Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast here we are on part three of our three-part series for midterm rentals, I know that’s a lot of parts, but there’s a lot going on here and there’s a lot of opportunity with midterm rentals these are sort of that limbo space between our short-term guests and long-term tenants. So, we’ve learned a lot stay tuned I’m excited to share part three where we talk about how to actually Manage your tenants or your short-term guests turn tenants while they’re in your property the move in the move out process Returning the deposits all that fun stuff. Stay tuned. Let’s jump in.

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. We’re talking about medium-term Stays, this is essentially when a guest becomes a tenant and although this varies a little bit state-by-state Most the time it’s 28 to 30 days or more and that guest becomes a tenant And so there’s a lot of things that we need to do differently to protect ourselves and to protect our property So we’ve talked about a lot of things that we need to do differently to protect ourselves and to protect our property We’ve talked about a lot of those already if you missed episode 211 and 212 go back and check those out the first one we talked about setting up our listings the best way possible to attract the most long-term guests where to actually Post our properties which sites to post on then the second piece we talked about all that sort of middle stage piece where we get guest inquiries? What do we do with the inquiries? How do we vet our guests? Where do we run the background checks? Where do we get a lease from? How do we get our lease signed all very very important things and in this third piece? We’re gonna assume we already got some great inquiries and we got some great guests that are getting ready to check into our property how do we best manage them?

So, the first thing is the move in before we even do the move in though we want to make sure that our guests or our tenants are fully informed about the property and where they can pay us what responsibilities they might have what responsibilities we might have so essentially, we want to provide them a summary and in this summary we’re gonna have quite a few things. I want to break them down for you here real quickly. The first thing is we want to welcome them to our property, right? This is gonna be a longer-term relationship we’re hoping that they’re gonna stay there month after month. We want to have a nice welcome message I want to let them know where they can reach out to us in case, they have maintenance. Hopefully you’ve taken these reservations and put them in your short-term rental property management software so that you can just use your same message templates if you have team members helping you out virtually, they see the guest or tenant in this case and you can go about your operations pretty much as you would with a short-term guest. Now if you happen to have gotten this guest reservation outside of one of the traditional short-term rental sites like Airbnb or VRBO that’s not linked into your software like furnish finder, then you’re gonna want to put them in your property management software. So, most of the time if they have a maintenance issue, they can just reach out directly to you by email or by phone number and it’s gonna be linked right in your system. So, make sure they know where they can contact you and that you’re there for them if something does come up second piece. We want to remind them where they can pay future rent if it’s not already set up automatic, hopefully it is remember we have two options for that so we can use stripe which a lot of us in the short-term rental world are already using to charge reservations. We can give them the option to pay for everything up front using a credit card You want to make sure you charge a credit card fee for that? But that is a good option for a lot of people out there. The other one is to take ACH payments and we’re recommending that you use apartments.com for that which makes it pretty easy sends reminders all that fun stuff pretty basic program but it happens to be free and it’s also easy on the tenant side remember It’s also where you can do their background check and it’s also where you can store their lease. So, we want to remind them where they can pay and when we’re expected to receive that payment and where we’re expected to receive it, we want to reiterate things like utilities so most of the time we’re covering all of our electrical our gas or water all of these things when we have a short-term rental guess but you may want to consider having some sort of limit on utilities. If you have a property that can just get out of control maybe you have some sort of limit otherwise, you just want to make sure you note that right in there one thing that you very likely are going to want your tenant to take care of is the trash so taking out the trash you want to remind them when they come around for that. You might want to have a note in there in terms of furniture property updates. Remember when someone’s staying in your property for multiple months, they’re going to feel like it’s their own, they might want to paint a wall or they might want to add some plants somewhere or in my case I’m actually staying in an airbnb right now in medellin columbia I sold my property recently and we’re sort of in this period where we’re developing a small community of short-term rentals. So, I’m running a place but I went out and bought a desk because there wasn’t a desk that I liked and you know what I’m going to be leaving that desk here instead of putting it in storage. So sometimes your longer-term guests or your tenants are actually going to add nice furniture to your property. It’s going to feel like their own place. It is their home for the next few months so you’re going to want to cover any notes around that you might want to include something real quickly in there about lease extensions. We recommend that you just have your lease go to a month-to-month basis but remember you’re going to want to make sure that your calendar is open for them to actually stay longer so you really got to plan that out and make sure that you’re not blocking your calendar for too much time hoping that they’re going to book it. I would recommend this depends on the market, but I would recommend that you require a decision from them within two weeks of the date of their original lease expiration that way. You still have some time to advertise your property if they are not going to be extending. So, basically, we just want a nice summary welcoming our tenants, welcoming our guests, highlighting the most important facts letting them know where they can reach us or anything that might be specific to our property that wasn’t obvious that they need to know. So, there’s one more piece here in regards to the move-in and that is and traditionally in the long-term rental world, we get our lease signed, we also get a move-in document signed to where when the tenant moves into the property. They have a certain amount of time to say hey the fridge is damaged or it’s not working or I saw this hole on the wall. They basically want to document any damage in the property so that when the time comes for us to return their deposit, we’re not deducting existing damage.

