5 Tips For Crushing The AirBNB Short Term Rental Game w/ Christian DelRocini

What's up everyone. This is ni at a wall, a host of via Cabo home financial freedom mastermind group. This group meets virtually every Wednesday at 7:00 PM Eastern and the members of this group are committed to achieving financial freedom. Well before the traditional retirement age. So in this podcast, you are going to get VIP access to the conversations we have about different forms of events.

And creative ways to get your dollars working harder for you than you originally worked to obtain those dollars. Welcome to the Aqaba home podcast. Today. We are joined by CT. He's getting ready to start his first Airbnb. And we're going to take a deep dive into some of the tools, tips, and tricks that can help you be successful as an Airbnb host. And so the first tip and trick is to use management software. It there's a bunch of 'em out there. I've heard a lot.

, I've heard of a couple others, but the one that I use is hospitable, formerly known as smart BNB. And CT, if you can see my screen. Okay. The cool. I know it's a lot going on right now, but the cool thing about this is everything is run through this system. Okay?

If you're only planning to have one Airbnb, you may not need something like this, but if you get that one and you find out, Hey, I really liked this and I want to start building you definitely want to have a software so that you don't miss any messages or anything from. So the first thing that this sophomore helps you do is from a communication standpoint.

One thing that guests like is being informed about check-in information, being informed about how to check out how to use all the software and everything that's within your house. And so I'm going to take you through actually a guest that checked in. So this is all stuff that comes out without me having to do with. Right. So as soon as somebody books, they get a new reservation message and this tells them, Hey, Dinetia, you know, thank you for booking our home.

We look forward to hosting you throughout our stay in Atlanta and helping make this a memorable experience. Immediately after booking, you should have received an automated message from August lock, which will give you your unique access code to enter the. Please note that your access code will only be available from 3:00 PM on the day of check-in until 11:00 AM on the day of checkout. And we also highly recommend that you download the app for the August lock key to allow you to open it.

If the key pad is not working and then it also tells them about the welcome book that's located on the dining table, that's going to have a whole bunch of other information for. Uh, to be able to like, know what to do around the area, know exactly how to work any of the thermostats or anything in the house and answer really 80 to 90% of the questions.

So when somebody books, they get this automated message that comes out and then on the day of, on the day of when they are checking in, they get a check-in message that says. Right here. So a couple of hours before they check in and just reiterate what it said before, Hey, please look at the check-in instructions on the main page. And also here goes your unique code for checking in, just enter that in and it's going to be available, you know, from this time, at that time.

And then the next day, another automated message that's important is to have a morning check-in right on the first day that somebody. And the cool thing about this message. It doesn't have to be long, but it shows them that you care. And one of two things will happen either one. They're going to say, man, this is awesome place. I love it. That's great. Well, one of three things, they're going to say one, it's an awesome place. I love it.

Too. They're not technically savvy and they're probably not checking their, their app or phone or have notifications. So they may not say anything or three. They can mention something that is off putting with your place, that if you were to resolve, could make this a five-star experience. I can tell you that we were able to learn from one of these first morning messages with a newer property that we had. That all of the electrical and one of the rooms was not working.

It was completely not functioning. Right. And, and the previous two guests hadn't said anything, but this, this one guest was like, Hey, I can't plug anything in. And we're like, oh, snap. So we had to send somebody in to get that fixed. And so it helps with that. And it allows you to fix any issues before it ends up in a review. The last thing you want is to get a bad review, especially starting. That can really sink your ship.

You don't want to be below a 4.5 and really you're shooting for 4.8 or higher average so that you can become a Superhost and get boosted to the top. Any questions on the, on the automation of the messaging piece? Um, no, um, I just like the fact that that's just a little more. The local area, but also how to use the place. We don't leverage that. Make somebody aware. Definitely. Definitely.

And, and to that point, the last piece, so these are all ones that you want it to seem like it's coming from you. Like you just typed it that morning. And the last piece is reiterating the checkout instructions so that they know, um, exactly what you have written in your welcome. And so this right here are the checkout instructions. I'm going to read it. It says, Hey, I hope you enjoyed your stay here thus far below our checkout instructions.

