How to Outsource your Airbnb Communication 24/7 | Airbnb Hosting Tips | Tim Hubbard

One of the biggest things I hear all of the time from people interested in investing in short term rentals is that it's too much work. There's too many guest questions coming in. People don't want to be bothered with that. Well, I want to talk this week about ways we can outsource those guest messages so you can grow your short term rental portfolio. 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. Bada bing, bada boom. We are back with another topic. Lots and lots of great things to talk about all the time in the world of short term rentals. One of the things that's probably most intimidating to people before they jump into short term rentals or as they're getting going are guest messages. Yeah, we don't want to be getting guest messages in the middle of the night. We don't want to be talking with guests that are maybe not pleasant to talk to. All of those things can be a little challenging, right? And they can be a little intimidating and they can keep us from really growing our short term rental portfolio. So until we figure out how to outsource those guest messages, we're going to be a little limited. So that's what I want to talk about this week. I want to talk about several ways how we can do that, where we can find this help. I want to talk about some of the challenges too because we just hired our sixth full time virtual receptionist and I'm super, super excited. We have a lot of other virtual assistants we work with remotely that aren't necessarily full time, but we've got six in house now on our team and they are rock stars and I'm so excited to have them on board. So I want to talk a little bit about that. But before I jump into hiring our own virtual receptionist, I just want to bring up the point that people want to work remotely now. Right. I know we went through the whole pandemic, you know that as well. And people discovered that they could work remotely and a lot of companies discovered that their employees could work remotely. Yes, A lot of those companies are asking employees to come back to the office and we are seeing an increase in work related travel, actually a pretty large increase. But the fact is, if given the option, people are going to want the flexibility. Airbnb, for example, back in April announced that their whole company is now able to work virtually anywhere they want in the world. It's a company of about 6,000 people at the moment, but they had within about a month a million people visit their career page. Imagine that, a million people. Imagine the talent that exists out in the world and we don't have to be constrained to our borders anymore. So I want to talk about that. But before I do, some other quick options to outsource your guest messages. You can hire a manager. That's an easy one, right? That's a no brainer. That's what they do. They manage your properties and everything in them, including the housekeeping, of course. This is one of the most expensive options. So option number two, you can hire your own housekeepers, for example, and have them help you with guest communications. That can work out really well, I would say. We want to get to this point though, after we've automated every possible question we can. I talk a lot about automation on this channel and the fact is we can automate a lot of it and our guests are used to the automation. That's not a new thing anymore. So it's not like it's creating a bad experience for them. It's something that's becoming standard in the hospitality industry. So you can hire your own manager, you can hire our contract, a housekeeper or maybe a co host to someone that can partially help you with guest messages. You can also hire a third party service and that's dedicated to answering guest questions. There's quite a few. I've talked before on this channel about Guesty and I use them for years. They used to handle all of my guest communications. But I'll tell you what, if you go back to that episode, the reason I left them was because of the guest communications. Yeah, it gets a little more difficult when you've got a company handling who knows how many listings and they're changing employees all the time. And so that was a little tricky. Unfortunately, that's why I left Guessy. I do really like their software though. So the fourth option here is to hire our own receptionist. And that's what I've done. And I am so grateful for my team. They do an excellent, excellent job. There's a few places where we can find our virtual assistant. Might have heard of Upwork or Fiverr before. I wouldn't necessarily recommend those, although you can find good people on there. But Upwork, for example, is going to charge a big percentage in between you and the person that you contract. A couple of the options I've talked about before, you can go Back to episode 76 and check those out. Onlinejobs. Ph. That's specifically for the Philippines. That's where all of my virtual receptionists are. Bestjobs. Ph. Also from the Philippines. VirtualStaffFinder.com will find a receptionist for you so you don't have to do the work. And then there's another one where you can find remote work, but it's not necessarily geared towards remote work. And that's indeed dot com. So if you're deciding to hire your own receptionist, which I highly recommend, I often find that this is for people that maybe have added one, you know, two, three, four properties and they start getting more and more questions. There's a certain point where you're just going to get the questions. No matter whether we like it or not. Some things just pop up and we've got to have someone on the other end to answer or you know what's going to happen. You're going to get a bad review, and rightly so. We have to be there for our guests. So those are a few places where you can find virtual assistants. Couple things you want to consider when you post your job is the time change. So if you're listening to this in the US you got to keep your time zone in mind if you're hiring someone from the Philippines, which is basically flipped now, we're also looking out to other options. Places like Mexico. And all of our guests, for the most part speak English. People speak English all around the world. Philippines speak excellent English even though it's not their first language. Lots and lots of people in Mexico and South America speak excellent English even though it's not their first language. So all you have to do is make sure when you put your job posting out there that you have English. English as one of the main requirements if that happens to be where your properties are listed. And if you're listening this show, I would assume that your guests are probably speaking English. So we can put these things in our job description. Another really crucial piece to our job description is making sure that we have the schedule we're expecting very clear. And to expect someone to work for you on call all the time 24 7, that's kind of difficult, right? You're not going to attract a lot of people that want to do that. In fact, the latest receptionist we just hired was working with someone else and that's the exact reason she decided to resign with that person, because they were on call all the time and it just wasn't realistic. So I understand this can be challenging if you only have a Couple properties. Maybe you don't have the budget to fill 24 hours, seven days a week. But there are times when we receive more questions than others. For us, that's Thursday, Friday nights and Sunday Mondays when a lot of people are checking out, they're coming in for the weekend and checking out after the weekend. So consider hiring just one shift and know again, if you're listening to this. In the US Our dollar is super, super strong right now. In fact, it's the strongest it's ever been in my lifetime. It just surpassed the Euro. I want to do a whole nother episode on this because the whole idea of currency arbitrage is a real thing and I'm living proof. I've lived out of the United States for four years now, as a lot of you know. So that's a good topic in itself. So we have a really strong currency right now and a lot of these other places in the world, we can offer a very fair wage for 3, 4, $5 an hour. So consider finding someone. If you're at that point where you're starting to get too many questions, you're maybe getting intimidated and you want to keep scaling. Well, consider finding just one person for reasonable shift, maybe Thursday through Monday to cover your nights or your 3pm to midnight when a lot of people are checking in, you might have issues. So consider that. I guarantee you after you hire your first virtual assistant, if you don't have one already right now, you're going to wish you did it a long, long time ago. It's a great person to have on your team. And we can't do this alone, right? In fact, the last receptionist that we hired was hired partially by one of our other receptionists. They helped me out tremendously in that search and narrowing down a really large pool of candidates. So if you're at all intimidated with the guest questions, don't hesitate. Jump on one of those sites and submit a job posting and just see what comes back. Now, you want to make sure that your job posting is as clear as possible. I've got other tips on that and other videos. But one thing that you do want to make sure you have in there is the schedule. 100%. You can say things like looking for a guest coordinator for Airbnb. You know what sorts of tasks they're going to be handling. That's things like monitoring your reviews, accepting reservations, declining reservations. If you have your own website or own direct booking website, maybe they're processing payments for you, maybe they're processing refunds, maybe they're Processing resolutions with Airbnb and following up on those resolutions. There are so many little tasks that we can get a lot of help with to make our business machine run a lot more smoothly and to make sure our guests are happier. So check out some of those sites, make sure you proofread your job posting before you post it on there, and do some searches, look through some of the available resumes online to see what people are offering. One other thing I would suggest when you have your job posting or when you're doing your interviews, and by the way, I wouldn't recommend doing interviews right off the bat. Have a series of questions that you want to send back and forth and see how those responses are before you jump on a call and potentially waste your time and someone else's. That really comes at like the fifth stage, I would say, in terms of exchanging communication before you're scheduling a call. But one of the things that you want to bring across to the person that you're hiring is stability. No one wants to work for a company or for a person that they don't see sticking around. Now, for me, that's easy. I am a lifer when it comes to real estate. I've been in real estate for a long time now and I don't see that changing. I just like it. I find it exciting and interesting. Short term rentals are just one of the little niches inside of real estate, right? But they're one that's growing tremendously and one where I think there's still a ton of opportunity and where I found more opportunity than other niches. In the last seven years, I guess I've been doing short term rentals now.

