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.

I’m happy you’re here again.

It is a beautiful, rainy day down here in southern Brazil.

A little chilly too.

And you might be thinking, Brazil sounds pretty tropical, or at least when I was there, it was nice and hot.

Well, the southern part of Brazil, pretty cold in the winter, and so I’ll be down here for just another six weeks or so before heading back to Columbia.

But you know what, I kinda like the cold sometimes.

It’s nice to see the seasons changing.

You bring out the comfy clothes and stuff like that.

And so just like the seasons of life, the seasons of our short-term rental are always changing as well.

And when it comes to our setup with the listing sites, the OTAs like Airbnb and booking.com and VRBO, all things that we’ve talked about a lot on this channel.

If you’re new to this show, well, thanks for joining.

We break down quick, actionable tips to help you along your short-term rental journey.

My team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests now.

We’re in multiple, multiple states, multiple countries, and it’s been a really fun journey.

So thanks for tuning in.

I hope you’ve learned something over these years.

Today, we’re gonna jump in to 41 factors affecting your actual listing, or that could be affecting your listing.

So these are factors that aren’t actual property attributes, right?

So we’re not talking about a five bedroom versus a four bedroom.

And we’re also not talking about pricing factors since we talked about that just recently.

If you missed the episode on 46 factors affecting your performance, go back and check that out.

I know there will be a couple in there that you probably haven’t thought of much.

And that’s the whole idea with these rapid fire lists is just to name off a whole bunch of things that could be affecting your performance.

We’re not gonna go in depth into each one because that could take a really long time, right?

And the reality is we already talked about a lot of these individual factors in greater depth in separate episodes.

You can check out all those episodes at strriches.com.

So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into it.

So number one, property photos.

Duh Tim, property photos are incredibly important for our listings.

Yes, they are.

Again, this is a list of all the factors affecting your property.

So obviously, you wanna make sure you have the best photos possible, professional photos.

Number two, local attraction photos.

This is a little different, right?

A lot of people put property photos on their listing, but they don’t many times include attraction photos or things that their guests are going to wanna see when they come to the area.

Now, of course, people are getting better and better at managing their short-term rentals.

It’s not like it was 10 years ago, but I still see a lot of listings with these photos missing or with really bad quality attraction photos.

So make sure you get some better ones to update your listing.

We did a whole nother episode on five photos that you should definitely have in your listing.

I can’t believe this was episode number seven.

I know that was a really long time ago, but it still shocks me that people do not have these photos in their listing.

So go back and check that one out.

Again, as much as I’d love to jump into detail on each one of these, it would just be an incredibly long episode to have all those details in here.

Number three, photo descriptions.

So yes, you want really, really good photos, but you also want good captions that help your guests envision themselves in these spaces.

Number four, listing title.

That’s not new to you out there.

Everyone has a listing title, but there’s a good way and there’s a bad way to do it.

So study up, check out our past resources, make sure you have a good listing title in place.

Number five is the listing descriptions.

And I’m just gonna go ahead and include the subsections in here as well, because there’s quite a few different subsections in the listing setup.

And this is not just Airbnb.

So make sure you have a really good listing description and make sure that you’ve got all of those other subsections filled out as well.

Number six, and this is sort of to piggyback off the listing descriptions, but it’s the way that those are actually written.

And I’m talking about like paragraph form versus bullet form, right?

So we know that our guests are not reading or they’re scanning through as many listings as they can as quick as possible.

And big paragraphs are a little intimidating.

So make sure that you have some bullet points with your highlights broken out in your listing descriptions.

Okay, number seven, we have interior amenities.

And now again, some of these listing sites have way more options for amenities than the other ones.

booking.com, for example, I believe they have like 750 amenity options.

That’s crazy, right?

So we have interior amenities.

Number eight, we have exterior amenities.

So do you have a barbecue outside?

Do you have a pool?

Those types of things.

Number nine, local amenities.

Is your property part of a community association and your guests have access to tennis courts or community pools or things like that?

We want to have as many amenities in our listing as possible, right?

Number 10, categories.

This is unique to Airbnb.

So you probably know already that Airbnb is categorizing properties.

And if your property is included in a category, then it’s gonna have a little better search visibility.

That’s just the name of the game.

Number 11, your owner profile or your owner description.

So depending on the listing site, this could be a little less or more important.

