Tim Hubbard discusses common weak points in short-term rental (Airbnb/STR) operations that can cause outsized disruption (e.g., housekeeper no-shows, manager abandonment, internet outages). He frames these as "breaking points," recommends practical mitigations (backups for housekeeping, multiple contacts, diversification across markets), and draws on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile to argue that volatility can reveal weaknesses that, once fixed, make a business stronger. The episode closes with a listener CTA to leave reviews.
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How stable is your Airbnb property, your short term rental? Is there potentially something that could happen that could wreak havoc on your whole operation, maybe leave a guest stranded? This week we're talking about breaking points, weak points, things that might leave you pretty stressed out if you don't think about them in advance. Stay tuned. Let's jump right in. 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. I was at the gym the other day, I'm still down here in Brazil and I had just got on the treadmill and I was hitting the speed up, getting ready to run. Popped my headphones in and they wouldn't connect. I'm like, what the heck? They just wouldn't, wouldn't connect. So then I looked down at my phone and my phone's going into this weird mode where it just like turned off. It popped up with a screen that I'd never seen before. And so I rebooted the phone and I started again and then it popped up and I had this like old school DOS looking screen. I use an Android, a Google Pixel, by the way, and I'd never seen this screen before. The phone's amazing. I love the phone. And I was forced to reboot the whole phone. I lost all my data, I lost all my contacts, I lost everything. But I didn't actually lose it all. I have everything backed up right? So it wasn't that big a deal. But why am I telling this story? Had this happen five years ago, it would have been challenging. Things would have been difficult. I would have had to reach out to people to recover different passwords and access to different things. But I have everything backed up. So for me, it wasn't a big issue. But it got me thinking about this idea of breaking points and how stable is our business. Do we have weak spots with our properties and with our short term rentals? Something that could maybe be small but have a big, potentially negative impact. So I want to talk about that this week. Some potential risks in the STR industry, some weak points that you may have with your property that might leave you stressed out. I want to finish the Episode two with just a few points from a really good and thought provoking book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, if you haven't heard about it, called Antifragile. And it's a really, really interesting book on this topic. So let's just get right into it. What are potentially some weak points with an STR business, With the short term rental business, or with your single property, if you just have one. Well, what if a housekeeper doesn't show up and your guest is showing up? What do you do? Is your guest going to have to cancel? What if it's a week long stay and it's a really expensive reservation? Hopefully you have a backup plan. We've talked about that in prior episodes, but that could potentially be a weak point in your business. And maybe it hasn't happened yet, so you haven't taken taking the time to find that backup. But you need to have those backups because when the time comes you don't have it, well, you're going to be losing money, you're going to have unhappy guests, you're going to have negative reviews, and it's just going to be a downhill cycle from there. So make sure you have backups for your housekeeping. It could be a professional housekeeper. That's likely the best option. If you have one that you're working with already, maybe you hired yourself. But having multiple, I recommend having three total. So one that you work with regularly and then two potential backups. What if, what if you have a manager running your operation and all of a sudden they just up and leave and you have no one to respond to your guests and they just kind of leave you high and dry? Hopefully that never happens, but it's possible it could happen. Right? And so these are things that we need to be thinking about. Maybe a slightly less drastic one, but for some people it might be a serious emergency. What if the Internet goes out? We got to have a backup plan for that. We at least have to let our, our guests know that one's very likely not going to break your business. But just think about some of these things that could potentially really, really impact your business, impact your property. And the more you think them through, the more you think about any of these weak points or breaking points we could call them, the more backup plans you have for them, the less your stress level is going to be. Now, maybe you're not stressed out right now, but I guarantee you, if you have some of these systems in place, you're sort of subconsciously going to be more comfortable, you're going to be at, at ease more if you have more backup plans. So those are just some really basic examples. And now the bigger your operation gets, the more fragile it could become, the more prone it could be to little breaking points because you're going to have more people working for you, you're going to have more properties in different areas. So the more breaking points you're going to have. But there is a bright side to all of this. When one of these things happens, when one of these little breaking points happen, happens something unexpected, well, we can learn from that and we can make our business better. So I want to talk about Antifragile, the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and just give a few really good thought provoking ideas that come out of it. First of all, anti fragile means it's basically things that benefit from shock. They prefer volatility, they get stronger with shock. So let's give an opposite example. Let's take the US economy, for example. Things have happened, right? We just had Covid, which was huge, but we buffered all these impacts with a bunch of money that we printed from the central reserve from the, that the Fed printed. So do you think our economy's stronger because of that or is it weaker? Well, I would go with the latter, right? We didn't give the economy a chance to heal some of these things on their own. So you could think of it like a muscle, right? You go to the gym, you work out, you break those muscles down, but they grow back stronger and bigger. And so these are the things that can actually benefit our businesses, benefit our short term rental operations when we uncover some of these breaking points, but then we rebuild stronger. He points out another flaw in the thinking too. Covid was, was a, has and still has been a huge, huge impact on so many, so many things, right? But he points out in, in the book Antifragile that it's flawed thinking to assume that our prior experience with negative events, those negative events are the worst thing that can happen. Something else could happen, right? We can have a black swan event. Now, I don't want to be all doom and gloom on this, this podcast. I just want to get you thinking about any points you potentially have related your real estate business, related your short term rentals, or for that matter in your personal life as well. Things that maybe you have some breaking points in there that you need to think through a little bit more. So with all that said, what do we do about this? Right? Well, my strategy has been diversification. So I've got properties, multiple cities, I've got properties in multiple countries and I have properties different, all different shapes and sizes. Right now we don't all have that luxury. But the point is we don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket. Or at least I don't. Some people say they do and they're more open to risk. But I sleep better at night knowing that if something happens in one place, it's not necessarily going to affect everything. So diversification is a big step at becoming antifungal fragile. So think about your business, think about your properties. Where are their weak points? Do you have employees helping you? And if one of them were to leave or you lost one, for example, what would you do? Would you be super stressed out? Or do you have a procedure in place to handle that? So minimize your risk where you can by thinking these things through. And the great side to all this is remember when these things happen that break down our business, the volatility, the unexpected things like Covid, well, we learn from them and we come back stronger, just like our muscles after working out in the gym. So think about that over the week. Thanks for joining me again. And if you haven't yet, if you're enjoying the podcast, hopefully you are. If you've listened till the end of this episode and you've been listening some since we started, I can't believe we've we've been doing this over two years now. But if you haven't, leave us a quick review on itunes and Spotify helps other people find us, helps spread the word, and helps us keep creating content for you guys. So until next week, I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week and everything's going well in your world. See you soon.
