In this episode of Vacation Rental Machine, Jon Bell and Julian Sage talk about how to keep guests from throwing parties in your short term rental airbnb units.
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Julian: 00:00 In this episode we’re talking all about how to prevent parties, so stay tuned.
Julian: 00:05 Vacation rental machine helps, so suggest 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, giving you 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.
Julian: 00:30 Hey, welcome back host nation to another episode of vacation rental machine. In this episode we are talking about parties and how to prevent them. So what happens just as part of the nature of the business is that people are going to try to sneak into your pro perties and throw parties. You know, people are traveling, they want to have a good time. It’s part of the nature of the business and part of our job as property managers and landlords is we want to make sure that we keep those people out and prevent those types of situations from happening. Because if we can set certain measures in place, we can stop trouble from happening in the first place. So as a property manager, John is someone that has multiple properties, 25 plus. Obviously you come into contact with a lot of people that are maybe [inaudible] getting into trouble or trying to start some trouble, or maybe they’re just getting a little bit too rowdy and too loud and it might cause disruption to your neighbors, which could hurt your lease. So what are some of the things that that we should be covering if we want to prevent parties?
Jon: 01:27 All right, so this one is a tough question and it kind of just answered it right? You’re really going to have to have a few different layers kind of put into one deter, prevent and protect your revenue from somebody that does come in and does actually have a party. So we’re going to talk about different layers of things that are going to be needed just to make sure that we keep the revenue, but we also maintain our reputation with our neighbors and our community and we don’t end up on TV. We don’t want to end up on TV. We’re not bad operators where the best operators. Right? All right, so first thing to do when you create your listing, you have to put in certain rules. Certain rules that I feel like I need to have in all of my listings are number one, you want to put in your quiet hours.
Jon: 02:13 If you are in a community, if you’re using rental arbitrage, you already know what those quiet hours are. Nine times out of 10 they started at 10:00 PM and go up until maybe 9:00 PM if that’s the case, my quiet hours start at 9:00 PM and go until 9:00 AM reason why I add that extra fluff is I have a window of time that I can go in and straighten up a guest that is actually doing something wrong. So that means I can message back and forth. I can maybe call them. I can do whatever. I got it dude, just to get them to quiet down before quiet hours start. Now that also means if you want an alert at nine o’clock when 10 o’clock hits, if you didn’t get anything resolved, you’re going to have to take the next steps. So in your roles, that’s number one. You’ve got to have that.
Jon: 03:01 One of the other rules that I recently added to my rules is that local people must message before they book. People will ignore that one and sometimes you just have to bring it right back up. If they don’t really give me a purpose of their trip in their initial message, sometimes I’ll ask for it because it’s just very hard to like deter against them. I mean it’s not like they, there’s a black anywhere that says, Hey, your thing says you’re from the same area as the listing. You got to go through this step over here. They can book just like anybody else. That’s your instant book. These people will instant book because they know they don’t have to interact with you. So keep in mind that there are people that are coming to party. They’re sad, right? They know that instant book means I don’t interact.
Jon: 03:46 They know that, so checking means I’m not meeting someone, so they’ll take advantage of all of that. One of the next layers of this whole thing is to have the devices to kind of start to see what’s going on at the property. No, you cannot have internal cameras. Not at all, but you can have external cameras. Your external cameras are going to be part of that. Identifications that just to try to tell the story to someone else. That third party who’s going to be more neutral but leaning towards the guests. This could be the platform support. Could be Airbnb, could be HomeAway. They’re going to be more guest kind of friendly. They’re really not host friendly. Keep that in mind. So you’ve got your cameras on the outside, right? That shows you how many people are going in. Let’s talk about some of the ways to identify people that are going to do something bad for me today.
Jon: 04:36 I just had one that just happened. I’m going to show some pictures of this example, but I had a guy that booked, it’s a three bedroom place. He listed for one guest. All right? For one guest at a three bedroom place, that just doesn’t make sense and because it was a last minute booking, you don’t have so much time to kind of correct it. Primarily when you do it on the same day, Airbnb, they don’t allow you to change the reservation on this thing. They check in. So quick message and my message, I say to him, Hey, I see you at your local. Can you tell me the purpose of your trip? Can you also confirm the number of guests that you’re going to have? I’ll tell you what his reply was later and I’ll tell you what happened later with this whole thing, but that’s the first thing. Try to identify what’s kind of going to go on one.
Jon: 05:22 You see their local too. If it’s just odd now don’t get an eerie feeling about everybody that’s booking because you can’t run a business that way. If you’re scared, people are just going to mess everything up. Nine times out of 10 to keep your minds that, that somebody’s going to put one thing you’ll be okay. So internal devices, I am a big fan of noise aware. I am testing one of their competitors at this moment. I’m actually gonna try to put out a video and competitors thing of the two products. Talk about the advantages and disadvantages and stuff like that. So we can all make educated decisions on which ones that we should put into our units. So you’ve got your external cameras, you’ve got some type of internal device, there’s the noise aware, there’s another device that checks the amount of cell phones inside of the place that might work in a rural area better than someplace that’s an apartment building where anybody could have cell phones or are user guests.
Jon: 06:17 So be mindful of your setup and get the best product for your setup. If you are getting a big place, you might need multiple devices for that one place. But definitely covered the big common areas of it. That way you know you’re covered. We’ve got devices covered. The other thing is really just kind of just be on it. You kind of get a feeling. Sometimes when I see the reservation booked wrong, I do get that feeling. I’m gonna shoot it over to my screen to show you guys exactly what I’m talking about here. Now I’m sharing just the message that I sent to a guest before booking. Well after booking he actually instant booked. He came in, I just looked at the details. I noticed that Hey, they booked for multiple days. That actually is another thing that you should do is to not allow one night looking cause when you’re not, allow those, those kinds of just deter people from going and throwing a party for a night and getting out.
