Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast. It’s always exciting launching a new property. If you’ve been tuning in for a while, you know, I’ve launched dozens with my team across five different cities in three different countries. Now so it’s been a really fun journey and I want to break down this latest property. Actually, there were two of them that we did. At the same time. If you missed last week’s episode, go back and check that out. We talked about the physical piece is the physical components to actually setting up a property and how we go about that.

So this week, I want to talk about something that people ask about all the time, what software do I use? And how do we break down the online setup piece? Because the reality is we can have the best property in the city, but if we don’t have it set up properly online, well, then people aren’t going to find it and people aren’t going to book it, and it’s not going to be that successful. So I want to talk about my software stack, the three essential pieces of software I think everyone with a short-term rental should have. I’m going to throw in a bonus one there. One that I think can be very helpful but maybe not necessary. Want to talk about how much this is going to cost you and how much time you can anticipate to spend setting up your short-term rentals. So let’s go ahead and just get right into it.

Welcome to short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals, quick actionable items to wire manage and scale your portfolio. I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

I was in Oklahoma City, very recently. I met with one of my managers and before, flying back here to Columbia where I am now and we really knocked these properties out. I mean, we basically furnished both them and A half days. Now, these are not big properties, so keep that in mind, the bigger your property, the longer it’s going to take but not for your online setup. That part’s pretty much going to take roughly the same amount of time. So let’s just get into the essentials. First of all, we got to set this up on the OTAs or at least initially Airbnb. Now Airbnb, makes us really easy for us. It seriously only takes about 10 minutes to set up your property online. Yes, you want to spend a little more time in there. You want to make sure you’ve observed your competition and make sure you have the proper amenities, and all those types of things. But actually just setting up your listing online, does not take very much time if you’re having trouble coming up with your title, or what to do with your photos head, over to our website Str riches.com. We’ve got tons of episodes in the past, that will help you. Make sure your property is set up perfectly and we go into a lot of these topics that I’m going to talk about today, very briefly. We go into them in detail in the past. So if you want the in-depth Overlook head over to our website, Str riches.com, and check those out. But for today, I just want to walk you through in a nutshell, like I did last week on the physical setup with this week, the online setup. So the essentials for our Airbnb listing we got to make sure we have the right cancellation policy. Want to make sure we have those professional photos and we want to make sure we have all of our fees set up and all those Types of things.

Now you’re going to want to set a base rate on Airbnb when you set up your property a base rental rate but we’re going to override that and I’ll get to that piece of software shortly. But before we do that, the first piece of software that I highly recommend everyone use and there’s lots of options out there is a property management software platform. It does a lot for us that Airbnb can’t do. Although, they are adding a lot of features property management software is built, just to manage short-term rentals. And if you’re planning on expanding your portfolio. Well, getting in early with the property management software, is going to be a really good call because it’s going to make your expansion easier to the good news. It doesn’t cost that much for property management software. The one I’m using is called host away. I used to use gas in the past whose host away now. But you will find that there are literally hundreds of options out there not saying hostaway is the best one, but it works well for me and all my Leo is on there almost 50 short-term rentals now and five different cities.

So it works for me. I think it’ll work for you but there’s lots of other ones out there. The second essential piece of software that I recommend everyone used in. This is the second out of three that is our pricing software. So again, Airbnb’s bumped up their features. They have more pricing features but not as much as price labs.com which is a software that I use, there are other ones out. Or if you want to explore them like be on pricing or wheelhouse, not affiliated with them at all, so feel free to explore before you jump in one. If you haven’t already set one up but I do believe that that is an essential piece of software. Pricing is very very important. We want to make sure that we get it right. This tool is going to allow us to customize a lot of things that we can’t with Airbnb. So that is a second piece of software that I think is essential the third piece. This is an easy one, but it saves us so much time and that is a guide book but not just any ordinary guidebook. That is a digital guide book. So we use host fully and yes, I think this is an essential piece of software. It’s very inexpensive. And yes, Airbnb has a built-in guidebook and so does VRBO and so does most of the OTAs are online travel agencies, but host fully is specifically for guidebooks and they do a really good job and they make it really easy to make sure that you include every detail you need to for your guests and Easy-to-Read form that they can pull up on their cell phone.

We send those links out for our digital guidebooks. The moment someone books, the reservation, we also send it the day, the riving, those are the two times when someone’s going to be paying the most attention to the reservation. So those are two opportunities we have to answer as much information and provide as much information for our guests as we possibly can. So I think that’s an essential piece of software. I think. All three of those pieces are essential, and they’re not very expensive. So, we have a property. T management software platform.

There’s a whole bunch of options out there. We’ve got a pricing software, Dynamic pricing and we’ve got a digital guide book. If you want to check out the ones that we use the ones that I mentioned, you can head over to our website, rest methods.com we have a recommended resources section on there that has these software programs on there. But also has some other ones that we’ve used and explore in the past, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff. So, if you want to check that out, freak. Head over there, quick intermission.

