[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is short term rental management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl.
Short term rental management with Luke. I love you. Great to have you here.
Summertime at the short term shop. And again, remember, if you buy a house with the short term shop, I'm happy to teach you everything I know about how to manage it. As a matter of fact, we have special guests all summer long on management Monday, which I teach to all short term shop clients. If you are in the market for your next vacation home, short term rental beach property, whatever the case may be, please give us a call. We want to help you facilitate that purchase. We have a fantastic team of real estate agents that can help you do that. And I will teach you everything I know about vacation rental management. And I've been doing this a long time and I'm grateful to have you here today, as today we are going to talk about our homes and the fact that it takes guests a minute to learn them. It's a lot about psychology here as a landlord on short term rental management, which we will discuss in just a few moments.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Did you know that we're officially back in a buyer's market? That's right. Even though interest rates continue to rise, they are causing prices to fall. So there's finally room for you to do regular real estate investor things that we couldnt do for so long, like gas, negotiate, make lower offers, ask for sellers to cover some of your closing costs. So its a really great time to buy in terms of being able to get a lower purchase price and being able to negotiate. So if youre looking for your first or next short term rental, its a perfect time to reach out to us at the short term shop. Let our team of agents in any of our true vacation market destinations help you find the perfect investment. Jump on over to theshorttermshop.com and click get connected to get started. We are brokered by Exp Realty. See y'all over there.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: All right, all right, all right. Now we're talking about learning a house today. All right, so here's the deal. Your guests are from another town.
In most cases, be kind of weird to go on vacation in the town you live in, but it does happen. We see that sometimes in the Knoxville smoky mountain situation because it's right down the road. But for the most part, they're from out of town. They're out of their element. They're lost. They don't know what the hell they're doing.
And every single thing in your house is new, and most people can't handle things that they're not familiar with. They just can't handle it. They don't, man. They can't. They just. They freak out. And here's a perfect example of something that happened to me on a recent, uh, Trek. I was staying at a house in California, of all places, and it was a beautiful rental home we were going to. This was last fall. At this point. It's been a while ago. We were going to a concert at whatever the hell that is. Coachella Indio. We're going to a heavy metal concert, as I am currently wearing my. Wearing a motorhead shirt with my long hair and my stupid sideburns. Anyway, we were staying in this beautiful home with a pool. And it was wonderful. Wonderful. Had a view. Fairly reasonably priced home, I thought, for what we were getting anyway. And I was very impressed. I was. I did not facilitate the renting of the property. So I don't know if it was self managed or not. I would assume it was not. My lovely wife, Avery, chose the home. She obviously knows what she's doing, and she hit it out of the park on this one. It appeared to me it was property managed just by some, you know, basic things around the house. Notes, you know, like signs. They looked like they were left there by somebody who had many of these signs, if that makes sense. And they were putting that at them at hundreds of properties, which. There's nothing wrong with that. Anyway, so there was a door.
I don't know. The door went from, like, the front courtyard area to the main living area where the pool table was. And there was a sign on the door, and it said, lift up handle before closing. Okay. So I was under the impression, and this is, again, I am a guy that deals with all. I'm adjusting and fixing doors on a regular basis. Every time. I've got so many houses. Every time I go to a house, it seems like, oh, this door is not functioning correctly. Let's adjust it. So you gotta, you know, suck the screws in or take out the old screws and put new screws to make it, you know, go left, right, left at the top, right of the bottom, whatever you need it to do. And I just assumed it was a little off kilter. And I grabbed ahold of it and pulled up on the handle, thinking that the whole entire door needed to come up just a hair in order to latch. Well, come to find out, this doorknob, and I think I may have even talked about this doorknob on a past program here. But this doorknob was engineered in such a way by the manufacturer that you had to lift up. It was a, you know, a handle knob. A.
It had a grab hold handle, not a knob. You had to grab hold of the handle, lift up on it to reset it so that it would then close and latch correctly. Otherwise, it would stay with the. With the. The plunger. That is the technical term, in the erect position so that you could not shut the door. It would stay. Stay open.
