Boost Your Home's Curb Appeal FAST with These Simple STR Secrets

We only get one shot at a first impression. Right. So this is really important for us as short term rental investors. We want to make sure that our guest first impression is a good one. And one of the foundations for setting a good first impression is having good curb appeal. It is different than it is with traditional real estate, though. We have some different things to consider and that's what I want to talk about this week. 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.

Well, welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm happy you're here again. Talking about real estate. Talking about real estate investing as a way to hopefully generate a lot of cash flow and live the lives we really want to live. Right. That's what it was for me. And so welcome back. If you're new to the channel, I started investing a long time ago, over 12, 13 years. And I've built a large portfolio of short term rentals in five cities, three different countries. And my team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests now, and I'm excited to be managing even more in the future. So welcome back. We're talking about curb appeal and it is really important, right? If you've seen all those Flip this House shows on Netflix and all those different series, you know how much money they put into the curb appeal because they want to provide a good first impression, really wow the buyer and sell those properties quickly. Well, that is equally important for short term rentals, but not necessarily. It depends on the type of properties. First of all, I want to talk about what is curb appeal? Well, it is the feeling, the emotions, the. The appeal that we get from the curb. I know, duh, Tim, that's the literal translation. But it's how we feel when we see something for the first time, when we see a property for the first time and everything that's embodied in that property. But before we get into that, I want to talk about where it starts. With a short term rental. And with a short term rental, it starts in the virtual world. Yes. It's the photos that your guests see. In fact, a lot of people are listing their properties without even having a photo of the exterior of their property. Now, that might be less important for some properties than is for others, but the fact is, for short term rental investors, we're trying to sell our property. We're trying to give the best first impression from our very first Photos. So if you've missed prior episodes, go back and check them out. We talk a lot about photos. You know how important it is to take really good photos. But there's a lot of other things that goes into our listing. This is, though. This is the first step to our first impression. It's our virtual curb appeal, if you will. So curb appeal is important in the virtual side, but it's clearly important on the physical side, too. It actually makes our property look better, but it could make it safer. I'm sure you've seen some areas, some neighborhoods, if you've been investing for a while, that slowly start to turn, and then all of a sudden, more and more of the neighborhood is getting neglected. I was in Athens recently, traveling around, and I remember seeing so much graffiti all over these beautiful old buildings. And I was taking a tour this one day, and I asked the tour guide, and he said, oh, it's legal here in this downtown part of the city. And I'm talking, like, all these buildings had graffiti everywhere. Now, had I not known that that was legal and it was just part of the culture and the customs there, I would have a different feeling about that area. Right. I might think it's a little less safe. So by having good curb appeal helps clean up our neighborhood, and it surely makes our neighbors happy as well. I remember when I invested in my first property a long time ago. I went with the house hacking method. For those of you that don't know, that's where you can buy a property. You can live in part of it, can rent the rest out. So I bought a fourplex. This was in downtown Sacramento a long time ago. And I remember putting in sprinklers out in the front yard, that it was a foreclosure that I bought, actually. So no one part of the units were vacant, and it's just been very neglected, and I was sweating away. If you've ever been in Northern California in the summer, it gets hot. I'm talking real, real hot. And I sweated away, and I didn't know what I was doing. You know, watched YouTube videos and stuff to figure it out. And I remember getting that lawn in and just thinking, wow, this is like, what a change. And I remember the neighbors saying, wow, this looks so much now. My green thumb, I guess, wasn't that green. I don't know how long that lawn ended up staying there, actually. I think I ended up going back with something more resilient, something that required less maintenance, like gravel or bark. And that's something I've Incorporated into a lot of my properties now since then, just trying to cut down on maintenance things to be able to scale a little bit more. But I still remember what a difference it made. It's kind of like painting the front of a property, right? Because painting the front of a property, it's just so much bang for your buck. I mean, it really changes the way a property looks, changes the way you feel about it. And so that is the same for landscaping as well and anything that your guest or someone's going to see as they step up to your home for the first time. So for short term rentals, we've got some other things we want to keep in mind. First of all, we might not even have the option to add more curb appeal. A lot of our short term rentals out there in this big world might be in condo associations where they're going to be taking care of the curb appeal. So hopefully if you have a property in a condominium, they are taking care of the property appropriately. And we've got to go a couple extra steps here with our short term rentals. We need to put a picture of our building in there, even if it doesn't look good because you know why the guest is going to show up and they're going to see the property and that's going to be their first impression. Right. And it's going to be lower if they weren't expecting it. So it doesn't mean we have to include 20 photos of the building or show the worst section possible, but at least give them an idea of where they're going to be showing up. So assuming we can add some more curbabile and fix up our short term rental, there's quite