10 Proven Ways to Earn More with Your Short-Term Rental

We've literally talked about hundreds of different topics on this show, but one of the most popular is of course how to earn more money with our short term rentals. And instead of having you dive through all the past episodes, what I thought I'd do today is just break down 10 rapid fire ways that you can instantly improve your visibility, your occupancy, and therefore your revenue. Stay tuned. Let's dive into 10 of those foreign.

Welcome back to the show. I'm happy you're here again and I'm looking forward to giving you 10 little nuggets. The first one has to do with upsells. You've probably been hearing a lot about upsells recently and it's really just the market's reaction to slightly lower occupancy, slightly lower adrs. Some common ones that you'll want to include are early check ins, late checkouts. What our team likes to do is give away like an hour or two for free if someone requests it. We know all of our guests basically request this, right? But if someone says, hey, I'm going to be there at 6am and your property is currently vacant, it's already cleaned, ready to go, well, they're very likely going to pay you a little bit more money for the convenience of being able to check in early instead of waiting around in the airport or wherever they happen to be. So make sure that you're capitalizing on the early check ins and the late checkouts. And then of course you can take this a few steps further. You can offer airport transfer. You can do things like offer lumber at your property if you have a cabin in the woods and they're going to be lighting some nice cozy fires. You can offer barbecue charcoal for the barbecue. You can offer kayaks and boat rentals and jet ski rentals. You can even partner with local businesses where you get a little cut if that guest shows up at the business and purchases one of their services or dines at their restaurant. Number two, offer extensions on reservations that are near a gap night. A gap night is a night in your calendar that's unbookable. Let's say your minimum stay policy says two nights and you have a one night gap with a reservation on each side. You want to reach out to both those guests and say, hey George or Hey Julie, we've got an extra night on our calendar that's empty. We'd love to offer it to you at a 30 or 40% discount. Whatever you decide. If you'd like to extend your stay so you reach out to both of them. You might even let both of them know that you've offered it to the other person. Creating just a little bit of competition. Number three, has to do with our expenses. We know if we lower our expenses, then we make more money with our property. A really big expense in the short term rental world are our utilities, right? Maybe we do something extreme like install solar. A really quick and affordable way to lower those expenses is to install a smart thermostat. We recommend the Sensi Emerson thermostat. We actually did a whole episode on it. That was episode 184. So go back and check that out. Aside from the fact that you can control it online, which means you can turn it off if there's no one there at your property and you can turn it on a few hours before they check in. Number four, to boost your revenue, you need to boost your visibility. And I know that a ton of you out there are not on all the channels. So if you add booking.com and you add Google Vacation Rentals and you add Hopper or whimsday, you will literally triple or even more your visibility. These sites have a lot of marketing budget behind them, and assuming your listing is set up well and it looks great, you're going to get more visibility. And with more visibility, you're going to get more people booking your property. Now, I know that one is a little easier said than done. All these different sites have different policies. If you don't want to handle all that yourself, well, we would love to take it off your plate and do an excellent, excellent job at it. You can go to Strom, you'll see there's a little partner with us button. We've been partnering with other owners and investors across the nation now and even in some other countries, and we'd love to chat with you to see if it's a good fit. Number five, you can increase your revenue if you decrease your booking commissions. Last week we talked all about creating a direct booking website and everything that goes into that. So if you missed that episode, go back to 316. Check it out. If you get guests booking through your direct booking website instead of Airbnb, well, then that 15.5% host fee is no longer there, right? You might even give the guest a 10% discount and you're still earning 5% more. Of course, the higher your reservation amounts are, the more income this is going to put back into your pocket. Number six, make sure you're using a dynamic pricing tool. If you're not already using one like Price Labs or Wheelhouse, you are at a serious disadvantage. I talked with the CEO from Hospitable recently. Their platform has over 300,000 properties on it and he said that over 40% of the properties on their platform are not using dynamic pricing. If you're using static pricing, you've got to get past that. The next step is turning on dynamic pricing tool, and then the next step is really, really truly understanding that tool and how to adjust your prices like our team does each and every day for all of our partners. This will of course allow you to take advantage of events, of seasonality, of any sort of high demand periods. It allows you to monitor your performance with the market, to adjust based off occupancy, to add last minute discounts, all types of things that would require a ton of your time if you didn't have the tool turned on. Seventh way that you can boost your income is by allowing for pets. And now I know a lot of you are thinking, no way, no way, can't do it. My housekeeper would kill me and I just don't want the mess in my property. The majority of people think the same thing. You can do a really easy check. Whatever city you happen to be in. You can pull up Airbnb with no filters and no dates selected. You can see how many properties are there, and then you can simply select the filter that says allows pets and see how many disappear. If 90% of the properties disappear, well, you know, there's way less supply of properties actually allowing pets, which means you have way more opportunity. And now, of course, we don't have to stop there. We can also charge a pet fee. Right? And so sometimes what I advise for those that are sort of on the fence is to offer the highest pet fee you can, which according to Airbnb's terms, would be your highest daily rate. That happens to be $200. You can't charge $400 for your pet fee. That's going to give you more visibility. But not everyone booking your property is going to have a pet, right? And we also know that a lot of people booking your property are going to say they don't have a pet, and then they're still going to show up with pet number eight. Adding sleeping space to your property increases the guest count, which increases the potential revenue for your property. Especially if you have a luxury property or property that's used for family vacations. The more family that can stay there, the more they can split those costs for that vacation and the more opportunity you have. Now, this doesn't require that you Actually add a whole new bedroom on. A lot of properties have dens or they have basements or they have places where you can get a little more creative. Remember, depending on how long people are actually staying at your property, they don't necessarily need a giant closet or all of these things. If they're staying for three days, you can have a nice bed and a nice space. Make sure that you have a way to separate it. Right. And if your way of separating that is with a curtain and you're calling in another bedroom, well, you got to be really clear in your listing description to show that this isn't actually a full bedroom, but we have some extra sleeping space. So make sure that you're not trying to fool any of your guests. It's going to show up negatively in your reviews. Now, a nice thing you can do with extra guests. Let's say you already have the space, but you're not necessarily really excited about having an extra two people at your property. Well, you can charge an extra guest fee per guest. Right now you want to make sure that you have exterior cameras on your property. So if you rented the property for 10 people and 12 people showed up and you have an extra guest fee, you've got some clear footage to say, hey, George, I thought you guys had 10 people on the reservation. Our team or I noticed that more people showed up. Are they staying there with you at the property or are they just visiting for the day? Of course, your rules might there are no visitors allowed. The way that you come across in your communications, really important. We are in the hospitality industry, so you don't want your guests to feel like you're in interrogating them. The 10th way for now to help you boost your income is to help you increase your average length of stay. So I know a lot of you out there don't really understand what the average length of stay in your market is based on the time of year. We know that this changes. You can use tools like price labs and air DNA, ideally you know, throughout the year. So if you're allowing a bunch of two night stays when the rest of the market or a lot of people are taking four night stays, that means you can increase your reservation. And if you have fewer reservations in a year, then you have less housekeeping turnover and you likely have higher occupancy. So make sure you understand the fundamentals in your market. Again, if you don't want to look into all these details yourself, our team would love to partner with you. You can head to strict. Com. There's a little partner with us button and we can jump on a quick call. I hope these 10 tips help you earn more money with your property. Until next time. I hope you have a fabulous week.

Sam.