What You Need to Know About Working With Contractors

welcome to short-term rental riches where we'll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache as possible this week we're going to answer some questions we're gonna answer quite a few questions from you guys so this will be the first time doing this we do get lots of questions i usually try to bundle them up and put them in a podcast episode but there's a lot of other ones that have been coming

in so i just wanted to take a chance to uh kind of do like a rapid fire q a so i'm just going to read the questions that i got and give you my best answers and hopefully it helps you out there because the reality is we usually don't ask enough questions we kind of were trained this when we were in school growing up right like no one wanted to ask a stupid question and it i'm guilty of that myself there's lots of questions i'm sure

i never asked that could have been beneficial so hopefully this week we can answer some of those for you the first one is from bill in mississippi and he said i'm just getting or if just getting started can we hire va's virtual assistants to help set up and run the automation like smart airbnb and price labs or should we do this ourselves i'm trying to purchase my first one so smartbnb that is a management software for short-term rentals price labs is a pricing dynamic pricing tool

for short-term rentals specifically for short-term rentals and my suggestion my answer to this question would be to set those things up yourself at least for your first property or your first couple properties but after that absolutely you can have your va help you set up anything really as long as you've provided the training and the access to the tools you're using so my va's help me with all those types of things so good question bill next question austin this is from austin and it's about building

your network he says hey tim currently i'm aggressively searching for my first property the biggest challenge i'm dealing with right now is networking my circle hasn't yet my circle hasn't yet reached out to the people i would like to have on my team i'd love to know a little bit more about how you would advise for a young real estate investor looking to get some skin in the game sincerely austin this is a great question austin because as you may have heard our network is our

net worth and that really is true or at least a lot of that is true is that we get more and more opportunities if we have a bigger network and you know we can get more real estate deals we can learn of new lenders we can get all these resources that we might not otherwise be able to get if we have a smaller network so that's a great question and i think it's very very important and my answer would be we just got to get in

there so a great start listening to the podcast you know hopefully you're checking out some youtube channels and checking out some events in your area or virtual events but you got to go one step further than that and you really have to reach out to the people providing the content or on social media platforms so you really have to reach out and you'd be surprised a lot of people are much more accessible than you might think they are so give it a shot i think you'll

find that you get some good feedback and it's one of those things that just takes a little bit of time but at least acknowledging it is going to set you off on the right path so good question austin next question comes from skip in tennessee it says quick operational question do you have one netflix and youtube tv account for multiple units are you setting up one account per unit it's a good question so youtube and netflix those are two different subscriptions and they both work a

little differently i don't currently have a youtube subscription or a premium subscription for all of our properties but i do have netflix and the netflix account i believe allows for like five simultaneous users so i try to set up an account for each five or so properties the reality is that in those five properties it's pretty unlikely that everyone's going to be watching netflix at the same time so you might be able to stretch that and use one netflix account for a few more properties but

i do think netflix is really important i mean it's kind of replaced tv right that in youtube so make sure you've got a smart tv this next question is also from skip and it's which mattress do we use this is a tough question because there's not a one size fits all mattress right some people like a mattress that's slightly firmer some like one that's slightly softer but the one that we use almost exclusively is a queen size mattress off of amazon and it's made by zenith

zin us it's called a 12 inch so it's 12 inches thick green tea memory foam mattress we get really good feedback on this again from the majority of all of our guests we can't have a perfect mattress for everyone unfortunately but this one's worked out really well and i know personally i like it i sleep in a lot of these different rentals when i'm visiting the us and i really like it and it ships in a box it's easy to get by the way we have

this mattress and we have a lot of other favorite resources on our website at restmethods.com under recommended resources so you can go there and check out the door locks we use a lot of the software we use a lot of things we talk about on this podcast so great question skip next question from wayne in arizona says first congrats on the hundredth episode well thank you wayne i found your webinar and your weekly podcast to be very helpful and practical so thank you for that since

participating in your webinar almost a year ago i now have three short-term rental properties two local in tucson and one in michigan using an airbnb co-host so congrats wayne that is very very good news uh glad you took the leap i bet you're glad as well too uh the tools you've suggested such as price lab smartbnb and airdna have made this more manageable especially why i still have my full-time job it's all gone very well with us now qualifying as airbnb super hosts and generating a

