Tim Hubbard discusses whether short-term rental hosts should allow one-night stays. He weighs revenue benefits against increased housekeeping costs and party risk, recommends using dynamic pricing tools (PriceLabs/Wheelhouse), limiting one-night stays by timing (weekdays, within a week, orphan days), and ensuring housekeeping capacity and monitoring (exterior cameras) before enabling one-night bookings.
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Does it hurt? Sometimes. Look at your calendar and see those little one day gaps and just know that man, you could have had a guest in there and you could have been making money. I know how you feel. Happens to me. We're going to talk about one night stays this week and whether you should allow your guests to stay for one night or not and all the other things to consider. So 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 short term rentals. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Here we are, another week. Glad you guys are back. And a really important topic for anyone that has a short term rental or is considering having one and it has to do with our occupancy. Obviously having the highest occupancy possible, it's going to generate the most money. But is it worth it to rent to a guest for one night? That's what we're gonna talk about this week. So if you already have short term rentals, I know you see those gaps in your calendar and if you're not renting for one night stays right now, might bug you a little bit, just seeing those days that aren't booked because we're basically leaving money on the table, right? Our properties are sitting empty. So this week we're gonna talk about whether we should offer one night stays, how we should price one night stays if we're going to the effects that one night stays will have on our housekeeping team and whether or not these one night stays are going to attract people trying to party or not and what we can do to prevent that. So let's just start from the beginning here. Should we offer them? Well, I think if you have the housekeeping resources available, then yes, but not yes across the board. And of course this depends on the type of property that you have too. So if you were running a more urban type property, which is what most of mine are, they're not, you know, giant vacation rentals. But because of COVID mainly we stopped doing one night rentals because people were having more parties than they ever were because they were coming from the same city. So we don't do one night on the weekends anymore, doesn't mean that we're not going to start doing it again. But, but we are doing them during the week. And now if you're using a pricing tool that's automatically going to adjust your pricing like Price Labs Co or Wheelhouse, well, then you can set some of These parameters up in there so that you're only offering one night stays during the week and that your pricing is different for those one night stays. So if you're not using a pricing tool yet, I highly, highly suggest you start using one because they really do help big time.
Couple things to consider with pricing our short term rentals and that's if, you know, if we have a really high housekeeping cost, it's probably going to deter short term rentals. So you really want to calculate that out with your expenses and just make sure that it still makes sense for you. But if you already have that team in place, then the way I see it is if you have a night that's empty, well, that's a night with lost revenue and you should be running it if you can.
Like I said, we're not doing them on the weekends because usually we're booked on the weekends. We have a minimum two night stay. But also because that invites a little more parties on the weekend. But there's lots of things we can do to prevent that now. And if you have a good team and you're monitoring your property closely, well then you can use cameras on the exterior to make sure that not too many people going to your property. So I still think you can do them on the weekend as well if you're not already booked up.
Now there becomes a question, how far out should I offer a one night rental? Because we don't want someone to book two months from now during some event period, it's really busy and then they block the whole weekend. So again, these pricing tools will help you to be able to do that. To say, you know, we're only going to allow one night stays if it's within the week, or we're only going to allow one night stays during the week, or we're only going to allow one night stays if it's between two long term bookings and it's one individual day, they call that an orphan day. Not sure if that's politically correct, but that's what they call it in the industry. It's basically a day between two other booked reservations. A single individual day. So some of the things that you're going to want to consider if you and when you're pricing it, just remember if your housekeeping fee's really high, well then someone's probably not gonna book the one night. Because if you're one night, let's say it's 125 bucks and your housekeeping fee's 125 bucks for 250 bucks. They might not seem, feel like they're getting as much value. So you might want to discount the one night stays. And if your housekeeping fee is also a profit center and that you're not using that whole $125 to pay your housekeeping team, maybe have your own staff or. Well then you gotta factor that in as well.
But we really gotta consider the housekeeping effects here. You know, if we have, let's just take any given month, let's say we have 15 two night stays, well then we're gonna have 15 checkouts, right? If those all become one night stays and we have 30, well that's twice the housekeeping work. Now that's probably not gonna happen. I mean, short term rentals typically have at least a few nights average, at least in the US and most markets I've seen. But if we're adding one night stays, it's going to add a lot of housekeeping. And we know that most of our guests typically are checking out on the weekends or checking out on Monday after a weekend. And so if we have limited housekeeping staff and we're adding these one night stays, well, we have to remember there's only so much they can do at the same time. Now if you're working with a professional housekeeping company, well then that makes it easy. And that's one of the advantages of working with professional, professional housekeeping company is they have more staff, but you'll just want to check with them and make sure that they have enough staff available if you tack on another 20% housekeeping work, for example. So really consider that kind of how that weighs in. And if you can, if you can get longer reservations and your housekeeping expenses are high, well then you're going to want to strive to do that first before you start taking the one night stays. But if you have a lot of empty days, it's definitely, definitely worth it if you have the team in place. Because really it's just money sitting on the table. Right. So in a nutshell, you know, should you offer one night stays? Yes. No. Depends on your property. I think if you have the staff available, we have the tools available to us to prevent parties. So if it's a last minute stay, if it's a last week stay and you have some gaps, I would definitely try to fill them in. Use the pricing tools. They're going to help you to be able to coordinate all that, to charge the right prices to make sure you don't get a one night stay way out in the future or one night stay that's blocking some important event date. So definitely check that out. That'll help. Consider the impact it's going to have on your housekeeping team or the company you're working with. You want to make sure that they can handle the extra workload. But at the end of the day, I'd say if you've got the procedures in place and you have the team, then absolutely do the one night stays. It's going to add revenue, you're going to fill in those gaps and it's going to allow you to keep scaling and keep getting more properties and keep growing. So hopefully that gave you a little bit of insight. And until next time, have a wonderful day.
