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

Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast I am happy you guys are here is always a lot of fun doing these podcasts and it’s good to reinforce a lot of things that I’m learning and it’s good to get your guises feedback I just found out recently that we have listeners in over 50 countries that’s pretty awesome it’s great to get all the feedback we love it and and that’s also cool to see that we have such a broad reach and one of the reasons why at least one the reasons I think why is because the operations we put in place to manage our short term rentals we can use the same systems anywhere in the world pretty much the same set of systems no matter whether our properties and South America and Australia or it’s in the US of course there’s different regulations in the investment opportunities natural properties are gonna be different but the systems we put in place for pretty much the same so that makes it a lot easier for you to scale today I want to talk about repeat gas repeat guests are great because we already know that they’re good gas right they’ve already stated our property so it makes it easier and they’re also more familiar with the property which means they’re going to have less questions and now I don’t do a whole bunch of direct marketing but 13 percent last time I checked of all of our reservations are repeat guests that’s great news that means that the gas can pay a slightly lower amount and we pay nothing to the OTA so we can make more money at the same time or gas or pain a little less for the reservation and that’s one of the upsides and that’s one of the things we do to market to our repeat guests very subtly I just want to talk a little bit about repeat cast. They are great to have but how do we get them how do we get more repeat gas we’ve got to be a little careful here because we can’t market to our gas directly on the O. T. A.’s if Airbnb for example sees that we’re trying to get our guests to book directly through us that’s gonna be very risky and they can straight up ban you from their channel from from Airbnb or VR BO you don’t want to do this on any of them right but we can ask for their personal email and the personal contact info us all talk about a couple ways we do that the first I just want to tell you how we advertise for our repeat guests and you’re going to think this is like the laziest approach. No no man but essentially all we do is put a magnet on our fridge everyone sees the fridge or the refrigerator in your property we just have a magnet on there it says Hey book through mid town stays next time it’s real fine the lowest price we look forward to having you back and then we’ve got our Instagram and stuff like that on there but the reality is this is the only place that we market and can you believe that we have 13 percent repeat gas now repeat guests are more common in certain types of properties than other I would say they can be very good in a vacation rental type property but they might not be visiting your guests might not be visiting that property as frequently as they might let’s say an urban city property I would say and we talked about this before but the loyalty for vacation rental type properties can be a lot higher for a family or someone that wants to visit there once a year perhaps verses someone traveling for work and they have a lot more options in the city where you have your rental so both options and really anywhere between we can get repeat gas with no matter what type of property we have so are simple lazy if you could say way is just to put a magnet on the fridge but there are other ways and there’s other ways I’m exploring we talk about having a digital guide book a lot on this channel we use host fully one of the cool tools with mostly is that you can require that your gas enter their personal information and agree to your terms and conditions which can be your house rules before they have access to your digital guidebook so since we send out our guide book to everyone we collect a lot of emails this way and that makes it really easy so if you wanted to send out a book marketing email for example you could go to hopefully you could gather all those emails you have you can send out a nice thanksgiving Christmas holiday special or a slow season special or whatever it is. To try to get a little more bookings directly there are some additional tools available to get this I know that there’s some smart routers are internet routers that requires them to put in their email before they can use internet so that’s a good way to you although I don’t really like to put more steps in between our gas connecting internet it’s crucial and if there’s one more step than might be a little more complicated but that is another way to retrieve emails. The third way to retrieve emails from our gas is just ask them so if you’re on Airbnb you’re not gonna have their personal email but I have to do is ask for and just say Hey we like to have the email and the best contact number from all of our guests in case of emergency and in case we need to contact you for some reason or other so I asked him for it but you got to make sure that you recorded on the back and so I think host fully is probably one of the best options for capturing gas emails and also providing a better service to the gas because they have are cool look in digital guidebook to check those out. Now there are some things that go along with taking direct bookings right we have to have a platform for them to build a book directly with us and we have to take payment so if you’re using a property management software application like host flee or gassy or there’s a lot of other ones out there. Most of those have a built in way to take direct bookings for you can have your own website so that’s an easy way there’s also some platforms like my V. R. so check those out that’s the first step the second step is having a payment processor and I highly recommend if you’re in the US that’s using stripe stripe is 1 of the biggest merchant processors in the world that’s what we use what most people in the vacation short term rental industry are going to be using cell with those 2 things you can really make it easy to take direct bookings of course want better gas and if the repeat then hopefully they had a good experience and you know that they were good gas before so keep those things in mind but at the end of the day having repeat gas not only allows them to pay a little less but it allows us to make a little more I usually split the difference between what an OTA would potentially charge so Airbnb for example can charge anywhere from 1315 I think even up to 20 percent now to depending on the length of the reservation so let’s just say it’s 14 I might charge 7 percent last but I’m not paying that other 7 percent so I’m still making 7 percent more it’s nice every P. gas because it fills that calendar up a little more but I would say maybe 1 of the best things about having repeat gas is decreasing in your exposure or your vulnerability to being on 1 OTA like you’re only on Airbnb for example what happens if they turn your account off you’re done so hopefully that never happens to you but it has to happen to people before and so if we can limit our exposure to any 1 OTA we can make sure that our business is going to be a little safer in the future so if you don’t have repeat guests yet I highly encourage that you reach out to your great gas you’ve had before use some of these ways put a simple magnet on the fridge you can go to Vistaprint.com have a cool 1. Made up and they’re not expensive check out a hopefully guide book and capture some emails and think about doing some direct marketing until next time I hope your rentals are staying booked you’re making a lot of money and thanks for listening and then really from all sides of the world now from Hong Kong to Africa to Australia to the US to Canada it’s great to hear guys feedback and I look forward to seeing you next time this week. There’s so much money to be made the short term rentals but it all starts by having the right property if you guys haven’t yet seen my free ebook on our website rest methods.com head over there and get a copy it’s going to break down what I look for in a property in some great short cuts so that you don’t have to spend hours and hours researching at over rest methods.com and you can grab your free copy there if you want a crash course in everything I’ve really learned to short term rentals in over 5 years managing over 15000 Gasol recorded on our last live event I am happy to say we broke it down really nicely into a bunch of different modules that you can watch at your own pace it takes you from start to finish from finding a property we talk about analyzing the property but then also some of the more important pieces how to find your team and how to set up everything so that you can run your operation is passively as possible and free up your time you can find that it rests methods.com forward slash virtual.

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• Episode 93: Should You Use This Tool? (Booking.com)
• Episode 82: On The Ground Market Research (Finding The Right Property In A New Market)
• Episode 36: How Much Time Does it Really Take to Manage an STR?
• Episode 25: How to Increase Your Listing Exposure
• Episode 08: How to Price Your Short-Term Rental Perfectly – EVERYDAY!