But I would say on Airbnb, it’s probably the most important, Airbnb and VRBO.

And sometimes it can really help sell your property, right?

So make sure you have a good bio about yourself on your listing.

Number 12, and this one’s gonna seem really obvious, but the number of reviews you have for your property.

Number 13, the average review score for all of those reviews.

Obviously, the more, the better.

And the better your average, the better your listing will do.

It’s really hard to put a number on how much your reviews actually affect the revenue you can generate with your property.

But we know for certain that they do affect it, and they affect it in a positive way, assuming you have positive reviews.

Number 14, do you have public review responses?

I hope that you do.

This shows your guests that you care about your property and that you care about your guests.

So what am I referring to here?

When a guest leaves a review, you have an option to comment on their review, even if it’s as simple as, thanks, Sarah, we loved hosting you, whatever it happens to be.

That shows that you’re taking care of things, and you better believe if you had a negative review that that response is even more important.

Again, we’ve talked about all these things in depth before over the past hundreds of episodes.

Go back to strriches.com and you can search for any of these really easily.

Number 15, what channels are you on?

So this list, I’ve tried to come up with just a general list, right?

This isn’t specific to any one OTA, and these again aren’t like physical attributes of your property, but the more OTAs you’re on, hypothetically, the more visibility you will have, right?

So we always recommend being on Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com and Google and having your own direct booking website.

Number 16, the time that you’ve actually had your property on these channels.

Now that sounds a little weird, and how would that actually affect my property performance?

Well, a lot of people ask us all the time, how come I don’t get any reservations from VRBO, but my Airbnb is just crushing it all the time.

And when we look into these properties, it’s really easy to see that they’ve been primarily focused on Airbnb.

And so as you sort of gain traction with Airbnb, maybe you have 50 reviews on there, but you only have two on VRBO.

If everything else is equal, then it’s pretty likely you’re gonna get booked up quicker on Airbnb.

And again, it comes down to availability.

So if all of your prime dates are getting booked up on Airbnb, it doesn’t leave a lot leftover for VRBO, right?

And so it’s an easy explanation.

You’re just more successful on one listing.

And because of that, all of your prime dates get booked up, leaving less for your other listing sites.

But regardless of which one’s doing better, you always wanna make sure that you’re on multiple listing sites.

Because if not, you’re really just limiting your exposure, and you’re also increasing your risk a little bit, right?

Because if something happens with one of those listing sites, let’s see, let’s say you get a bad review on Airbnb and they happen to take down your listing for a while.

Well, if your guests don’t have another place to go to, then of course, it’s gonna hurt your property.

Number 17, do you have a direct booking site?

This is going to affect your overall annual revenues, right?

We know that we earn more with direct bookings and if we don’t have a way for our guests to book direct, well, then we’re not gonna be able to get those reservations, are we?

Number 18, your cancellation policies.

So we know the more flexible, the better for our guests, but that doesn’t mean we should be using a flexible cancellation policy.

This really comes down to your market dynamics and what your comparable properties are doing.

Number 19, guest requirements.

What are you requiring of your guests before they book with your property?

Again, these are different on the different OTAs a little bit, but are you requiring an ID?

Are you requiring prior reviews, these types of things?

Number 20, do you allow events and parties?

Some of you might be thinking, of course not.

I never want people to have parties in my property.

Well, there’s a lot of properties that are set up really well to accommodate parties, right?

And as long as you control your guests before they check in and set the right expectations, then that can be a really good source of revenue for you.

But if you’re not allowing parties or events, then of course, that’s going to limit your exposure a little bit.

Number 21, smoking.

So we don’t want people smoking in our properties, right?

But do you allow smoking outside of your property?

Do you have a designated area?

Hopefully you do.

We know that a lot of our guests still smoke, even if it’s vape or it happens to be marijuana or whatever it is, having a designated smoking area is gonna save the interior of your property, and it’s also gonna make your property available to more guests.

Again, this is a topic we’ve broke down in detail in the past, and also how to combat smoke and how to get rid of smoke after it’s already entered our property.

We do have a really cool bot.

If you haven’t tested out yet, I know that you’ll love it.

It’s at strriches.com.

It’s in the bottom right corner.

You can ask it anything.

You can ask it what we use to eliminate smoke within 30 minutes after someone smokes in our property.

Check it out.

I promise you’ll love it.

