5 WARNING SIGNS you will have a BAD GUEST | Tim Hubbard

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache as possible.

Probably the biggest hesitation I'd say from people or the biggest question I get is around having bad guests and the fear of having someone destroy your property or stealing everything. But the reality is this, is this like never happens. I mean, it can be eliminated, it can be preemptively screened so that it basically never happens. So with the huge returns we can make with short term rentals, I don't want this to be freaking you out. Today we're going to talk about five different ways we can screen our guests before they even book our property. To eliminate some, what I'd call red flag reservations. Let's jump right in. So there's some reservations that you need to be a little more weary of. They're not all created equal. Some you can tell right off the bat are going to be a little more risky. And I'm going to break down five of those situations. The first one is essentially if it's a last minute booking, if someone books a few hours before your property, well then you have less time to communicate with them. You have, you have less time to sort of check the reviews and quite a few different things. And so it's more likely that you could get a bad or potential bad guest if they're booking last minute. So one easy way you can prevent that is just by shortening your booking window. So if you don't allow same day bookings, for example, and they're all at least one day out or further, well, then you have a little more time to review, communicate with the guests, find out why they want to stay at your rental and just ask them a few questions. So one of the other things that goes along with last minute bookings is that if you're using a pricing tool, which I highly suggest I use, price labs, a lot of times our last minute bookings are at a discounted rate, right? We're trying to fill our calendar, we're trying to get our occupancy up. And so if your rate is lower and it's a last minute booking, that could be a bad combination. But only really if your rate is too low to the point where maybe someone will book your property and they don't care about the money it's costing them. So just to give you an example, let's say you have a home that rents for $200 a night and it's got four bedrooms. Well, imagine four people maybe wanting to have a party last minute, potentially. It's Friday night, your property's available and they say, oh, we can book this place in two hours, we can be there. It's only $50 for each of us. If you think about it that way, that's not very much money. And it might be money that people just don't really care about, they're willing to lose. So consider that the last minute bookings, a lot of time have our lowest prices. So we need to make sure that our lowest price is a level that we're comfortable with and that doesn't attract maybe a bad guest. So the second one, we've talked a lot about this in the past and that's accepting locals. It's a red flag. But not always. Not always. I don't want to say that these reasons we're talking about aren't always going to be red flags, but if someone's local and they're booking your property, you just simply want to find out why. Why are they booking a property in the same town where they live? It's a good question asked because sometimes those can be potential party scenarios. We used to never allow local reservations. We do now after Covid, because during COVID a lot of people just weren't traveling from far away. And now I'm happy that we've discovered ways to vet our guests a little bit better because we do have lots of local reservations and a lot of them are really good. So easy way is just to ask them why they're coming into town. And we do have some house rules. Go back and check that episode out if you haven't already. That's another good way to make sure that you're covering your bases and you have a good contract with your guests. You can actually download it. My 12 house rules that I think can protect you in almost every situation. We'll leave a link in the show notes for you here. So number one, last minute bookings, also with a low cost per night. Want to make sure that cost isn't too low. Second is locals. The third one is no communication. And especially if these things are being combined, let's say it's last minute booking, it's local, and you're not getting any response or communication from them. They that's definitely a red flag. So the more of these five items you have, the more concerned you might want to be. But communication is an easy one. So we always, and we're in the hospitality business, so we like to communicate with our guests. Right. It's good to know why they're coming to town, for example, and if they don't respond to you at all, and then maybe you try calling their phone number and you can't get through to them. Well, that's a red flag. So it's actually one of Airbnb's rules, too. They have to have a valid phone number. So if their phone number does not work, you call and it goes, you know, goes to a dead number or Google voice number or something like that. Well, that might be risky and you want to let Airbnb know. Number four, a fourth reason that a reservation might potentially be risky. That is, if you have someone booking your property, let's say one person books your six bedroom home. That doesn't really add up. Right. One person doesn't need a six bedroom home, so. So you'll simply want to ask them. I notice you only have one guest on your reservation. Can you please provide us the rest of the guest names? If they don't respond to you again, then that's going to get a little more risky. Again, if this is a last minute booking, that's going to be a little more risky. And if your cost is lower. So the more of these things are combined, the more risky it'll be. But normally one person doesn't book a six bedroom home. Right. Something's not adding up there. So double check that. Make sure you check your reservations when they're coming through. And this last one is, if someone's already stayed with you and you notified Airbnb they weren't a great guest and they try to book with you again, well, hopefully you've already warned Airbnb and you can put them on your blacklist. But you want to check prior reviews with guests, too. So if a potential guest doesn't have any reviews, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a red flag, because lots of people are discovering Airbnb still. Right. And we don't want to eliminate all those bad guests, but we do want to check the reviews if they have them, and if they've got one that's a little iffy, you can simply let Airbnb know that you don't feel really comfortable with this reservation, let them know why, and they can help you cancel without a penalty. So check these five things carefully when you get reservations. The best way to handle all this is just through communication. So there's a whole bunch of other things that we can do to protect our properties. Right. This is just one step. This is a preemptive step. We've got our house rules in a nutshell. A few other ideas. We've got security cameras, we've got noise monitoring devices, we've got additional check in or sign up forms so there's lots of things that we can do. We talk about those in other podcasts but in this episode I just wanted to give you guys five potential red flags from reservations when you get a new reservation just to check it out and make sure nothing's a little fishy in there. Now this is by no means a comprehensive list but these are some of the more common things to look out for so don't be discouraged by bad guests. I swear it is very minimal especially if you're taking all these steps. So jump in if you don't have any short term rentals yet. If you do make sure you are vetting your guests for appropriately. And until next time I hope you have a wonderful day. See you in a week.