Please make sure all the furniture's returned to its original location. Number two, please make sure you have all of your valuables. Number three, if there is one available, please place all your dirty dishes into the dishwasher and hit run. This is important because it helps your cleaning. Uh, move efficiently through multiple units. If you have one property in one cleaner, okay. That four-hour timeframe or however long you have between one guest checking out.

And another checking in is probably sufficient. When you start to have 6, 7, 8, you need to make sure that you, you make it seamless so that your team can get in. And. Um, number four, please turn off all exterior interior lights five, please make sure all your stove, burners and ovens are turned off six. Please leave all the linen on the bed and place the dirty towels that you've used inside of the bathtub just makes it a little easier for our cleaners to know, Hey, these are clean.

These are not. Uh, from a towel perspective or, Hey, we didn't even use this room perspective. Right. And it kind of seamlessly make, make that a little easier for them and then making sure they know it's important they, to part by the departure time, because we do have people coming right after to get the place turned over. We also ask that they empty the trash into the outside bins, and then that they send us a text or a message, really a message through the.

Uh, when they've left the house, now, some guests do this, some don't, but the guests that do it does help us get an even earlier and potentially be able to get that unit turned over quicker so that we can offer an early check-in to the next guest for a feat. Uh, we actually did that with this guest. They were asking, Hey, can we do an early check in? And we happen to not have somebody staying the day before. And so we were able to get them in at 11 instead of three, and we charged him $75 for.

Uh, so you can get extra money for check-ins extra money for checkouts, if you don't have somebody staying. And so that's part of the automation. So this is a message that was sent for the checkout. And we also reiterate because not everybody knows that, Hey, if you enjoyed your time, please leave us a five star review. It's going to help our business grow. And it's so important for us. Um, the other piece here is there's going to be some questions.

You notice that you answered it pretty consistently. One of the ones for me was how to work the TV. If somebody does not read the guidebook, they may not know, or the whole instructions on the listing. They may not know that we don't have. We purposely don't put cable in any place because it's an extra expense. What we do is put high speed internet, and then we put Google Chromecast so that you can cast whatever you have to the TV. And so, uh, some people know how to use that.

Some people don't and I found myself answering that question over and over, Hey, how do I cast? Well, first you gotta connect to the wifi and then you turn on the TV and then you cast, right? And so you can put automated responses to questions about TV. Two questions about parking. And I've started to do that to the point where it will send an automated message to somebody, as soon as they mentioned something about TV or about parking and it lets them know what the situation is.

So if you were to say something, I'm actually going to pull it up in the operations. So here goes some of the, the rules that I have guest experience. So here goes some that active messages. That I have. So this is all the pre-check and people, you know, questions about the TV. So you can see if this pops up, it's going to answer it instantly. If somebody says something about the TV and it's going to let them know, Hey, our TV does not have traditional cable. It's a smart TV and named by Google.

You can cast any media. And once you turn on the TV, please ensure that it's on the right side. And then go ahead and cash from your laptop, smart, former tablet. And this is something that I kept typing, like after three times of trying to find it. And re-type it exactly the same. I said, you know what, let me automate this. Make sure if somebody asks, it's going to automatically go out. And the cool thing is at the bottom, it tells them that this is auto-generated.

Cause they're going to wonder how you answered within three seconds. Right. But Hey, please know, this is an auto-generated. And then did this answer your question? Um, I had somebody a couple of weeks ago ask about the TV at like 1:00 AM, right. Auto-generate response. Hit them. I didn't see any of this until the morning. And they had already responded to said yes, thank you. We figured it out. Perfect. That's good. Um, so that's how you work. The automate auto-generated responses to that.

Gotcha. And for one second there, um, it sounds like, well, where are you doing? What you're talking about with the Chrome cast, not providing cable, um, allowing them to do their own logging. You're showing them, but you don't have any house account for Netflix or anything of the sort on and on any of that. Okay, good. I was like, additionally, um, It sounds like you'd like to leverage Natalie hospital, but August because they work together. Is that correct?

