What Landlords Need to Know Before Choosing A Short-Term Rental Property Manager? (Part 2)

There is a lot of craziness going on in the economy right now. It's more important than it's ever been for us to manage our short term rentals better than we've ever managed them. And so this week we're going to talk about what landlords need to know to best manage their properties or if they have someone managing their property for them, the questions they need to be asking their property manager. 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. It's like Armageddon out there, isn't it? We've got banks failing, a whole bunch of craziness going on. The economy is not in good condition, is it? And the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates again and they're going to continue raising them. And what does that mean? Well, it means that less people are going to be able to afford to buy properties, which is going to put downward pressure on real estate prices, which means property prices are going to go down. Now, every market is different, of course, but it's just a little crazy out there, right? And so if we have a short term rental, if we're planning on having a short term rental, we need to make extra certain that it's managed professionally and we're not missing any steps. So welcome back. This week we're breaking into part two on our management series. So if you missed. Last week we talked about why I think virtual management is the future of all property management. But whether you're managing your property virtually or you're working with a professional property manager, this week we're going to talk about all the things that you should be doing before a guest actually checks into your property. So these are things like advertising, like pricing, like the communication with our guests. And I'll end the episode with just a quick checklist that our receptionists are reviewing for each and every guest that checks in to one of my properties. The success we have with our short term rentals really does come down to our property management. A lot of mentors of mine or people that I really look up to in the real estate space that have acquired huge portfolios of real estate, they very often say that they would much rather have a B class property with A class management than an A class property with B class management. Why? Because if they have poor management and the property sits vacant, well, the property's not going to return very well. And that is the same for short term rentals. If we have a vacant short term rental, it's not going to be a good investment for us. So today is all about the things that we need to be doing before guests even checks in. And it starts with our advertising. So of course we know that we need to have professional photos for our short term rental, but we need to have those professional photos on multiple places online, not just Airbnb, especially in a more competitive market. 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago you could throw up an Airbnb and pretty much anywhere in the US and someone is probably going to book it, but it's not necessarily the case. Again, all markets are different, but it really comes down to management. So we want to be on as many platforms as possible. I suggest at least for starters that you're on Airbnb vrbo booking.com you will get a lot of reservations from, but there are a few management pieces that go into that and I recommend you have your own direct booking website as well. The more exposure you have, the more places people can find you well, the better your property should rent. So I'm just going to go through rapid fire. A lot of the other things that you need to be doing with your short term rental or that your property manager should be doing doing for your short term rental. And if you're not quite sure if they are, well, you will want to make sure that you ask them. So I'm just going to go through kind of rapid fire. We know we need to be on lots of OTAs, lots of different travel agencies, but we need a way to manage that easily. So I recommend using a channel manager or property management software platform. That channel manager is going to make sure that all those calendars integrate properly. But we also need to make sure that all of our cancellation policies are aligned with with all the different OTAs and they're not all the same. We need to know that we have deposits in place so if a guest does make a reservation that our property is protected. We need to go into all those different online travel agencies and make sure we have all our amenities checked. Our listings need to be perfect and they need to be revisited very often. I recommend once a month to make sure any additional feature that one of these sites added doesn't get missed and that you check it off for your property if it's applicable, because it will help. So that's first piece we need to have our property property advertised. The next piece is if we do get a reservation, we need to make sure that the guest is going to be a good guest. So there's a whole process in making sure that they don't have bad reviews. If they do, we need to make sure that we get their reservation canceled. And there are ways to do that. I'm going to run through our checklist at the end of today's episode just to give you again some quick ideas, some things you want to make sure that you are doing or your property manager is doing for you. Another way to verify our guests is to get additional information from them. So after they've made a reservation, we require a check in form for all of our reservations outside of Airbnb. So for booking.com, direct booking, VRBO, anything outside Airbnb, we get a check in form, we have them update their id, we make sure that they verify the reservation dates and that they know that we're going to charge them a deposit. So that is an important step as well. If your guest booked a long term reservation or a medium term reservation, you could say, or over 30 days, well, we make sure that we get leases for all of those guests, something we do digitally. So it doesn't take a lot of time. But it is a step that you don't want to miss. Because if you have a guest staying in one of your properties and you're in a state that's not very landlord friendly, well, that guest could stay in your property for a long, long time if they know how to beat the system. So there's a lot of steps that goes into advertising and there's a lot of steps that go into vetting our guests before vetting our guests. So we got to make sure that we have the right pricing in place. Because if we don't have the right pricing in place, well, you better believe no one's going to book your property unless you happen to be the only short term rental in town. And that is just not a reality anymore. So I always recommend using a dynamic pricing tool. I use Price Labs personally, but it doesn't stop there. You need to know your market. You need to know your market data and competitive rentals and make sure that you're pricing properly. So if you don't know this, if you're working with a property manager, you want to make sure that this is something that they're checking out as well. A good way to check on this is to look up maybe the top 10 listings local or near your property and see how their performance is doing. And then you can weigh your performance against theirs. This is called a comp set in Price Labs, for example. But you could also do this manually by just looking up listings