With a lot of casa going or short-term rentals a lot of those are fixed like maybe our mortgage or lease payment but most of them are variable like our housekeeping costs it change periodically and I want to talk about one this week that is variable that I’m hoping we can shave down and save you a little bit on it we’re talking about utilities this week how to cut our costs their short term rentals when it comes to utilities let’s jump right in.

Welcome to 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 excited you’re here again is always actually it’s this whole podcast has been really really an exciting to see all the feedback you know we’re getting thousands thousands of downloads and it’s just been a lot of fun so I hope you guys are gonna lan enjoyment out of it and if you aren’t if you would head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you’re listening to us leave us a review we would really really appreciate that all right so this week we’ve got a important topic this one is important when it comes to our finances with their short term rentals and our expenses the goal is to have as little expense as possible running the best rental as possible which means we’re gonna make the most revenue right so we’re gonna be talking about utilities this week and a few things I’ve been considering with my own rentals a few things that we can do right now to maybe cut some of those costs and I just a few recommendations in general so I started thinking about this topic today actually I was talking with a good friend who lives in South Africa runs an awesome portfolio of amazing properties out there. I actually met him at a conference in Israel a short term rental conference so. Just goes to show that short term rentals work everywhere in the whole world they’re growing in popularity everywhere but the main thing is that the operations are all the same we were talking about the same operations and this topic of utilities came up in some of the things that he’s working on to cut his utility so I thought I’d be good and today I want to just break down a few different areas of utilities so I’m gonna jump in a little bit about solar some smart home devices some fixtures we might be able to put into our property and just some guidelines to maybe help our guests understand the expense side of it and maybe help them to use the utilities a little more efficiently so before we jump into that though I just want to break it down and not show just the numbers really quickly here because let’s just say we’re we’re making $2000 net on a short term rental before expenses to $2000 and that after our mortgage or property taxes insurance housekeeping,s receptionists management software so $2000 and that after all those expenses except for utilities storytellers are gonna be our water in our electric and our gas those are the ones I want to focus on this week so let’s say that those are $200 a month out of that $2000 that we noted that’s 10 percent so that’s a lot imagine if we can cut that down to $100 a month and save 5 percent rumor this is gonna be on going right this is when we save on utilities when we implement some of these things we’re gonna say these costs for the long run so this whole idea is really got me thinking about solar because solar has made a lot of advancements in the recent years it’s much more available now there’s more financing options and it’s just more of a realistic option now to get electric to our properties of. Courses depends where you are how your house is positioned how much sun you get where you are in the world you know some places have much more options than others but in the U. S. we have quite a lot of options now it’s becoming more regular in fact a lot of the new construction is being built with solar panels so for me a quick example you know was on mine I I only smaller multi family apartment buildings which all share the same roof right but if I’m paying the utilities for all these different apartments it really adds up so you know I’ve been considering it putting in solar panels on top of some of these buildings and just eliminating the electric cost now I see we’ve got a price and how much the solar panels are gonna cost and we can kind of calculator pay back period here right so if you’ve got $200 a a rental and electric expenses per month for example and you have even if you just have 1 but if you have 5 or yep tannery of 20 the more you have the the more this really starts to add up and can can be very expensive self so we got to calculate the pay back period but we don’t remember on top of that pay back period you know maybe that takes 345 years whatever to get our re queue park Spencer Acosta put the solar panels and we got our member this is also adding value to our property so if we want to sell our property later on it’s going to be worth more and if for some reason we decide we want to short term rentals anyone’s property we want to put a long term tenant back in it well we still have our electric costs covered right if running completely on solar so we can either charger the new tenant more or we can bill back a little bit for the electric expense so I’m gonna be looking into this more personally you know there’s also in the U. S. this is different everyone the world in the US we have some great tax benefits for doing this as well so I think there’s a lot of positives to solar might be worth looking into for your proper. He’s so you might want to consider that. Good news everyone travel is coming back and so I’m super excited to announce our next upcoming live event takes place in Memphis Tennessee it’s gonna be July August 30 first and incredibly jam packed weekend packed with info and all the tools and all the resources