Tim Hubbard (Short Term Rental Riches podcast) explains how short-term rental operators can use virtual business phone numbers to improve guest communication and scale operations. He describes Airbnb’s restriction on virtual numbers and a practical workaround (register a real/physical phone number with Airbnb and forward calls to a virtual line), compares providers (phone.com, Dialpad, Grasshopper, Twigbee), and outlines key features and benefits: call routing to multiple people, call monitoring/recording, SMS-to-email, local numbers by market, number porting, and cost ranges (~$10–$60/month). He emphasizes delegation, faster guest response, and easier staff turnover management.
Chapters
Have you tried to hook up a virtual phone number to your Airbnb account and you got denied? Well, I have too, but I've got a way around it. We're going to talk about that this week. 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. There are always new things coming out and there are always new topics, and there are always things that are going to be relevant because short term rentals are never going to going away, and I hope you know that. So I'm glad you're listening. And then this week, we're going to talk about a really good tool, a thing that you need to have, especially if you're starting to get more and more rentals, and that is a business phone number. Now, Airbnb doesn't make that super easy if you are trying to use a virtual phone number. And a lot of the best phone companies are Virtual Grasshopper and phone dot com. I'm going to talk about a few of them. We've got to get around this, right when you set up your Air Airbnb account and you plug in a virtual number, they're going to say, we don't accept virtual numbers. I believe they don't even accept Google voice numbers anymore. Could be wrong on that. Things are always changing. But if you're listening to this in real time, in my experience they are not. But there's an easy way around it. Essentially, we have to have a real number in there, but we can forward that to a virtual number. So that's what I've done. And I'm just gonna break it down exactly how I've done it. I tried with several phone numbers when I decided back in the day to set up a business line. And we're gonna talk about all the features and the benefits of having a business line and why it's a must. If you've got even one property but you're planning on expanding. I definitely think it's a must. I got a bunch of different numbers. I ended up getting some cheap phone line from Walmart, which, if you're in the U.S. familiar with Walmart, you know, it was like a very low, inexpensive monthly subscription. And the phone's basically just like a burner phone. I mean, it's not even turned on. But what I did is forward that number automatically. So any call that comes in gets forwarded to my virtual phone number. So I used the real phone line with Airbnb and then use one of the features from the phone line to forward, which you got to be careful because there may be some phone lines out there that don't allow that feature. So just make sure if you're getting a real phone number to forward to your virtual phone number that's not your own. See, we're trying to get away from using our own phone number so that we can easily delegate calls or messages or whatever we need to to team members, if not right now, but in the future. So the sooner you have this, the better and the easier it will be to grow. Now, I have a friend in one of my inner circle groups who said she opened another line with like, AT and T or one of her main carriers, and then after the line was open, she ported to her virtual number and then just canceled the old one. So she doesn't pay a monthly fee for some spare burner phone line. So double check that if you want to go this route. I haven't done that, but I guess I never thought of that. So it sounds like that can work as well. Once we get past the piece of having a real number on Airbnb, which you can use on multiple accounts, by the way, and if you have lots of properties, suggest having more than one Airbnb account. So I use the same real number on multiple Airbnb accounts, that forwards to my virtual line. And the virtual line that I use is by phone dot com. We'll put links in the show notes for that one and also another one that I hear is very good as well. So once you've got that out of the way, well, then we have some freedom. Right? Because a call coming in, we can route it however we want. So I want to go over just some of these basic features, and the big one is the routing calls or calling two people or more at the same time. It's super important that our communication is very, very quick with our guests. If they're calling, it's probably because they have a question on something. There might be an issue, and we need to respond as soon as possible. So by being able to call multiple people at the same time, we can help make sure that our communication is as good as possible, but we can also set priority. So if you are just working by yourself, then of course you just have the number come to yourself. But if you maybe have one other person you're working with, well, then you could have it go to them first. If you have two people you're working with, you could have it go through the chain. You want to make sure that when your Guest is calling in that they're not waiting on hold forever, you know, as it's routing to all the different people. So just be cognizant of those things. But that's one of the huge obvious features of having a business phone line. We can contact multiple people at the same time. Now, we can also monitor their calls. So if we've hired a receptionist or someone on our team is handling just that, we can record the calls like you hear on all these other company phone lines. You know, for quality assurance, we're, you know, recording your phone line, so on and so on. And that's important. That's a good thing. I mean, if we receive feedback from a guest, for example, that maybe the communication between our team and them was not what they were expecting, we can go back and revisit that if it was a phone conversation. Now, you can also use the phone lines for text messaging and the text messages you can have sent to emails. So it just gives you all these options to make sure that you're not missing messages from guests, but also so that you can expand and you can start to delegate some of these tasks to other people. And, you know, another thing might not be as important for some other people. But, you know, when you, when you get a lot of properties, if you have a digital guidebook or you have a printout in the apartment or in the property or in the vacation rental, which if you haven't yet, go back and check out my podcast on the one pager that you gotta have in your property that's gonna have a phone number on it for a last resort phone contact. Now, if that's a personal phone number and you've already got a lot of properties or you've got a housekeeper or manager's phone number on there and something doesn't work out and you're no longer working with them, well, then you gotta go back and change all those phone numbers versus if you have a fallout with an employee or team member, you can very easily just switch the phone number on the back end and it can go to whoever you need to. Now, I really like the business phone line too, because I have properties in multiple cities. So when someone calls in, it's one phone number, but it says, you know, if you're calling for Sacramento, press 1, Oklahoma, 2, Memphis, 3. So they can quickly get to the appropriate person. And the more cities I go in, the more I can add that phone number. Now, I have multiple phone numbers with phone.com, so I have a company line, which is that one, but I also have local phone lines and those are the ones that I would put on our local contact pages with the local contact zip code so that someone doesn't have to go through a whole automated process or select the appropriate extension. If they're in a rush for something, they're going to have the local business phone number. But you can set up as many phone numbers with these systems as you need. At least the ones that I've worked with and the ones that I'm going to recommend. So those are some of the just the basic features of having a business phone line. And overall we have the phone line to improve the feedback and to improve our guests experience, but also to allow us to scale more easily and the costs, these things are not expensive. I mean you can get virtual phone numbers for as long as $15, 10 bucks up to, you know, 50, 60. You can grow as your number needs to grow. So I use phone.com and I'm going to put that in the show notes, the little burner phone line that I use. If you're in the U.S. this one's probably available to you, it's called Twigbee. But you could, like I said, you could try adding another phone line to an existing phone account, porting it to your virtual phone line. If you're not familiar with that term, porting. When you start to look into these virtual phone lines, you'll see a lot of have that option or if you switch from one phone company to the other, a lot of times they give you that option to port your phone number so you get to keep the same one. So look into that and you might be able to cancel that burner phone line and still use a virtual line. With Airbnb, it's going to be a huge help. There are other companies you could spend a lifetime reviewing all the company options. There's Grasshopper and all these other ones. But the big two, the one that I use is phone.com and one that I've found to be highly recommended is called dialpad.com so check both those out. If you don't have a business phone number in there yet, I suggest you get one. It's gonna make things a lot easier, you're gonna be able to scale faster. And until next time, have a wonderful day. Thanks for tuning in. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals? Well, it all starts with the properties you acquire, but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties. I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods. Com. That's Rest Methods. Com.