Is there another, is there another August that works with hospitable? So it's not specifically with hospitable it's with Airbnb. The August lock works is integrates with Airbnb and also the yellow lock. I've never used the yellow lock, but have you heard of that ELL lock? Okay. So both of those integrate with it, I just, from years and years I've been using the August lock. So once I found out about it, I said, Hey, I'm gonna keep using all that.

Um, and they should pay me, but yeah, we've been using that. True true. And they should, they should pay us for this free advertising. Uh, but, but on that Netflix piece, right, there's some hosts. I mean, you stayed at Airbnbs. I've stayed at Airbnb that used and have those house accounts. And it's awesome. I'm not gonna lie when I was in, cause I don't personally have Netflix on my phone. I have it on my TV. But that's a whole nother story. We're not going to get into how it happened.

But, uh, so when I was staying touch with the family, um, they had a house account that had Netflix and Amazon. It, it was awesome. We finished watching, you know, a couple of squid games, me and my brothers, uh, and other shows, right. Family friendly shows and things of that nature. Um, but for me personally, I don't give a house account just because it's an extra expense. That's not necessarily new.

Yeah. And especially for something like me or prime incur costs, but yeah, I like the personal accounts. Absolutely. The other piece within this, and this is still just the first one, but this is the most important thing is setting up your system. It takes some time. But it's going to help you on the backend.

So the other piece with this is from a guest experience standpoint right now, when it comes to reviews, the way the reviews work is you have 14 days after a guest checks out to leave them a review and they have 14 days to leave your review. If you don't do it within that time period, no review gets left with guests. You have, I have some active messaging rules where it reminds them after like the day they check out to say, Hey, you know, that five star review would really help.

And we have automated reviews that go out. So look at these pending reviews, you're going to see two different ones. These are two guests that checked out yesterday, right? So 24 hours later to review, we'll leave. I have just a regular review. It's pretty automated. The review's going to say, let me pull it back. The review is going to say. Um, So that this, so this is the same review.

I leave everybody all five stars and it says guest name was an awesome guest would definitely host again, if they were not an awesome guest or I wanted to change something, I could edit that here and then hit save, and it'll still go out at whatever time I want. Now, if you have a bad guest and there's going to be one every so often, right? I guess that does something to your. And, or a guest that you believe did not have the best experience.

Maybe they're angry about something that you've tried to assuage them, but they're like, they're just out to get you on that point. You want to hit the review guests and you click this bad review button. And what it allows you to do is it automatically delays the publishing of this review until literally two minutes before the 14 day period. Right. Right. And then it posts.

So this guest right here was, it was stuck outside for no, no, not this guest, this guest right here, uh, came into the place and was immediately complaining about some like chip marks. This is one that I managed chip marks and things that were, have been there for years. Like, Hey, this is. Mark is here. Hey, there's a mark on the counter, like a bunch of stuff. And so just to be safe, we put bad review. They're not a bad guest, right?

To be clear, they're still going to get a good review, but we enabled this button so that if they post a review and they try to talk through all this stuff, it's not going to hit our account for 14 days, which is important. You don't want any bad reviews. You want those to delay as much as possible so that you can get as many good reviews on them. To assuage that and to kind of mask it up one bad review out of 10 is not going to hurt you.

Now, if you have one bad review with only three reviews, that's going to hurt you. People are gonna start asking you questions. Hey, what's going on here? And it's kind of hard to, to get off and running there. And also you're going to get so busy with one, not so much, but as you start to build up and it gets booked up, you're going to get so busy that you can't. Remember to post six guests reviews, right? Like, Hey, you're going to be doing other things.

So this automatically will post a good review, 24 hours later. And if it's anything but that you need to change something, you just go in before that 24 hours edit it and kind of go from there. Yeah. Because you'd probably be aware of some issues prior to their departure to, to absolutely. Now for most of your guests, if you set this up correctly and get all these active rules going. 90% of you will, we'll call it 80% of your guests are not really going to ask anything.