and all the procedures that my team and I have put in place to manage over 15000 gas as you guys know I’ve acquired a multi $0 portfolio across several cities across several countries and I’m really excited to share everything with you guys everything I’ve been doing to acquire these properties to set him up like a pro and to operate them as passively as possible it’s going to be a ton of fun you’re gonna learn a ton and I really hope to see their all the flying back from Colombia and you can find out more information by heading to rest methods.com to save your spot there is limited space because we’re gonna be going through some my actual properties the last one sold out so I really hope you guys can make this one a look forward to seeing you in Memphis. So the second thing we can do to cut down on some of these expenses and probably one of the biggest draws is gonna be our heating and air so. Heading on how that’s done if you have a central heating their system where you have window units or you have the mini split systems no matter what it is a lot of times you know most the time he’s working off electric so. If we can lower the usage of these will the will lower our bills to sell smart home devices are more readily available than ever smart thermostats to be specific so they have the nest thermostat Honeywell has them I mean there’s lots of options we can just find on Amazon now but those are going to do us any good if they’re just being used as a normal thermostats what we can do in the short term rental world is make sure that all these air condition systems are turned off while we don’t have gas in the property and now if these are set up for wifi and remote then we can turn them off wherever we are or team that’s helping us can turn them off to make sure the usage goes down and helps cut our costs so if you don’t have smart thermostats yet consider putting the man the relatively cheap now 300 Bucks and they can really really help with your expenses and cut down on costs I’m at the moment looking at going back and put in these and and lots of properties little bit of investment up front but as long as we’re monitoring I think it’s gonna shave a ton of money off of our expenses remember this is for the long run the other flip side of having a smart home thermostats is that of course you can make sure your temp Turner properties perfect for when your guest arrives and you can turn on a few hours before so that’s another advantage there. As we have tons of smart light options I’m not gonna really go into the smart light options because I don’t think they draw a whole lot of usage on your electricity bill we use LEDs most the time now and they’re very inexpensive to operate so another big bill that you might have is your water bill there are lots of options to help conserve water now this is also like a global environment thing right I mean we shouldn’t be wasting water really so there’s some easy things we can do your your shower head for example you can simply unscrew your showerhead go get one at home depot go get one at your local home goods store and that can really cut down on the water usage but we can also do that with 6 and kitchen faucets the little nozzle thing that goes underneath you can swap those out for a water efficient one as well so consider that a and then the other piece of this our toilets toilets back in the day the used to flush with the tunnel water and now some of them arguably don’t flush with enough for her but there’s a there’s a good balance in there so there’s some great toilets we can get that are very water efficient some cities some counties have tax benefits for this too so check that out but all these little things will really add up to help lower your costs on your expenses and this is for the long run so as to keep more money in your pocket. So we’ve got solar as an option we’ve got you know that’s probably the the most difficult option obviously but with the biggest and best long term returns we’ve got lots of options for smart home devices water saving devices and then lastly the this last piece of we can do is just ask our guests to help us out a little bit and when they’re not using the utilities to turn them off now this is the last step here because most gas aren’t really gonna read anything it’s just the truth but the more we have a posted you know in a polite kind way the more effective that’s going to be so you can put these notes in your digital guidebook for example just says if you’re not home if you wouldn’t mind just turning the air conditioning down or off we put this in our check out instructions when I guess leave just please just turn turn everything off when you leave you can also leave it on the devices themselves so if you have a AC remote for example for your many splits you could pull a little a label on the back that says you know when you’re not using it if you could please turn it off to help us conserve energy we see this a lot of times in hotels as well with my 2 little sign in the bathroom that says the end regards to the water you know and conserving water and not using more towels and we need to all these things are really going to help cut down our usage and if we can cut down our usage that we’re going to cut down our expense and that means more money it’s going to go into your pocket so hopefully that help just a couple ideas around the utility subject it’s something that we all short terminal operators have to pay for it’s a really important one hopefully got a little bit out of that because I have a fabulous day out there in. Touching. 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 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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