There’s one thing my team and I have learned managing tens of thousands of guests, is that one day, some of your guests will leave something at your property.

That is a fact, that is a guarantee.

And so this week, I want to talk about how you should handle items that your guests leave behind.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short-term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches Podcast.

Really happy you’re here again.

I’m happy to be home in Brazil, or at least where home is for half of the year.

As most of you know, I moved out of the US quite a long time ago.

I do spend a lot of time in Colombia, and I spent a lot of time here, but I was traveling around, and it just feels really good to get back and get settled in and to revisit some of the things that I really enjoyed about Brazil, or some of the things like tennis, and going to the beach, and all these fun things.

So, on my way back, or actually one of the flights right before coming back, I was reading my iPad, which I do, I love my little iPad Mini.

It’s the only Apple product I have, actually.

I use an Android for my phone, Google phone, Google Pixel, because it works in the whole world with their service, which is great.

I’m sure there’s a lot of other options out there now, but that’s why I switched over back in the day.

But I still have an Apple product, and it’s my iPad Mini, and I love it because it’s not connected to work in any way.

It’s the one device, the one electronic device that I have that isn’t connected to email, it’s not connected to WhatsApp or a phone, none of that.

So I don’t get any messages, any notifications on there, and I use it just to learn and study and journal and read and review my goals, things like that.

So I love it.

So I was reading on the plane, and then I got off the plane.

Actually, I was on the next flight, headed out, and I went to reach for that beautiful little iPad mini and realized I left it in the seat pocket of the flight before.

So yes, guests and travelers leave stuff all the time.

I was really fortunate.

This story has a happy ending.

I got that iPad back before leaving the country.

So I actually went to a hotel, and I was there for a couple of days, and the airline, I think this was Delta Airlines, managed to ship that iPad to the hotel, which accepted it, and I got it just before leaving.

So some of our guests, they leave really valuable items in our properties, right?

And not all the items that they’re leaving are items that they’re going to want back, right?

We get phone chargers all the time left.

That’s probably the number one thing.

Sometimes people leave clothes.

Sometimes people leave all sorts of little things.

We know they leave food and stuff like that.

But obviously, those aren’t things that they’re coming back for.

We’ve had guests leave some pretty valuable stuff, phones, watches, all kinds of things.

And so, we have a way for handling that.

And I want to tune you in to the way we do it.

But before we get into that, I want you just to ask yourself, no matter where you are in your short-term journey, if you’re just getting started or if you have lots of properties, this is something that’s going to happen.

So you’ve got to ask yourself how you’re going to handle it.

And assuming that you’re not doing the housekeeping for your short-term rental, your housekeepers are going to be the ones to find these products.

So really, it’s a conversation that you need to have with your housekeeping team before you start.

If you work with a company, getting those items back to the guests is probably going to be a little more challenging.

If they have three, five, ten, twenty housekeepers, then shipping items back is probably not something that they’re going to be super excited to do, right?

So you got to make sure that you talk with whoever’s actually doing your housekeeping.

Of course, if you just are getting started and you have one property, that is a lot easier to do, but there’s still quite a few things that we need to think about.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I’ve been managing my properties virtually for years and years.

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

We’ve learned a ton, and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made.

In fact, we’re now big enough to help manage your properties as well.

Our team has a ton of experience from the inner city apartment to the large lakeside retreat.

We’ve worked with all types of properties across the nation.

We’ll help to take the management workload off your plate while earning top revenue and excellent guest reviews, all while charging an industry low fee.

If you’d like to find out if your property fits with our program, just head to strriches.com.

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

Just click on the property management button, and we look forward to chatting with you soon.

So the first step here, step number one, is that you need to have a description of how you handle this in your house rules.

So in our house rules or your rental agreement, because items will get left behind, that is a fact.

So in our rental agreement, we have an item in there that says, if an item is left behind, we’d be happy to ship it back to you.

But please note, it could take up to a week before we mail it.

There is a $50 charge plus shipping.

And so obviously, the charges, you guys decide whatever works for you.

And a lot of times, that might just be the charge that you’re passing right on to the actual person that’s doing it, right?

So if your housekeeper is willing to ship these items back for you, then that could be a fee that you’re passing back to them.

So that’s the first thing.

We want to just have that disclosed.

So if they ask about it, they already signed our rental agreement, they saw our house rules, and we already had that laid out for them.

So we need to communicate with the guest, hey, we found your so-and-so.

We’d be happy to ship it back for you, but please note, it’s going to take X amount of time and we do have a charge since we have to pay one of our team members to go and do all the shipping and all those types of things.