nice profit so thanks once again for being big part of this of this success all that leads up to this question what resources would you recommend for me to begin more direct bookings so that is a good question direct bookings are bookings that we can take with our short-term rentals directly so not through airbnb not through vrbo and my answer to this question i think the easiest way to handle this is to use a management software platform and those management platforms like the one i use

host way has a built-in option to list your rentals online on your own website so that's the easiest way and then he also asks how you can go about taking payments on that we use a credit card company called stripe and you want to link that directly into your management software and then if you get a direct booking it's gonna it's all gonna sync up and just work pretty seamlessly now keep in mind if you're taking direct bookings you don't have the airbnb host guarantee like

you would have so you wanna make sure you get a deposit and you really vet your guests well so you don't have any issues popping up so great questions wayne congrats congrats on getting several rentals already that's that's great news alec in arizona and i know alec he's a friend of mine he just bought a vacation rental so congrats alec um he has a luxury type vacation rental and his question was i have an extra living room an extra space essentially that's not being used it's

essentially a second living room should i add more sleeping space so this is a good question as well and i would say it depends so it depends on your type of rental depends on the type of guest you have coming so luxury rental i would be much more inclined to add more sleeping space because you usually have families headed there on vacation so the more space the more opportunity you have to get your property booked now i experimented a lot with this with a lot of

my smaller rentals and i found that sometimes the rentals too small and you're adding extra sleeping space like on a sofa couch or something like that it's kind of cramming too many people into a space that was just my experience and the more people you have in your property the more people you have to accommodate so keep that in mind it could be a little more difficult on the management side one thing you can do is charge an extra per guest fee over a certain amount

so let's say your vacation rental had spots for eight to sleep in so but you wanted to add another spot maybe get a ninth and a tenth guess well you can advertise for eight people and then charge an additional amount on your ninth and tenth guest and so that's an option available in airbnb so take a look at that good question alec and congrats on the property next question from michael says tim i've got to say you have the best resource out there i've run into

i went through a few training sessions for short-term rentals to get different perspectives and i'm so glad i ran into yours first you have set the standard at delivering value thank you michael the other two compared to your training just doesn't compare just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for because you've guided a good portion of my goals in business this year you're welcome michael and that is great to hear so michael's referring to our our str playbook that we added not

too long ago on our website rest methods i really do try to jam pack that with as much info as i can it's actually a recording of the virtual event that we do and the next one's coming up so if you don't get a chance to attend it live virtually we will have a copy and that's what will become our str playbook so it is jam-packed as much as i can possibly fit in there so his question says any tips on utilizing hostly guidebooks i was

attempting to do one guidebook per property but that would cost a lot i want to do that because each property has different instructions on entering into the property so that's a good question and hostfully is the guidebook resource that i recommend it's the one that i use with all my properties and i would say you know they do charge you per property now a lot of my properties are very similar they're multi-family properties so i might have four units that are pretty much identical i don't

send my checkout instructions in the guidebook because those are changing with each guest it would just be a little too much hassle so i have pretty generic information in my guidebook but that's still very helpful so it has all of my favorite local recommendations it has information about parking for multiple units if they all happen to be in the same building or complex so i don't have a guidebook for every single property individually i do have a guidebook available for any guest visiting that's going to

match their property but it's not going to be as specific as having check instructions and stuff like that i would say this can save you a heck of a lot of questioning and it does make it very nice for your guests so if all your properties are totally different i would definitely consider just kind of paying a little extra money and having one guidebook per property so hopefully that helps answer your question michael and thanks everyone for all the questions we actually have a lot more

so i'm gonna do another episode and hopefully i can answer as many as they come in and bundle them together and we can keep doing these podcasts they're really good questions so um thank you for sending them by the way we like to get the feedback and and you guys can check us out all the podcast platforms you can also find us on instagram at rest methods so if you've got a question please don't hesitate to ask it i can't promise that i'll get back to

you right away but i do want to get back to everyone so until next time have a wonderful day you