Podcast episode (Short Term Rental Riches, host Tim Hubbard) describing use of SignNow, a digital signing service, to add protections for short-term rental hosts. Covers using SignNow for non-Airbnb reservations to confirm dates/guest counts/house rules, collecting signatures for leases for stays over 30 days, and integration with HostAway via Zapier. Mentions costs and ease-of-use.
Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches, where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache as possible.
Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I've got a new tool for you today. I talk about tools all the time. I'm like a tool.
Well, I'm not like a tool.
But I love tools and I think they're helpful and that's why I want to share them with you guys. And this is one that we recently implemented in my business and we're using regularly, all the time, and I think it's a huge help. So I want to break it down and provide the details for you to see if it's something you might want to include with your short term rentals. So what is this new tool? Well, it's an added step of security, essentially against an unruly guest, against someone that maybe causes some issues with your property. And this is a tool that we're going to use before someone ever checks into our property. It's called Sign now, it's a digital signing service, similar, similar to DocuSign, if you've heard of that. And we're using it for multiple things. So Airbnb, of course, has their own host guarantee policy. That's a million dollars liability. I hear mixed feelings about that. You know, I know some people have had good success with it. I know some people who haven't received anything after filing a suit. Hopefully you have some liability insurance on top of that, on top of your property insurance or an umbrella policy. But this is really just one more step to protect ourselves because it's essentially going to create a contract between our guests and our property, and that makes it easier for us to win any sort of disputes or any claim that we might have in the future. Now, let's talk real briefly about the preemptive steps before we have these bad guests. And I don't want to scare anyone with bad guests. It's really. It's the minority. It's not a whole lot. And our house rules help prevent some of these unruly or unwanted guests, I should say. And so we want to make sure that we have those in order first. Go back and check out our episode specifically on House Rules, if you haven't already. We've got the ones that I use laid out in there. So what do I use this Sign now signing service for? Well, it's pretty much for reservations outside of Airbnb. So because Airbnb already has their host Policy, and they collect all the money and everything up front. So I'm using this for every reservation I get outside of Airbnb. So anyone from Vrbo, from HomeAway, from my own website, wherever it is, before we send check in instructions to them, we're sending them one additional document from Sign now that is going to ask them to verify their dates, verify how many guests they have staying at the property, and then also agree again to our house rules. You can do a few more things like ask them to upload an identification or anything like that, but we're just putting the bare, bare essentials on there, really. And there's a really easy spot where they can digitally sign this. So this gives us essentially a contract between our guests. Now, your reservation is also essentially a contract. But when push comes to shove, if, if you're filing a claim or a dispute or you maybe have to kick someone out of your property and the police show up, hopefully that doesn't happen. But if you have this contract outline that says, you know, they're short term guests and they don't have tenant rights, well, then it's gonna be way easier to win that. And it only takes a couple seconds. So we send that out as a check in form essentially for every guest reservation we get outside of Airbnb. But there's another really cool thing that we use it for too, and that is for anyone that has a reservation over 30 days, we want them to sign a lease. Because at that point, in most jurisdictions in the U.S. actually, everywhere I can think of, if someone's staying in your property over 30 days, well, then they become a tenant and not a guest. And so they have. There's different rules and laws that are going to apply and we want to protect ourselves from that. So Sign now will automatically send out that form and they can sign it. It only takes them a second. It's on their mobile app, you know, or wherever they happen to be. It works on all platforms. Super easy. So it only takes a few seconds and it's just another extra layer of security. Not that we really need this a whole lot, but when push comes to shove, it'll be very helpful. Now it's really easy for us to use it. I'm using HostAway as a management software program and this integrates right with HostAway through Via Zapier. So there's three pieces of technology going on here. Sorry for the complication, but the way we have it set up doesn't, doesn't take us any more time and we're accomplishing Everything we want to. Now, there's some small little costs. So Sign now is between $8, $15 or $30 a month as of this recording of the current subscription rates, you could probably get by with the $8 a month one. Now if you only have a couple guests coming in a month, then maybe you don't want to use this. But as you scale, this is really, really going to help. And it's also an easy way to get a signature and a signed contract without making it too much of like an issue or question, you know, versus sending a digital document, versus calling a guest and saying, hey, you know.
Since you're staying over 30 days, we need to have you sign your lease. It's a lot easier to get their approval and to get it signed than is to send out a digital document. So the cost for Sign now is not too much. We have Sign now integrated with our management software, which is Hostaway via Sapier or Zapier. I'm not, I still don't know how you, how you call it, but Zapier is like the middleman connecting two different software programs. So we're going to put all the links in the show notes and it's been really helpful for us. We, we just implemented this like a month or two ago and I think it's fantastic. Now if you're not using Host Away, then you might not be able to integrate this automatically, but you may take a look at integrating it with your Gmail or if you see a reservation come through from Airbnb, for example, maybe you can use Zapier to link Signow on that reservation. So it's a really cool program, it's very inexpensive and I think for the extra security we're getting out of it and the EAs of use, check it out. If you're not doing something like this, you know, I highly suggest having a lease for anyone that stays over 30 days. This is just one way to do it and it makes it really easy for you and your guests. So until next time, I hope you explore this little tool. I hope your short term rental portfolios are exploding and growing and I hope you're learning a lot. Thanks for tuning in. Have a wonderful day and I'll catch you next time.
