[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.
Today on short term rental management. I hope you like the party cause today we're gonna talk about what to do if and when you have a party in your vacation rental. Oh, the dreaded party.
And we are not condoning such activities, but we're gonna teach you how to handle a situation like that and some real world examples with myself, cash flow Carl, and my buddy cK Chuck Kramer from the short term shop. Today on short term rental management.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: This episode of the short term show is brought to you by the short term shop. If you're interested in buying a short term rental in one of the top vacation markets in America, just go to theshorttermshop.com and click get connected with an agent. If you purchase a home with the shop, you'll have access to all of our client only benefits, such as training on how to manage your short term rental. So we'll teach you everything you need to know, from how to set up your Airbnb and Vrbo listings to how to use the property management software that you'll need to streamline your business all the way down to helping you source your local boots on the ground like cleaners, handy people, etcetera. We've taught thousands of people just like you how to buy and manage their vacation homes from anywhere in the world. So head on over to theshorttermshop.com and click get connected with an agent to get started. I do have to mention that we're brokered by Exp or else I get in trouble. We'll see you guys over there.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Welcome to the party. Quite literally as today we are talking about parties and I've got my old buddy, Mister CK, Chuck Kramer, who's old school. You may have, may recognize him from some short term shop reels and videos and such if you hang out around here a lot, and we hope that you do, and if you have any interest, we want to sell you a house. Not Chuck or I, neither one of us do that. But the organization does. And feel free to check us out at the shorttermshop.com dot. But today we are going to discuss parties. Parties, parties, parties. We get a lot of folks that are worried about people bringing, you know, in a keg and throwing a rager, you know, maybe even advertising this party. Um, or maybe just, uh, bringing too many people in general, that kind of thing. We're going to cover all those topics today. But I do want to start with, uh, by introducing Chuck and letting Chuck tell a story that happened to him recently here at a beach property on the Emerald coast. So, Chuck, I'll turn it over to you. How you doing, buddy? What is going on?
[00:02:52] Speaker C: Doing good, my man. Doing good. So let's get right to it. We got a nice little beach house. Well, not so little. Six bedrooms. We've been at this a long time. You know, we're not newbies. We, uh, we vet our people, we do what we can. We just don't blindly accept everything, especially at spring break and down here, we also were extra careful in fall break, usually the first two weeks of October. So we had a booking come in, didn't look unusual. We collect ids, everything looked great. Communication with the guy was good. We get it set up for them. Date comes along, things seem to be fine. Now we have a doorbell camera and we have another one that covers the driveway. I don't check those. I mean, only if there's a problem, they're there if there's a problem. I got better things to do. We all do. So I also have minute sound detectors. I was a little iffy on these to begin with, but here's the way I look at it. They're partnered with Airbnb, so Airbnb is not going to have a problem with me having them. And the second thing is, my insurance company actually gave me a discount that more than covers the cost. Hey, why not? Actually, it puts me about $20 ahead for the year. Not a big number, but it's nice to have your costs covered. About 1215 on the first night, my alerts go off, and I upgraded my phone recently, and I forgot to go into the minute app and change the notifications. So it went off like the Amber alerts go off on your phone at 1215. So got up, looked at it, and it told me the noise level was above normal. Okay, that happens. People turn the tv up, they get the blender going. We sleep 16, you get 16 people in one room. It's just not unusual. So I fixed the notifications, turned it off, tried to go back to sleep, and I couldn't. And a few minutes later, it goes off again, saying it's still noisy. Now, I bring up the cameras, and I don't see anything too unusual in the cameras, except my doorbell camera catches the fact there's a couple cars parked on the street. Now, if you know anything about south Walton county and Destin, you don't park on the street. There is no parking on the street. And the fines are pretty heavy, so I think, okay, I need to get in touch with them, let them know this car's got to go. I couldn't get anyone by phone, so get up, get dressed, drive over there. About 70 kids in the place between inside and outside on the porch and in the backyard. So I keep asking for the guy at rented, and finally someone says, oh, yeah, and that's a so and so's dad, and he's not here. Okay, so find that person. I'm leaving the names out for privacy purposes. And she's asleep. I mean, or passed out. I mean, I. You know. You know, I can't tell, especially at this point. And finally someone gets her up, gets her down, and, yeah, it was clear that she was asleep and said, hey, this has got to break up. It's got to go. I got a little pushback from a couple of the larger gentlemen there. And I just said, look, I'm the owner. There's no parties. The police are bound to show up in a few minutes because my neighbors will call them, and I'd really like to have this cleared up before they do so they don't keep bothering me in the future. Took about 15 minutes, but everybody was gone within five or ten minutes. It looked like an uber convention with everybody calling for Ubers to go get back to wherever they were staying. It was nuts. So we got everybody out of the house, got it down to just the 13 people that were on the list, because mom and dad weren't there, they would have made 15 plus little brother 16. And so I did a quick walk through the house, nothing damaged, at least nothing obvious. And I decided not to kick them out. They were there first day of four. I figured they now know that I'm extremely close. I can be there quickly. And I got an idea. When something goes wrong, things seem to be pretty calm the next few days. Until the last night wasn't the noise alarm this time. They were smart and kept everybody outside. So my noise monitor. I don't have an outside noise monitor. Even though they do make them. My neighbors often get loud, and I just don't want all those false alarms. Yeah, my neighbors get loud. So I got a call from one of the residential neighbors that lives on the other side of the house, and