Jon Bell:                              00:00                    In this episode, we’re talking about short term, mid term and long term reservations. 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, 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.

Jon Bell:                              00:33                    All right, welcome back, hosts. I am Jon Bell and I’m here with my good friend Julian Sage. And we’re talking about the length of stays in the terms that we’ve identified within them and really how it’s impacted our reservations in general. So Julian, I know we’ve all been expecting shorter term stays, but COVID-19 has hit. And really what’s the thing that we’ve seen that a lot of hosts have really been getting and what’s the day category that they’re really in?

Julian Sage:                       01:02                    Right. So I think we need to clarify what the differences between short term, mid term and long term. And mid term is a term that’s been thrown around quite often recently, so we need to clarify this once and for all, but short term, a short term stay is less than 30 days. A long term stay would be something that is like a long term tenant, so that would be a year plus.

Julian Sage:                       01:26                    The midterm stay is really that in between and that’s where we find corporate housing companies lying. So a corporate housing company is typically going to be getting in corporate guests and corporate guests coming from hospitals, from working facilities, interns, people that are transitioning. These are people that are going to be staying anywhere from one month to maybe up to 11 months. After that point though, we are going to be going more into a traditional long term stay, long term reservation. But what we’ve seen during this time is that a lot of hosts have been able to pivot their businesses to accommodate for midterm guests. They’ve been able to incorporate direct booking components and the corporate housing entities to be able to get these types of midterm stays in their places. And even though it isn’t from a profit standpoint, it is still a very good way to be able to supplement and get in some reliable occupancy.

Julian Sage:                       02:21                    So Jon, what are your thoughts on short term versus mid term versus long term and how you’re going to be applying that into your business?

Jon Bell:                              02:26                    You know, right now we need a good good mix between long term and mid term just to endure the storm. Of course, we know that our revenue really relies in the short term stays, but just because we don’t know when things are specifically going to end nationally and when people will start traveling back across borders, we need to really entertain those longer guests. And one thing that I’ve seen personally is you get somebody that books two weeks, but in the messaging that they send you, they say, I’m going to need to possibly extend. And it’s really because of the unknowing of when this whole thing will be lifted, when they can go back to wherever they came from., And they just need to extend to endure the storm.

Jon Bell:                              03:19                    So that’s a good guest right now. Those are the people that you really want. The one days and two days stays are coming in as well because we’re at minimum price or below. They’re not necessarily the best, but you need a good mix of medium and longer term stays.

Julian Sage:                       03:36                    Right. That’s because right now everybody is dropping their prices to be able to really compete with each other. Your short term stays aren’t going to be as profitable as they once were. So really it makes more sense from just a sanity and from a business operation standpoint to be able to save on cleaning fees, to be able to save just the amount of wear and tear on your unit to accommodate those midterm guests, those traveling nurses, those students, interns, all of these types of people. Now this is the point where you really should be focusing on optimizing your business.

Julian Sage:                       04:12                    Direct booking sites is something that will be able to help you to convert those people that are staying with you. So if someone is staying and they’re saying, Hey, I’m going to be here for a couple of weeks because of this thing, but I might want to extend, that would be a perfect opportunity for you to be able to have a direct booking portal for them to be able to stay. One of the ones that I recommend, it’s just very easy is YourPorter. If you have less than probably I’d say around 10 listings or you’re just trying to manage a smaller portfolio, yourporter is just very easy. They have a simple, a direct booking portal that you can create. You can put your custom domain name. It’s very, very simple. Probably one of the easiest on the markets if you are a host that’s managing quite a few more than we also recommend that looking into hostfully for your direct booking needs.

Julian Sage:                       04:58                    But there’s a lot of tools out there that make this easy for you to be able to build your direct booking websites. But again, this should be something that is a common standard. And moving forward we’re also going to be talking about different ways that you can try to get more direct bookings, some more corporate clients into your units. We have been talking to a lot more corporate housing companies, a lot of other hosts that have been pivoting their business for corporate stays. So that’s something that you can also expect in the near future.

Jon Bell:                              05:26                    Alright, Julian. So let’s just say you’re co-hosting a property or you’re looking to cohost. How could you either reposition yourself to really show your new owners that you have great value?

New Speaker:                    05:40                    Right Jon? So moving forward in the future there’s going to be a lot more competition for probably hosts that are going to be moving into the co-host model.

Julian Sage:                       05:48                    So we really have to be looking at different ways that we can differentiate ourselves from everybody else. One of those ways is how are we going to be able to tap into the local market and offer in case of these types of situations from happening again. This is a very pandemic situation, one of the larger black Swan events, but there’s also situations and times where there could be micro black swans. This could be like if Disney’s shuts down, this could be like if there is a red tide, let’s say the beach, just a bunch of fish die, there’s a red tide or something like that. There are these micro events that could happen that could make it very difficult or regulations in your city could change. Making it difficult for you to be able to maybe work around them.

Julian Sage:                       06:32                    Maybe you have can only rent your place out short term for six months. You have to be able to position yourself for how can you be the best asset for your client and that’s going to be with these midterm stays. If you can incorporate midterm and short term into your unique value proposition offering that you can tap into the local market. Or maybe that you have some different types of channels. I’ve talked to some of the hosts on the success stories podcast now and they’ve even created their own direct booking sites or their own corporate client websites to be able to funnel into their own business. So if you can go to a host and say, Hey, not only can I get you short term stays and help you to be able to increase your, your rental rates, but let’s just say we need to be able to accommodate for any type of regulation changes or any type of black Swan events, then you are the perfect person that knows how to pivot the business.

Julian Sage:                       07:24                    And if you are coming out of this time you know, with this COVID-19 pandemic, then you can also probably add that to your resume saying like, Hey, I knew how to pivot my business during this time, or I got out of this situation because of these types of tenants that I was able to bring in. And I can offer that to you as well as part of my unique value proposition.

Julian Sage:                       07:51                    So question of the day, where are you in your business? Are you accommodating short term guests, midterm guests, or long term guests? Leave it in the comment section down below.

Julian Sage:                       07:59                    And until next time, host nation. Keep on hosting. If you’d like Jon and I to answer your guys’ questions and be sure to go to the host station, Facebook group and use #askVRM. 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 episode. Keep on hosting.