Jon Bell:                              00:00                    In this episode we are talking about weird guest experiences.

Julian Sage:                       00:03                    Weird, so stay tuned.

Julian Sage:                       00:07                    Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, give any more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribe to this podcast today, come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation where we’ll be talking about starting automating and scaling a short term rental business. Now onto the show

Jon Bell:                              00:34                    What’s going on host nation. I’m here with Julian Sage and today we’re going to have a little fun with this episode. We’re going to talk about our weird guest experiences and I got a few of them. I know Julian has some good ones as well and I know all of you guys that are actively hosting have your own. We definitely want to hear some of those. Of course, don’t expose the guests’ name or anything like that, but you can definitely tell what they did that you thought was weird because our people do weird things behind these closed doors. Julian, what do you got to contribute to this episode?

Julian Sage:                       01:08                    I don’t know if it’s, it’s, it’s kind of bad because I, I share a home so my basement unit, we renovated it, we turned it into an Airbnb and it’s been able to cover our mortgage.

Julian Sage:                       01:18                    So, you know, the beauty is being able to live for free. But with that, having, you know, being able to live for free, you’re also gonna get some pretty weird situations. So I, one of the guests that I remember we woke up one night, my wife and I, and we heard some noises coming downstairs around two to two 30 in the morning. And we were just like, what, what was that? And it was, it was, it was a person that checked in by themselves. But it sounded like there was two people, two people down there. So I, I look at the security cameras and I’m like, you know what, what’s going on down there? But you know, the only showed one person a well come to find out the, the, the moaning that was coming from downstairs. It was coming from one person.

Julian Sage:                       02:02                    So it was, we had a noisy, noisy masturbator in our basement. Yeah. did they set off your noise aware? No I didn’t. I didn’t have a noise aware because I did not have it at that time. Well, I don’t have that experience. So that is very unique. So Jon, that one’s a pretty hard one to beat. But what’s the weirdest, Nope, no pun intended, but what’s been your weirdest guest experience?

Jon Bell:                              02:32                    All right. I was hosting an international guests and this person was very scared about the area that they were going to stay in. Granted, this is probably one of the nicest areas that there is a, this is old town Alexandria. It’s not bad. It’s not rough. I barely see any homeless people ever. I was talking this lady, she called,

Jon Bell:                              03:01                    I really don’t know how she got my number before she booked, but she called me maybe seven times. Everything about the place was just unsafe. She said, Oh, I’m a single female and I need to make sure that I’m safe. Nobody else could have access to the door. You guys, smart locks. I’m going to have to remove the batteries so nobody else can get into it, but do they have cameras? Can I get the person that controls the cameras because I’m a single lady and somebody could come and take advantage of me and I’m just like, Oh my goodness. Like lady, like it’s not that bad, but am I telling you that you’re not going to see any thing that might be bad? She was like, Oh, this place is across the street from a gas station. That’s where people go and Rob and they could just be running across the street and I’m like, it’s a city to city.

Jon Bell:                              03:49                    There’s, there’s things everywhere. There’s a tot lot right behind the building, but what do you want to say? The kids are just going to be making too much noise, whatever. Anyways, she came and stayed. I told her just book two days. If you’re not comfortable, you can go on. She was very comfortable. She stayed, I believe about 30 days or so when she checked out everything in the entire apartment had been moved around. We’re talking pots and pans, [inaudible], the upper cabinets, glassware and all kinds of other stuff on a center Island underneath. It was like I almost had to just like pay somebody to go and reorganize the entire place because she moved everything, everything holiness to say she booked another 30 day stay recently, so she’s back at my place. I just know what to expect this time, so there you have it. That’s one.

Jon Bell:                              04:42                    I got another one. This one encompasses everything that you need to have inside of your unit and why it’s so important. I had a unit in a transitioning area, not the greatest area. This one, I’d admit it’s not the greatest area. I had a one day reservation come in and a gap. We allow one day reservations and a gap period of three or less. This person booked the basement apartment, which at the time was about $120 inside of this town home. This person booked. I messaged them, we talked. I let them know that, Hey, these are the rules and I just, I had an eerie feeling. Sometimes we get those eerie feelings. This was one of those reservations that gave me that feeling, so I just monitored. I’m looking on the camera. These people don’t check in until about 10 o’clock 10 o’clock one person checks in.

Jon Bell:                              05:42                    That’s fine. Okay, great. Maybe I’m tripping. You don’t worry about it. 11 o’clock I’m getting notifications, movement, movement, movement, movement. I’m like, what in the world? I look at the camera, it looks like aunt are just running towards a piece of watermelon, which happens to be my basement apartment where there’s like 40 people coming into the apartment. Oh my God. Now it’s like 1:00 AM, what do I do? Message the guests, call Airbnb, call the police, head to the unit. All of that is happening pretty much as I’m just throwing what I need to put on just to go out there and handle this situation so the police get there. I get there, I talked to the police. I let them know what’s going on. I tell them how to approach the whole place. Say definitely there’s only one entry into the base, man. It’s through the back.

