You guys have a lot of great questions out there, and I love answering them. This is part two of our Q&A series. If you missed the first one, head back, it was just a few weeks ago. So, we’re gonna go ahead and just jump right back in. Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. As you know, this industry is changing so, so quickly. There’s so many new tools, there’s so many new ideas, there’s so many resources out there telling us that we should be investing here, or that we shouldn’t be investing at all. The best way to find these things out is just to ask questions, right? For us to dig deeper, and once we do that, that helps us eliminate uncertainty, it helps us eliminate fear. So, no question is a dumb question. Thank you for submitting yours. I wanna go just through a few of them today.

So, the question says, great video. Key question is, what tasks do I give to a VA in STR management? So, VA, virtual assistant, as many of you know, our team has team members from Europe, from Mexico, from the Philippines. We have people in the US, obviously, but there’s so much talent out there everywhere, and so the world is our oyster. We shouldn’t be limiting ourselves to our backyards or to our local area when so much of management can be done virtually. So that’s a great, great question. What tasks should we give to them? The answer is, depends. We can outsource whatever tasks we want. So, our team is virtual, and we’ve managed almost 30,000 guests now. We handle every step of the way, but that doesn’t mean that if you’re starting out and you’re looking for your first virtual assistant, that they’re gonna be helping with everything, like pricing, for example. So, where I would start, I would start with communications and guest support. That’s usually the first place that people look, and that’s one of the biggest work pieces of it, right? We get a lot of questions, and we don’t always wanna be answering them ourselves, especially if it’s two in the morning and someone’s calling about a clogged toilet. That’s not why a lot of us got into real-estate, right? But luckily, working with people virtually, there’s people in other time zones, and we can use that to our advantage so that we have people working around the clock depending on what time zone they’re in.

So that’s the first thing that I would outsource. The next task that I would outsource after guest communications would be your support calls with Airbnb, with VRBO, with booking.com, whoever it happens to be. Maybe you need to file an air cover case or a resolution. Those things take time, and that’s a task that can be easily outsourced to your VA, for example. So, I’d start with communication. I’d then move to support. I would also have them manage your reviews. We know how important reviews are, right? And so, I would make sure that those reviews are being responded to, that any negative reviews have extra attention paid to them, why they were negative, monitoring the private feedback. And if someone leaves a review that wasn’t totally honest, then I would have them try to remove that for you as well, which we definitely can do now if it’s breaking one of the rules. The next thing that’s really important is updating your actual listings. So, we know that these listing sites are changing all the time, right? They add new amenities. They add new discount option features. They add new policies or rules, or they change the existing ones. And this takes quite a bit of time to monitor. Maybe not as much if you just have one property, but when you start to add more and more properties, this can become very time consuming, and it’s still very important to make sure that you’re doing it so that you’re always staying fresh on those OTAs. They like that, of course, when their properties that they’re advertising are up to date. And so that’s why they add a lot of these features, and that’s exactly why you or your VA in this situation should be updating those for you.

The next task that I would outsource to your VA, and this one’s a little more complicated. They have to have a little more skill set, but it’s very easily done. Repetition is the mother of all skill, right? And that’s your pricing. So pricing, luckily, we can learn as much as we need to from anywhere. We’re managing properties all over the place. Now, if you didn’t know that already, you can head over to strriches.com, and you’ll see there’s a property management button there. We’d love to chat with you to see if your property fits within our portfolio. We use the same team with my properties as we would with yours, and this is one of the things that our team members help with, pricing. It’s super, super important. Luckily, we’ve got a lot of tools at our fingertips. We’ve talked about a lot of them on this channel, like Pricelabs, for example, the one that we’re currently using. So that’s one of the last things that I would outsource, because it does take a little more skill level. If you get your pricing wrong, it can really affect your property performance, so it’s something you gotta pay extra careful attention to. But these are just a few ideas. In a nutshell, we can outsource everything, right? The only thing that we can’t outsource virtually is our housekeeping and our maintenance, so great question.

Next question is about banking. So, we did an episode recently talking about new banking options. We’re in a pretty crazy banking environment right now where we’ve already lost more banks than we did in the last financial crisis in 2008. That’s pretty mind-boggling, right? Because we’re kinda just getting into this. And so banking options are important. We wanna make sure we’re with a secure one. We talked about two mainly. One was Relay Bank and one was Mercury Bank. So, the question is, can you expand on the big difference between these two banks? They essentially do the same things. They offer a lot of easy access to sharing your bookkeeping, so if you have other people helping you, then that’s really helpful. They also make it easy to create virtual cards, to add new bank accounts if you’re separating between properties, so they do a really good job at that. I’m not personally using Relay, I’m using Mercury, and it’s been working out very well for us. So, you can just go to relay.com or relay.fi, I think it’s the website, or mercury.com. Check out some of the differences there. They’re much more feature-rich than our traditional banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, for example. So, I’ll just say that.

