When Are Your Guests Most Uncomfortable | The STRR Podcast #95 | Tim Hubbard

So when are your guests checking in your Airbnb most uncomfortable? And one other question for you. What is the most underrated and often overlooked element of your interior design? We're going to answer both those questions this week. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches, where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache at possible.

Happier here again as always. Another week, another topic relevant to your short term rentals and your real estate. And this week I'm going to start off by asking you a couple questions. When are your guests most uncomfortable? And the second question is, what is the most underrated design element or often overlooked element of our designs for our short term rentals? These things are both related. All right, I'll just give it to you. Stop beating around the bush. Here it is. Our lighting. Lighting is super duper important and it's actually really easy to incorporate and improve these days. There's so many things. So that's what I want to talk about this week because it makes sense. Such a big impact, a lot of bang for our buck. And it also changes the way we feel when we stay in short term rentals. It changes our mood. You know how it feels to be in a doctor's office and have that super bright white light just beaming down on you versus sitting in a cozy chair next to a lamp with some nice warm tones reflecting off the walls. Very, very different. I've kind of.

Jumped way too far, and I wouldn't say way too far, but I've really dove into this arena of lighting and I've learned quite a bit and I want to share that with you guys this week. So let's just go ahead and jump right into it. I want to start off by talking about the most important spaces where you should be spending the most amount of time on your lighting or you should be thinking about your lighting the most. And this also has to do with when our guests are most uncomfortable. And they're most uncomfortable when they're first showing up to our property. But they're even more uncomfortable if they're showing up to it at night in the dark. So I would say that the number one most important place for lighting is our exterior lighting, our entryway lighting, especially if you're in an area that's near other properties and someone not exactly sure which apartment they're going into, or if it's in a complex of some sort, then lighting super, super important or if it's in a nice neighborhood. And the entryway isn't the front door or something. Maybe it's a guest house in the back. You want to have super good lighting. So that's when our guests are most uncomfortable. And it's also because it's the first time being there, whatever it is, this is when they're most uncomfortable. Until the moment they step in that door and they realize they have the right door code. They have right everything. Of course, the better your check in instructions, the more of this discomfort you can alleviate. So we've got lots of podcasts on how we can do that, but we're going to stick to lighting this time. So that's, I would say one of the most important areas is our exterior lighting. And now you can improve this just by adding some dust to dawn lights. So lights that come on when it starts to get dark and they go off automatically when the sun comes back out. Great invention. And they're very easy to add. If you already have an existing light fixture, well, you can replace one. They're not expensive. You can get them at Home Depot, you can get them at Lowe's, get them off Amazon. And if you don't want to go through the trouble of changing your light fixture, well, then you can just change the bulb. Yeah, they sell dust to dawn light bulbs. That's super easy. Just take the bulb out, boom, pop the new one in, and you're good to go. Of course, you want to make sure that the power for that light is always on because if you have a guest that turns it off, well, then it's not going to come on even when it turns dusk. So they do have some things that you can put over light switches so you don't turn them off. You could also just leave a little note on the light switch that says, please leave this on all the time. So I would say that's one of the most important areas for a light in the other is our living area and our bedrooms. And it's super easy to change the lighting. Of course, we can just do this with light bulbs. We can change the color. I really recommend using a warm tone light bulb. Not daylight, not the, the super bright office looking one. It's 3000K. I think that's 3000 Kelvin is the lighting system that they use. So look for those. It's a warm bulb, 3000K.

Now, better than that is having it on a dimmer. And dimmers are super easy to add these days to. They're inexpensive. 15, 20 bucks can have your local handyman swap them out. It's going to make a huge difference. That way your guests can control the light that they want. Really important in the bedroom, really important in the living room. It sets the mood, right? If it's too bright, we're trying to have an intimate dinner or something like that, and there's too much light, well, just, just not as good. And this is such an easy, easy thing to do. So our living area and our exterior lights, those are super important. Also on the exterior, I forgot to mention this, but you can get those low voltage landscape lighting systems that plug into the wall. They're really expensive, inexpensive. You can get them on Amazon for a few hundred bucks. Literally anyone can do it. You plug it into the wall. They also can come with a dust to dawn sensor and that really helps for a few hundred bucks. The impact that makes shining on your landscaping, shining on your trees, it really gives it a great feel. So.

There's lots of options for updating our lighting. We've got tons of smart bulbs. I don't even want to attempt to list them all because there's so many these days. But I can say that I've used personally the Philips Hue bulbs. The spectrum of color with the Philips Hue bulbs is incredible. I use them all the time and there's some really cool things that come with them. So if you're not familiar with the Philips Hue bulbs, they've got them at all your local Home Depots and Lowe's and Amazon. And they're not super cheap. But you got to remember they are LED bulbs. So they're going to last a really long time and they make a huge impact. So some of the cool accessories that come with Philip Hue bulbs are wireless dimmers. So if you didn't want to install a new dimmer, you can simply change the light bulb in one of your fixtures and a lamp in a pendant light hanging over your kitchen. You can change it to a Philips Hue bulb and put a wireless dimmer on the wall that will allow you or your guests to dim the lights. So really cool. They also sell like sensors and sky's the limit. You can set all this up. But another thing I like about it is that you can turn them on remotely. So you could also set schedules for exterior lights to come on and all types of things. So check them out. Lighting is so important. It really is. And I feel like a lot of rentals I stay in, they just drop the ball when it comes to lighting. It's so easy to change. A few hundred extra dollars can make a huge impact to your short term rental, which is going to make a huge impact to how they feel in your space. And of course that's going to lead them to give you a better review. So review your lighting. If you haven't recently, check out some YouTube videos on some of the latest smart light technology. Most of it's readily available and it makes a huge impact. And remember, these lights that you're changing, they're led, they last for years. So it's not something that you're going to have to do very often. So take a look at that. Let's spice up our rentals a little bit if we're lacking in this area. And until next time, have a wonderful day.