It’s basically trained on all the content we’ve been creating for years and all the guests that we’ve accommodated.

Number 22, the amount of guests that you allow your property.

Now, I know we’re not talking about physical attributes of the property.

You might be thinking the bigger the property, the more guests, but not all the time.

Sometimes we see three bedrooms where they’ve crushed 10 beds in there and they allow a lot of guests.

So that of course is going to affect your guest experience.

You wanna make sure you’re setting the right guest’s expectations, but that’s something that could vary quite a bit with one two bedroom versus another.

Number 23, your house rules and your rental agreements.

Are these really strict?

You have a lot of rules right up front that might be deterring your guests.

The way you write these and the amount of rules that you have will affect your performance.

These things are all hard to say exactly how much this would affect our performance, but I just really wanna include a list here just to make sure that you’re not overlooking anything or you haven’t thought about these.

Hopefully there’s one or two on this list that you can take another peek at, maybe tune up a little bit, make sure you’re not missing out on exposure.

So number 24, Instant Book.

Do you have that turned on?

Yes or no.

If you don’t have it turned on, well then you’re missing out on a huge opportunity, but I understand there are certain situations where you would want to keep it off.

And the next one, number 25, Inquiry Only.

This is really the flip side of Instant Book, right?

If they can’t Instant Book, then they need to inquire.

But how do you respond to those inquiries?

Are you requiring that your guests send you a message?

Those things, again, can affect your conversion rates when it comes to your short-term rental.

Next up, we’ve got Check-In Time.

This is a big one, right?

And again, the more flexible we are with our policies, the more appealing it’s going to be to potential guests.

So do you have an early check-in time or is it a really late one?

And the flip side of that, number 27, is Checkout Time, right?

Everyone always wants to check out later.

We know that hotels generally have 11 o’clock checkouts, so that’s where we like to set hours, but we are flexible with ours, depending on when our next guest is coming in and our housekeeper’s schedule.

So the more flexible you can be, the better it’s going to be for your performance.

Number 28, Internet Speed.

So depending on the listing site, they have ways to put these right in your listing.

We always recommend taking a snapshot of our internet speed and having it in our listing.

This is of course gonna be much more important for people that are getting away to do some work or they need to stay connected, but just in general, the better your internet speed, the more visibility you’re really going to have because they have filters now where you can filter out certain listings if the internet speed is not as high.

Number nine, Dedicated Workspace.

So you don’t really have to change your property around to have a dedicated workspace, right?

You can throw a desk in the living room.

You can throw a desk in the bedroom.

You can set it up in the corner of a basement or open space.

Just make sure you have a dedicated workspace if that fits your guest avatar.

But I would say most all the time, we want to have a dedicated workspace because lots of people are working remotely, aren’t they?

And even if your property is geared towards vacations, there might be someone in that group that wants to get away and do a little bit of work.

And if they filter you out because you don’t have a dedicated workspace, well, then that means less exposure for you.

Number 30, buffer days.

What I mean by buffer days is basically the time that you block your calendar before and after because of cleaning where you need time to check on it.

So obviously, the bigger your buffer time, a lot of times we see someone blocking it for a day.

That affects your calendar and your performance.

And that’s one factor you might want to go back and look at and just see how many days were actually blocked and how many times that prevented someone from booking.

Maybe because by blocking that day, it made it so that you didn’t have a big enough gap in your calendar to receive another reservation.

So if your minimum stays three days and by adding a block for cleaning, there’s only a two-day gap there, well then that’s just two days lost, right?

So go back and take a look at that one.

Number 31, availability.

So what do I mean by this?

Throughout the year, when we list our property on a listing site, we have the option to list it for three months or six months or a full year or even longer.

We’d recommend having your property open for at least a year.

And if you go longer than that, just make sure you’re really proactive with your pricing because if an event pops up, if Taylor Swift announces she’s coming to town, someone’s gonna snag those dates.

And if you don’t have pricing policies in place for that far out, well then you might miss out on a lot of revenue.

Number 32, Guidebook Options.

So most listing sites allow us to put in our recommendations on what our guests can and should and what we think they would love to do when they’re in town.

So Airbnb of course has this, but you can also offer a digital guidebook.

So make sure you have some recommendations included with your listing.

Number 33, Accessibility.

So could someone in a wheelchair make it into your property?

