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 everyone to the short-term rental riches podcasts this week we’re talking about VR BO and my meeting with an account manager actually my account managers or reviewing my listings my properties but he gave me some really good tips and I want to share those with you guys today if you’re not on VR BO already vacation rental by owner it’s also known as in they also own a home away now so keep that in mind that they’re a good at least seen platform you can get lots of exposure with them and more exposure for your list scenes means higher occupancy and more revenue for you right so consider using them if you haven’t already but let’s jump in I want to talk about a few things that we recapped one was just reviews and their procedures in the policy and some of things you want to do on our end to make sure we’re getting more reviews we’ll talk about listing fees real quickly how much it costs to put your properties on there we’ll talk about a little new feature they have called property booze which actually boost your rankings on their website that’s kind of cool and then we’ll just talk about some general support contact numbers and things that you might need so let’s get right in reviews we all know reviews are super important and the more we have the better search rankings are as long as our good reviews obviously and he gave me a few tips on this their system similar to other listing sites like Airbnb and he gave me some some great tips so first one is that after a guest stays with you you have the opportunity to review them right away he actually recommended not doing that because what happens is if you review the. M. then it starts the clock and they only have 14 days to review otherwise they actually have a whole year to review now you might not want someone reviewing you 7 months down the road when they don’t actually remember what their stay was like but it will shorten your window to get a potential review from them so he recommends requesting a review from them first now the system’s automatically going to send out an email to him on the data check out so you don’t want to send another one on the day of check out and kinda overwhelmed them I sent out a couple review requests as you probably heard prior podcasts automatically to all of our guests if they haven’t left one already so you know maybe and this is really important because sometimes if you don’t ask for it you don’t get it right you know the squeaky wheel gets the grease they saying so try sending one out maybe 2 days after they check out and then another 5 days after that if you still haven’t got a review from them but you’ll have to log into V. R. B. O. for this I always recommend using a property management software which is going to link with your VR BO but reviews are one thing where you really need to go to the listing site directly to respond to reviews and also request them directly through the system you can request a review through your messaging which might go through your management but the obvious offer also has the ability to do it right through their their software so head over to B. R. BO check out the review section don’t write your review quite yet ask your guests to do it first and they have a little template review requests and they’re always recommend saving a response you can have your VA do it if you’re doing it’s gonna make your life easier because you just copy and paste and maybe plug in the guest name so created template and then after 6 to 7 reviews that’s really when a guest star. It’s a little more confident about your property so if you have 0 reviews they don’t know what to expect there’s no prior feedback but what we want to get as many reviews as possible so having 6 to 7 that’s when B. R. BO finds that you start getting more and more bookings so just a few tips on reviews there again we always want to respond to the positive ones too we on our end usually respond like every fifth positive one just it just to let people know that we’re there and we’re we’re reading their responses and that we care about our business really self reviews super super important listing fees so every listing site has a different costs commissions structures for charging you to put your property on their VR BO has a couple as well so you can do it 2 ways you have a 5 percent commission fee that you can pay per listing or you can pay a $499 flat fee per year per property so this is pretty easy to calculate right if you’re not getting a lot of reservations from VR BO or homeaway then you probably want to do the commission model let’s say you have a big vacation rental or you have you know hundreds of properties and they’re getting tons and tons reservations for VR BO well as soon as your commission starts to exceed that $500 then consider switching to their flat fee model you might save a little bit in the end now the commission that they charge is just on the night stay and the cleaning fee does charge on the cleaning fee also but it’s not going to charge on top of things like taxes and deposits and stuff like that so that’s on the hosts that’s on the host side we’re gonna pay 5 percent or that for 99 feet and that’s per property. But on the guest side it’s gonna very so it’s going to very depending on the cost of their reservation and it can very anywhere from 6 to 12 percent so B. R. B. O.’s doing pretty good aren’t they I mean if you add up the 6 to 12 percent and maybe 5 percent that we’re paying they’re making a good chunk humming but you know you can get some really good gas from B. R. B. O. and is going to help with your occupancy so definitely if you’re not using