Michelle Russell scaled her short-term rental business by hiring a 38-person team in the Philippines to handle everything from listings and guest messages to maintenance coordination. Virtual assistants cost around $500 a month full-time and can manage calendars, cleanings, and emergency repairs, turning rentals into a hands-off operation.
Questions this video answers
April 29, 2021
38 full-time employees in the Philippines
About $500 per month (full time)
Chapters
I would like to hear from you, like what do, what do your virtual assistants do in your short term rental business? What are some of the things that they do specifically?
Basically, like you said, it's like duplicating yourself. They can create my listings. As soon as I get another property, I'll just send them all the files for the pictures. I don't even send it to them. I have my photographers send them the piles of the, all the pictures of the place. They'll create an entire listing. They will create the guest books and if it's a new site for me and they even update old sites. But let's say because I'm here in Phoenix, I also have properties in Tucson, I have properties in Florida. I have properties in like three main different locations in Florida, Orlando, West Palm and the Keys. They'll create books for me and they'll get the restaurants and like as if they are there. They can create these wonderful things for my guests once the listing is up and running and they'll do all of that for me and we start getting the bookings. They do all the messaging between me and them. So we have somebody live. This is really crucial in building your short term rental business because bots are easy. You can use smart BNB and that's great. But when people ask complicated questions, they need a real person on the other end. They can answer all of those questions. So I think it's really important. When I was doing regular real estate, we had a company called PatLive and they would handle our phone calls live. It's better than a pat live. Okay? It's like because these people are real, they're handling all the questions. When something goes wrong. They have, and I give them this permission to. Because I set my boundaries, I say you are allowed to do this, this, this and this. What I won't let you do is this. So my people have permission to hire a plumber or somebody if there's an emergency going on in a place. If the AC is out, they get on it and then they contact me and they say, okay, this is what's going on in that unit. We just have the AC system go out. I've already contacted this place. They're on their way there. They'll have somebody in there in 10 minutes. They're, I mean, then they tell me what's going on. So I give them room and a lot more permission, I think, and the fact that you can trust them much more. But basically everything in my business, from setting the cleanings, they'll look at my calendars, keep my calendars balanced between different platforms. They'll make sure that everything is in alignment. And hire the cleaning companies, get them in there. Scheduling. If somebody cancels, they'll schedule somebody else. They do all the scheduling of the maintenance for the properties, the pest control pool, you know, keeping the pool, maintenance. They do everything. And it's like it turns it basically into a turnkey business for me. I just, you know, pay them and you know, hand the, my bookkeeper the each property. They do the taxes and stuff. And I can't say more. They even actually have. When I need more help, when I'm doing something, they find more people for me. So they'll say, I have a friend who's looking for something. So it turns into. It's an amazing, amazing process.
When I started, I started by hiring one person and everybody always wants to hire a team. I have 38 people in the Philippines who work for me now full time. But I started with one and then I hired another. And then I realized they're both busy full time and I have more work to do, so I hired another. So let me just tell you the kinds of things you can get done in the Philippines.
Philippines.
The kind of work that I get done. So basically my business is online and anything that can be done online is done by someone in the Philippines. So all all of our design work, all of our programming, all of our data entry, all of our lead generation, all of our research, I have programmers, designers, data security people. I have customer support people. I have people that do my social media, I have content writers, I have an HR person.
Your HR person is in the Philippines.
My HR person's in the Philippines because everybody's in the Philippines.
Exactly right, Exactly.
That's true. I have some project managers. Just so you know, I didn't hire a project manager. I hired people to do work. And then as we needed more people, I, I helped them transition.
Like, because they grow with your company, their abilities grow with your company, they're with you so long that they train other people for you.
Exactly.
So it's the best of all worlds, I think.
Right. Because they're so affordable. I mean, you can hire a full time person at $500 a month, very easily. Full time. And then they're so loyal that they'll stick with you as long as you're willing to.
