Jon Bell:                               00:00                     In this episode, we are talking about how to protect yourself and your property against parties.

Julian Sage:                         00:08                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show is 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 subscribed 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:                               00:32                     All right everyone. A couple of my favorite words, parties and NoiseAware. We’re talking about those two things today, right? I talk about preventing parties and stuff like that. Don’t be part of the Airbnb stigma. Don’t end up in the news. Don’t have a camera inside of your place. We are 100% professional so we’re not going to do any of that and one of the devices that we need is noiseaware. I’m putting this one brand out there. NoiseAware, NoiseAware, NoiseAware because it is key to what we are doing. We cannot operate loosely and allow certain things to happen in our businesses. We are business owners and if we owned a business we just don’t want people coming in and destroying our stuff, right? As professionals, we want to make sure that we’re keeping our properties pristine. We’re going to protect ourselves from any type of lawsuits, from many types of press, from any type of negativity that could come.

Jon Bell:                               01:28                     I mean we’re already dealing with the sensitive word and that is Airbnb. We just don’t want to fall into that bad boy operator category, so we want to make sure that we protect our properties with NoiseAware. What is NoiseAware do if you don’t know by now? It tells us the noise levels of the property almost that real time. Why is that so important? It’s because when you get noise after a certain time, if you have quiet hours, you’re able to jump on it before your neighbors start to report it to whoever they report it to or before they started calling the police and then you finding out about it later on keeps you in the know of what’s going on and you’re able to resolve issues quickly. This is 100% key. I’m able to resolve any type of noise issue normally within 10 minutes of receiving the alert. I don’t know what other device you could use that could actually do that for you.

Julian Sage:                         02:24                     Now John, I know that there are some people that are also getting into the space and one of them being this company called Minut and you’ve actually started using this and testing this in your properties. If you can talk about NoiseAware versus Minut, because I know for a lot of people NoiseAware might be, they might think of that as like an expensive thing because it is a subscription service. You do have to pay for that, so you do have to account for that in your business expenses. But Minut does not have a subscription model. So if you could talk about the pros and cons of both of them in which one do you think would be best as a professional who is scaling a large rental arbitrage sub leasing business.

Jon Bell:                               03:03                     All right, well let’s just talk about the features of NoiseAware. They have two different sensors. They have an indoor sensor and an outdoor sensor. What does it do? It detects noise. That is all it does, but it does it in such a professional way that you are not just bombarded with false alarms. In my discovery against Minut. I found that Minut goes off just with me opening the door in my own home and my alarm chime saying, Hey, open door. Well my Minut goes off and says, Hey, there’s noise in the hallway. Well that’s not really true. I mean I literally could sit there and set my Minut to a level where, okay, this is too loud, right? I’m playing my own stereo system. You know, my whole seven speakers around and I turn it up and it doesn’t really go off where it needs to go off, but my NoiseAware has already tripped and started monitoring almost in real time what’s going on inside of my own home.

Jon Bell:                               04:06                     Now I program most of my devices in house. That’s how I’m able to kind of really bring up just what I’m seeing in my own home. Right. I want to test and make sure that this stuff is going to work. When I put it somewhere else, I just don’t go and install it and then say it’s supposed to work. I hope that you guys as professional operators go out and test many different things; sheets, devices, locks, cameras. You tell me what you like. I might switch to something that you guys like. This was one of those things that came up in one of our meetups where somebody told me, Hey, try this device. I tried it. On the noise side, it’s a little weak. On the other side, what it does have that is pretty good is one, it’s battery operated.

Jon Bell:                               04:51                     That battery should last about six months says the manufacturer’s claims. This means I can mount it anywhere. On the noiseaware side, I have to give up almost a wall plug because I want to plug it in and screw it in so nobody could move it so I could put this anywhere. If you are not using some type of nest system or something that tells you when the smoke alarm goes off, the minut we’ll notify you that something is going off inside of the home. So we got noise, we got motion and we got smoke. What else does Minut brings to the table. It also gives you some type of meters in regards to moisture and the inside temperature of the apartment or home or wherever it is. This could be very important if you just want to monitor what’s going on. If you have a tropical destination where mold might be a big thing, they have a mold index that’s also there and available with inside the app. These things I’m not able to fully test inside of my home just because I’m not privy to most of those extremes, but what I can test and what I do want to defend against is noise, parties and that fact alone Minut fall short to noiseaware.

Julian Sage:                         06:10                     So if you’re looking for a tool that is really just focused on the indoor monitoring of the noise, then go in with NoiseAware, they are clearly the dominant in the space. Minute sounds like they are trying to do a whole lot of things and noise monitoring is one of the things that they do fall short on. So at this point, it is not a direct competitor with noiseaware. It sounds like they are kind of being the all in one for a bunch of other aspects that are definitely useful for your property and might be useful in more of those tropical places, let’s say like Puerto Rico or Florida or somewhere where moisture and humidity and stuff like this might be a bigger issue, but just for monitoring noise, noiseaware is the winner.

Jon Bell:                               06:56                     One other advantage that I see that’s coming for noiseaware is it is going to tie into my messaging system. When it ties into my messaging system, I’m 100% sure I’m going to be able to automate those same messages that I personally will send when noise starts to happen to the guests and wait for a response, and then if it doesn’t quiet down, it will send my next message and if it doesn’t calm down, I’m sure I can send myself a message. This is almost automating this whole piece. This is key. We want automation, we want to make sure things are very simplified for us as operators. There’s no way that we can do all of this without any type of smart things or automations of any sort. This extra tie in is 100% something that I’m looking for that I’m not too sure Minut is gonna have within a few months or maybe even a year or so.

Julian Sage:                         07:53                     Right? So we’re trying to stay on top of the cutting edge and we’re building this business. We’re not just building for one property but we’re building for multiple properties. Let’s say, if you have a portfolio of a hundred properties, you can’t be waiting there and having a message sent directly to you and then having to manually send messages when noise starts going up, because that’s, that’s a a hundred property. That’s a hundred people that could be potentially, you know, maybe getting a little bit too loud. So we want to be able to automate these things on the back-end because we’re scaling a vacation rental machine, not just a single property.

Julian Sage:                         08:32                     So question of the day, which monitoring devices are you going to be trying out? Leave it in the comment section down below. And 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 is that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon the community. And then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next step episode. Keep on hosting.