Exclusive! Insider Tips From A VRBO Account Manager | The STRR Podcast #55 | Tim Hubbard

Are you guys on VRBO yet? Well, you probably should be, depending on your market, but there's some couple little tips that are gonna make your experience with VRBO better and they're gonna help boost your rankings. That's what we're gonna talk about this week. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick, actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Welcome back, everyone, to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. This week we're talking about VRBO and my meeting with an account manager, actually my account manager. So we're reviewing my listings, my properties, but he gave me some really good tips and I want to share those with you guys today if you're not on VRBO already. Vacation Rental by owner. It's also known as and they also own HomeAway now, so keep that in mind. They're a good listing platform. You can get lots of exposure with them. And more exposure for your listings means higher occupancy and more revenue for you. Right? So consider using them if you haven't already. But let's jump in. I want to talk about a few things that we recapped. One was just reviews and their procedures and the policy and some of the things we want to do on our end to make sure we're getting more reviews. We'll talk about listing fees real quickly, how much it costs to put your properties on there. We'll talk about a little new feature they have called Property Boosts, which actually boosts your rankings on their website. That's kind of cool. And then we'll just talk about some general support, contact numbers and things that you might need. So let's get right in. Reviews. We all know reviews are super important, and the more we have, the better our search rankings are, as long as they're good reviews, obviously. And he gave me a few tips on this. Their system similar to other listing sites like Airbnb. And he gave me some great tips. So, first one was that after a guest stays with you, you have the opportunity to review them right away. He actually recommended not doing that because what happens is if you review them, then it starts the clock and they only have 14 days to review you. Otherwise they actually have a whole year to review. Now, you might not want someone reviewing you seven months down the road when they don't actually remember what their stay was like, but it will shorten your window to get a potential review from them. So he recommends requesting a review from them first. Now, the system's automatically going to send out an email to them on the day of checkout. So you don't want to send another one on the day of checkout and kind of overwhelm them. I send out a couple review requests, as you've probably heard in prior podcasts, automatically to all of our guests if they haven't left one already. So, you know, maybe. And this is really important because sometimes if you don't ask for it, you don't get it right, you know, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they say. So try sending one out maybe two days after they check out, and then another five days after that if you still haven't got a review from them. But you'll have to log into VRBO for this. Recommend using a property management software which is going to link with your vrbo. But reviews are one thing where you really need to go to the listing site directly to respond reviews and also request them directly through the system. You can request a review through your messaging, which might go through your management, but VRBO software also has the ability to do it right through their software. So head over to vrbo, check out the review section. Don't write your review quantum yet. Ask your guest to do it first. And they have a little template review request in there. I always recommend saving a response. You can have your VA do it. If you're doing it, it's gonna make your life easier cause you just copy and paste and maybe plug in the guest name. So create a template. And then after six to seven reviews, that's really when a guest starts to get a little more confident about your property. So if you have zero reviews, they don't know what to expect. There's no prior feed, but we wanna get as many reviews as possible. So having six to seven, that's when BRBO finds that you start getting more and more bookings. So just a few tips on reviews there. Again, we always wanna respond to the positive ones too. We on our end usually respond to like every fifth positive one just to let people know that we're there and we're reading their responses and that we care about our business really. So reviews are super, super important. Listing fees. So every listing different costs, commissions, structures for charging you to put your property on there. Vrbo has a couple as well. So you can do it two ways. You have a 5% commission fee that you can pay per listing, or you can pay a $499 flat fee per year per property. So this is pretty easy to calculate, right? If you're not getting a lot of reservations from VRBO or HomeAway, then you probably want to do the commission model. But let's say you have a big vacation rental or you have, you know, hundreds of properties and they're getting tons and tons of reservations through vrbo. Well, as soon as your commission starts to exceed that $500, then consider switching to their flat fee model. You might save a little bit in the end. Now, the commission that they charge is just on the night stay and the cleaning fee does charge on the cleaning fee also, but it's not going to charge on top of things, taxes and deposits and stuff like that. So that's on the host. That's on the host side. We're going to pay 5% or that 499 fee and that's per property. But on the guest side it's going to vary. So it's going to vary depending on the cost of their reservation and it can vary anywhere from 6 to 12%. So VRBO is doing pretty good, aren't they? I mean, if you add up the 6 to 12% and maybe 5% that we're paying, they're making a good chunk. But you know, you can get some really good guests from BRBO and it's going to help with your occupancy. So definitely, if you're not using them, check them out and definitely get on property management software if you're not using it. So you can link right in. Beautiful thing with using the management software is like, let's say you have all your properties in Airbnb already and you want to go on brbo. Well, a lot of these management software platforms like Guesty and Smart BNB can push directly to VRBO so you don't have to recreate your whole listing so you can get all the exposure without so much upfront work and creating the listings over again. Okay, so little bit on reviews, a little bit on their basic listing fee structures. They have this cool new feature called Property Boosts and it literally does just that. It boosts your search rankings. It's a new feature they have and you get the ability to use it based off your prior reservations. As long as the property didn't have cancellations. They give you these points, power up points they call them. So they're going to break it down for you on your VRBO dashboard by property. They'll show you which ones are eligible for it and you'll see how many power up points you have. And then they're going to show you a date in there. And that date is, or it's a date range rather that you can potentially boost your search rankings there if you want to use the points for that date. So you can check out the date. And it's cool because it shows you what your search ranking is already. Let's say it's in your marketers, your neighborhood, it's 70, you're ranked 70th. Well, it'll show you what you're going to jump up to. So it might go from 70 to like 6, really increasing your odds of getting booked. But a couple things to consider with it. And of course when you use these points, then it wipes them out and you have to earn more to be able to boost more. Kind of like credit card points, I guess. But it can, it can really help and I've used some of them and it got them booked. Now, you'll want to keep in mind the date range that is on vrbo. If it's two months out and they're asking you to use the points to boost it and your normal reservations within like seven days, then you know, you might not want to waste the points on that. But if they have a date range that you could potentially boost that's like, you know, five days away or it's coming up really soon and you can boost it, well, then maybe that's going to be a lot more beneficial for you. Now they also have a difference between how much of a boost it gets. So is it going from 70 to 6 or is it going from 70 to 65? Which isn't going to be a huge benefit for you. So keep an eye on that as well. You can't use points from one property to boost another property, even if you have a bunch of properties with the rbo. And he recommended just monitoring this every week or every other week because it changes all the time. And this is again, this is something simple. You can have your VA do or your reservation manager or whoever's helping you or you can do yourself, but take a look at it, it can really help. And the points are just sitting there anyways, so you might as well use them. Right. So that was a cool piece about property boost. Then a little bit on support. You know, they've got pretty good support, I would say, for property managers. We'll leave a link in the show notes for their US Property manager phone number and then they have normal support Monday through Friday. They do use virtual assistants on the weekend for their support. So you might not get as good of support on the weekend. Now this is, this is if you're a property manager, if you have your own properties. Of course they have 247 support for guests and reservations and stuff like that. So if you're not on VRBO check them out. If you are on VRBO make sure you're monitoring your reviews and you're responding and requesting them appropriately and take a look at those boosts because you might get some more reservations. Fill up your calendar a little bit more and it can't hurt checking it out. So take a look at that. Hope you guys are doing great out there and until next time have a wonderful day. 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.