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 acquire manage and scale your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the shore terminal riches podcast we got another great episode for you today and another important one today we’re gonna talk about injury how to your gasket and cheer rentals more specifically digital locks because that is the most essential piece I would say of automating your short term rental if you have to have someone meet your gas at the property that can require a lot of operational pieces a lot of time employees and it’s really hard to scale that way especially if you’re properties are scattered out all over the place sell digital locks in the number one essential step in my opinion to automating your short term rental business but which ones do you use a it seems like literally every week there’s a new digital lock popping up.

And it seems like it’s the latest and greatest has the best features maybe has a better price and so how do we narrow it down and not have decision fatigue and also make sure that we get one that that is gonna last us for the for the long run well I will tell you which ones I use but more important than that I want to give you some some features and things to keep an eye out for because you may get locks different than mine you want to make sure there’s a certain set of features that allow you to scale so my favorite thing about the locks I use I use majority of my locks are made by a company called lac St and I have tried all different types of walks maybe 5 different kinds over the years you know slay Agen.

Wicks said in a number of different other ones ones that required applications and I’ve basically settled on the remote locks and that’s because of the platform that they have available so I know a lot of the newer locks are coming out with platforms if and that’s great and that’s really helpful and some things that you want to keep an eye out for on the platform his ability to manage multiple locks on the same platform the ability to check battery levels would be fantastic that way you never run low and there’s never an issue there Cecchin who entered with what code so the locks that I use you can assign a specific code for a specific amount of time and you can have expire as well so finding a locked in as a platform that has those features will be great and I can even take that one step further and there are locks than actually integrate directly with Airbnb now mine does that as well there’s a handful of them out there I think August lock is another one so the ability to integrate with Airbnb or your listing platform homeaway VR BO is really great because it’s going to provide a lot of extra security so if a guest checks N. and their code only works until the reservation and you never risk someone else using the same code again the property because it’s not gonna work anymore and that’s not such a big deal you know when you have a a few rentals but when you’re scaling and you’re getting hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people coming in.

Making sure that people don’t have access to apartments when they shouldn’t have it.

Is gonna be very helpful especially if you’re managing other people’s properties.

That’ll just give you one like up you can insure those owners that you know their security is gonna be a lot safer because code camp used twice.

Another thing I want to keep in mind is just finding a lock that that simple to use so Airbnb is short term rentals of really spread around the world and with that we’re getting gas of all different age ranges some better more technology.

Inept than others and you will no matter how easy your lock is you will have guests have issues with it they’d all in all the codes or the interim and the wrong order they don’t press the unlock button or just whatever it is and as simple as some of these locks are today people are going to have some issues.

And the lock itself may have an issue you know if it gets hung up if the if the door jamb shifted and dead bolts getting stock and it doesn’t open you gotta have a back up because if you’re just can’t get into your rental then that is the ultimate fail and that’s not fun for anyone you have to refund them.

You know unless you could get there manually open it for them.

So if you guys can’t get N. then you definitely have to refund them for their stay and it’s just not good it’s very inconvenient and that is not a good experience when you show up to a property you can’t get in we’re trying to scale our business here so what we can’t have that happen really and having someone available to go out and let the men is just something that we we want to avoid in that we can avoid an easy way to do that is just to have a back up lock box with a physical key and now you want to put it somewhere it’s easy to find room the gas is probably already and be a little frustrated if they couldn’t get in and they had to reach out to you so sometimes I leave them right on the actual door knob and I have automated messaging to go out to the gas if for whatever reason the digital lock is not working like is in the code they grab a physical key and then boom there N. hopefully with minimal minimal frustration and in just a couple minutes something else to keep in mind is that if your property you know I have some properties that are gated and they require a gate code to get in before they get to the actual unit or they have their own you know private insurance so you’ll want to have a backup gate remote or a backup way to get through the gate too so it’s just backups backups backups so you have a fail proof system someone shows up they can always always get an R. in automatically if both of those were to fail you have someone available to make it out there but that’s something you want to avoid at all costs because it’s not a good experience for the gas and it makes it difficult to run your business and scale that way and you’re gonna get some bad reviews if that’s happening so just to sum up that you know there’s so many locks available just keep an eye out for.

Some of those features that are gonna allow you to scale and make it easy for you and your team so as you can monitor things remotely create codes remotely check battery levels remotely if your wifi goes down in your locks connected to wifi make sure you get a lock that has a back up so that has an actual memory and the codes are generated will still work even if the wifi goes down.

So once you’ve gotten your locks remember some people unfortunately are just not gonna build operate on that well they’re gonna have questions they may just enter the code wrong so have a back up plan have backup responses ready to go save responses so your team knows exactly what to do and that your guests have the best experience possible.

So when do you send a code out to the guests Walt I’ve experimented with this as well and what I found is that you know some Bucks a couple weeks out they are not remember the code that you send them unless I wrote it down immediately once you sent it to him you know if you sent as a booking confirmation which would only do really if that was unique code for the gas so what I do or what I found best I just send it right before they check in the day right before and I let them know that your confirmation email or message that says Hey send you all the.

Unique checking codes a day before arrival but I do it 2 ways so I’ll send it to their actual cell phone via a text message and you will have this option if you are using some sort of management software.

Or you can just send it directly through Airbnb whatever platform using but so I send it through text message but I also send it through the platform so I have 2 options and that the text message one is very brief it says Hey you know just in case you didn’t see the check in message here’s your unique code to lock and we look forward to hosting you know.

If you have any questions let us now you know something really brief just like that a bill out of people you know they won’t go back and check those messages before they check and they just ask you again so you want to try to avoid that too just to free up a little bit time and make it better for gas.

So until next time I hope that helped and look for to bring a great content in the near future.

Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals little search the properties you want to make sure that you acquired the right. I want to give you my. Just that there is no charge my gift to you for one of our subscribers just go to restmethod.com R. E. S. T. methods.com

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