on Airbnb or vrbo, checking their calendars and checking their rates. Of course, that's a lot more work, so I just recommend using a dynamic pricing tool. Just to add one more note on our pricing too. I've talked with a lot of revenue managers recently, people that have focused their careers just on revenue management. All the big hotels have this, all the big airlines have this, and it is a serious job and you can become very skilled at it. There's much more that goes into your pricing than just having a minimum price, a base price, a maximum price, and maybe some last minute discounts or seasonal discounts. So make sure that you are looking into to this or your property manager, whoever's helping you, it has a good grasp on your specific market. Okay, so we've advertised our property appropriately, we've priced it properly, we've vetted any guests that have made reservations. We need to make sure that we are communicating with them in the best manner possible. Hospitality is key, right? We're not just running a system of short term rentals and operations, although I know if you've listened to the podcast for a while might seem like that. But it does come down to hospitality. Our guests don't want to feel like they're just a number churning through our short term rental machine. So we have to put some personal touch in place. A good quote that I heard at a short term rental conference at some point in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years was that our guests are not always right, but it is our job to make them feel that way. And I know that's not always easy. It's easier for some people to communicate that than it is for others. But that is our job. And the reality is, if our guests don't feel right or if there's an issue or something happened, well, you're not going to get a good review likely, right? So the little things really do matter. Adding a personal touch to messages, for example. These things really matter. And remember that our reviews, every single review we get affects our property's performance in the future. So it's super important that we have a good approach to our hospitality with our short term rentals. So here's just a quick few items. Things that we're doing, things that you should be doing, or things that you should make sure that your manager is doing for you. If you're working with a property manager, first thing is we're going to verify what channel the guests made the reservation from. We're going to verify if they've stayed with us before, if they have, or we're going to send them a nice message, welcome, welcoming them back. We're going to make sure that it's not a bad guest. We're going to check their past reviews. We're going to make sure that they're not on our block list. If they are, we're going to reach out to to Airbnb or vrbo, wherever it happens to be. And we're going to have the reservation canceled penalty free if the reservation came outside of Airbnb. So through one of the other platforms that we're on and that you should be on as well, we're going to check with Stripe to make sure we actually received our payment. We're going to make sure that we received our deposit. We're going to make sure that we sent the guest an invoice. We're going to double check if it's a local guest booking our property, and if it is, we're going to kindly ask what the purpose of their stay is. We know that there are certain times when a reservation is a little more risky than others. If you missed the episode we did on our Red Flag reservation request, well, go back and check that out. And if you missed our episode on the top 15 questions that you will get asked before a guest checks in your property, go back and check that out. That's episode number 96. We've received and sent literally hundreds of thousands of messages, and we narrowed all those down to the top questions we got asked before the check in. And so that's what that episode's all about. I'm not going to spill the beans here. You're going to have to check it out. But know that there are certain questions you will get asked, and you got to be prepared with responses. Right. That all comes back to hospitality. So we like to have some personalized messages in there if they're a repeat guest, if they're a local, we're going to dig into that a little further. All of our guest communication, we're going to be responding in five minutes or less. That is a rule that we have. Assuming the guest checks out. Okay, well, we're going to make sure that their door code synced properly. So we use quite a few different smart locks. We want to make sure that they have a unique door code. We use remote lock for that to integrate with all of our software. So we want to make sure that that went out. Okay. The beautiful thing about having a unique door code for every guest is we can send their check in instructions right away. We're going to confirm that we got their check in form back, that we got their lease sign. If it happens to be a medium term stay or a little longer, we're going to confirm that their cleaning is scheduled after their checkout. So we use another software for that called Breezeway. We're going to take note of their arrival and departure time and we're going to make sure that we adjust any automatic messages we have to go out at the proper time. And I'll just give you a quick example. If our guest is checking out at 6:00am and our checkout message is scheduled for, for 8:00am, well, we're gonna go in and edit that message so it goes out before our guest checks out. Otherwise, what's the purpose of sending it? Right? So automated messages are fantastic, but sometimes they need to be altered and we always need a personal touch. So there is a lot that goes into managing a short term rental. This series is designed to help you make sure you don't miss any steps. And so today we talked about some of the things that you need to be doing before your guest actually checks in or if you're working with a property manager, making sure that these are things that they're doing as well. So there are a lot of things that go into managing our short term rental, but the truth is, the better we manage it, the more money we're going to earn, the more efficient it's going to be, the better reviews we're going to have. So I hope this series, this is the second part, is helping you to make sure you don't skip any steps and to make sure that whatever property manager you're working with, if you're not managing your property yourself, is also doing these things for you. Coming up, we're going to talk about all of the things that you should be doing while a guest is staying at your property. And then we'll finish the series off with everything that happens and everything that you should do after a guest checks out and during the checkout process. So there's a lot that goes into it. We've got it broken down for you. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. I've dedicated years figuring out how to manage my personal portfolio remotely and it wasn't always easy and it took a long time. But now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me. And good news, our team can also manage yours. Let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an industry low fee. To find out more about partnering with us, head to Strom, hit the property management button, answer a couple quick questions and meet with me personally. That's strriches.com rest easy knowing that with my team, your properties will be in excellent hands.