They're just going to be in out. And it's going to be pretty smooth to where you don't even really talk. Especially those guests that are technology savvy. Once they see all this and like, oh, I got it. And they're going to leave you alone. Pretty much the in and out. Gotcha. Can you use the same platform for your ongoing rentals or as is more Airbnbs? This is you used to be called smart BNB because it literally integrates with Airbnb. You can't use it for a regular rental.

It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Um, but from a short-term rental perspective, it's awesome. And it integrates with all of your. Um, your, your booking platforms. So I do Airbnb and BRBO, um, booking.com. I haven't figured out yet. I need to like, take some time and, and do that, but I do those two. And then I also do the, um, the direct site, which they just came out with. They're working to get this one filled out, but they also have a direct.

And for repeat bookers or people that have five star ratings or are really good, staying at your house, highly recommend putting something in there. I personally put a little postcard with a QR code to the direct side saying, Hey, next time book here to save on fees. Uh, but would highly recommend putting something in there to make them a repeat customer, even off the platform. And so I have a guest that's checking in and more.

Uh, that comes here once a month through senior, they come here to teach people and they do concerts and stuff, and they've been booking direct the last three times. They booked four times in the last three times they booked direct and they come back to the same place. But this is kind of my direct website, pretty basic, but it has, it pulls in all the data from Airbnb.

So you don't have to create two sites to just literally once you have the one and you link it to your hospitable, it pulls it all in and they can look in book from there. Fair enough. Any questions on the software? All right. So we're going to keep this up in the background, cause we're going to have to keep coming back to this between, but now what a jump into the second tip and trick, and these are the longest tips and tricks ever. Um, so the second one is dynamic pricing. All right.

This is important. So, uh, I live in Atlanta and operate in Atlanta. And the cool thing about this city is there's always something. Literally, I just had some friends come out and stay and actually some, some clients come out to, um, look for some houses and they couldn't get a hotel. So they ended up staying at, at one of my, and they were like, oh, you know, dude, the dude. And they ended up staying at one of the BnB's because literally everything was booked.

And I have no idea what's going on this weekend. There's literally no sporting events, there's just conferences or something. And so, uh, you can lose out if all you have is just the same standard pricing for during the week and the same standard pricing for, uh, the weekends, right. And with dynamic pricing, what this allows you to do. Is it makes you operate like a hotel.

If you ever look at booking a hotel, you'll notice that during the week, it's a lot cheaper when you hit the weekends or there's an event that price gilts up. Um, and so this allows you to do the same thing and I'll actually dive in to show you kinda what the pricing looks like. As you're pulling that up at some point here, I will ask you if there's a percentage charger, a flat rate or the assault, here's a lower okay. The leveraging. Yeah. So let's, let's jump in that hospitable.

It is when you start out, it's $15 per property when you start out and then that price goes a little less as you have more. So I think right now I'm averaging maybe $10 per property with. But when you start out, it's 15 or so, uh, per property. And then for dynamic pricing, which is the pricing labs tool or beyond pricing tool, this one charges you 1% of your bookings.

So if you have like right now, you can see, I have somebody staying here, checking in today and they're staying here through Thursday. So they charged me 1% of the 99 per night. So, you know, 90 cents. Right? We're $9. Scratch that. Sorry. It's early $9. Hey, come on now. Um, but 1% scratch all that. It's 1% of this total. So 5 96, 1% of 5 96. We put you at a five, $5 and 96 cents. So it's not bad at all.

And the cool thing about this and what I come in here and do is the weekends typically are a lot higher and you can set your minimum price, like, Hey, this is the bare minimum. I want to take it. And as you start to get closer to that date, if it's not booked, it'll start to lower your price, especially during the week. And then you can set your base price and it just goes off of your history. It goes off of what is available in the area. And also if there's some special.

That the algorithm knows of that you don't know up it'll boost your prices. So you can see right here for the ones that are further out, they're paying a little more and for the ones that are close together, it's a little less. And if I ever feel like, Hey, I really want to get this booked. You know, Monday through Thursday is going to be tough. I can highlight those days and I can say, you know what, let me, let me do a. Uh, slight change.

