In the short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate with a specific focus on short term rentals quick action items to wire. Scale your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast hope you’re doing well out there today we’re gonna talk about house rules it’s important for every listing and it’s our way of protecting ourselves against a potentially bad gas and it’s also something that’s constantly evolving and we’re having to change our house rules as our gas change and in today’s climate with the corona virus we are getting some different gas so I just wanted to revisit my house rules and also share them with you and I’m just going to go through these in no particular order so let’s get right into it

1. my first rule says if you are a local resident that you must contact us before booking and now this one has actually changed a little bit with the corona virus pandemic because almost all of our guests right now our local because they’re not allowed to travel or a lot of travel restrictions have been cut so almost all of our guests for local however we have added some extra security where only allowing local guestbook that have positive reviews so when the world goes back to normal we will try to avoid local gas normally because if they’re booking locally and they already live in the same city or the same town and there’s kind of something else going on there we tend to find that they were looking for a place to throw a party so we try to avoid that in the past but now we’re taking local residents were getting lots of good gas but we just want to make sure that they have positive reviews first so that’s number one and that’s actually not enforceable by Airbnb some of these in fact will not. The 0 percent forcible by Airbnb but I believe that they’re good to have in your house rules because every gas that books your property through Airbnb has to agree to these house rules so they’re at least seen it they know that it’s important to you and it can’t hurt

2. I guess the knowledges and that’ll keep their noise level to a minimum after 10:00 PM and these rules again you want to just you know every rules going to be custom tailored to the property in to anything you find more or less important so a lot of my properties are older historic you know 0 plus years old and the sound unfortunately travels a little easier through walls and it doesn and your property so I have that in there just as a basic reminder

3. Guests must have a valid working phone number this is actually part of Airbnb these terms and conditions anyways but we want to remind the guests that we need a bill to get a hold of them so we have that one in there and we’ve also noticed this recently with all of the corona virus pandemic and the the the changing gas that were seen to some people not so good guess I would say have Google voice numbers or they get a Google voice number they used to make a booking and we aren’t able to get a hold of them so that’s a red flag if you try calling the number and it’s a Google voice number and you don’t get a response so that one is really just to reiterate an existing house rule existing policy from Airbnb this next one

4. A lot of our properties have gate remotes or garage remote clicker or a parking pass from the city so we have an extra note here that if that gas accidentally takes a parking pass that we have a replacement fee for that and that varies depending on how difficult it is to get it and really it’s to protect the next gas from checking in they don’t have a way to open the gate. Them a place to park on the street without risking getting a ticket then it’s affecting that gas so we try to prevent that and we also write that on our actual parking passes for example you know it’s got the fee on there if they lose it or sometimes we’ll put these rules or all of your rules if you want on the back of the entrance door so the guests can always see them now just a side note on house rules I mean we’re in the business of hospitality so we don’t want to throw all these things in someone’s face or even deter someone from booking one of our properties if they see a 40 page booklet on house rules so we want to be comprehensive but we want to also get our main points across as little as you can get by with and still feel comfortable that’s what I would do and we just wanna be cognisant of the language or use in as well there are easier ways to get your point across than others for example just putting in the word please or not capitalizing a whole stream of words to make it sound like you’re yelling at someone these are whole just kinda little things you can do so just be cognisant of the actual tax that you’re using in your house rules so it doesn’t so you’re not coming across as ops Sattar angry you’re like you’re yelling at your gas.

5. No smoking and this one has gotten trickier because of the legalization of marijuana especially my properties in California which is one of the first places to legalize marijuana so now we have no smoking and all of our properties but we also have a little section here and says no smoking also includes the use of vape pens and marijuana if we find that someone was smoking one of our properties we have a daily fee we’re going to charge them now this one again is hard to enforce but you can enforce it as long as you have proof so proof could be a picture of ashes or a joint rapper of blind terror at cigarette **** anything that resembles smoking that you find in your property. You can use that as evidence but and this is the caviar with Airbnb you have to submit a resolution both for the next guest Jackson so really you should make this part of your instructions for housekeepers because they’re the first ones and right so if they find something they want to notify you as soon as possible or notify your team so that you can file resolution before the next guest Jackson otherwise it’s gonna be very difficult if not impossible to get compensation for that there are also devices available now for monitoring smoke. So I’ll see if I can find one and throw it in the show notes I’m not actually using one myself but I have heard of them and. In regards to these devices we put in our rentals we always want to make sure that we outlined that in our properties description to or somewhere so that the guests knows it for monitoring smoke and when I say monitored smoke I’m talking actual like you know this cigarette or marijuana smoke not smoke like a fire alarm so those devices are out there and they’re out there for noise as well and always wears a company that makes as I’ve had one in one of my properties it’ll monitor the decibel of the volume in your property so you can set it if it goes over a certain decibel that it can send you a text message or notify you but again you want to make sure that you disclose that in your property to let the guests know that you’re not listening to what they’re saying but you do have a device in there that monitors their noise level if it should go over a certain amount so some pretty cool tools out there and still more more that are coming out all the time.