I’m really excited to announce the next dates for our annual virtual event. We only do it one time a year and it is jam-packed. We cover a lot on this podcast but it’s sometimes hard to wrap our minds around how much they’re really is. It goes into a short-term rental business. So if you want to find out how my team and I have managed over 21,000 guests with great reviews, we’ve got to jam-packed days for you, October 22nd to 23rd, the prices, do go up as we get closer to the date. So I hope you can find your way over to restmethods.com. That’s REST methods.com and save a spot today. Look forward to seeing you on the inside.

Now the fourth piece of software, I don’t think this is essential but I think it really really helps and it’s a good option especially for anyone. That’s having trouble with housekeeping. And this fourth piece of software. I’ve talked about in the past, that is an operational type piece of For we use Breezeway but there’s also another program called properly. These are programs that allow us to monitor our housekeeping to create custom checklist and to really interact with our housekeepers on a very transparent level. So, if you’re having any trouble, tracking your housekeeping, or having housekeeping issues, or you’ve built a big portfolio, and you’ve got a bunch of Maintenance items that are kind of hard to track. Well, this is a good piece of software. You can use, again, I use Breezeway. This is optional. If you only have one property, it’s not going to be as important, but the more you add, which hopefully keep adding them because they’re not going away.

People have short-term rentals, and there’s so much opportunity and then if you listen to podcast for a while, you know, why we talk about that all the time? But in a nutshell, those are the four pieces of software that I highly highly recommend. I think three of them are really essential the beautiful thing with that property management software to. If you set that up right after you set up your Airbnb listing, you can use that to integrate with other listing. Like, VRBO and booking.com and TripAdvisor.

So that you only have to set up that list in once. So, the review in a nutshell, we set up our property on Airbnb, it doesn’t take us very long. We link it to our property management software. We link our pricing software into the property management software. So that’s going to override all of our prices, including the base price and it’s going to sink those prices to wherever we want to go. Then we’re going to set up our digital guidebook, which doesn’t take that long either. If you’ve already set it up on Airbnb, will you can copy a lot of those items, put it in the digital guidebook and that’s something we’re going to send out as a link to our guests via a message, could be directly through the platform or hopefully, if you’re using the property management software, you can send it right through there. And then that fourth piece which I think is optional is going to integrate with the property management software as well to make sure you don’t have to track different reservations or anything like that. So it’s all integrated together.

So how much does all of this cost? Well, it Pens. A lot of these programs have volume pricing. So if you have a larger portfolio, they might give you a break. If it’s a per property, price Model, some of the software programs out there, charge a percentage I’ve sort of moved away from that because I want our income to continue growing and I don’t want my expenses to grow with that. I want my expenses to go down. I want to gain some economies of scale as I’m scaling my business. So I spend about at sixty dollars a month for these four pieces of software and some other miscellaneous ones like my security camera monitoring my door lock monitoring but about sixty dollars a month. You might find that it’s anywhere from there to a hundred dollars a month. But I’ll tell you what, even though that might sound like a lot yet $1200 a year, might seem like a lot. I’ll tell you that it would cost much more than that if you hired additional team members to help you with all these specific. X.

And as you grow your business, these tools will help you stay organized and make more money at the same time. So how long does all of this take to set up? Well, I think the Airbnb listing really doesn’t take that long, but you do want to spend some time, make sure your descriptions and all of that is set up as best as it possibly can be. Remember, you can always change your descriptions in the future so don’t postpone launched in your property for weeks at a time because you’re trying to make everything perfect. You can change your listing title, you can change all these descriptions over time. So I would say your Airbnb listings, probably going to take about 30 to 60 Minutes, to setup, to import your photos to run through your descriptions, and make sure you’ve checked all the boxes. And I would say that additional setup integrating that property into your property management software which you’re not a software person. Don’t get too intimidated. They make it pretty easy for you. Most of them in fact are just hitting a sync button.

So, I would say, integrating into all those Other pieces of software maybe an hour to two hours to make sure that everything’s really dialed in. So, in total, we’re talking about two to three hours of time. And remember, we’re not doing this all the time. Once it’s set up and it’s plugged into your system and it’s going to keep on turning. Of course, you want to monitor it and make sure that you’re not falling behind in any sort of area and that everything is accurate with your property, but really, that’s about it. So if you missed last week, go back and check that out. I broke down the physical set up the delivery coordination, all that stuff in a nutshell.

Again, in a nutshell, all these individual topics, we broke down in other episodes. So hopefully that gave you a little better idea. So, if you don’t have those software pieces in there, I highly suggest you go back and you add them in. At least take a look at them because I know they will help you and your property. Both are going to help your property performance. They’re going to help you stay more organized. So until next time, I hope that gave you Little more inside.

Thanks again for tuning in and have a wonderful week. I will talk to you soon. Want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties, I want to give you my e-book. That will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It’s my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods.com that’s REST methods.com.

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