In other words, it was, like, locked open, basically, and you had to lift up on the knot on the handle to make it so that the plunger was no longer erect, and then you could shut the door again. I've never seen a handle like this before. I really. I don't know where they found this door knob. I don't even know what the purpose of this was. I would assume. I would have to think about it a little harder. I'm sure somebody knows. I would assume it's some sort of safety scenario. I don't even care. I don't. I do not care. Because to me, it was just annoying as hell. A guy that's got hundreds of doors, hundreds of properties, hundreds of houses. I'm having a hard time with this thing. Average Joe. There's no way. They had six signs on this damn door. Okay, so now this is where it becomes a fine line between the sweet old Susie that's coming to stay at your home doesn't understand what she's gotten herself into. And the kitchen sink doesn't work the same as the house she's. She lives in. This one is actually going a little bit over the other side of the mountain to stupidity. This was a bad move on the behalf of the owner of the home. Now, the owner probably doesn't care. Why would they care? They're busy. They're busy making the kind of money it takes to buy an extra house in California for a million bucks. I think this. I looked it up. The house was worth, like. I think it was a $1.1 million house somewhere in that neighborhood. And they probably. They may have. The property manager was any good. They may have even gotten a phone call and said, hey, we're having trouble with these doorknobs. What do you want us to do about it? Put a sign on them. Sometimes it just doesn't cross folks minds to replace these items. Sometimes people don't want to spend the money to replace these annoying items. But here's the deal. Something we talk about all the time here at short term rental management. You got to get upstream. If this doorknob has become a problem more than three times, it, it's got to be replaced three times and you're out. Three strikes and you are out. Much like baseball, which, it's great to have baseball back. As we are cranking on yet another glorious summer season, this episode is brought to you by short term rental listing advice.
Join this Facebook group and post your listing to get advice from other hosts, including myself, on how you can improve your listing or just post your property so you can show off.
Join
[email protected] that's strlistingadvice.com.
now, that owner and or that property manager had no interest in getting upstream, and I understand that. But you get my point. When somebody walks into your home, they have opened themselves up to an entire new world. It's like, it's like when the color comes in on wizard of Oz, when she opens the door and everything becomes color. Now that's the experience you hope that they're having. But in a lot of cases with your guests, they may be having the opposite where it's, oh, my goodness, doom and gloom. They might even be scared of your home. They're nervous. They're out of their element. They've never been here before. They don't know if it's a safe area. They don't know if the home is safe. They're worried about, everybody's constantly worried about their kids. Of course. I know I am. So it's wonderful to keep this stuff in mind with your guests as they're checking in, coming and going. You know, that's, this is, this is the quintessential reason to check in, send them a message. How are things going over there? Because you can get those jitters out of their system. You know, I have talked many a guest off a ledge. I, every now and then you got some guest that's willing to ruin their vacation over some sort of stupid little item like a doorknob, and you've got to intervene and get in there and talk them off the ledge. Now, of course, at some point, if you get to the point where you got 20 properties, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to pay somebody else to do that, hire somebody to do that in house or third party, if you get to that point, whatever takes. Of course, we're talking about self management here today. But, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've sensed that stress from a guest for whatever reason, you know, that maybe they indicated it in some way in a message. