How the Right Virtual Assistants Can Boost Your Short Term Rental Property Performance (Part 4)

I know managing our short term rentals sometimes can seem like a lot of work, and I have sad news that work does not stop when our guest checks out. No, it doesn't. There are still a lot of things that we need to be doing if we want to be professionally managing our short term rentals. But good news, we can have help. We don't have to do these things ourselves. So I want to talk this week about how virtual assistants can help boost our property performance after a guest checks out. 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.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. We've been talking a lot about management lately and I hope it's not scaring you off if you don't already have your short term rental. Because even though there are a lot of processes and a lot of things that we should be to best manage our properties doesn't mean we have to do them all ourselves. And there are lots of systems we can put in place to save us time. I want to talk this week about how having the right virtual assistants can help boost our property performance. All the things that you should be doing with your property after and as your guest is checking out, or things that your property manager should be doing for you if you're not managing your property yourself. So let's jump right in. So sometimes you get a message right before you think your guest is checking out and it's good news. They're asking for an extension. A lot of times this happens. It's something we need to know how to manage. We need to act quickly. If we have another guest checking in, well, of course we won't be able to do it, but if we don't, then we need to involve Airbnb or if we're taking this reservation directly, then we need to make sure that we charge the guests get that extra money and we'll keep them in our property. That's a great scenario. But sometimes our guests don't check out even when they should. Yeah, they stay after the checkout. And this can create some. Some issues. So we need to know what to do. Sometimes we have to involve support. Sometimes we have to charge the guests extra. There is a procedure to making sure that our guests check out on time. So again, this is the fourth part of our management series. If you missed the prior three episodes, go back and check them out. I really do think that virtual management is the future of property management because we can do all these things efficiently from wherever we are. As I record this podcast, I'm thousands of miles away from my property. So that was the first part of our series, why I think virtual management is the future of all property management. And then part two, we talked about what we need to be doing before our guests even check in. There's a lot that goes into that. Part three was all about what comes up and what we need to be doing while our guests are actually at our property. And today we're talking about the very tail end of things, when our guests are checking out and what we need to do afterwards. And so sometimes they don't check out on time, sometimes they leave items. We need to have a policy in place for storing items, maybe mailing them back. A lot of times this is just a cell phone charger or cable or something like that. But regardless, we want to let our guests know, we want that personal touch and we want to let them know that they forgot something. So you need to have a policy for that. We all do it a little bit differently, but it's something that will come up. Sure. So when it comes to the turnover, the actual housekeeping turnover, I gotta say, this is probably the most challenging aspect that any short term rental operator is going to have. Now, it's fantastic to be working with a professional housekeeping company, but sometimes they might miss a step here or there. And so we use software to help manage all this. We've talked about Breezeway. Breezeway is also going to help you track maintenance. So that is our operational tool, how we make sure that nothing gets missed. If we have some sort of issue with our housekeeping, then we will make sure to check our housekeeper's list to make sure something wasn't missed. We can require photos. We can see exactly when our housekeepers finish the job without having to message them. And if we have a guest hanging around hoping for an early check in, well, then we can message them, give them the good news and let them know things are good to go. Sometimes there's issues, though, during the checkout. This is where, where we're going to uncover if there was some sort of property damage, if perhaps there's an item missing, if there's an issue with whatever, it happens to be a stain on one of our linens. And so we have another checklist for this. There's a reason we use checklists, there's a reason airlines use checklists, because it helps us make sure that we don't skip any steps. And so our housekeeping staff, our maintenance staff, or whatever housekeeping and maintenance staff we're working with, they can fill out all these forms, and we get those virtually to make sure that our properties are staying in great shape. So if there is an issue of some sort. Well, yep, sometimes we've got to call up Airbnb, we've got to call up vrbo, we have to message back and forth with the guests. We have to provide invoices to help settle a resolution if there is some sort of reimbursement that's due to us. So it's good to have a procedure in place for that so that it's not taking longer than it should take. Again, I think this is something that you can do yourself, but depending on the size of your portfolio, sometimes it doesn't make sense, sometimes it doesn't make financial sense. Sometimes it's just something that you don't want to do. And so that is a time when you'll want to reach out to a property manager, whether it's local or virtual. So let's assume that we had a nice, smooth checkout. There were no issues. There were no items left behind. We didn't have to involve Airbnb. There wasn't a maintenance issue that we needed to report. And our guests, Our next guest checks in with no issues. Hooray. Good news. That's what we want. We want a full calendar. Well, we're not going to have a full calendar if we're not monitoring our performance. So even though our guests are checking out, we need to be tracking our performance. We need to make sure that our pricing is correct. We need to track our reviews. In fact, review management should be a whole career in itself, because it really is the lifeblood of our properties. If we have bad reviews, they're not going to get booked. And so we need to know how to remove reviews that are eligible to be removed. We want to be requesting reviews, especially from our best guests that we were chatting with a lot, if they haven't already left us one. So we do that custom review requests to make sure we're getting as many as possible and they're good ones. And if they're not good, well, you better believe we're going to bat to try to get all of them removed. And it is a process and it is a skill. So it's nice we've got someone on our team that's dedicated just to review management. So having great reviews and making sure our pricing is perfect by having a good grasp on our market and our market data. That's going to do a lot to bring in more reservations into our properties. But another thing that we want to be doing always is letting our guests know that they can book through us directly. If you don't have your own direct booking website, head over to striches.com and search in our episode list. We talk about direct bookings and some of the tools you can use to set that up on your own. So the more online travel agencies where we have our properties listed, the better. But ultimately the end goal is just to have all of our reservations coming directly to us. And a lot of times that comes in the form of repeat guests. We already know they're great guests. Helps fill up our calendar a little more in advance. So we want to make sure that we have that website set up. We have marketing materials where our guests know where to find us, because we got to be careful here. We can't just reach out on the Airbnb GMB platform and request their personal information. Ask to book through us directly next time. That is a big no no. That could get your listing taken down. So we need to have another way to collect our guests information. We use our guidebooks. And so every time they access one of our digital guidebooks, we capture their email and that goes in our list that we can use for marketing later on. So I hope this series has not intimidated you from managing your own short term rental. I really do think you can do this effectively with minimal time if you put the right tools in place. But if you're starting to scale, you can't do it all alone. That is the truth. And so I really recommend hiring another team member which can definitely be virtual. We've talked a lot about how a lot of our team is from the Philippines and Mexico. The world is your oyster, as they say, and we can work virtually more easily than we ever have before. So look for some help if you're finding yourself in a position where just getting overwhelmed and especially if you're planning on scaling, because this can be the bottleneck. This can be the reason why you don't scale. So I tried lots of options in the past, from outsourcing communications to other companies to hiring property managers. And now, fortunately, with the scale of my portfolio, I've got my own team. And it really is fantastic knowing that they're there for our guests because at the end of the day, it comes down to hospitality. So I know we've talked about a ton of different things in this series. This is the fourth episode now. So 1, 2, 3, 4 and each one of those there's a lot of little things that goes into professionally managing a short term rental. And so if you're missing any of those things and you're managing your property yourself, make sure to incorporate them, make sure to look into them more. If you're working with a professional property manager already, maybe ask them a few questions and make sure that they are doing all of these things as well because it's really going to affect your performance. And if you're at a point where you're managing your properties and you're just a little overwhelmed and you're looking for some extra help, well, we would love to partner with you. You can head over to striches.com same place where you can find all of our episodes that I've been recording for the last few years. There you'll see a property management button where you can connect with us directly to see if your properties make a good fit for us to partner with and use my exact team. So I hope this has given you some good insight. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous day.

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