6. There cannot be any more than the allowed number of gas in or out the property at any one time in violation could lead to the removal of all the guests without refund so again this is one of those ones you want to words as nicely as possible you know whenever you’re talking about removing a guess from your property chances and sound that nice but this is an important rule because this will help you enforce against parties

7. Late check outs I’m sure you’ve experienced this before and this can be challenging. The way our house rules set up is that if someone checks out after the allowed check out time which is 11:00 AM that we will charge a late check out fee we pay housekeepers by the hour and if they show up to clean the unit and they can’t then we still need to compensate them we make that clear to the gas in our house rules and I put that right in there you know that we have housekeepers that show up and so we have to pay them regardless now if the gas isn’t leaving you know maybe it’s just a late check out and that’s fine and we’re not there you know 1101 with a whistle in our mouths you know waiting to collect that extra for your anything this is you know case by case but it’s better to have these rules in there than not now sometimes gas won’t leaving its total pain in the **** so we have in there that if it’s over 2:00 hours censor check out that we can charge them a whole day’s rent and now if someone just really not checking out you can and get him out of property then of course you’re going to want to call the police 1 of the nice things with short term rentals is they’re not actually tenets rate I mean or residence their short term gas so if they exceed the reservation technically they’re trespassing and the way that you’ll be able to prove that their trespass into an authority is with the reservation on Airbnb or wherever it was and also with your house rules stating that they need to be out by a certain time so you will want to have that if it ever comes to that scenario if if that ever happens hopefully it doesn’t but the longer you do this with the more rentals a little bit of everything seems to come up so you wanna be prepared

8. No pets allowed and that’s pretty clear 1 we’ve got that you know in our search criteria when someone searches on Airbnb that’s when the filters they can use so that’s pretty basic 1

9. An excessively dirty units you know sometimes guests have parties sometimes they’re just really dirty and and this is another one we’re gonna need proof so you want your housekeepers to take pictures but if that unit is taking much longer to clean than it normally does and you have proof of the dirtiness. What we do so we we charge an additional cleaning fee if it’s excessively dirty if there’s damage and of course we’ll go after the damage too but if it’s just really dirty than we typically will charge it additional cleaning fee and that’s in the house rules and you can enforce that weather may be as long it’s is it in your house rules another important one just to give the gas a heads up really is that if they’re booking over 30 days we are going to require that they sign a lease and run a background check on them so I have that in my house rules and we put a little note in there too that says we’ll be sending that before their check in as well so if you have longer reservations you accept longer reservations you wanna make sure you have a house rule in there as well. Lastly the we’re getting to the end here this is the last one and it just says that if by not following any of these rules forces us to to refund upcoming gas or offer a discount on upcoming gas that this gas could be liable for those charges as well.

So those are my house rules it’s constantly involving some of them were enforceable in the past and it’s become a bit of a gray area now with Airbnb so something we’re constantly going to be monitoring we’re going to be changing we’re gonna be adapting but I think at the end of it we want to make sure that it’s as comprehensive as possible without being in like in your face to the guests you know and I mean we we want them to feel comfortable and offer them a warm welcome to our property and since this is one of the first things are going to see we wanna be cognisant of the the verbiage that we’re using in their. So take a look at your house rules. Give them a little re visit see if maybe you can incorporate some of these things that you don’t already have in there you can adjust the Burbage and this of course is gonna be different for all properties if you have something unique to your property make sure to include that in there. And before I hang up here one last thing is where where can you put these so course there on Airbnb but you can also put him on the back of the door the entry door where someone’s going to see them all the time in the third place is in your guidebook so if you’re using a digital guidebook you can put one in there I use a cool guy book tool called hopefully will do a whole nother podcast on that one. But until then hope you’re doing well hope you’re staying safe and healthy out there talk to next.

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