a lot of things we can do. I already mentioned the landscaping that goes a long, long way. Think about the long term maintenance. So lawns and plants and stuff, depending on where you're in the country or in the world, they can be much easier to take care of than others. Think about your driveway and your garage space. Is someone pulling into a garage that has some clutter in there or, you know, unfinished walls or mismatched paint, something like that in the garage, or maybe just the garage floor itself. You know, you can get those epoxy paints and you can have your garage floor painted. And it goes a long way too. If you have a property with a garage. If you have a property with a carport or cover or just an open air driveway, make sure that it's presentable as well. I know driveways can be expensive sometimes so maybe even just a good pressure wash to clean it off will go a long way. Your entry door. I always recommend having a picture of the entry door as well, just so guests know they're at the right place. And also to remind them that you have remote check in or you have a digital door lock. I hope you have one. If you don't, make sure you go get one, because that's what guests are expecting these days, but it just reminds them that they can check in remotely. Remember, our guests aren't reading all of our listing descriptions. So if we have a picture of something they're going to, they're more likely to see it. They're more likely to remember it. But make sure your front door is welcoming. If your front door needs a fresh coat of paint, well, by all means, that is worth the money. Consider having a nice welcome mat right in front of the door. Or at least make sure that you have a clean space. Maybe you want to put some plants or something out there. But we want our front door and entry to be a good experience. No cobwebs, nothing like that. And that doesn't take a lot of maintenance. To spice it up, make sure you have good address numbers too, at least ones that are very clear so people know they're in the right place. But you don't have to spend too much more money to go from a normal address number you might find at Home Depot to one that looks really nice and cool. A modern one or a historic one or whatever it happens to be. Remember, you're only going to put it on there once. They also have ones that light up at night. That's very helpful for our guests that are showing up late at night. They've never been to your property. If you're on a street that's got a bunch of dark driveways and your address numbers are lit up well, they're going to find it a lot easier and it's a nice element to your property. And that brings me to lighting. Lighting is really, really important. Luckily these days we have lots of good, inexpensive options with LED bulbs that last a lifetime, pretty much as long as they're taken care of. We have low voltage landscaping lighting. Landscaping lighting. Wow. It's really worth the money as well. You can go on Amazon or you can go to your local home supply store these days and you can pick up some landscape lighting that plugs into an outlet. It goes on an automatic timer for just a few hundred dollars. Really easy to set up or for your handyman or your landscape or whatever. It happens to be. They can set those up for you too. Again, you can set it on a dust to dawn timer. So it just turns on. Really adds a lot to your curb appeal and adds a lot to your guests first impression. So aside from some of the simple things that we can do, like paint, like landscaping, like lighting, like address numbers, welcome mats, and maybe some nice patio furniture, if you do have a nice private patio, then I'd recommend putting some patio furniture out there. Remember though, that's one other thing you'll have to keep track of and one other thing that your housekeepers or whoever's helping you out is going to want to monitor as well. Make sure it's not too dirty. So aside from some of these simple things that we can add maybe in a day's time, or they're inexpensive and they don't require a whole bunch of coordination and all these different things, we do have some more structural elements that we want to make sure are in good condition as well. Now remember, you want to have a property that's in good condition too. That's going to cut down on your maintenance. That's going to make your life easier. But I realize it does cost money, especially if we're talking about something like a roof. Roofs are expensive or they can be expensive, right? It's also something that can be an eyesore. If you've got a property that's got mismatched shingles or it's been patched or the gutters are hanging off or whatever it happens to be. Well, you want to make sure that you maintain that as well as the siding of the home. There's lots of different siding options these days. Some are much more resistant than others, but we want to make sure that they're taken care of. They're not rotted, they're not falling off, they're not different paint colors. There's not giant gaps between the siding that need to be filled with caulking or whatever it has to be. So make sure that your home or your short term rental has a good appearance when it comes to the structural side of things too. And it's one of those things that you're going to have to fix at some point anyways if it's already messed up. So you might as well fix it now. Have better first guest impressions, which mean better reviews, which mean more revenue for you, more revenue in your pocket, and hopefully more short term rentals down the road. So remember, curb appeal is really important. It starts at the virtual level. It starts online. There are some differences between long term rentals and short term rentals when it comes to curb appeal. And every short term rental is different. So some short term rentals we're not going to have the luxury of being able to change the outside of our property or add lighting if we're in a condo association or if we're in an area that has regulations. So this is different depending on the type of short term rental you have. But it is super, super important. So if you have a little bit of deferred maintenance, I recommend getting to it sooner than later. Hopefully a few of those tips help you out. And until next time, I hope you have a wonderful week.

Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals? Well, it all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties. I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods.com that's R E S T methods dot com.