I'm going to decrease that by 10% to hit the algorithms within Airbnb and make it really, really, um, float to the top. Airbnb likes lower price properties, of course, and they just did an algorithm change and they do this every so often, but the new algorithm looks at your next two weeks of available or next, next two weeks of availability. And it displays the lowest price that you have within the next two weeks. So. Within my next two weeks, the lowest price is 70.

There's also one for 134, which is a pretty large spread for a one bedroom. Right. But they're going to show $70 on the list page. When people are looking, they're going to see 70 before they select their dates. Right? And so it gets people to see it, look at your listing, see the descriptions, hopefully fall in love with it. And then when they book their days, that's when their actual pricing per day will come out.

Okay. Now, as far as a pricing strategy, when it comes to your, um, cleaners, right? What I typically like to do is charge a little bit more than what the cleaning fee is. So for this one bed one bath, my cleaning fee is down to $51. Uh, preterm. And that was over time. It used to be 65, but once you start getting more business, you can negotiate and bring the overall price of your cleanings down. Um, and so I charge 75 per cleaning for this one. I also have another home.

Um, that's a three bed, two bath that costs one 20 per cleaning or yeah, one 20 per cleaning. And I charge one 50. And the reason for that is there's going to be some times where you're potentially going to have to pay more for the cleaning because it's an extensive cleaning or that guests just left it in not a good situation.

And there's other times where you're going to need to replace some stuff and grab cleaning supplies and, and all that's not really factored into just paying the cleaners, their cleaning fee. So you got to build in a little buffer for that. To, to make it a little more palatable for you now, you don't want to make it super high, right? Because that will kind of deter some people, but you do need to have a cleaning fee that's higher than what you're paying your actual cleaners to clean.

And then during the low season, the cool thing about this dynamic pricing is you can really easily go in and cut your prices down because in the winter time, it's typically a lot less people visiting, especially during the week. I can tell you the weekends typically stay booked. Um, during the week you do need to get creative to make sure that you can stay book in the off season during summer when everybody's traveling, at least in Atlanta, don't really got to worry about it.

I can just leave this thing, let it do it. And it just stays booked. You can see, I actually have a request and I need to address that for these are direct booking requests, these ones that are blocked right here. So I need to actually go in and accept that from hospitable, which I will. Okay. Any questions on the pricing tool? No, no, I can see how this is all scalable. Absolutely. Absolutely would be nice to work for a long-term mental as well. Yeah, no, that'd be smooth, man.

The automated messaging. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now we're jumping into August block and this is the third automation and it's your locks. And we just talked about it before, but this integrates with Airbnb. And it allows you to have automatic messages sent to guests, which will give them their lock code and also give them, um, you know, access to the app if they want to download that.

And so I'm going to kick it back over to the platform just so I can show you what that message looks like when it comes out. So when that automated message comes out, what I have here, as soon as somebody books. This message comes within a minute after they book. And it tells them that, Hey, Airbnb is partnered with August lock to give you access. And it automatically creates a code for them that will only work during the time that they're checking in.

And the time that they're checking out, it also allows them to download the app directly using the same information that they have in Airbnb so that they can have access to unlock it from the phone. Because sometimes the key pad that we use, uh, needs a new battery, or it doesn't function correctly, or you gotta it's finicky. Sometimes they keypad, but they always would have access to that. Uh, during their stay so that they can get in and out from there, from that standpoint.

So that's really a benefit only because I've, uh, talked to a couple of other Airbnb hosts that did not have an automation system. And they were the ones that were putting it in for each lock. And that worked for a while. Until they started getting a couple more and, and there was one instance where they forgot and they were out, you know, in a loud place and they didn't see it for a couple hours. Right. And that's definitely a negative review.

Somebody can't get in and it's cold or anything like that. It's not going to be good. And this was out in Chicago. So you can imagine it's not going to be good. So you want to automate as much as you can to eliminate the human error. So it's not you having to really actively do any. Unless there's an issue or some random question that pops up. Yeah. Nah, I'm just trying to encourage everyone to use August story yet. This better. Airbnb, but also for long-term rentals. That's interesting.

