Tim Hubbard, who has managed over 15,000 guests across multiple properties, argues that guest experience and managing expectations matter more than photos. Set realistic expectations so you can exceed them. Demand relative to supply ultimately determines bookings.
Chapters
Many people will tell you that your pictures are the most important piece of your listing. I'm here to tell you that they are not. My team and I have managed over 15,000 guests. I've got dozens of properties in multiple cities, and we've kind of figured some things out. So I want to break that down this week on the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Stay tuned. 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.
So let's talk more about pictures this week. Many people say they're the most important piece. They are clearly very, very important because that's what people see before they decide to make a reservation with our property. But they are not the most important. So I'm going to get to that in a second. But first, I just want to talk about the guest experience. That's really what's the most important in terms of getting good reviews and the future success of our properties. And a lot of that experience is actually all that experience is based off of expectations. So if our pictures aren't portraying our property correctly or maybe there's something slightly off, well, then we might have higher expectations from our guests and we don't meet those when they arrive. Then that's an equation for a bad review, and that's an equation for an unsuccessful Airbnb or unsuccessful short term rental. So the expectations, that is the biggest piece. We want to set lower expectations and exceed those when our guests arrive. That is a recipe for a successful Airbnb. So that is up there, one of the most important pieces.
My main reason for saying that photos are not your most important piece of rental is because demand is the amount of people that want to book a property in a certain area is what's most important. And the other side of that, supply. If there's more people wanting to book a property than there are places to stay, well, then you're going to get a guest staying there no matter what, right? So even if you didn't have any photos, you could put up a generic whatever and someone's going to book your rental. So that's, that's the whole foundation of this whole short term rental business is supply and demand. But of course, we can do lots of other things to make sure our rentals get booked more often and at higher rates than our competitors or our neighboring properties. So I would say demand is number one. Obviously, photos are really, really important.
I want to talk a little bit More about having photos that are too good. Yes, this is a real thing and it's a real thing because if our photos are better than what our space actually looks like, well then we're raising those expectations from our guests. And, and when they arrive, if it's not what they imagined, well then we're going to get a bad review. They're not going to be as happy. So I'm actually going through one of the complexes that I own and operate properties out of and redoing a lot of my photos. I realized we put in too much HDR light blending. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically, you know, you can take pictures, multiple pictures and blend them together and it creates a brighter photo. But if your space isn't actually that bright, well then that's setting false expectations. So we're actually going through and I asked my photographer, I said, hey Keenan, can you go take worse properties? Can you go take worse photos of this property? Which you don't hear very often, but I want to make sure that my guests expectations are, are exceeded and it's making it difficult with these photos. And so how do we know if our photos are too good? Well, it comes back to guest feedback and guest reviews. If they said, oh, it wasn't as I was expecting, well, we can dig a little further. Why wasn't it? The place looked brighter in the photos than it actually did in person. And so that's something we got to change. That's the great thing about this industry. We get lots of feedback and it's easy to make these changes. So we're going back and changing those photos. Now. If you've been operating properties for a long time and you might have small furniture items that you've changed in your properties or small art pieces or whatever it is, if you do, just go back and change those photos and make sure it's as accurate as possible. So we meet or exceed our guest expectations, get the best reviews and then we can continue scaling, continue growing and continue making the really, really high returns that we can with short term rentals. So hopefully that gave you a little insight. If your photos are too good, you should know through your feedback, just change them, go back and change them and they'd be good to change periodically anyways. So until next time, I hope you guys have a wonderful day.