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. Hold on. What are you talking about? Let's fix this. We can talk this, we can talk this out. Let me, let me, let me show you. It's, it's not, the hot tub does get hotter than that. It's just not on the right setting. Let's go ahead and fix that setting. You know, be proactive with your guests, because if you let them, they will ruin their vacation over the stupidest little thing. Another prime example is these hot tubs. The hot tub, it never ends. And here's the deal. You, I'm guilty of it, too. I got to get better at knowing that the hot tub is a big deal to the guest. To me, these hot tubs are disgusting. If you think about what goes on in these hot tubs yet, and I didn't, I didn't mean my hot tubs are disgusting. My hot tubs are drained and cleaned and refilled after every guest up to the legal standards of the industry or whatever the hell you want to say. But if you think about it, I mean, if you really think about what's going on in there, it's nasty, filthy, unspeakable things going on in this hot tub. Yet your guests cannot wait to get in there. It's the pinnacle of their entire life, the culmination of their life's work, it seems most times to get into your hot tub and then you'll get something like, oh, your hot tub is broken, the jets won't turn off or which, by the way, it just, sometimes they just take it, you know, they, they keep circulating. Or it's, you know, 1030 at night and they're sitting on the porch and the hot tub is doing its thing, turning itself on, which it has to do that, by the way, to keep itself hot. Right. There's so much to unpack here. Number one, the guest doesn't understand that it's going to turn itself on and circulate and keep itself filtered and clean. Number two, guests don't understand that it stays hot all the time. How do you not know that a hot tub stays hot all the time? It seems common sense to me. It's almost like thinking that when you shut the refrigerator door, the refrigerator turns off. What? Your spaghetti is going to go bad, dude. Of course the refrigerator stays on. Just because you can't see it and you're not using it right now doesn't mean that it's not keeping your food cold. You want the hot tub to stay hot. It's another reason they don't freeze in the wintertime. You don't have to worry about a hot tub freezing in the wintertime because it's always hot. If you unplug it or turn the breaker off then we're going to have a problem because that some bitch is going to freeze and you just cost yourself an expensive pain in the ass. But again, these are normal folks. This is main street coming to these homes. Right. They don't really necessarily think like we do. A lot of these folks can't even begin to comprehend what it looks like to buy a house and rent it out. I would say that 90% of our guests don't even understand that there's a mortgage on the house. They just think that some rich, that's the word they're going to use. Some quote unquote rich person owns this house. They don't worry about money. Rich people don't worry about money. They don't understand what it took me to get the money to come to this house. And how dare you not have the hot tub turn itself off at 1030 when I'm trying to smoke on your porch, which is against your rules anyway. You know, here's how we, how do we mitigate this? We don't. You know, the only thing you can do is try to be very upfront and honest. You know, I call it the purple apple with your guidebook is a good way to do it. Just say, hey, this is exactly how everything in this house works. Because you do get these nervous Nancy's that will want to read every tiny detail about your house so they know what they've gotten themselves into. I would say most people don't give a crap. But sometimes you get the nervous Nancy. So it's nice to have a guidebook available so she can, you know, prepare herself or himself. Nervous Ned touch stays a great option for guidebook. Hostfully is the other, other option. But other than that really all you can do is just understand that that's part of the gig. That's what we've gotten ourselves into here. And you just walk them through it, hold their hand and never say no. That's my recommendation. Don't tell them no. As much as it pains you because we don't want to admit that our house is not perfect. That's, that's where we have the disconnect here. You always want your, we just want to assume our house is perfect, you know, and certain personality types. This isn't even an issue if you're a type b. That's chill and easy and just matter of fact, you're probably a better property manager than me because I'm not. I'm type a and I'm all over the place and I'm, like, crazy about every tiny little detail. And, you know, I'm a runner. And not that there's not type B runners, but I'm very intense, so I have to constantly remind myself, just chill, dude. It's no big deal. It's no big deal. And again, I've been doing this for years and years and years. You get to the point where you're, you know, it's just not a big deal where we're just old hat. Done it a million times. Not that big a deal. You know, but you gotta, you know, just keep in mind that the guests are. They're entering a whole new world. It's a whole new world. Like the. I just got back from Disney World, so, like the Disney song, whatever movie that is.
Little mermaid, I don't know. And have some empathy for these folks. And that's the gig. That's the gig. I tell you. It works big. It works big. It beats working a nine to five, you know. So loved having you today. Thanks for coming to hang with me. Short term rental management. Go easy on your guests. Love them. Hug them, kiss them. Well, don't do that. You might get in trouble for that. But happy renting. Hope you have a wonderful summer season.
