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 glad you’re here again as always today we are trying to get as much exposure from as many sources as we can but that becomes a challenge when we start having multiple calendars for short term rentals and multiple places where people are seen our properties there’s a lot of things we need to consider but it’s not that complicated so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today how we can integrate a bunch of different listing sites maybe not a bunch but at least a few hopefully with the channel manager.

What is IT channel manager what channel manager essentially just takes multiple channels or O. T. A.’s online travel agencies like Airbnb booking.com Expedia X. cetera it takes all of those online travel agencies and that combines them into a sync calendar so that you can make sure that you avoid double bookings with your gas double bookings are something that we Ned ever one I have to say we have had a couple now we’ve had thousands of reservations so the more reservations you have the more chances something like that can happen we had little glitches in our property management software 1.and we did have a couple double bookings in the past not fun for any of us we just wanna make sure we have a backup plan for that so in that case we have other units we can put the men or find a hotel first comes worse but we want to avoid that at all costs in the channel managers gonna help us do that.

So how do we actually use a channel manager well it depends it depends if you’re already using property management software or not let’s say you have a few listings with Airbnb for example and you want to combine them with homeaway well there’s an easy link that you can grab from Airbnb call then I cal link and that is under your counter settings and essentially what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna take that link and pasted and home always counter which will have the optional so or vice versa homeaway to Airbnb that we’re sensually sharing both those calendars so that you don’t get double bookings so when you get a book in one place and blocks your calendar so that no one else can book it from any other listing site now a lot of tools are available for this and a lot of them are built right into management software programs which there’s a bunch and I’m gonna leave several in the show notes for you guys but these software systems have built in channel managers so they will help you manage multiple listing sites at the same time as well and some of them have direct integrations which that is the ideal way because then that means you’re getting all of the messages and everything coming from those listing sites as well we’re gonna talk about that because there are some concerns aside from double bookings that you want to consider when you start listen on multiple O. T. A.’s or online travel agencies so you’re on a couple sites let’s say their Airbnb homeaway VR BO how do you charge your fees for this or how do you decide what you want to charge you going onto a new platform let’s say on Airbnb and homeaway for example but you’re considering going to booking.com and booking.com has a really high fee to list your properties on their.

Well if you want the maximum exposure but you don’t want to be giving up revenue you can simply sat in increase on your prices on booking.com to where it equals out to be the same amount to turning on your other platforms and now most all channel managers are going to allow you to do this so that’s what I’ve done in the past but just because we have access to all of these different platforms online and and different listing sites doesn’t mean that we want to be on all of them because the more you’re on the more complicated things can get she wanna consider for example that if you’re almost full calendars even though those are shared you’re probably getting messages from gas and multiple places you were going to have multiple cancellation.

Policies not every online listings site has the same options so those are gonna be different the payment options are going to be different is the gas pain in advance so they pay 100 percent Vance or do you need to figure out how to charge that gas refunds those are gonna be different as well what about reviews now you have another place where you want to monitor your reviews and make sure that you’re getting good reviews so there’s lots of things to consider going on multiple listing sites but at the end of the day it is definitely definitely worth it and if you’re using a property management system all put in the show notes summer smart B. and B. you Porter gassy which I use personally my VR all these systems have built in channel managers to help you manage the calendars and all of the messaging between these different sites so it really isn’t that difficult to get set up on multiple sites in it increases your exposure and it protects you in case of an issue with any given list inside if Airbnb took down your listing for example and you were on no other sites when you’re gonna be in a pretty tough spot so we want to be on as many as possible that we can easily manage without all of the headache and ideally the end game is to have our own website and to get you know if we can all of our bookings through our own website now that’s gonna be pretty tricky to do it’s easier with vacation rentals where guests are booking regular year in and year out but we have to remember Airbnb and homeaway and these companies spend millions advertising to get people to book through their sites so it’s a good idea to be on as many as you can but as long as you’re.

Comfortable with the management again consider the fact that you’re gonna have different sets a cancellation policies different refund and review policies a whole different set of rules but you can use those management tools to help you with all that you’ll find after you’ve got it all set up that it’s real easy to coordinate everything and then your gonna have more exposure your rentals will hopefully stay more occupied and make you more money. So check that out check out a channel manager if you haven’t already signed up with one take a look at some of the veil besides take a look at using your own website which is offered easily an integrated through some of these management tools all share within the links and I hope you see an increase in occupancy without seeing an increase in your work load until next time have a wonderful day. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals what all searching the properties.

You want to make sure that you fire the right properties to give you my. There is no charge to you for being one of our subscribers just go to rest methods. R. E. S. T..

RELATED PODCAST EPISODES

• Episode 70: Must-Have Photos in Your Listings
• Episode 55: Insider Tips From a VRBO Account Manager
• Episode 54: Looking for Help Managing Your Properties?
• Episode 52: Airbnb Took Down ALL of My Listings, This Could Happen to You!
• Episode 30: 3rd Party Bookings – Good or Bad‪?