Is Your Airbnb Secure? | The Best Home Security Cameras for Your Rentals | Tim Hubbard

It used to be a total pain in the butt to mount security cameras. You had to run all the wires. You had to have an electrician come out oftentimes. But now we have these beautiful battery powered security cameras. Are they worth it and are they good option for short term rentals? That's what I want to discuss this week on the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. 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. It's really nice to have eyes at our properties and for more than just the obvious. Obviously having a security camera, good for security, right? But it's also good for some other things that maybe you haven't considered. So I want to talk about a few of those things this week, but also talk about three of the main features that you want to look for when you're considering a security camera for your short term rental. And then I want to give you five options, including the ones that I use on dozens of properties with my team. So let's go ahead and get started. Security cameras are for security, Duh. Obvious, Tim, but there's other things that we can use them for in the short term rental world. For example, when we have a guest check in, let's say there's two people on a reservation, but six people show up. If we are operating our properties remotely, that's going to be hard to figure out unless we have those eyes out there. And so security cameras will allow us to do that. We've got to be careful where we mount our security camera though, because we can't record any inside footage. That should be a no brainer for all of you out there, but sometimes that's not super obvious. If we have a camera with a nice 180 degree view mounted on the side next to our front door and someone opens the door and it views into that property, technically you're recording inside the property. And if you use that footage to try to win an Airbnb case, for example, they're probably going to deny it. So we want to make sure that the placement is good in a place where we can see people entering our property. Now, if we have multiple entry doors on our property, we're going to want to have multiple security cameras so that we don't have people coming in the back when we thought they were coming in the front, so on and so on. That's Pretty obvious, right? So we can verify guests coming in. We can also verify if they are bringing a furry friend a pet when maybe they weren't supposed to. So for my team, what we do with our receptionist is when we get someone checking into our property, the sort of locks that we use notifies our team the first time that guest uses that lock. That way we know that the guest has checked in, they have found our property. So that allows our receptionist team to know that the guest just showed up. They can go check out the security cameras and verify that the guest is showing up with the correct amount of guests and without a pet and that there's no issues. Can also help us too. Sometimes a guest might message us and say, hey, I can't get into the property. And we can pull up the camera and say, we don't see you at the property, maybe you're at the neighbor's unit or whatever it happens to be. So it can help our guests out that way. It's also just good protection for our guests in general too. And a lot of our guests like knowing that the exterior premises of a lot of our properties are protected with security cameras. We have had people's cars broken into over the years. We've managed over 20,000 guests with my team. So we've had a lot of stuff happen. And so those cameras are helpful in a situation like that. That's really helpful to send to a guest. They can send to their insurance company and they can get reimbursed if there happen to be damage in their car. Of course, that depends where your security cameras are. Our main security cameras are showing the front door, but not inside all the access doors into the property. But sometimes you've got to put a camera on the inside. No, not in the closet or the bathroom or anything like that. But if you have a property, small apartment building or somewhere that has a common area. A lot of my properties are like that. We have common area hallways. We have security cameras in there as well. So it's good to have a camera anywhere where you have access doors to your property. So those are a few things beyond the obvious security protection that might be helpful with you and your short term rental. Having a security camera. I want to talk about a few things to look for when you're purchasing your security camera. And I'm going to get to the ones that we are using as well. The biggest one I would say having access, remote access. And I know that sounds like a no brainer, but some companies, some cameras have a lot better access than Others. And we want to make sure that we have online cloud storage and it doesn't have to be stored locally on an SD card or something like that. You can, of course, after we go through this, you can go on YouTube and you can verify some of the cameras. I'm going to give you options for. There are people out there doing full reviews on these cameras. But. But I will say the ones that we're using are working pretty well and they're easy to install. So having remote access is a huge, huge thing. And the more cameras you add, you've gotta be conscious of that. If you have 50 cameras, for example, you gotta have a platform that's easy to navigate as you scale to allow your team to be able to monitor things easily. So the platform, the online platform's important, making sure it has cloud storage. The installation is huge. And I mentioned in the beginning of the episode that there's a lot of wireless options. Now if we have a wireless option, then it's going to be a lot easier to install. We don't have to call a technician now. We can literally, we can get them up right away. There's a lot of good options out there, including the one that I'm using. So is it wireless or is it a wired option? I would