Jon: 07:16 They know if they throw a party they’re most likely not going to stay the next night anyway because you’re going to be on them about it. Somebody reported it to somebody so they’re not going to book for 10 days and then you know have a party on the first or second day. If that happens, they’re probably planning the party on the last day, not allowing one day bookings is one of those deterrent factors that deters people from even booking a party. That’s the only thing that I’ve found that has turned kind of like our instant book scenario into something that deters people from booking. Plus you get the benefit of longer bookings and more revenue per booking and less turnover for your cleaners. There’s a whole lot of benefits from just having a longer stay requirement. Play with it as you must. Sometimes on those orphan days you do need to allow one night bookings and that’s perfectly fine if you’re going for that high occupancy.
Jon: 08:11 Okay. Back to this message. The guest got all my automated messages saying that they can check in. They actually wanted to check in at one o’clock I didn’t approve anything like that because he didn’t answer some of my questions, so in here I just said, just a reminder, you didn’t answer some of my questions. I repeated the questions that I had sent him previously. I basically, he’s a local and I wanted to know the purpose of his trip. At the same time. Could he confirmed the total number of guests? Well, not too long. After that 10 minutes, he sent a message saying it is just him and that he is just trying to get out the house because he’s angry with his roommates. Right. Right around that time, people were already at the door, so all my cameras, I was able to see all these people standing outside.
Jon: 09:00 Well, what did I do? I turned on the speaker just to listen in, and what I found out was the guy that made the actual reservation was not present, so therefore people right here, that means one more person was missing. There was no escalation and price for having five people in this place, but because he told me that it was just him and I see four people at the door and I was able to identify that neither one of them were him at the same time. Each one had their own suitcase. He blatantly just lied. Right. That’s how I felt. I felt like, you know what, I can’t trust this guy, so what did I do? Call it Airbnb. I was able to kind of get them to call the guests, interact with them, try to get a feel for you know what’s going on.
Jon: 09:47 I told them technically that he already started breaking the rules prior to check and that was true. So what Airbnb did was I sent him a copy of the roles. They then communicated with the guests said that, I’m sorry, so reservation is going to get canceled because of blank reasons and yeah, I think I prevented something that could have been a little bad. And this was one of the new units that I have. So I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. Now granted this reservation was 900 plus. I would have loved to have it, but you have to sacrifice certain things at certain times. So today’s example, this episode was, was properly time just because this just happened this morning and you can see my phone was already dying, so I’m for an upgrade.
Julian: 10:34 Yeah. John, one of the same things happened to me recently. I had a guest that was a very new profile that didn’t have any reviews. They were local and they just said, Hey, I’m trying to book like tonight and you know, because my wife and I, we live in our property and that that was a downstairs basement unit. We didn’t really feel comfortable, you know, renting it to someone that didn’t have a clear ex, you know, explanation. They didn’t have any reviews. They were looking to book on a very short notice. So these are just all kinds of red flags and it was actually good that we didn’t end up booking with them and they actually ended up canceling that and going somewhere else. But you know, had we gone with that, you know, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to book this week long person that was able to stay with us that you know, brought us in a whole lot more revenue because we didn’t want that really short, just weekend booking for this one person.
Julian: 11:23 So there’s a bunch of different ways that you can prevent, one of the big things that we do need to say is that you have to disclose if you are going to be recording anything inside or outside the house. There has to be proper disclosure because if your guests complaints like, Hey, why are you messaging me? How’d you know that I had people or you know, or they could even just complain that there’s a camera outside and if you don’t have that proper disclosure they can actually cancel your account. They could cancel that listings profile because it’s outside of the rules and you know they can flag that you could not be able to take any bookings. So it’s a big deal. Y’all have proper disclosure in your listing description when you are communicating with the guests like, Hey, you know we do have a monitoring devices, you know to make sure that X, Y and Z reason, but you have to let the guests know that.
Jon: 12:06 I definitely want to add to that one and just say I have it in my listing at the same time. I send it to my guests one more time just to make sure that they fully have it. I also asked for them to acknowledge it. I don’t always get that acknowledgment back, but if they’ve been going back and forth with me over messaging, I assume that they have read it. So yes, very important to let them know and if they feel a little ways about, you know, monitoring devices or whatever like that, you just have to just ease them and let them know whether they’re not recording, they just let you know people are going to party or whatever like that and just softly say, but I don’t think that you right. And they normally say, no, not me at all.
Julian: 12:48 And there’s lots of recording devices out there available on the market, but if you want to know what John and I use, then go on over to short term sage.com back slash kit and you can see all of the items that we use in our properties to be able to prevent parties because there’s lots of stuff out there that have different levels of service and types of subscriptions. But if you want to know what we use then definitely go check that out. And like John was saying, we’re constantly testing out new things. And seeing what is it going to best optimize the business because maybe it doesn’t make sense. Purchasing these expensive products when you can find something that maybe doesn’t have a subscription service and stuff like that. So we’re constantly trying to find better ways. So question of the day, what are you using in your properties in order to prevent parties?
Julian: 13:28 Leave it in the comment section down below and following on with this and the next video we’re talking all about what to do if someone does throw a party and how to keep that under control. Talk to the host in the next episode. Until next time, keep on hosting. Hope you host found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with John the community and I, then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.
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