The Ultimate Tool for Airbnb Housekeeping and Maintenance | Tim Hubbard

The devil is in the details, they say, right? You know, you've heard this before and it couldn't be more true for the short term rental world. The short term rental industry, if we miss one little detail, it could lead to a bad review. So we're going to talk this week about how we can track these details and stay on top of things. Stay tuned. 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. Happier here again as always. A lot to learn in the short term rental world and a lot to stay on top of. A lot of little details to stay on top of. And this week I want to talk about one tool that, that I'm using to really help me and my team make sure we don't overlook one little thing and get a nasty or bad review. That is the biggest piece to this puzzle, right? We want to make sure our guests are as happy as possible and the reviews are excellent because it's going to help our occupancies, it's going to help our returns. But if we miss one little hair or we have one little doorknob that's loose, it could lead to, to a worse review. So there's a tool I'm using now called Breezeway and I know I talk a lot about software on this channel and I really am a big proponent for software. If you haven't listened to the channel for a while, you maybe haven't didn't know that. I have a background in software. I used to work for a software company for about eight years and I worked with a lot of independent businesses selling them software that helped run their business. And I know for a fact that the shops that took full advantage of that software versus the ones that were just using it as a basic calculator, the ones that took full advantage always outperformed the other ones. So I'm a big believer in software. It can really help us increase efficiencies. And Breezeway is an excellent tool for us to be able to do that with our short term rental businesses or our short term rental properties. Now, if we have one property and some little things pop up, that's pretty easy to track, right? Depending on the size of the property. But, but if we start adding 2, 3, 10, 20, 40, 50 properties, things get a little more complicated. My team and I have managed over 20,000 guests now and I've added dozens of properties in my portfolio and this is one of the things that's gotten a little harder to track is maintenance. Right? Everything from making sure we're changing our H vac filters to making sure we change the batteries in our remotes. And this tool can help us do all that. So I want to talk about what is Breezeway, what are some of the items that we should be tracking with all of our properties, my experience using other property management software and why I think they're lacking in this specific area. I'll talk about some of the main top features for Breezeway and the ones that we're using, what it integrates with, how easy it is to integrate and how much it costs. So we're just going to do a brief overview and I am not affiliated with Breezeway in any way. I just want to bring you guys the best tools possible for your business, or at least make you aware of some of the options available, if you haven't already heard about it. So Breezeway was designed specifically to help us in the short term rental world with short term rental properties, with the detailed items, the little things. And now this is everything from housekeeping to maintenance. So they've got some excellent, excellent features in to handle both those things, but it was designed specifically for these tiny little things. And probably the biggest one of those things is housekeeping. We all know how important housekeeping and keeping our property super clean is, right? It's huge. It's probably the number one reason we get bad reviews. If there's one little hair and someone doesn't like it, well, then they're not going to think your property's clean. So Breezeway does an excellent job at this. You might have heard me talk about Properly, an app called Properly in the past, which is also designed to help housekeepers to make sure that we're not overlooking anything. So Breezeway does an excellent job at creating checklists, fully customizable checklists that we can pass to our housekeepers, our housekeeping team, via mobile app. It's really easy for them to log in, see which cleanings they're doing for the day, and we can create tailored checklists for each property. If there's an item that our housekeepers are overlooking from time to time, and we want to make sure that they don't overlook it anymore, well, then all we have to do is change this checklist. If they're not dusting the fan above the bed, for example, well, we can put that in the checklist and we can require that they Take a photo of it. If our guests are logging out of our Netflix accounts and logging in with their own or leaving the property with Netflix not connected, that's another thing. It's actually a, you know, something that comes up more often than you would think now. But that's something we want our housekeepers to check to make sure that the next guest coming in has a great stay and they don't have to worry with any of these little details. So you can literally add whatever you want when it comes to housekeeping in there, from counts on towels to making sure they put laundry pods for the wash machine. So it's really good for housekeeping, but it's also really good for maintenance and saving items that need to be repaired or need to be looked at and then setting priority on those items. So the more properties you get, the more things that pop up. And you can track everything from the name brand of your appliance to the model number, to sweeping the front porch, to whatever it is when it comes to maintenance. And you can schedule these things. So it's really good. We got to make sure that our properties are in tip top shape or it's going to reflect in our reviews. So most management softwares, I don't want to put them, throw them all under the bus, but a lot of software programs that are designed for the short term rental industry are still lacking in this area. They don't quite have it when it comes to task related items or really getting in depth on housekeeping. So this is an excellent, excellent complement to your property management software if you're already using one. But don't get discouraged because if you're not using one already, this can easily connect to Airbnb, to VRBO, to TripAdvisor to make sure that all your reservations come in and you can manage them without having to manage multiple pieces. The software is used by a lot, a lot of other users, so it's been tested and they're continuing to improve it. But it is an excellent tool. And for anyone that's starting to scale or just wants to keep better track of the properties, I highly suggest taking a look at it. Some of my favorite features, just to name them off in a quick fire list, here are the checklists and the templates and those can go for all things housekeeping or maintenance. If you have a routine checkup on a property, I love how you can set priorities on this. So if you have a number of things stacking up at a building, for example, I do a lot of small apartment buildings, so Maybe we have one unit in the building needs one thing and another unit needs something else. Well, when our maintenance person goes there, they can look up the building as a whole and see all the things that need to be done or at least looked at by priority. So I love the priority piece there. You can also track your inventory. You can track supplies and linens and towels and pillows and anything that you use regularly. Any sort of consumable you can put in there and you can have it deducted from your supplies. You can assign costs to all of these things so you can really get detailed, you can really get organized and it is really a big help. I know I've got some friends that have really large portfolios of short term rentals and they can't imagine managing their portfolios without this software anymore. I'm just getting started with it, but I'm really excited to implement it and to organize a few things that need a little more organization. So they do have a great mobile app available so your housekeepers have an easy time or your maintenance team has an easy time checking in. They also have a mobile friendly website.

And then if you're not on your mobile phone, you're just checking on your desktop. Well, their, their desktop website is really good as well. They also have the ability to communicate directly with guests in here. Now, I'm not using that because we do all of our guest communication centralized through the property management software that we're currently using. That one's called Host Away. So they do have a lot of features. I'm just giving you the main ones that I like. If you are having any trouble managing or prioritizing your maintenance tasks, or if you're having trouble with your housekeepers that keep forgetting something or you want to better track your inventory, Well, I think this is a great app. Now there are other ways to do this. A lot of the property management software programs have something like this built in, but believe me, I haven't found one nearly as in depth and as great as this one. There are other ways to do it. I've talked about Notion before in the past. I love Notion and I still use Notion countless times every day, but not specifically for tracking my maintenance. This is designed just for that and for housekeeping. So if you haven't used Notion before, go back and check out a couple of the episodes I did on it. Those are episodes 63 and 127. So many uses for Notion and it is free, so can't hurt. You can use it in your personal life too. I swear it's one of the best, best pieces of software available. The cost for Breezeway, the one we're talking about today, ranges depends on how many units you have. But for as little, you know, as $6 up to, I'm not sure what the top of the range is, but maybe $15 a unit. Not a whole lot of money. You know, one little detail that we overlook could cost us a reservation. It could cost us a discount. So consider those things when you're looking at your software budget and what you want to add in to help you manage your properties. I think this is a really cool tool. If you haven't seen it yet, we'll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out. It's called Breezeway once again. And aside from that, hopefully you don't have too many maintenance issues at your properties. Hopefully your housekeepers are doing an A plus job. But if they're not or you need any help at all in this area, check out this program until next time. I hope you guys are having a wonderful day out there. Catch you next time.

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