So you want to talk about stability and talk about the future and where you see things going. I guarantee if you're getting started with short term rentals right now, and you hire someone at this beginning stage, it's going to help you grow your business and make it a lot easier. A lot of us get into real estate because we want things to be passive. We want some of our time back. That's exactly why I got into it, so that I could travel more. And without our fabulous receptionist team, that would not be possible at all. So once you find your virtual receptionist, you're gonna wanna make sure that you track their progress. This is important. They need feedback and so you can determine what that is for you. But I do have a couple episodes on this before you can check out episode 124 on how I track progress with the rest of my team. But another way to track their time and also their time spent on the computer is to use a program called Hubstaff. They clock into it. It's an easy way to track their time, but also make sure that they are in fact working for you. And you can take random screenshots on the computer. You're going to need a way to pay someone and if they're international, that's not always very easy. But there is a company called payoneer that can process and facilitate these payments for you very easily. That's what I use for all my Filipino team. It's the most cost effective, it's quickest, most efficient and we all find that it works really, really well. So there is a lot that goes into this. I actually created a course on this. It's called Replace Yourself Challenge. You can get tons of free content from this podcast or on our website at str riches or restmethods.com but if you want the whole thing scripted out for you, email questions, where to go, the work contracts and all that stuff, you can check out the Replace yourself challenge@restmethods.com it's a four week program. Three weeks is all it takes in my opinion, to get someone on board and have them fully trained in that program. We also have all the questions that guests normally ask. So there's a ton of free resources. But if you want to go really in depth, you can check that out. And then I'm also really, really excited to offer our services. We've got a 24, 7 team and they are excellent. So if you are out there and you're at all interested in someone else managing the virtual part of your business, your short term rental business, give us a shout. You can send us an email@contactrestmethods.com this isn't for everyone, but we're going to manage your properties like I manage mine. So that's exciting for me and it's going to help us build our business while it helps you build your business. So if you're all interested in that, send us an email. Contact estmethods.com and until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day. I hope you're out there wheeling and dealing, working on your short term rentals and producing more revenue than you might otherwise in a different real estate niche. Until next time, take care.

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 restmethods. Com.