The SECRET to Writing CLEAR House Rules and Policies

We know as hosts or short term rental owners that most the communication between our guests is written. So we need to make sure that we're writing properly and we're writing in a way that's not turning our guests off or our potential guests. I want to talk about one specific area this week in regards to our house rules to make sure that you're not scaring guests off because your house rules sound too crazy or sound too strict or make you look like a not great person to rent from. So stay tuned as we jump in to written communication this week. 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.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. The way we communicate has really changed over our lifetimes, hasn't and over the generations. Our grandparents, for example, were not sending text messages. They also weren't running short term rentals on Airbnb. And so there's a lot of benefit that comes with this written communication. It's efficient. And we know that our guests prefer written communication, right? Because that's generally the way they're communicating with us. Written communication can be a little more challenging to interpret properly versus verbal communication or face to face communication. A big reason, because we can't actually see the other person. Right? So emojis have helped with this quite a bit. If you send a message that says, you're welcome to check out late if you would like, versus you're welcome to check out late if you would like, with a smiley face, that is a different message. Right. Your guest is going to interpret that differently. So emojis have helped us a little bit with this. But nonetheless, written communication is really important and there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it. So let's go ahead and jump into some tips on how to better write your house rules and some of those important messages that are kind of hard to write. Here's an example. No smoking in the property. We do not allow smoking. You will be fined. You will be charged if you're caught smoking our property. These are getting the point across which we have to have this in our house rules, right? In our rental agreements. But we can can write it in a way that's a little more pleasant and knowing that our guests are reading all these before they actually reserve our property most of the time, although some people aren't reading anything, it's Important that we're communicating in a pleasant way that's warm and inviting and that's going to help us get more reservations. So the first of my six tips is really just that we want to write in a friendly way. Now we have tools, luckily, to help us do this. If your natural writing style is not very friendly, well, you can jump over to Chat GP and you can write the message. You're trying to ask ChatGPT to write it in a more pleasant way and boom, that's pretty easy. You could do that in under a minute. The second thing we want to do is focus on what guests can do during their stay. So if you have pool hours, for example, for your pool, instead of writing do not use the pool after 10pm, you could simply say you are welcome to use the pool up until 10pm so simple little change, but it makes a big difference. Again, you probably want to fine tune this with ChatGPT because that's really the easiest way to do it. And spoiler alert, we have these templates set up in our AI document for you. You can go to restmethods.com forward/AI and you can find these tips, you can find these templates to help rewrite your house rules in a more pleasant way. The third tip is to offer a little bit more explanation around your rules to help them come off in a in a more pleasant way or to help the guest understand why you actually have that rule. So one example might be if you have a late checkout fee, that you simply explain it by saying your housekeeper traveled to be there and they're going to be waiting around if you're not checking out on time and it's not fair to to them. So just a simple suggestion, sometimes offering a little bit more explanation around our rules can make them easier to read and more pleasant. The fourth tip is just to be clear and concise. So we don't want to have a super long list of house rules if we don't need them, right? Or if we can have a set of house rules or a rental agreement written in five pages, that's going to seem better than having it written in 10 pages, right? So again, you can use ChatGPT or you can use our prompts to help you write the most concise rules in the most pleasant way to make sure that your guests aren't getting to the bottom and deciding, you know what, this property owner or this manager just seems a little too uptight. I think I'm going to book something else that's not what we Want. So the fifth tip, and this doesn't work for all of our rules, but a lot of times we post rules in the property, right? If you're not, you should. We post our most important information on a one page printout. It's laminated. I think everyone should do this. And in there we repeat some of our most important rules. The benefit to having some of these printouts in the property is that you can add color to it, you can add emojis to it, you can add images to make it more pleasant than just a simple line of text. So unfortunately, with some of the OTAs like Airbnb, we don't have the ability to add images and stuff like that in there with our house rules, but we do in our property. So wherever you can make those images, make those signs a little more visually pleasing. The last thing is we want to leave our house rules, our rental agreement, in a way that lets our guests know that they can reach out to us if they have any questions if they need further clarification. So we want to start on a good note and we want to end on a good note with our house rules, and we want to write our actual house rules and all of our policies in the best way possible. So I'm going to recap these tips real quick and then I'm going to break down just a couple examples of a normal way people are writing, a sort of mediocre way, and then an exceptional way that you could be writing a couple house rules. So we'll get into that in one sec. So to recap the tips, the first one is engage positively. Use a friendly tone. The second one, focus on the positive. Focus on what your guests can do and not what they can't do. So remember, there's two ways to write those types of things. Explain or, or help clarify really important points with a little bit more of a description when you think it's necessary or when you think it will help your guests receive that message in a better, easier way. The fourth thing is just make sure things are clear and concise. We don't want to stretch something out longer than it needs to be. The fifth thing, if you have the ability to make something a little more visually pleasing, like adding an emoji or adding a, you know, colors or images or something to something printed out in your property, then definitely do that when you can. The sixth thing is we want to just make sure that we're always available for open communication. So here's a quick example of three ways that you could write the Same rule. And this is a rule that I guarantee almost everyone is going to have in the property or they should. And that is no smoking. So the first way, no smoking allowed anywhere on the property, period. Violators will be fined or you, you will be charged or we have a heavy smoking fee. So that is one way to write it. That's one way. We see it all the time. So here's a more adequate way to write it. Please avoid smoking inside to keep our space fresh for all guests. Thank you for your understanding. Much better. Here is the well written example and we use ChatGPT for this. So it actually starts with a little fresh emoji. I think this is a leaf or something. But it says to ensure fresh air for everyone, we kindly ask you to enjoy your smoke outside. Enjoy your smoke outside instead of do not smoke or you cannot smoke. So we're focusing on what they can do. Most places allow smoking outside or on a patio. So to ensure fresh air for everyone, we kindly ask you to enjoy your smoke outside. Thank you for helping us keep the indoors clean and welcoming for all guests. If you have any questions or need directions to designated smoking areas, we're here to help. So again, you can tailor one down. Maybe that's a little too friendly. Right? But you get the point. There's different ways to write things. And remember, we're only writing these house rules once. Usually we're hardly ever going back and rewriting the way that they're in there. Again, these are things that our guests are reading before they actually book our property. So that's going to give them a little bit of insight into how we communicate with our guests. So make sure you go back and you revisit all of your writing, especially these important rules and policies. Make sure that they're friendly, they're inviting. It's going to help your communication, it's going to help you get better reviews and it's going to ensure more success along your short term rental journey. I hope that helped a little bit. And don't forget to go check out all of our AI prompts. Restmethods.com forward/AI. We've got a whole bunch of tips there. Everything from setting up your listing descriptions to writing your photo captions, to helping you write your house rules in a more effective way. So until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week and we'll talk soon.

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