Would you like us to send it back to you?

A lot of times if it’s something not super valuable, really, if it’s something less valuable than the charge you’re charging most of the time, they’re going to say, don’t worry about it, no big deal.

But for those times where it is something valuable, like my little iPad mini, they’re definitely going to want you to ship it back.

And so the first step is holding on to that item in a secure place until someone is able to ship it.

And so if again, if you’re just getting started, you have one property or if you have a really good relationship with your housekeeper and they’re happy to go ship it off the same day, that’s the best case scenario, right?

We want to get it back to the guest as soon as possible.

Had Delta Airlines got my iPad Mini back to the hotel one day or two days later, I would have never got it.

I mean, I would have er, it would have been stuck in storage somewhere for months because I’m not going back to the US for quite a while.

So I was really grateful for that.

I remember we’re in the hospitality industry, so we want to do everything we can to make sure that our guests have a great experience before, during, and after their stay.

And so this is the after the stay part.

And this will, if they’re ever back in the area, they’re going to remember this, believe me, and they will look to book your property first.

So the first step, we need to make sure we have our process disclosed.

We need to communicate this with the guests.

We need to store that item in a safe place if we’re not able to ship it that same day.

So a lot of our properties, we just have a locked storage and that could be a good spot.

Or if you have a really good relationship with your housekeeper, they can hold on to it for you.

The place where it might get a little iffy is if you’re working with a housekeeping company that has a lot of housekeepers, maybe there’s new housekeepers going in, you don’t have security cameras on your storage and stuff like that.

You don’t really want to be responsible for that guest item, but you do want to have that disclosed that if something unfortunately happens, you guys are not responsible for those items left over, right?

You want to make sure that it’s stored in a place that’s safe until the day, until the moment where you can ship that item back.

Then, you’re going to want to figure out how much the shipping actually costs.

And shipping can range a whole lot.

Of course, if you’re trying to ship something internationally, that could get exorbitantly expensive.

We actually do not ship anything internationally, especially electronics.

And I’ve learned that one the hard way a long time ago when I was living in Colombia.

I ordered a new phone and my mom sent it down across the border.

But you know what?

It never actually showed up.

You have custom fees.

You have all those types of things.

These extra taxes.

And so fortunately, there’s not really an easy way to ship things internationally.

But for all of these domestic type things, it’s pretty easy to get a shipping estimate.

You can go on ups.com or FedEx or DHL and look up a shipping estimate if you happen to know the weight and the sort of package size.

A lot of our properties are near postal centers, right?

So the most sure way is just to go there, figure out that charge, and communicate that with your guest.

We will charge our guests the estimate first.

So we will do that via Stripe.

And most of you, if you’ve been in the industry for a while, and if you’re on other platforms where you’re taking credit card payments, you probably have Stripe set up already.

So we’ll get that charge first, and we’ll also get the charge for handling before we go ship that item.

If there happens to be a big difference in the postage, if it’s really big for whatever reason, we just totally underestimated that we might charge the guest.

But most of the time, we’re not going to cover that tiny little difference, right?

When you’re shipping the items, always a good idea to get a tracking number, and that’s one thing that you can send over to the guest, especially if this is a valuable item.

Sometimes it’s a little jewelry piece or something that a grandmother gave to them, or the husband or the wife left, or something like that.

And they want to know when it’s arriving, right?

So you can get a tracking number, communicate that over, and then hopefully that guest will receive that item soon, and you will make their day, and they will book with you again in the future.

So remember, with our short term rentals, the goal is to give our guests the best experience possible before, during, and after our stay.

And this is something that hands down is going to come up if it hasn’t happened yet.

You want to make sure you have that process in place so you can make your guests happy even after they’ve stayed with you, just like when I got my little iPad Mini back from Delta Airlines.

Thank you, Delta Airlines.

You saved the day.

So if you didn’t have a process in place already, I hope these few little tips helped you, and you can put that little process in place.

And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, well, then you know that I love technology, and we can save a ton of time implementing AI, artificial intelligence, in the right ways.

My team and I have been playing around with this for months, and we’ve written the perfect prompts that you can just plug in to your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT to help you uncover exactly who your guest avatar is, help you write your listing descriptions, help you write your photo captions, and so much more.

It’s a living, breathing document that we’re consistently working on, and I’d love to give it to you for free for being one of our loyal listeners.

You can head over to restmethods.com forward slash AI and get your copy for free.

I hope it helps you along your short term rental journey.

Thank you.