretty good job we got information from the guests at least from what they said they're moving back into town and so even though there was a few red flags going on there we were able to sort them out and we let the guests check in so we thought everything

was fine and dandy until the day the checkout came and our housekeeper showed up and luckily no one got hurt or anything like that in this situation but the guest basically slammed the door on our housekeepers and right in front of our housekeeper uh locked the door she thought she saw a weapon a gun inside and so we contacted the police and this is when things got a little dramatic like scene from a crime movie or something and I'm not just saying that I mean the

police actually showed up the news showed up because what we found out is that this guest actually had multiple felonies after providing the ID to the police officers and our rental agreement trying to get their help to get this guest out because they would not check out and there was you know of course we sent the the general messages through the OTA or through email or you responding always a good idea and of course we involved the OTAs but there was nothing they could do at

this point the checkout date came door slammed in the face for a housekeeper guest is not leaving we call the police he is a wanted felony not just with one felony but like multiple felonies on his record our housekeeper thought they saw a gun in the apartment and so what did the police do sadly they didn't do much of anything they would not go in there and so they basically left it up to us so of course we started to panic just a little bit we

do have some learning lessons from this I promise so I'm going to share those with you here in just a quick minute but just continue we didn't stop there right the the police basically told us we're not comfortable entering the property because there's a weapon there that the actual local police would have but they had called like the chief of police or something and that person told them not to so just remember we need to know the rules in our local jurisdiction I'm going to get

to what our lawyer advised us in just a second but we need to know our local rules but just because there's a local rule it doesn't mean that the ordinances the police are always going to fall follow them to a tea right in this case this happened to be in Tennessee in a state that's pretty landlord friendly where we would have thought that the police could have got them out a little bit easier uh but they're basically told by the higher ups just not to do

it and so we're thinking things over we're trying to figure out how can we possibly get this guess out of our property and multiple things were going through our minds right can we turn off the utilities can we tell them we're Towing their car and actually tow their car can we uh lock the door when the guest leaves yes we could have locked the door because all of our locks are virtual right we can do that when they leave but we didn't know that there was

actually more guests in the property than there should have been so this is one other spot where we dropped the ball the camera for this specific unit was not working it is now you better believe we fixed it right away but just another reason to make sure that those cameras are always working or you never know if unless you're there personally how many people are actually entering your property so even if we had locked the doors with the guests on the outside uh which surely the

police would have gotten him after that there was guest in there just to easily unlock the door so that wasn't really a good scenario so what did we do we called my lawyer a real estate lawyer mind you so different lawyers for different things you want to make sure you're talking to a professional that knows your industry and he recommended unfortunately not to turn the utilities off as much as we wanted to you know after finding out all the details and to not do any of

those things but to go to our local court and file what's called a forced eviction and so this would have given him s days to make it to court and had he made it to court to accept the court date in the future he could have actually stayed in our property for another 30 days legally so again this is just the local jurisdiction where we are at if you haven't checked your local jurisdiction yet highly highly recommend it hopefully you never have to get to this

point but it's good to know beforehand so that you and your team or or your property managers whoever is helping you with the property can stay a little more calm during these sort of stressful situations so I'm going to recap and give you our takeaways here and just a second but just to sort of break this down again the guest is still on our property it's the day after they're supposed to have checked out it happened to be Valentine's Day in this property in a downtown

nice area above a restaurant with the news coming out and the police being there they actually had to close the restaurant so it seriously it turned into like a big ordeal and I feel bad for the restaurant owner he probably lost quite a bit of money on Valentine's Day luckily we're on really good turns with them uh and they understood we've never had a situation like this before as I explained in the beginning so luckily for us during the night this guest took off they left

the property and as I mentioned we did not have a camera there so that is totally our fault uh but we didn't know it was a good surprise in the morning so in the end we really lucked out here so what can we do to prevent these situations let's recap here a little bit well the first thing is you got to have some policy setup for vetting your guests checking their prior reviews is always a good one remember on on Airbnb and vbo it's a little

easier sometimes on booking.com people don't have reviews right or maybe they haven't used it as much and so check the reviews on whatever platform they're on if there's some red flag ones well you can cut it there make sure you have the rental agreement make sure you get an ID make sure you get payment for the reservation before someone actually checks in make sure you're getting a deposit or a deposit waiver is another good way to go and remember if the credit card does not match

the guest name then they can do what's called a chargeback what is a charge back basically means that the end of a payment or whatever time it happens to be a credit card customer calls a credit card company and says this was a fraudulent charge or I didn't approve this charge or whatever it happens to be and most of the time sadly that credit card company is going to refund the customer of the credit card company and not the merchant Us in this case and what

do you think happened with this reservation afterwards so not only do we want to avoid these bad guests in the first place but they're always they're the ones that leave the really bad reviews or have these fraudulent charges in the back end so it's it's even more important to make sure we're doing our guest verification up front and never getting these people in in the first place so we want that credit card we want to make sure it matches the ID we want a selfie this

allowed us to go to the police show them the ID and say hey look this is in fact that person they were able to match that up and of course find that they had felonies and all that so you do want a selfie and that's going to help you win those chargebacks if someone ever disputes a credit card charge uh that is not fraudulent so in the end what we decided to do here is that we had multiple kind of red flags popping up here and

we just decided if we ever have more than one red flag on a reservation we're going to decline it so here we had an obvious couple right we had the the credit card that didn't really match up we had the local coming back and so we would deny this again in the future some other things you might want to keep an eye out for are those last minute bookings remember if we have less time to vet a guess to get our real agreement to do all

these things that leaves a little more exposure for us we don't want the mismatch credit cards and another example came up is that we had another gas check in in the future that had a credit card now not all company cards match up 100% with those names I know that I have some that just have my company name on it versus my name so that's up to you we we decided we're not going to accept any reservation unless the guest from the ID they they give

us matches the credit card we dropped the ball with the camera so we would have seen multiple people coming in to that property had our camera been up and working that day and that would have been an earlier red flag maybe we could have got this whole process started started instead of figuring it out when the guest was supposed to check out again I don't want to freak you out that this is something you be overly concerned about the reality is we just need to do

a good job in the beginning of vetting our guests doing these things uh and that's going to help us weed the good out from the bad and it's also going to help us not get bad reviews yes guest left a onestar review which we will have removed because there was some obvious craziness going on there but they disputed the charge facts I mean so never want these guests in the first place because they're a lot of times the ones that are leaving us bad reviews and

doing all that on the back end yes a bit of drama on Valentine's Day but it all worked out uh really much better than expected because remember this guest could have legally stayed in our property another seven days had to get a chance to go to the court and then another 30 had they actually made it to court so make sure you check your local jurisdictions on this talk with real estate lawyer a local real estate lawyer if you haven't yet just to be a little

bit more prepared but at the end of the day remember this is a very very small chance if you're doing everything right if you want a little more help with your house rules or you want to find out a little more in depth about some of these red flags that I talked about today you can head over to our website strr riches.com you can see all of our recommended resources there uh you can there's tons of downloads our house rules you can search for the episode

we did specifically on red flags lots and lots of information out there after over 225 episodes I can't believe we've been doing this every week for 225 weeks uh it's been a fun journey and I hope things have been going well in your world until next time have a wonderful 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