Next question comes from John Williams. He says, thanks for the videos. So, I heard that if we use other platforms to list our rentals, that it drives the SEO search engine optimization and the ranking down on the Airbnb platform. Do you know if this is true? Or maybe explain this in more detail so I’m understanding correctly. This is a great question, John. Thanks for bringing it up. And unfortunately, I do not have the exact answer. As much as I would love to know exactly how our properties are ranked on the listing sites, like Airbnb and VRBO, they don’t give that secret away. But I would say that one of the things that really drives your performance is constantly updating your properties, right? So, if you’re using a property management software platform or something that’s linking into an OTA, those are still updating your listing on the OTA website too. And I’ve gotta think that Airbnb, for example, has special support for property managers on Airbnb. And so, this is something that they actually want, right? They want more properties on their platform. So, if Airbnb is seeing properties come in from a property management software system that’s not directly tied into OTA, then you’ve gotta think that that might not hurt the listing too much because they’re expecting this property to be a little more professionally managed than maybe someone that’s just using the Airbnb platform. So, I wish I had the exact answer for you, but unfortunately, I don’t. If I find out, though, you better believe that you and everyone that tunes in to this podcast are gonna be the first ones to know. So, thanks for tuning in.

This next question comes from Charlie Gates, and he was actually at one of our virtual events in the recent past. I’m excited to say that we just announced the dates for our next virtual event. It’s gonna be October 14th. We’re talking about margin mastery, how we can make more money with our properties that we currently own. And there’s a lot of ways to do that. My team and I have been doing that, perfecting that with our properties and other people’s properties. As you know, we’ve managed tens of thousands of guests. We’re always looking at the latest and greatest tools, and we’re using them as well. So, if you’re interested in that, head over to restmethods.com. You’ll see it right under events there. We’d love to see you there. It’s gonna be jam-packed. It comes with tons of our checklists and things like that that we use. And we’re gonna go deep into pricing. We’re gonna go deep into maintenance. We’re gonna talk about VAs and how to hire them and best practices and give you the scripts and just gonna be jam-packed. So, I hope you can make it. And I love to hear the questions there live as well.

So, this question says, how much time per week in maintenance do you spend on your STR portfolio? And Charlie, quick answer to this one is basically zero. But that’s me. Of course, I have team members that are helping me. So, someone is helping with all of this maintenance, right? The only time that I’m really getting involved anymore is if there is a really big, you know, something breaks down or a massive flood or the roof needs to be replaced or some really large capital expenditure. And then I’m gonna wanna know about it and just do a little comparison. But all of our minor maintenance, we have an excellent team that helps us on the ground there and we use Breezeway as well to track maintenance and to organize things. So, I’ve talked about that program before. So, I spend very little time in regards to maintenance. But great question. Also, something that we’re gonna go over in our virtual event coming up. So excited for that.

Next question is about review removal. And this also came from YouTube. It says, how long do you wait before requesting another review removal after your first failed removal attempt? And so, what this is referring to is if you don’t know already, we can have negative reviews removed and we did an episode on this. And our answer is we submit the next one right after the first one was declined. And in fact, we will submit that again. If that review is breaking one of our house rules, we know that it can legitimately be removed. Well, then we’re gonna continue until it gets removed. The trouble is that a lot of times when you contact Airbnb or you contact VRBO, you might be getting a support agent that’s totally different than the one that you spoke to the day before or the week before. Or maybe your VA spoke to the day or the week before. But the reality is that they have rules that allow us to remove our reviews if they’re not accurate. And as long as we follow those rules, they should be removed. So, keep trying until you get those actually removed.

Next question comes from Billy. This says, is a HELOC a good idea to buy a rental property? So HELOC is a home equity line of credit. And my short answer would be no. For a couple reasons. The first one is that when we take out a home equity line of credit, it’s often with a variable interest rate or maybe it’s fixed for a year, maximum two years, to where it could change after that. So maybe you borrow some money. And again, this is equity that we’re pulling out based off our primary residence, right? A home equity line of credit. So that interest rate can change. And as you know, we’re in an environment right now where interest rates are changing pretty quickly and they’ve been going up and up. I happen to believe that they’re gonna continue to go up for a little while. Not to say they can’t go back down. But the other challenge with the HELOC is you gotta look at the fine terms on these loans. A lot of times, these banks have the option to call that loan in and have you pay it off. It doesn’t happen very often. But if you’re in a situation where you really need that money and you use it for something and then you’re required to pay it back, well, you could be in a bit of trouble there. So, we like to invest in properties with long-term fixed debt that allows us to manage our expenses over years, 30 years fixed, for example, with a normal residential loan. And so that just makes things a little more conservative. So sorry, Bill, I wouldn’t recommend that one. One that I might recommend, a different financing option, for example, would be seller financing. So, if you found a property that you really like, the reality is that a lot of homes in the US are owned outright. They don’t have any loans on them. And you might be able to work something out with that owner, especially in today’s environment where less people are able to purchase because of higher interest rates. There’s still a lot of people that wanna sell their homes. And so, if you’ve come across some properties that are owned outright, you could work out a deal directly with that owner. And I think that’d be a lot safer than purchasing a property with a HELOC. So, I hope you found a little bit of value in that Q&A.

This is just quick rapid fire. Please write to us if you have any questions. I love getting them. I love reading them. You can go to strriches.com and you can just scroll down. You can see there’s a spot there to ask questions. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while and you haven’t left a review and you’re finding value in it, I would really appreciate that. And you can always just take a screenshot of an episode if you think one of your family members might find value in it or a friend of yours. Send it over to them. I’d really appreciate that. It’s gonna help us grow. It’s gonna help us have more resources for you guys. Our website, strriches.com, we’ve got a ton of free resources on there. And if you already own a property and you’re interested in fine tuning your management, improving your margins, and really learning everything that my team and I do with my personal portfolio and other properties we’re managing, come meet up with us at our virtual event on October 14th, Margin Mastery. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’d love to see you there. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

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