My Tech Stack REVEALED | Insanely Helpful Software For Airbnb | Tim Hubbard

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. It's always exciting launching a new property. If you've been tuning in for a while. You know, I've launched dozens with my team across five different cities in three different countries now. So it's been a really fun journey. And I want to break down this latest property. Actually, there was two of them that we did at the same time. If you missed last week's episode, go back and check that out. We talked about the physical pieces, the physical components to actually setting up a property and how we go about that. So this week I want to talk about something that people ask about all the time. What software do I use? And how do we break down the online setup piece? Because the reality is we can have the best property in the city, but if we don't have it set up properly online, well, then people aren't going to find it and people aren't going to book it and it's not going to be that successful. So I want to talk about my software stack, the three essential pieces of software that I think everyone with a short term rental should have. I'm going to throw in a bonus one there, one that I think can be very helpful but maybe not necessary. I want to talk about how much this is going to cost you and how much time you can anticipate to spend setting up your short term rental. So let's go ahead and just get right into it. 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.

I was in Oklahoma City very recently. I met with one of my managers before flying back here to Columbia, where I am now. And we really knocked these properties out. I mean, we basically furnished both them in two and a half days. Now these are not big properties, so keep that in mind. The bigger your property, the longer it's going to. But not for your online setup. That part's pretty much gonna take roughly the same amount of time. So let's just get into the essentials. First of all, we gotta set this up on the OTAs, or at least initially Airbnb. Now Airbnb makes this really easy for us. It seriously only takes about 10 minutes to set up your property online. Of course you wanna spend a little more time in there. You wanna make sure you've observed your competition and make sure you have the proper amenities and all types of things, but actually just setting up your listing Online does not take very much time and check those out. But for today, I just want to walk you through in a nutshell, like I did last week on the physical setup, but this week the online setup. So the essentials for our Airbnb listing, we got to make sure we have the right cancellation policy, we want to make sure we have those professional photos, and we want to make sure we have all of our fees set up and all those types of things. Now you're going to want to set a base rate on Airbnb when you set up your property, a base rental rate, but we're going to override that. So the and I'll get to that piece of software shortly. But before we do that, the first piece of software that I highly recommend everyone use and there's lots of options out there, is a property management software platform. It does a lot for us that Airbnb can't do, although they are adding a lot of features. Property management software is built just to manage short term rentals. And if you're planning on expanding your portfolio while getting in early with the property management software is going to be a really good call because it's going to make your expansion easier too. The good news, it doesn't cost that much for property management software. The one I'm using is called Hostaway. I used to use Guest in the past, I use Hostaway now. But you will find that there are literally hundreds of options out there. Not saying Hostaway is the best one, but it works well for me. And all my portfolio is there, almost 50 short term rentals now in five different cities. So it works for me. I think it'll work for you, but there's lots of other ones out there. The second essential piece of software that I recommend everyone use, and this is the second out of three that is our pricing software. So again, Airbnb's bumped up their features. They have more pricing features, but not as much as pricelabs Co, which is the software that I use. There are other ones out there if you want to explore them, like beyond pricing or Wheelhouse, not affiliated with them at all. So feel free to explore before you jump into one if you haven't already already set one up. But I do believe that that is an essential piece of software. Pricing is very, very important. We want to make sure that we get it right. This tool is going to allow us to customize a lot of things that we can't with Airbnb. So that is the second piece of software that I think is essential the third piece, and this is an easy one. This is an easy one, but it saves us so much time. And that is a guidebook, but not just any ordinary guidebook, that is a digital guidebook. So we use Hostfully. And yes, I think this is an E piece of software. It's very inexpensive. And yes, Airbnb has a built in guidebook and so does VRBO and so does most of the OTAs or online travel agencies. But Hostfully is specifically for guidebooks and they do a really good job and they make it really easy to make sure that you include every detail you need to for your guests in an easy to read form that they can pull up on their cell phone. We send those links out for our digital guidebooks the moment someone books their reservation and we also send it the day they're ARR. Those are the two times when someone's going to be paying the most attention to their reservation. So those are two opportunities. We have to answer as much information and provide as much information for our guests as we possibly can. So I think that's an essential piece of software. I think all three of those pieces are essential and they're not very expensive. So we have a property management software platform. There's a whole bunch of options out there. We've got a pricing software, dynamic pricing, and we've got a digital guidebook. If you want to check out the ones that we use, the ones that I mentioned, you can head over to our website, restmethods.com we have a recommended resources section on there that has these software programs on there, but also has some other ones that we've used and explored in the past, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff. So if you want to check that out, it's free. You can head over there. Now, the fourth piece of software, I don't think this is essential, but I think it really, really helps and it's a good option, especially for anyone that's having trouble with housekeeping. And this fourth piece of software I've talked about in the past, that is a operational type piece of software. We use Breezeway. But there's also another program called Proper Ly. These are programs that allow us to monitor our housekeeping, to create custom checklists and to really interact with our housekeepers on a very transparent level. So if you're having any trouble tracking your housekeeping or having housekeeping issues, or you've built a big portfolio and you've got a bunch of maintenance items that are kind of hard to track, well, this is a Good piece of software you can use. Again, I use Breezeway. This is optional. If you only have one property, it's not going to be as important. But the more you add, which hopefully you keep adding them because they're not going away. People love short term rentals and there's so much opportunity in them. If you listen to the podcast for a while, you know why we talk about that all the time. But in a nutshell, those are the four pieces of software that I highly, highly recommend. I think three of them are really essential. The beautiful thing with that property management software too, if, if you set that up right after you set up your Airbnb listing, you can use that to integrate with other listing sites like vrbo and booking.com and tripadvisor so that you only have to set up that listing once. So the review in a nutshell, we set up our property on Airbnb. It doesn't take us very long. We link it to our property management software, we link our pricing software into the property management software. So that's going to override all of our prices, including the base price on booking.com and it's going to sync those prices to wherever we want to go. Then we're going to set up our digital guidebook, which doesn't take that long either. If you've already set it up on Airbnb, well, you can copy a lot of those items, put it in the digital guidebook, and that's something we're going to send out as a link to our guests via a message. Could be directly through the platform, or hopefully if you're using the property management software, you can send it right through there. And then that fourth piece, which I think is optional, is going to integrate with the property management software as well to make sure you don't have to track different reservations or anything like that. So it's all integrated together.