Jon Bell:                              06:37                    So if you have somebody go through the back, we can go down to the front of the home and go down the steps. That’s exactly what happened. One police officer blocks off the back. We go down the steps. We see literally about 20 people in this maybe 500 square foot basement apartment, and it smells like weed. Oh my God. They’re smoking all over the place. Weed is legal in the state that they’re in, so I’m looking at the cops like, this got to be illegal. 100% illegal. There’s too much cause the, a lot of it. Well, they pull up. The guy that made the reservation, I talked to him one-on-one. I’m bringing up, Hey, didn’t you see that? There’s external cameras, there’s noise monitors, there’s no smoking. What made you book this place? Did you think I was lying? You say, well, I didn’t see it.

Jon Bell:                              07:31                    Then he goes to tell me that, but what I did see was that you said that this was an entire place and I’m like, yeah, you got the entire basement apartment, all 14 photos that you’ve seen. You have access to that. But no, you listed it as the entire place. Okay. I’m not going to debate with you about what you booked, whatever, but the audacity, right. So I said, why did you bring all these people? He says, well, we were going to record a video kind of video or rap video. Really. It also says in the rules, no video holography, no loud music you were going to get put out within the first 30 minutes of you getting there. We actually put them out within about 45 minutes. They lingered around the place for probably a little longer than that, trying to record their little video outside of the property, which the police had to go circle back around.

Jon Bell:                              08:29                    So then further kicked them out. Very, very funny. I felt like this guy was just tested me by saying, Hey, it’s an entire place. One side note about this whole thing. In most places the police are not going to negotiate your independent contracts, so they’re really not going to be forceful in this scenario. They’re really just there for safety. So because was a large number of people against a smaller number of people there, they’re just doing short of safety so they’re not going to be the muscle and just throwing people out of the house. Don’t think that. But that’s my two funny scenarios. Two a one definitely my worst guest. The other one is definitely just the very unique guests that, Hey, they, they book long stays. What can I say?

Julian Sage:                       09:22                    Yeah, Jon, that’s a pretty crazy situation and I want to highlight this. I think that this is a such a unique episode because this really does show the, the difference of this business. This is not your typical real estate business. Yeah. You know, when you’re dealing with longterm renters, you might get someone that you know, messes up the inside of the house or you know, maybe they, they don’t, they don’t want to stay and you have to evict them. But with this business, you’re going to get some weird stuff. I’m sure that you’ve got plenty more stories, John. Well, we’ll, we’ll probably have to make another episode in the future. You know, because when you have, when you have 30 plus properties, you know, 35 plus properties, you’re going to get a bad egg every once in a while. So it’s just part of the business.

Julian Sage:                       10:00                    But like, like you said we don’t, we don’t say these things and we don’t call out guests because we want to complain about them. That’s not what we like to do. In our community and the host nation family we’re all about learning how we can better enhance ourselves as hosts, protect ourselves, that we can prevent these types of situations from happening. You know, how do you, how do you stop a person that’s in your basement making loud noises? How do you stop a person that is, you know, very emotional and they are, you know, maybe a little bit having some, some issues emotionally. And how do you handle that, that type of guests? How do you handle a situation where someone’s throwing a wrap party in your house? You, you have to be prepared for all these different types of situations and there’s tools and there’s methods that you can use to be able to handle these types of things.

Julian Sage:                       10:46                    Like Jon was saying, I could’ve had my noise monitoring device. Luckily it was just in my basement and I heard it from upstairs and I could just be like, Hey, can you quiet down? But if it was a situation where, you know, maybe there’s, it’s a shared space, maybe it’s a shared room and I’m not in the house. Maybe I have multiple units that I’m renting out. If I have those noise monitoring devices, then I could say, Hey, you know, I hear a lot of noise in this area. Can you please be mindful of the other guests? There are some people that use the hostel model, which is where you’re renting out multiple units in the same building. You do have to be mindful because you can get a bad review based off of your other guests in that same place. So having those devices, having noise, monitoring, having security, those are things that can help you to prevent yourself from having bad reviews. So question of the day, this is going to be a really good one, but what are some of your most interesting or worst guest experiences? Leave them in the comment section down below. And again, if you have any questions for us, use #askVRM. Let us know what your questions are. Leave it in the host nation Facebook group on Instagram, wherever it is, and your questions can end up on the show.

Julian Sage:                       11:54                    So until next time, host nation, keep on hosting. Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review as that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon the community. And I then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next step sewed. Keep on hosting.