Now if you’ve listened to a podcast for a while then you know, we already have a rule like this in our short-term rental house rules which basically says you have three hours from the time you check into our property to let us know if there’s any sort of damage. If the cleaning didn’t meet your standards or whatever it happens to be and that actually protects us on the back end. If someone made a claim on airbnb, for example, and they told us three days after the reservation, we can go back and reference that house rule so we’re essentially doing the same thing here with our long-term tenants our medium-term reservations but we’re taking it a step further we’re going to want them to really thoroughly document that property so we’re going to require that they take a video of the property and any sort of damage or anything that they see that they want us to know that we’re going to want to receive that video within you know you name it but I would say within 24 hours of checking into the property again. This is after our Housekeeper or one of our team members has done an inspection on the property prior to their arrival so we’re also going to want our version of this too, right? So, it’s really good idea the same thing just go around the property take a video. This also helps us remember what furniture we have in there so that nothing kind of gets left out in the end so we want that move out document back from them in the form of video again. These are messages that we can pre-program in our short-term rental software after we’ve added these guests as a reservation.

Okay during the reservation sometimes some things come up don’t they just like they do with our short-term rentals so one thing that might come up is in regards to supplies I highly recommend that in your lease you mentioned that you will have an initial supply of toilet paper and these types of things that way there’s no confusion on who’s paying for what but let’s say something else comes up and you know that the toaster stops working or the blender stops working or something like this. You can simply order things on amazon these days and most markets send it to your tenant very quickly just send it to their address to make it a lot easier on you. You don’t have to pay a maintenance technician or someone like that to actually go out to the property so that is a convenient way if anything that’s easily replaceable comes up during their stay that you’re responsible for just check out amazon and send it right over to them. We like to do a medium term stay clean at about the 15-day mark. This allows us to get into the property to have an eye on it and make sure that there’s not something going on there that we didn’t know about so to make sure they didn’t have multiple pets in there something like that now this is a fee that we’re going to charge to the guest. It’s going to come out of their deposit so out of the non-refundable part and this is again something that we’re going to have in our lease It’s also something that we’re going to need to schedule with the tenant. So, we’re going to let them know 24 hours in advance or or hopefully just find a good day that works for them this is also a good opportunity for your housekeeper to make a little more money, right? So, you can simply pass your contact over to your tenant and if they would like to have more cleanings in the future then they have their contact there and that can be a win-win for both sides. Now during the reservation sometimes, a guest might show up and maybe they’re not happy or maybe they don’t like your property or maybe it wasn’t what they expected and they just want out of it well, what do we recommend in that situation? It’s never a great situation, right? We we always want to set the perfect expectation so this doesn’t happen but sometimes it might and so I would recommend that you stick with your cancellation policy that’s to say if the guest actually does not want to stay there and they’re like hey look this place just isn’t going to work for me. I would recommend that you stick with your cancellation policy. Another alternative to that is that you may offer to relist the property right away and if you’re able to find another guest or another tenant to occupy that space then you will refund them the difference between what your cancellation policy said and the time that it stayed vacant after the reservation. So as an example, if your cancellation policy is 30 days, they check in they say I just don’t like the property or whatever is not working out then I think it’s fair for you to stick with your cancellation policy. Remember that calendar’s blocked so if they leave that same day, for example, you relist it and then five days later you’re able to secure a medium-term reservation. Well, then maybe consider giving them a little bit more of a refund. This brings up another question is that a lot of times when someone’s going to stay in a property for a longer period of time, they want to see the property first. I don’t recommend offering this It can become a bit of an operational. I don’t want to say fiasco It’s not that challenging, but it’s just one additional thing that you’re going to have to do and hopefully your property’s occupied already, right? And so you don’t want a new potential guest checking into the property where you already have one there. So we don’t offer this we have floor plans for all of our properties and to go one step further It’s really nice to have an overview video that you can provide your guest or you’re the person inquiring to really help them out with the whole decision most of the time that ends that conversation right there and most of the time most people are perfectly okay with this.