Why, um, have you ever had an issue with attendance or during changeover? Um, just the ongoing in August. Uh, you can see when things go and leave, you can use, uh, video recording, if you would like to that's all capable with. Um, but that's been a huge blessing for us with all just long-term rentals and that's less turnover obviously than the Airbnb side. So yeah, August has been great for as long as you put me on to local dude.

See, I didn't even think about using it for other long-term rentals because it's an expensive block, right. Compared to just getting a quick set. Um, but that makes sense. Cause then you can see. And out, even for maintenance, you can just, Hey man, it's going to be there. You can just say, then I can let them in without that tenant being there. Um, and additionally, we've actually repainted less doors without having to use it in the door and.

People fumbling with stuff, they can use your phone and can come in passive. So there's less marks in the door. If that matters. I don't have a qualitative number for that, but I don't like painting tools. I don't pay any. So I got some marks here, somebody else's Netflix account. So I have to do the painting. No. That's a huge gym, man. I didn't even, that's pretty cool. I'm going to look into that cause uh, I love that. Um, I don't have a problem.

You wouldn't be able to keep people out of that property, but we haven't had any of those kinds of serious issues. But the main one you mentioned is maintenance, um, and not letting that affect the renter's day to day. Yeah. And do you actually give a. Key physical key to them too, or it's it's that? And then there's like a lockbox dude. That's awesome. Uh, when Barbie doesn't have a physical key for the garage, we're not putting all this outside in there. Okay. So, um, okay.

Moving forward, we're going over to the cleaners, right? Cleaner strategy. The cool thing about this software. Is, and the main reason I got it, cause I thought I was, I had like two properties on it. I mean, I can do this through the app, but with these two, how do I let the cleaners know when they're cleaning? I'm going to tell you another story. It's about my same friend in Chicago, right?

They were, um, they were running Airbnb for the past two years and this is somebody that inspired me to get in. Right. And they're like, man, it's going good. I don't need to worry about anything there. They were used to sending their cleaner, the whole calendar. Like taking a screenshot, sending it to them, uh, at the beginning of the month so that the cleaners can schedule it and be ready to rock.

But then they had a last minute booking and forgot to let the cleaner note and they had guests show up. Right. They went into the home. Thankfully, I don't know where these guests came from. I don't know, you know, the whole situation, but these guests didn't trip and they were like, Hey, you know, it's okay. Just bring us some sheets and we're going. And they didn't leave a bad review or anything.

Those guests were some saints, but if I walked into a hotel and I saw, you know, the sheets, ruffled and everything, like somebody literally had just gotten up, it would not be good. Right. I'd be like, Hey man, I need room. I need everything. Right. Same thing with the Airbnb. Cause you're running a mini hotel when you think about it. And so what this allows you to do is automate all the messages that you have going to your cleaner. Which is huge.

So when you look at the operations tab, this is my team members, right? So I've got my cleaning team. I've got some maintenance guys, my lawn guy, and an of course, me as well, cause I had to test it out. And so when I'm looking at some of these rules and notifications, anytime there's a new reservation, my cleaners get a message. Uh, immediately that says, Hey, there's a new reservation at this address. They're going to be checking in on this date at this hour.

And they're going to be checking out on this date at this hour and then ask them, Hey, if you're not able to handle this cleaning, please let me know. And they can respond via text. Cause this sends a text message to them. You can do a text or an email. I like text messages. Cause they seem to like. And they can respond to that text and you'll get an email or a message back if they respond to it. But this is only if they're not able to take it. I haven't had to respond or take anybody else.

Um, since I've implemented this system and if the reservation gets altered at all, like sometimes people extend or they cancel it. It'll automatically take that task off of their list. And the cool thing that I've enabled in here is whenever there's a new reservation, it automatically puts a task for cleaning. Immediately after they check out and it puts it on the calendar, it puts it there for them and it sends them a message immediately when it's booked.

And then two days before it, it sends them another text to say, Hey, just a reminder, or checking out on this date.