In the short-term rental world, our guest’s experience is top priority. If we don’t get that right, well then, we don’t get good reviews and then you know what that means. That means lower revenue and a worse performing property. This week we’re talking about one of those things that can be completely out of our control and that is maintenance and construction issues. Stay tuned as we break down a few tips to keep your guest’s expectations in check this week on the Short-Term Riches podcast.

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.  This week we’re talking about construction and how sometimes it’s completely out of our control. Whether our HOA, our condo associations doing construction, whether our neighbors doing construction, or whether we had construction planned in our property, a renovation for example, and we didn’t quite get the timeline right and so our guests are running into issues.  I want to break down just a few tips.  This kind of sprung up recently because with one of my properties, actually my property down in Brazil, we had a couple little issues.  That property is in a condo building. I think it’s like 19 floors, maybe 13 floors tall.  My property, however, is on the second floor, but on the second floor is sort of like a wraparound terrace.  It’s sort of the base structure of this tall building, right?  Fortunately, my property is a little bigger because I have that outdoor space and our condo association is painting the whole building.  And so, you can imagine a tall building like that. That’s Hey, our guest sent us these issues and it was a video of painters on our porch, pressure washing the building and the guest was videoing it.  So that’s not what we want, right?  This actually happens to be the only property that my team and I are not managing ourselves.  Mainly just because this is Portuguese speaking down in Brazil and we don’t really have anyone on our team that speaks Portuguese yet, except for my broken Portuguese.

I do have a manager down there. She does do a great job, but this is something we didn’t really get ahead of, right?  We should have set some better expectations so that we never got this video from our guests.  They should have known about this if they were checking into the property.  I want to break down just construction a little bit.  Some of these things are out of our control and some of these things are in our control just to make sure that we’re setting the best expectations possible so that we can continue to get great reviews.  Even if we’re doing some sort of renovation or there’s some sort of renovation or construction going on near our property.  Before we jump into these topics though, we’ve had quite a few shows.  So, we’re coming up on 200.  I can’t believe it, but just a real quick recap.  We’ve talked about construction in different ways before and maintenance issues.  If you missed episode 146, go back and check that out.  It talks about how you should know if it’s time to renovate your property.  So that’s 146.  Episode 87, we talked about the best flooring for an Airbnb and that’s my personal opinion, but I think you’ll agree. So, if you missed that one, check that one out.  And then if we go way back to episode 42, we talked about some best practices for working with contractors and maintenance technicians, because that really is a skill.  The better we can handle those relationships and set expectations with the people we’re working with, then the easier that’s going to be for both sides. So go back and check out those episodes if you missed them.

Alright, so let’s just jump into it. Let’s say that you’re planning to do some sort of construction. Well, the first thing I would say is that most of the time, and this is almost always, unfortunately, our construction projects take a little longer than expected.  Let’s say you’re planning on adding another bathroom, for example, that can be a big construction project.  And as much as we want to have guests in our home as much as possible getting that nightly revenue, we can’t do that if there’s construction project going on. So, make sure you leave yourself plenty of time.  That’s the first thing we need to be proactive and block our calendar advance and make sure that we give ourselves ample room to finish the tasks we’ve planned.

So, the next thing that might come up is some sort of renovation project or a renovation happening around you. Let’s say it’s at the neighbor’s house that causes a little bit of noise, but you’re still able to rent your short-term rental, but maybe not in a perfectly quiet setting like it normally is.  And so, what do we do here?  Well, we have to make sure that we set the right expectations, right? If there’s construction going on, your guest is going to hear it. They’re going to find out about it.  We need to let them know before they actually book our property.  A couple of things you could do.  And I know you probably don’t want to do these things when you first think about it because you might get less bookings, but that’s the reality. If your property is less desirable because there’s some sort of renovation going on, we need to be upfront with that.  What you could do, let’s say there’s some sort of outdoor landscaping project going on, for example, you could take some pictures of it.  Make sure that’s in your listing for people that are booking during that time.  You might want to take it one step further and actually put it in your house rules.  Put it in your rental agreement that says, we are doing this outdoor landscaping project.  No one’s going to be accessing the property between these hours.  It’s only during working hours, every little detail that they really need to know.  And yes, that is going to deter some people from renting your property, but others will still rent it.  You might have to have it at a discounted rate until those projects are complete, but at least you’re going to have some income coming in. And at least your guests are not going to be unhappy because they knew what they were renting before they booked it.  Had I done that with my property down in Brazil, we wouldn’t have had that issue with the guests.  We made it right.  I’ll get to that part in just a second.  But again, we just want to make sure that our expectations are right so we can do that by putting in the house rules.  We can do that by putting that in our confirmation message.  You might want to turn instant book off on your property during these of construction where not everything’s 100% and just take requests.  That way you can communicate with the guests before you actually take a reservation and everything will be nice and clear.  It’ll be in writing.  And so, everyone will be on the same page.  That’s another good way that you could do it.