That was a mouthful. Okay, so how much does all of this cost? Well, it depends. A lot of these programs have volume pricing. So if you're, if you have a larger portfolio, they might give you a break. If it's a per property price model, some of the software programs out there charge a percentage. I've sort of moved away from that because I want our income to continue growing and I don't want my expenses to grow with that. I want my expenses to go down. I want to gain some economies of scale as I'm scaling my business. So I spend about $60 a month for these four pieces of software and some other miscellaneous ones like my security camera monitoring and my door lock monitoring, but about $60 a month, you might find that it's anywhere from there to $100 a month. But I'll tell you what, even though that might sound like a lot, yeah, $1,200 a month for a property, especially if you've already got your property up and running, it's doing well. $1,200 a year might seem like a tell you that it would cost much more than that if you hired additional team members to help you with all these specific aspects. And as you grow your business, these tools will help you stay organized and make more money at the same time. So how long does all of this take to set up? Well, I think the Airbnb listing really doesn't take that long, but you do want to spend some time, make sure your descriptions and all of that is set up as best as it possibly can be. Remember, you can always change your descriptions in the future. So don't, don't postpone launching your property for weeks at a time because you're trying to make everything perfect. You can change your listing title. You can change all these descriptions over time. So I would say your Airbnb listing is probably going to take about 30 to 60 minutes to set up, to import your photos, to run through your descriptions and make sure you've checked all the boxes. And I would say that additional setup, integrating that property into your property management software, which don't, if you're not a software person, don't get too intimidated. They make it pretty easy for you. Most of them, in fact, are just hitting a sync button. So I would say integrating into all those other pieces of software, maybe an hour to two hours to make sure that everything's really dialed in. So in total, we're talking about two to three hours of time to make sure one property. And remember, we're not doing this all the time. Once it's set up, it's set up and it's plugged into your system and it's going to keep on churning. Of course, you want to monitor it and make sure that you're not falling behind in any sort of area and that everything's accurate with your property. But really, that's about it. So if you missed last week, go back and check that out. I broke down the physical setup, the delivery coordination, all that stuff. In a nutshell again, in a nutshell, all these individual topics we've broke down in other episodes, so hopefully that gave you a little better idea. So if you don't have those software pieces in there, I highly suggest you go back and you add them in. At least take a look at them because I know they will help you and your property both. They're going to help your property performance. They're going to help you stay more organized. So until next time, I hope that gave you a little more insight. Thanks. Thanks again for tuning in and have a wonderful week. I will talk to you soon.

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.