Airbnb Tips: Use A 3D Floor Plan! | How to Create a Floor Plan | Tim Hubbard

There's something that's really easy to do to really help our listing that I just don't see a lot of people doing. I want to give you my insight on that in this quick actionable episode this week on the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll 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. So I see a lot of listings all the time and there's something that I just don't see people doing and I don't know why. It's super easy to do. It doesn't take very long and it really helps our guests out in the booking process. I've talked about it before, I've mentioned it before in prior episodes, but this week I want to break it down in a little more detail. And that is our floor plan. Our floor plan for a property. And if you already have your property and it's already furnished, well, don't go anywhere yet because it's still helpful and I'll get into that a little bit later. So the floor plan is a roadmap for furnishing our property, I should say. So it's ideal to do one before we furnish the property. But like I said, if you've already got a property, it's still going to be helpful. And I'll mention a couple of reasons why here in a quick second. But first of all, a floor plan allows you to make sure the furniture you're going to put in your property are going to fit. They're not going to be too crammed. They're going to look right. I mean, there's some really cool programs now to do this. I've been doing this with all my properties for a long, long time. So I want to give you a couple options for do it yourselfers that want to do this floor plan on our own, how we can do it. And then if we want to hire it out, I'll give you some options for that as well. And super easy to hire it out as well. So why do we need a floor plan? Well, it helps design our space. It has the actual measurements of our property. So before we can make a floor plan, we need the measurements right now. That's pretty easy to do as well. You basically just need a piece of paper and a pencil and a tape measure if you want to do it the old school way. That's still the way I do it normally, but I Know, they've got a lot of handy, dandy little measuring apps now that are probably really easy to use. You can just go the App Store and down one for your Android or your iPhone device to get a pretty accurate measurement of a space. They also sell the things at Home Depot or Lowe's or your major home store that it just shoots the laser beam and it tells you exactly how far it is from one wall to the other. If you have a big space, maybe you want to do that. So once we have the measurements and let's just make an example of like a living room, for example, we're trying to design our living room. We want a floor plan. So we put those measurements down, we put them on paper, and then we can plug them into a program. So there's a couple programs for the do it yourselfers. The one that I use is called roomsketcher. I've been using it for a long time. I still think it's one of the better options. And it's not expensive. And it also allows you to import furniture and see it in 3D views. It's really cool, actually. And it's not a super sophisticated software. It's easy to use. I promise you. You can figure out how to use it in a little amount of time. They also have a large database of furniture, even furniture from like Ikea, for example. So you could choose the exact couch from Ikea, plop it in there and see, oh, does this fit? If you get a couch from somewhere else where you can easily adjust the measurements and it just gives you a lot of insight before you actually furnish your property. There is a reason that the pros use a floor plan, right. Professional interior designers use floor plans because it makes it easier. Makes it easier. So get your measurements, get your measurements and use one of those programs if you want to do it yourself. The one I use again is Room Sketcher, or you've got programs like SketchUp from Google. And these, these programs are inexpensive. So SketchUp, I believe is free, depending on what version you want to use. That's the Google one. We'll put the links in the show notes. RoomSketcher is very inexpensive as well. So you can take these measurements and you can have someone at roomsketcher actually do this for you at the time of this recording. It's like 38 bucks to have someone do a 3D floor plan for you. So that is not expensive and it's not going to take you a ton of time. And it's definitely going to be Worth it. It's going to help you with your furnishing journey, but it's also going to help our guests. So those are a couple ways that we can do it ourself. The other ways are just to simply take a picture of those measurements and upload it to fiverr or upwork and outsource it. There's lots of people on there that can make 3D floor plans for you very easily and probably as little as like $10. Right. So there's going to be a quality difference probably between someone doing for 10 and someone doing it for 40 or 50. But it's not complicated thing and it's really, really helpful to have so they're not expensive, it doesn't take long. And the great thing about it is it's going to help your guests as well. So many people do not have a picture of their floor plan in their listing. And especially if you have a bigger space, if you have a studio that's just a square with a bathroom, well, maybe it's not going to be as important. But if you have a vacation rental and you've got three families booking it and they're like, okay, is my, is my son gonna have enough space? How far is he gonna be from our bedroom? And is this family gonna have more space from ours? The bigger the space, the better it is to have a floor plan because it's gonna help your guests make decisions. So it will take a little more work to measure out the other rooms. But having a floor plan is going to set you apart on your listing, I promise. There's just not a lot of people doing it. If you go on there yourself, you can see what I'm talking about. Most listings do not have a floor plan. So it really helps someone make a decision easier and it's going to set you apart. So take a few minutes, take some measurements, outsource them if you don't want to do it, and get some 3D floor plans, upload them to your listing. And if you're starting your furnishing journey, if your property doesn't have furniture in it, well, it's going to really help you out there. You can take it one step further than this one. Well, I should say you're probably going to want to hire a professional for this, but they have 3D virtual tours of properties now. And I just realized recently that if you have a property where people are trying to book for long term stays, a lot of times, let's say someone wants to book for two months, they don't Want to go to a place and decide they don't like it after one day. So a lot of times they want to see it beforehand. Well, have your professional photographer do a 3D floor plan. It's essentially like a walkthrough you see on a lot of real estate listings these days. Do one for your short term rental that you could send to a guest as well. That's going to really help them make a decision if they want to book your property for the long run. And we love those long term bookings, right? Less operations and more money in our pocket and less messages. I mean it's just, it's nice having guests pay nightly rates for a long term stay, right? So check that out. And then lastly, if you're selling your property, well, this is going to help too, right? So there's lots of reason to have a floor plan. It doesn't take very long, super cheap. It's going to set you apart, it's going to help your furnishing journey. So please, please, if you don't have a 3D floor plan or a 2D floor plan, at least in your listing, jump on one of those sites and go ahead and make one. Now next week we're going to take this a little further and this floor plan that you're using you can actually give to a 3D designer. So it's going to be really helpful if you don't want to do the actual design either. So stay tuned until next. Thank you for tuning in again. I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you soon. If you're looking for a ton of free resources, well, you can check out the links in the show notes or head to our website restmethods.com where you'll find free guides, house rules, and my ebook on finding the best short term rental properties. Thanks for tuning in.