The other scenario that might come up where you still want to rent your property, but there’s some sort of construction going on is the same example that I gave about my property.  That’s if you happen to be in some sort of HOA and the actual building’s doing a renovation, maybe they’re painting interior common hallways, maybe they’re changing the roof on the building, maybe there, you name it, fixing the elevator, whatever it happens to be.  These things come up.  Luckily, if you’re in an HOA, these are things that they plan out, right?  They need to get funding for these construction projects.  And so all of the owners and the property need to know.  So, it’s usually something that you can plan out plenty far in advance to make sure that everyone’s on the same page there.  So that’s actually one of the bright sides about being in an HOA. There is a downside where they can change the rules for the building.  So, you might be able to rent short-term right now, you know, 30 days or less.  If the majority vote changes at that HOA, they could simply restrict short-term rentals.  That’s one of the downsides to HOA.  But one of the upsides is they take care of your exterior maintenance, right? They take care of the common exterior walls and landscaping and roof and everything.  If you’re completely hands-off, that can be a good way to go. You just got to make sure that they allow short-term rentals and there’s no risk of them changing that.

Another scenario that might come up that might disturb your properties and it’s really completely out of your control, that’s if your neighbor is doing construction.  There’s not much we can do about that, right?  If you happen to be in an HOA, a lot of times they have times of year where you can’t do construction.  So maybe you’re in a very touristy area, there are simply times where your HOA will specify you cannot do construction during these times. That might save you during your busy season, but maybe on the off season, your neighbor’s doing a complete renovation project, there’s hammers and drills going every day, that could very easily disturb your guests.  And if you have a single-family home, maybe your neighbor is building a brand-new home and a nice lot right next to yours.  It’s the same scenario, right?  It’s going to be a lot of construction noise.  It’s going to be a long project.  We all know how long new construction takes these days. I mean, this literally could be years, right?  So, if you’re looking to get into a property, you haven’t quite acquired it yet and you notice that it’s next to construction, this is something you really want to keep in mind because you might have some very unhappy guests or no guests coming in because you don’t have good reviews during this construction process.  So, I had a property like this as well.  Not really much we can do about it, right?  We just have to go back again to setting those expectations.  Maybe we have to discount our rates and we just have to be really clear about what’s going on so our guests have the best possible experience. How do you make your guests happy if some of this construction noise or some unexpected maintenance or some expected maintenance that you didn’t plan well for slips through the cracks?  What we like to do is really just ask our how can we make this right for you?

Now, of course, if it was something drastic where they couldn’t sleep at all and they left the property, then we’re going to be refunding them, right?  But sometimes it’s just a minor inconvenience and that’s just a good way to start, right?  How can we make this right for you?  A lot of times that just ends in a discount, but that’s fair.  If they didn’t get a good night’s sleep, then we need to make that right for a guest.  Another thing you can do if there’s some sort of construction that you can’t control, make sure you have a white noise monitor, leave it next to the beds, have earplugs there.  Those are really simple things you can do if you know there’s going to be some additional noise maintenance construction.  These things are just going to happen.  We’ve got to keep our properties in tip top shape.

Luckily, most of the time we can plan for it, but in some of these other situations where it’s out of our control, we just need to make sure that we’re 100% transparent so that our guests know what they’re getting when they book our property and they still have a great time and they leave us great reviews and we just keep the cycle going.  I hope that gave you a little bit of insight and hopefully your construction projects are staying on time.  I know that most of mine haven’t, so if yours have, well, you are probably one of the lucky ones. Until next time, I hope you guys have a fabulous week.  Remember, if you have any ideas or things that you want us to talk about, head over to strriches.com and just scroll down there. You can request a topic.  We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and until next time, take care.

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