Are You Automating Too Much?

airbnb has changed from what it used to be it used to be very personal now we're automating all kinds of things many of which i teach on this channel but are we automating too much that's what we're going to dig into this week 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 talk about something that's kind of reverse of

what i normally talk about which is scaling and growing and automating and operating our properties remotely from columbia or anywhere in the world where you are so this is a bit of a flip but there is such a thing as too much automation so that's what i want to talk about we didn't see this a long time ago with airbnb you know when airbnb started it started as someone a host renting their property and many times this was like before automated locks you know someone met

the guests there maybe they're traveling from the other side of the world it was fun it was interactive we got to meet lots of people and then we handed them the keys we showed them around our property we gave them some recommendations verbally maybe and then we wish them a good stay and we checked in with them more often and but now things have really changed right we have recognized how much money we can make with these properties four or five or more times what we're

making with long-term rents and so a lot of investors myself included have jumped in and we're scaling and with that scaling naturally we're losing a little bit of the human touch but that doesn't mean we have to lose all of it and that doesn't mean we can't get great reviews so i want to talk about the main points here hopefully just as a reminder to you guys to check on a few things to make sure that you're not automating too much so before we can kind

of decipher whether or not we are automating too much we need to know what type of guests are staying in our property or our avatar you could call them you know vacation rental where families are staying for a week is going to be different than some probably tree house tiny home out in the forest which is gonna be different probably than some guests staying in urban city places although i would say that the demand and the visibility of short-term rentals is just growing exponentially so we

will start to see people of all ages traveling at all types of properties we have a really wide range of people checking into our properties so we have to try to set up our automated messages to accommodate as many people as possible so we need to know what types of guests are checking into our properties and try to accommodate as many of them as possible with our automations and with our guest messages sometimes we're going to be too automated and how do we know well it's

going to show up in our reviews and one thing i've noticed is that you know as i've scaled i created my own company to manage my own properties and when someone on airbnb this is more specific to airbnb because booking.com that's traditionally been like hotels and but airbnb and vrbo i would say you know there's still quite a lot of people out there that are looking for and they're expecting a personal experience you know maybe even like handing keys over if they were using airbnb a

long time ago they're expecting more of a human interaction so we're gonna realize if we're not meeting that buyer reviews and if we're a management company managing all of our properties well some people get turned off by that some people aren't going to book your property if they see it's managed by a property management company so instead of us advertising all of our properties as you know my company name and that's the picture of the logo on there i've got a picture of my face on

all my properties and yes it's not me sending all the messages i talk with my team about this all the time but i am behind a lot of these processes and everything so it still allows a little bit of that personal touch and i do have a bio on my airbnb profile so if you don't have a bio on there put one in for sure mine says i love traveling it says uh you know i like to stay active when i can and just a little

bit about me i like real estate investments so just talk a little bit about yourself and if you're doing this with your spouse or significant other have a picture both you guys with your dog or whatever it is a nice friendly picture will help add a little more of this human touch so that's the first step is just having a little profile bio that says the person behind these properties is actually a real person but we can also add in some human touches with our guidebooks

and our recommendations so yes our digital guidebook is automated if you haven't already go back and check out our podcast on hostfully that's what i use for guidebooks but this can add a personal touch in an automated type way because i've got my favorite restaurants on there i've got some recommendations in a city that i'm very likely more familiar with than the guests that are coming right so um put in some little notes in there you know i i really love this back alley korean barbecue

place you will not find a better one and you wouldn't know it was there unless someone told you so those little things add a lot uh and again that's kind of automated but it's still a bit of a personal touch another thing that you're going to want to do and i recommend this for any guest coming in is just ask them why they're coming to town we want to know that anyways but in that response we can find out a little more are they coming to

to meet a family member they haven't seen a long time and then we can offer a legitimate response you know i hope you have a great time with your great uncle or whatever it is so it's just a little more personal that's not an automated well you can make that automated question uh but it'd be nice to have a legitimate response so obviously you know if you're not the one sending these messages then you've got to have receptionists on your team or multiple receptionists that are

helping you with this just to add a little bit of personal touch and of course we need a phone number we need someone that can be accessed at all times so we can ask we don't have to ask too many questions you know uh there is such thing as is being too personal right so we don't want to ask too many questions if the guest isn't writing a whole lot well then we shouldn't write a whole lot back in response we should try to match how

much they're communicating with us and that'll help that'll go a long way too you can add little things like welcome cards in your property and have your housekeeper add the name of the guest coming in each time so that's kind of a nice touch too it's a little more personal it's easy to do and if you're using property management software which i always recommend you can easily share the guest's name and contact with your housekeeper so they know that in advance and you don't need to

add it in so those are just a few things that we can add in amongst all this automation but we still are going to have a lot of automated messages right i think that it's a good idea for some of them like i we have one for example that follows up uh it goes out uh four or six hours after check-in and just says hey i just wanted to make sure that you checked in okay and you're enjoying the space and below that you can put

in easily please note this is an automated message but we're monitoring it full-time so if you do have a question let us know and we will respond right away so by adding a note in there that it is automated message that can help too so someone knows they're not communicating with the robot right so that said there's a few touches in there i'm a big believer in automation it's better for our guests too because they're getting things timely but we need to have the other end

of that we need to have someone that can respond if we need to and just add a little more personal touch um and this naturally as we scale becomes harder and harder to do but it's not impossible right the big hotel chains of the world they save notes on our guests so we can save notes on our guests and our property management software one of the things we do when our guests are checking in is we check to see if they've stayed with us before and

we can welcome them back another little touch so take a look at your automations how they're set up are you guys getting negative feedback because there's not enough personal touch well then let's just make a couple changes let's make the guest experiences better that's going to improve our reviews that's very likely going to improve our revenue and our occupancy and then we can keep on keeping on so until next time i hope that gave you guys a little insight and i hope you're doing very very

well out there take care you