them check them out and definitely get on property management software if you’re not using it so you can link right and beautiful thing with using the management software is like let’s say you have all your properties and Airbnb already you want to go on B. R. BO well a lot of these management software platforms like gassy and smart BMB can push directly to V. RBS you not to recreate your whole listings you get all the exposure without so much up from work and and creating the listings over again. Where intermission thank you so much for listen in the podcast it’s been fun for me and I look forward to getting up so it’s out if you have a specific topic that you’d like us to talk about send us a comment and let us know you can send it to contact at rest methods.com and if you haven’t already subscribed and given us a review that would be greatly appreciated too and lastly if you know someone that you think would find benefit in this as well send it on over to help us keep growing and help us to get amazing content back to you without further ado let’s jump back into. Okay so little bit on reviews little bit on their basic listing fee structures they have this cool new feature called property Bruce and a literally does just that it boosts your search rankings it’s a new feature they have and you get the ability to use it based off your prior reservations as long as property didn’t have cancellations they give you these points power up points they call themselves they’re gonna break it down for you on your VR BO dashboard by property the show you which ones are eligible for it and you’ll see how many power up points you have and then they’re going to show you a date in there and that date is the date range rather that you can potentially boost your search rankings there if you want to use the points for that date so you can check out the date and it’s cool because it shows you what your search ranking as already let’s say it’s in your marketers your neighborhood it’s 70 your ranks seventieth well it’ll show you what you’re gonna jump up to so my go from 70 to like 6 really increasing your your odds of getting booked but a couple things to consider with it and of course when you use these points then it wipes amount you have to earn more to build a boost more Callie credit card points I guess it’s but it can it can really help in and I’ve used some of them and it got booked now you’ll want to keep in mind that the date range that is on VR BO if it’s 2 months out and they’re asking you to use the points to boost it and your normal reservations within like 7 days then you know you might not want to waste the points on that but if they have a date range you could potentially boost that’s like you know 5 days where it’s coming up really soon and you can boost it well then maybe that’s gonna be a lot more beneficial for you now they also have a difference between how much of a blue. State gets so is it going from 70 to 6 are they going from 70 to 65 which isn’t going to be a huge benefit for you so keep an eye on that as well you can’t use points from 1 property to boost another property even if you have a bunch of properties with the R. BO and he recommended just monitoring this every week or every other week because it changes all the time I and this again this is something simple you can have your VA do you or your reservation manager or whoever’s helping you or you can do yourself but take a look at it K. can really help in the points are just sitting there anyways so you might as well use it right so that was a cool piece about property boots the little bit of support you know they’ve got pretty good support I would say for property managers we’ll leave a link in the show notes for their U. S. property manager phone number and they have normal support Monday through Friday they do use virtual systems on the weekend for their supports you might not get as good of support on the weekend now this is this is for if your property manager if you have no properties course they have 247 support for gas and reservations stuff like that so if you’re not on the R. BO. Check them out if you are on the RBL make sure you’re monitoring your reviews and responding and requesting them appropriately and take a look at those boosts because you might get some more reservations fill up your calendar a little bit more and it can’t hurt check it out so take a look at that hope you guys are doing great out there and until next time have a wonderful day. So we just had our live virtual and I gotta say it was a blast as always we done to live events before and this was basically a replica except for we got to attend from the comfort of our own homes and the beautiful thing about doing a weapon or is it was easy to record so if you missed it jump over to rest methods.com forward slash virtual and you can get your copy we jam packed it full to the brim everything that I’ve found to be the most important setting up your short term rentals and making sure you’re earning maximum revenue in the highest occupancy but all while not giving up all of your time in creating passive systems so I give you all my resources we go over my actual properties case studies with pre and post code numbers and then my outlook in the future I think there’s a ton of opportunity so if you guys are just getting started or you have several properties already there’s no need to reinvent the wheel get all my tips and tricks things that I’ve learned and save yourself the headache and frustration just head over to rest message star forward slash virtual I know you’ll find a ton of value in it enjoy.

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