Have you tried to hook up a virtual phone number here being the account and you got. Denied well I have to but I’ve got a way around it we’re gonna talk about that this week. 

Welcome to 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 there are always new things coming out there are always new topics and there are always things that are to be relevant your short term rentals are never going away and I hope you know that so I’m glad you’re listening and then this week we’re gonna talk about really good tool I think that you need to have especially if if you’re starting to get more more Runnels and that is a business phone number now Airbnb doesn’t make that super easy if you are trying to use a virtual phone number and a lot of the best phone companies are virtual grasshopper and John.com I’m gonna talk about a few of them we’ve got to get around this right when you set up your Airbnb account and you plug in a virtual number they’re going to say I I will accept virtual numbers I believe they don’t even accept Google voice numbers anymore could be wrong on that things are always changing but if you listen this in real time and my experience they are not but there’s an easy way around it essentially we have to have a real number in there but we can forward that to a virtual number so that’s what I’ve done and I’m just gonna break it down exactly how I’ve done it I tried with several phone numbers when I decided back in the day to set up a business line and we’re gonna talk about all the features and the benefits of having a business line and why it’s a must if you’ve got even one property but you’re planning on expanding I I definitely think it’s a must. I got a bunch of different numbers I ended up getting some cheap phone line from Walmart which if you’re in the US familiar with Walmart you know it was like a very low inexpensive monthly subscription and the phones basically just like a burner phone I mean it’s not even turned on but what I did is forward that number automatically so any call that comes in gets forwarded to my virtual phone numbers so I used the real phone line with Airbnb and then use one of the features from the phone line to forward which you got to be careful because there may be some phone lines out there that don’t allow that feature so just make sure you’re getting a real phone number to forward your virtual phone number that’s not your own see we’re trying to get away from using our own phone number so that we can easily delegate calls or messages or whatever we need to to team members if not right now but in the future so the the the sooner you have this the better in the easier will be to grow now I have a friend one of my inner circle groups who said she opened another line with like 18 T. or one of our main carriers and then after the line was open that she ported it to her virtual number and then just cancel the old one so she doesn’t pay a monthly fee for some spare burner phone line so double check that if if you if you want to go this route I haven’t done that but I guess I never thought of that so it sounds like that could work as well once we get past the piece of having a real number on Airbnb which you can use on multiple accounts by the way if you have lots of properties suggest having more than one Airbnb account so I use the same real number on multiple Airbnb accounts that forwards to my virtual line and the virtual online that I use is by phone.com we’ll put links in the show notes for that one and also another one that I hear is very good as well so once you’ve got that out of the way it will. Then we have some freedom right because a call coming in we can route it however we want someone to go over just some of these basic features and the big one is the routing calls or calling 2 people or more at the same time it’s super important that our communication is very very quick with our gas if they’re calling it’s probably because they have a question on something there might be an issue and we need to respond as soon as possible so by being able to call multiple people the same time we can help make sure that our communication is as good as possible but we can also set priority so if you are just working by yourself then of course you just have the number come yourself but if you maybe have one other person working with well then you could have a go to them first if you have 2 people you’re working with you could have it go through the change you want to make sure that when your gas is calling in that they’re not waiting on hold forever you know as it’s routing to all the different people so just be cognisant of those things but that’s one of the huge obvious features of having a business phone line we can contact multiple people the same time now we can also monitor their calls so if we’ve hired a receptionist or someone on our team is handling just that we can record the calls like you hear on all these other company phone lines you know for quality assurance we’re you know recording your phone lines and so on and so on and that’s important that’s a good thing I mean if if we receive feedback from a gas for example that maybe the communication between our team and then what was not what they were expecting we can go back and revisit that if it was a phone conversation now you can also use the phone lines for text messaging and the text messages you can have sent 2 emails so it just gives you all these options to make sure that you’re not missing messages from gas but also so that you can expand and you can start to delegate some of these 10. S. 2 other people and you know another thing might not be as important for some other people but you know when you when you get a lot of properties if you have a digital guidebook or you have a print out in the apartment or in the property or in the vacation rental which if you haven’t yet go back and check out my podcast on the on the one pager that you got to have in your property that’s going to have a phone number on it for a last resort phone contact nope that’s a personal phone number and you’ve already got a lot of properties or you’ve got a housekeeper manager’s phone number on there and something doesn’t work out and you’re no longer working with him when he got to go back and change all those phone numbers versus if you have a fallout with an employee or team member you can very easily just soul which the phone number on the back end and it can go to whoever you need to I really like the business phone line too because I’ve properties in multiple cities so when someone calls and it’s one phone number but it says you know if you’re calling for Sacramento press one Oklahoma to Memphis 3 so they can quickly get to the appropriate person and the more cities I go on the more I can add that phone number now I have multiple phone numbers with phone.com so I have a company line which is about one but I also have local phone lines in those are the ones that I would put on our local contact pages for the local contact zip code so that someone doesn’t have to go through a whole automated process or select appropriate extension if they’re in a rush for something they’re going to have the local business phone number but you can set up as many phone numbers with these systems as you need at least the ones that I’ve worked with and the ones that I’m going to recommend so those are some of the just the basic features of having a business phone line and overall we’re we have the phone line improves the feedback and to improve our guests experience but also allow us to scale more easily and. The cost is things are not as expensive I mean you can get virtual phone numbers for as low as $15 10 Bucks up to you know 5060 you can grow as your number needs to grow so I use phone.com and put that in the show notes the little burner phone line that I use if you’re in the US this 1’s probably available to you it’s called twig B. but you could not like I said you could try adding another phone line to an existing phone account 49 to your virtual phone line if you’re not familiar with that term porting when you start to look into these virtual phone lines you’ll see a lot of them have that option or if you switch from 1 phone company of the other lot of times they give you that option to port your phone numbers you could keep the same 1 so look into that and you might be able to cancel that burner phone line in still use a virtual line with Airbnb it’s gonna be a huge help there are other companies you could spend a lifetime reviewing all the company options there’s grasshopper and all these other ones but the big 2 the 1 that I use his phone.com and 1 that I’ve found to be highly recommended it’s called dial pad.com to check both those out if you don’t have a business phone number in there yet suggest you get 1 it’s going to make things a lot easier you’re gonna build scale faster and until next time have a wonderful day thanks for tuning in. 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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