Are your doors wide enough?

Do you have a stair lift for your stairs?

These things are not super common in a lot of properties.

So if you do have this, this will boost your exposure.

It’s a little bit more of a niche target.

And again, this is one where you would argue that it probably is gonna cost a little bit to outfit your property for that.

Number 34, this one’s a little easier.

Do you allow children?

So do you have stair rail guards?

Do you have electrical outlet covers?

Do you have things in place to where young children would be protected in your property?

Lots of people love to travel with their families, right?

If you have a vacation home, then hopefully you’re allowing children and you wanna make sure that this one is turned on.

Number 35, is your property suitable for the elderly?

And that leads us right in number 36.

Do you have stairs?

Most of the time when we’re talking about suitability for the elderly, we wanna know if we have stairs, if someone’s gonna have to go upstairs to get into the property.

Do they have to go upstairs to get into the bedroom?

And so we wanna be as detailed as possible on that.

But that can definitely affect your performance.

I remember back in the day, I had bought eight condos and they were townhomes actually.

And so they were three stories.

And I thought they were gonna do really well because they all had garages.

They were in a really good location.

And I had some short-term rentals right across the street that were already crushing it.

So I was like, yeah, this is gonna be a home run.

There were newer properties too.

So there wasn’t a lot of maintenance there.

You know, they did do well, but they didn’t do as well as I was hoping.

And I know the stairs had a little bit to do with that.

I ultimately sold those properties and I rolled that into some other properties, right?

That’s the end game for me is just building a portfolio.

I’m a real estate guy for life.

So if you’ve been tuning in, thank you.

And you can expect these episodes to come for years and years.

But after all of that, I really didn’t have a whole lot of reasons as to why those properties were performing quite a bit less than the properties right across the street because they had great reviews.

And so I think the stairs did affect it quite a bit.

Number 37, self-check-in versus not.

So is your property happen to be in an HOA where they have to meet with someone to get access?

Or if not, well, then that’s definitely going to deter some people.

I know personally when I book a property, I really prefer to have self-check-in because sometimes I don’t exactly know my travel schedule, might be moving around a little bit.

And I just want it flexible, right?

That leads me into the next one, number 38, 24-hour check-in.

So if you have digital locks, then this is pretty easy, but you have a way to limit this on your listing site, right?

So a lot of times we see that it might only go till 8 p.m.

or 10 p.m., and that, of course, is limiting your exposure a little bit.

Not a whole lot, but again, the more flexible we can be with our policies, the easier it’s going to be for our guests.

Number 39, this one’s probably not as important, especially with Google Translate these days, but languages spoken.

And who knows, really the idea here is that we want to fill out as many things on these listing sites as possible.

So if you’ve got other languages, you can add, then definitely add those in there.

Number 40, OTA updates answered.

What do I mean by this?

We know these listing sites are changing all the time.

Airbnb just did a big one on how you update your actual listing.

And so you’ve got to make sure that you’re in there consistently and you’re answering their questions.

They ask questions all the time.

You know, if they change a policy on your security cameras, for example, and they have a question and you don’t get in there in time to respond to it, well, then that’s absolutely gonna affect your performance.

And all the listing sites are different.

So you’ve got to make sure that you’re in there, filling those all out.

Okay, quite a bit this week.

The last one, this is really an all-encompassing one, number 41, and that is, make sure that all sections and every question asked on every listing site has an answer.

It’s filled out because the more complete your listings are, the better you’re gonna perform against an equal property that doesn’t have a complete listing.

That’s just sort of common sense to me.

If a listing site like Airbnb created a field for us as property owners to put in an answer, and we don’t fill in that answer, then that listing’s a little more incomplete.

We’ve gotta remember that they created that question for a reason, right?

And that is to detail our property a little bit more to make sure that our guests know exactly what they’re getting.

So I’m sure there’s one in there, hopefully, or a couple that you’ve maybe been overlooking.

Again, we wanna make sure our listings are as complete as possible, but these listing sites are changing all the time.

There really is a lot that goes into this.

If you missed our episode on the 46 factors affecting your short-term rental in regards to pricing, we’ll go back and listen in to that one real quick.

The reality is that the more of these things we’re staying on top of, the better our properties will do.

So I hope that gave you a little bit of insight.

Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week and we’ll see you back here soon.

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.

We’ll 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 to 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.