How I Organize My Airbnb Business With Notion | The STRR Podcast #63 | Tim Hubbard

How do we really create a passive system to run our business or our properties so that we don't have to be involved every step of the way? Well, we need something, a platform to organize all that information. And I have an amazing one that I just discovered that I want to share with you in this week's episode of the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. 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. I'm happy you're here, as always, and I've got a really exciting topic this week, something that I've been using for multiple months now. My VA has been helping me with it and it is a tool that is allowing us to organize our whole business very, very easily and to be able to share it very easily with the rest of our team. And that's all going to help us create a passive operation, or as pass passive as it can possibly be. This is one of the main steps to having a passive operation. We have to have standard operating procedures. We have to have answers to questions when they come up. We have to have information on properties if a guest needs to know, if one of our team members needs to know. And so there's a whole bunch of things going on here, right? There's a whole bunch of information. And the easier we can organize it and the easier we can share it with our team, well then the better it's going to be. The gears will be greased and that thing's going to operate like a machine. So what is this tool that I discovered? Well, it's a database tool called Notion. So we're going to put the link in the show notes, of course, but I just wanted to take this week to tell you guys about what I'm using it for, how I'm using it and why. I think it can really help you with your short term rental business or even just your personal life. It's an amazing, amazing tool. So Notion is essentially a database tool, a way to organize notes, links, audio clips, YouTube videos, files, PDFs, whatever you can think of that you use on a regular basis on the computer, you can put in this program. The amazing thing about it is that it allows you to display everything in a way that's very visibly pleasing. So I've had challenges in the past organizing my Google Drive or my Dropbox drive or my OneNotes. We did an episode on OneNote before which I really want to strongly urge the power of one of those systems. Just getting all your Notes down. This can take the place of OneNote though, and what it can do is create an interface or a workspace that call it notion. It's very visibly pleasing. So if someone on your team or you hire a new VA or whatever it happens to be, you can share these pages with them and they can go in and they can see everything really easily. So it's amazing, amazing tool. I'm going to go over some of the main features before we get into it. I just want to let you know you can use this anywhere. So you can use it on your iPhone, can use it on your Android, on your iPad, on your PC, on your Mac. Doesn't matter what platform you're using. I have it on my iPad and I have it on PC, so doesn't matter. You can use it on multiple. It's also. This might be even better news. You can use it for free. Yes, that's right, it's free. Now if you want to use some more of the features and have team members involved, then you do have to pay a little bit. But it's anywhere from like 8, I think it starts at $8 a user. So if you have one VA, if you have two, however many people you have and you want them to have access to this and to be able to edit and stuff, might have to pay per user. But check it out. Seriously. Seriously. This is like, you know, you guys hear me talk about tools all the time and I've used a ton of them and I still use a ton of. But this is one of the best ones that I've discovered recently and that we are definitely implementing. We're taking information from our old mind maps that we used to have and we're taking information from a lot of different sources and we're putting it in here now. So it's gonna be one centralized, awesome, nice looking place for all of our business operations, all of our short term rental operations. So it's free to very cheap to use. It works on all the platforms. It's pretty user friendly too actually. I would say it's really user friendly. There's tons of training resources. You can check out some YouTube videos online. If you're skeptical, check out a YouTube video and see how someone set it up for themselves. Watch a quick 5, 10 minute 1 and that'll give you a good overview of the power that it has. So I want to go over a couple of features and then I'll share with you guys exactly how we're using it for our property. So one of the best features is this idea of a shared database. For example, we have a lot of utility accounts. We have Internet. We have water and gas and electrical, and whatever utilities you have in your city or for your property, they start to add up the more properties you get. So we can easily put them in a database with the account numbers, with a link to log into the website with contact numbers, email addresses, and we can filter it. So if you're creating a profile for a property, that's the main thing. We've been doing a profile for a property that has everything you need to know about that property. Well, you can have a link for utilities and click on utilities, and it'll show you just utilities for that property. So let me kind of explain that again in another way, just because it might be a little bit confusing. You've got a whole bunch of different properties. You got a whole bunch of different utility accounts. Well, to have a different database or a different spreadsheet for each of those utility accounts is really cumbersome. It's really complicated. You know, if you have a different Google Drive folder that has information about utility accounts or property photos or whatever it is, you can create these shared spaces, but then filter them so that they're only relevant for the property that you're currently looking at or your team is looking at. So basically, you can store anything that you can think of about a property very easily and make it very simple for your team to get the information that they need. Another example of the shared databases, we have properties, multiple cities. So we have contacts in multiple cities, right? Maintenance contacts, our own team, our housekeepers, roofers and lenders and bankers, and anyone that's involved in your operations. There's a ton of contacts. Well, you can put them in one of these databases, and you can easily sort them by city. You can link them to relevant properties or to relevant team members. You can put their profile photos in there. I'm telling you, you can literally do, like, everything with this. You guys are just gonna have to jump in and trust me on this. Check out a YouTube video, watch it. I think you'll find that this can be super, super useful for laying out all of your standard operating procedures. And then one of the coolest pieces is, once you have them in there, boom, you just click share and. And you can send that to whoever you want. You can even create it as a webpage. So you could send a web URL instead of sharing it with a team member, you could make it public under a webpage, and anyone with that link could view the information that you put there. Another example of how I use this. Recently I've been refinancing some properties which if you guys have a lot of equity in your properties, probably a good time. Interest rates are crazy low. So I've been looking at refinancing quite a few properties. And for a lot of these commercial loans, lenders, they want to see your history a little bit sometimes and you know, a personal financial statement, maybe properties that you already have and loan balances and all that stuff. So there's quite a lot of information that they ask for. Right. This goes for residential loans too. So I created a page that has my profile, it has my history, it has all the properties that I've worked on in the past, it has my personal financial statement, it's got everything a lender wants to see. I can share that link with any new potential lender and boom, they have everything. That's just another example how I've been using it. Definitely setting up the properties in there. Contacts, guest questions. So this is another thing we put into a shared database. We've got different types of questions. So pre arrival questions, post checkout questions. For example, we can filter the answers to all of these for our VAs or for our receptionists or for whoever needs the information. Really easy. It just makes it really easy to navigate. So definitely check it out. You don't even need to change out your Google Drive or your Dropbox. You can simply just link from Notion to your Google Drive and have everything on a visibly pleasing workspace that links to a Google Drive that you already have. And so really how well organized your Google Drive is isn't even going to matter anymore because you can organize it all on the front end with Notion. So it really is like a one size fits all type of tool. I mean it really can take the place of all these things. It can take the place of your note program. You can use it for your personal use. So jump in there, watch a YouTube video, check it out. I think you'll find that it can really, really help your business. Until next time, I hope you have a wonder. 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.