Okay, so we officially listed our property in the perfect places listed in the perfect way and we got a great guest and now it’s time for them to move out we’ve come to the end of the road and we need to do the checkout and so this of course is already pre-arranged in your lease. They know what day they’re ending and what time they need to be out by. We recommend of course you’re going to go in and have your housekeeper clean it, right? We recommend blocking the calendar a couple days after these longer-term reservations because you need more time to account for certain things that may have come up during a three-month stay. There’s a lot more that can come up than in a three nights day for example, especially if you have back-to-back medium-term reservations, you’ve got someone else checking in for three months if you don’t leave yourself a gap and something comes up. Maybe they did have dogs in there or something that’s going to take quite a bit of time and that new guest or that new tenant shows up and they don’t like your property that really is a bit risky so instead of trying this is my opinion, but instead of trying to get every last second occupied It’s better to make sure that you have a little bit of buffer in there to make sure the property is perfectly spick and span and there’s no damage you have time to fix any sort of maintenance that may have come up at this time. It’s good for your housekeeper to do the same thing that they did or the person doing your inspection in the beginning to do the same thing and take a video afterwards and this is going to be time stamped. So, we’re going to compare this with the tenant’s original video see if there’s any sort of damage or anything like that most of those things especially if you had a great tenant in there are pretty easy to work out, right? But when it comes to actually sending the deposit back well, if you are using apartments.com, it makes it really easy. You want to give yourself enough buffer time to make sure you actually thoroughly inspected the property and then you can easily submit the deposit back from apartments.com in form of a ch payment. If you are using some of the new fintech type bank accounts out there we actually did an episode on a relay bank and the one that I’m using mercury bank at the moment which are really good banking options for paying contractors but also for sending a ch payments and so that’s a place where we could send an a ch payment back to our tenants for free in just a couple days. If you do happen to have any sort of damage come up well, you’re going to want to itemize it and when you send the deposit back you’re going to send it back with an itemized invoice of what that damage actually was. This is one of the places that I’ve seen I I still have a lot of long-term rentals as well and I used to manage all my own long-term rentals in the past and this is one point where there can be a bit of discussion. If someone doesn’t agree with the amount or something like that, so make sure that you’re just being really transparent and clear, honesty is always the best practice right. Midterm rentals, they can be a great opportunity for anyone that has a short-term rental that gets a little slower in the off season, It could be a great opportunity for someone that just doesn’t want to have to deal with so many guests checking in and out. So, I hope you’ve enjoyed these three parts the three parts of this series. We actually combined all of these into a handy dandy ebook. You can get it at restmethods.com. It’s totally free It’s also something we’re probably going to continue to edit modify as we learn more and we add new best practices into our own policies. So, I want to thank you for tuning in again. I hope that gave you some good insight I hope your properties are staying booked and until next time have a fabulous week.

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, will 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 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.