Noise-Proof Your Airbnb: Sleep = 5-Star Reviews

Can you guys hear that? Do you hear it? Anything? No. Little background noise? No. Silence? Well, silence is what we want, but that's not always what we have at our properties. So this week we're going to talk about the noise in our rentals and how it affects our guests and what we can do about it. Stay tuned, let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on on short term rentals. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Another week, another topic, and a really important one. One that I'm currently experiencing right now in one of my own properties. We're talking about noise and I'm in one of our new rentals. So I want to talk about noise, how it affects our guests and what we can do about it to help make their experiences better. So stay tuned, let's jump right in.

So I left Brazil a couple weeks ago and I made it back here to the good old usa and I'm here in Tennessee where a lot of my properties are. And I'm excited to be in one of our brand new rentals that we're just getting ready to launch. This is one I actually don't own and I talked about it before and I some other podcasts. This is my first lease arbitrage property and so I wanted to come test it out. I wanted to see how they look. And I gotta say, they look fantastic. These things are awesome. They've got so much character. They're in a fabulous location. They have all the amenities we need now in a living, working environment. We've got laundry, dishwasher, near attractions, near entertainment, super fast WI fi. But there's one thing that we've got to work on still and that is noise. So we are above a restaurant. I don't know if you guys can hear that at all, but there, I'm actually above the restaurant right now and there's some noise. The owner didn't put a lot of thought into the noise proofing, unfortunately, but something I tried to put in our lease that we didn't actually get in there. But all is good, we're working it out and it's just gonna take a little longer than expected. So this week I wanna talk about just how important this issue is, is having noise. And we really need to know our rentals thoroughly. So of course we wanna stay in them or have someone in our team stay in them so we can pick up on the little things. Maybe a train passes by Every morning or every evening at one in the morning and at honks its horn Maybe it's loud. Neighbors coming home. If we're in an apartment building and the walls are thin, it's an older property and there's noise travels more easily. Maybe you're in the bedroom and the fan makes a little squeaky, clunky noise. I'm sure you guys have experienced this before in the past, but we want to eliminate all of these things. And if we can't eliminate all the noise, we want to let our guests know. So I want to talk this week about the three steps that we need to take and to make sure that our guests have a great experience when it comes to noise. Now, the first one, and this is if we have the luxury of being the property owner or if we have a good agreement with someone that we're doing a lease arbitrage model with, and that is to put in noise proofing. So this is really important in apartment buildings. And today, most code is going to require, you know, extra thick walls between apartments for fireproofing and things like that. There's a couple extra steps we can take to put in some noise dampening materials. So if we have that luxury, of course that's going to be the number one step is in the construction. Now, if we don't have that luxury and we're working with what we have, or we don't have the finances maybe to add in some of these additional soundproofing things. If noise is an issue, this is probably going to be more of an issue for your urban area apartment rentals. Right. If you have a vacation rental home out in the country and it's all secluded, well, then it's probably not going to have too much issue with noise. So the first step is in the construction. The second step is that we need to set the right expectations with our guests. So if we have a property where there's going to be noise and there's nothing that we can do about the construction, well, then our guests need to know. And there's several ways that we can do that. First of all, we're going to put it in our listing description that says this property is a shared apartment building. You may hear your neighbors. This property is an older building. The sound travels easier through the walls and maybe a newer building. Airbnb also gives us the option to put it right in our listing description. They actually have a little tag in there now that says potential for noise. So if you think there's any potential for noise or you've stayed in your property, you've noticed a little thing that you think might bother a guest, well, then I would check that box. And if it turns out you don't get any negative reviews or negative feedback about noise, well, then you can always uncheck it later. But we want to set the right expectations up front. So make sure that if there is a potential for noise, that we've notified our guests in every way that we can in our listing and that potential for noise checkbox in our guidebooks. Hopefully we're sending out a digital guidebook. We can put it in there as well. So we want to set the right expectations. Now there's a third piece to this. If we can't adjust the construction and we've already set all the appropriate expectations, well, we can add some supplemental devices. I guess you could call them in to help with noise that may be in an apartment. And what are these? You're asking what are these supplemental devices? Well, one could be a white noise machine. You know, you get the little things on Amazon, they're very inexpensive. Now, of course, there's different ranges of them, but we in these apartments, these 10 brand new apartments, we have a little noise machine that we got off Amazon was probably like 20, 30 bucks. And it's just an extra option in case someone wants it. So it can play gentle rain noises, it can play sweet ocean breeze or whatever, you know, whatever features your noise machine has, it's an extra option for the guests. We can also order earplugs. You can get a giant box of these things on Amazon for very, very little money. And they're all individually packaged and just to have the option. And so we can add these things in our rentals for very, very little money. If they don't use them, that's fine, but at least they have the option. So those are two things we can do. Smart TVs now have the option to integrate with YouTube or to pull up YouTube. And there's lots of white noise YouTube channels that you could just put on as well. So we have the white noise machines and we have earplugs. Just a couple more options, supplemental things that we can add in our rentals just to give it that little extra edge. Now a third thing we can do, we've talked about this before in our house rules, and that's preventing noise from nature, neighboring apartments. If we're an apartment building, we can have a noise monitor, so noise aware, or we're using some here called minute just to make sure that a guest in one of our Rentals isn't affecting the other one. So noise is super, super important. If we don't get a good night's sleep, well, we all know it affects our whole day. It affects our mood, and that's going to affect our guest experience and ultimately the review you get at your properties. So if we have the luxury of being able to improve the construction of our property, well, then we want to do that for sure. If there's a noise issue, if we don't have that luxury, we, of course, want to make sure that we're always setting the right expectations. We're notifying guests in every way possible. And then that third step, we can add some of these supplemental devices. Now, I want to add a bonus to this whole sleeping topic, which has to do with noise. And because sleep is just so, so important, if you can't get a good night's sleep, well, you're not gonna have a good rental. So this little bonus thing, super easy. Just add some blackout curtains in your bedroom. If there's light coming through, that's gonna affect people's sleep, too. You can add blackout curtains from, you know, 50 to 200 bucks. And that way, all of your guests are gonna have a black space if they want it. Not everyone needs pure pitch black to sleep, but for those few gu. Just add it in. It's so easy, and it's gonna make your space better for your guests, it's gonna make your rental better, and they're gonna be able to sleep better, and you're gonna get better reviews, and then you're gonna be able to get more properties because they're gonna make more money, and you're gonna keep scaling. And up, up, up we go. Right? So I hope you're doing well wherever you are out there in the world. I'm heading back to Colombia in less than a week. I'm super excited. I haven't been there for a few months, so hope you guys are doing well, and we'll see you next time. Take care.