say the wired options, if you've got someone to help you install them, then go with the wired one, because then it's one less thing to worry about, right? A dead battery or a unit going down, a camera going down because it ran out of battery. So if you can do the wired one, the cost difference in the cameras is, you know, they're pretty much the same price. So go for the wired option if you can. So the costs on these things vary. There's some really cheap ones out there, and there's some really expensive ones. We can find the best options right on Amazon.com One other additional thing that you're gonna make that you need to make sure that you're doing. If you have a security camera, which I highly, highly suggest is disclosing it, you have to disclose that in your listing so that your guests know. And actually, it's one of the reasons you can get your listing taken down, or at least temporarily, if you are using a security camera and you have not notified Airbnb or filled in the section that that says you're using a security camera. So there's some great, great reasons to have a security camera. It's really the ultimate protection. It can save you from so much headache making sure you don't have parties coming in, making sure if someone shows up with a pet that wasn't authorized, you can charge them for those fees as long as it's not a service animal. If you missed that episode, go back because there's some strict regulations on service animals. But if it's not, you can charge extra fees. You can see when they check in so you know that they got in okay. You can monitor the parking areas and make them feel more secure and have more protection for their cars and all those types of things. So that's pretty obvious. When you're buying your actual camera, make sure that it's got a good online storage access platform. You can access it from your mobile phone and that it's only recording really when it picks up motion. Otherwise it's just going to fill up a lot of space. Most of them are doing that now. Most of them have night vision, which you're also going to want. Consider the installation. If you can do wired, go for Wired, because then you're not gonna have to change any batteries. But if not, there's some good wireless options. I'm gonna give you mine in just one quick second. Make sure you're not recording anything on the inside and make sure you disclose that you have your camera. Okay, five camera options that I'm sure you've heard about if you've been searching around Google Nest. So Google, I have these at 10 properties. Actually, we have Google Nest cameras. This is sort of always an evolving thing, you know, with my portfolio and adding new properties and trying things out. So I hope you do find value in these podcasts. This is real world advice and I use these products that I mentioned on the podcast and the things I recommend, those are things I'm implementing and using with my team. So I hope you're finding some value in it. And if you have something else that you want us to talk about, please write in. You can send us an email@contactrestmethods.com or you can jump over to our website, strict. Com. So, okay, Google Nest, that is a very common one and they do work well. They have different options on there. You do have to pay for their Nest Aware subscription, which is going to provide you the cloud storage. I don't know the exact prices on that, but that's something you will want to consider, especially if you're planning on adding multiple options. There's a cheaper version out there called Zmodo Z M O D O and I still have this on a lot of properties. I'm using a wired version. It still works well. It's outdoor, it's weatherproof. But the one that I'm using now I like a lot more. So you might see that one on there. The cost difference I would recommend just going with with the one that I'm using. The next one is Arlo. You've heard of that. They have some good cameras. Again, they've got the whole spectrum, a lot of different options. Another one, Amazon Blink, and this is probably the least expensive one and they do have a battery powered option so you can throw it up right away. But from what I've heard, it doesn't do a good job at picking up motion. And if it's not picking up motion, then it's not doing its job. Not going to really help you out. So the camera that we are using is the Reolink Argus pt. That's what we're using. It's not the newest version now it is a battery operated version, but it's got a solar panel attached to it and you can move this solar panel to really help extend the life of the batteries. We've had some of these that have been installed for over six months. Of course when you install them, they're fully charged with, but you can see the batteries on the platform and they're still going really well. So those are the ones we're using now. Like I mentioned, I'm also using Google Nest cameras. I'm also using the Zmoda ones, but all the new properties we're adding, I'm using those cameras now. It does have a mobile platform, so our whole team can check it out there. And this is a really good thing too. The cloud storage cost low. It's really low actually at the time of this recording, for $4 you can have five cameras on there with a certain amount of storage. For just as little as $10 you can have 20 cameras on their platform, saving I think 180 gigs of storage. So it's a real inexpensive monthly subscription and it's a good camera. You can find it on Amazon.com I don't think it's more than 120 to $150. So if you're shopping around, that's one that we've been using lately and we're happy with it. If you don't have a camera yet, go out and get one because it can save you so much trouble and offer so much protection. And they're inexpensive now and they're easy to install. If you don't have someone install the wireless one, go with a battery powered option. It's gonna be better than nothing. So until next time, I hope your properties are staying secure. And I'll catch you next time. Cheers.

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