they said, hey, it's getting too crazy over here. So I went over. Now, we got about. I wouldn't say 70, but I think they're probably about four dozen or so. And most of them were in and around the pool. This was about one in the morning. So got them out. And this time, yeah, I made them get their stuff and leave. Now, the real question here is, and I know a lot of people would have jumped right to this, why didn't I put them out first time again? I thought, you know, at this point, they got the message, I got their money, and I got to say, it was a lot of money. It was deep, high end for the four nights. And, you know, I had hoped that they'd gotten a message. No, they didn't. Now, the worst part about this is that not the parties. I mean, we caught it. It got taken care of. Police never showed. There's no. They don't know anything about it, because if that happens here, you start to get on their radar as a party house, and they'll bug you to death. Kind of a good way. But it's all the damage that started to show up after they left things that really, unless you went deep. I did a deep inspection. You wouldn't have found, for instance, we took about $2,000 damage to our golf cart. Overloading is the assumption, but the actual frame snapped. So, uh, and then we had two sets of beds where the slats were completely broken even, you know, and it wasn't not the cheap kind of beds that only have, like, three slats. I mean, they're. They're every few inches. They're pretty solid. Things like that. You don't know. You just can't see on that walkthrough. If I had to do it again, yeah, I wish I'd put them out first night. But, hey, you know, trying to understand. I mean, there was a time, believe it or not, I was that age, so, you know, and, yes, there were cars around back then, and, you know, there were rental homes at the beach you would get from a property manager. But I just thought, hey, give them a break. Maybe they got the message and they didn't. So now I'm going through all of the insurance claims. We have damage insurance. It does not cover vehicles, so it doesn't cover the golf cart. We have a high number on that house because of the pool. You know, pool heaters, if misused, are extremely expensive. So, uh, nowadays. So our pool motors the pumps. There's just a lot of stuff that's expensive that can break easily. So we're covered up. We got $1,500 in coverage. We're good. We're good on the beds and that kind of stuff. But it was inconvenient and then having to rush around replacing stuff. We had a one day gap and spent all of that day, and we ran right up until the 04:00 p.m.. Checkout. Then the following day, uh, getting. Getting that place ready. And there were a few things that I could not fix in time for the next guest. We have. We use refillable dispensers, and literally everyone was broken. Every single one. Again, you can't see that stuff. I mean, you have to walk up to it and try it, you know, and that's. That's the other hard part about this, is that, you know, you got to check the stuff for the next guest. You can't just look at it. You got to try it. You got to touch it. You got to make sure it works. So.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Okay, well, listen, I've heard this story before, and I have lots of questions. Number one, wasn't there a situation, I remember you texting me about a neighbor went through something similar to this, like, the day before or something?
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Two days before, it was all over the news down in Crystal beach area, which is just over the line in Destin, in the city of Destin, and they cleaned out, like, 170 people, I think the news article said, from a house party there. What kind of freaked me out about that was the news video. Apparently, they interviewed the police officer in front of my house in Destin. So when I saw that news video and the police officer in front of my place and destined, I was, like, freaking out. It's just that they wanted to pick a more nondescript and open area, and my parking lot was, like, the first one. Besides the crab trap restaurant that's there.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Oh.
Which I have a house in that neighborhood also, so it could have been me. Yeah, that was a big rager that the police were involved in all this. And then you. I remember you messaged me and said, I'll check it out. There was a rager in desk, and that was more of a. That's what I was going to ask you about your party with this one that was on the news. That was more like something they sold tickets to or something I would every now and then. You see that, right? Can you explain that to me?
[00:11:14] Speaker C: Yeah. People rent a house, and they'll charge five or $10 and then put it out on social media. And, you know, when you're that age, as much as you hang around on TikTok or Instagram, you can see that stuff pretty quickly. And then word of mouth. The party at my place, I can't say for sure. I can only guess. But based on the discussions I had, with my folks. I think it was one of those things that started out that they met some people on the beach and said, hey, come on over. And then those people invited others, and then it grew out of control. I don't think they actually planned on having a party. And when I went back and looked at my video, know, people were bringing stuff, and that's not typical for a party. If you're going to a plan party, the stuff's already there. You know, the ones that you're charging for. Yeah. I understand from someone I have a passing acquaintance with in the Ocalusa county sheriff's office who handles destin that. Yeah, they were charging money for that, and they tagged them for illegally selling alcohol because your admission included all the beer you wanted. So, yeah, to, it was a mess.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Join me live every Thursday for a weekly q and a, all about short term rental.
If you like my vibe. If you're digging the long hair extraordinaire cash flow Carl and want to ask me questions in real time, join
[email protected] it's a lot of fun. Strquestions.com they didn't sell tickets. And you had no idea this was going to happen. And, I mean, it was just a fluke thing.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: We were on the beach. They said, hey, we got a house, why don't you come over? They were probably young, good looking people, and next thing you know, there's 70 of them.
[00:13:00] Speaker C: Mm hmm. I think that's exactly now, I think.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: This would have been a different situation for me because I don't have, you know, and I don't have any interest in the noise type stuff. Do you having gone through this or even before you went through this, do you think that this noise monitor, you know, are these something that everybody needs? Where do you stand on the necessity of something like that?
[00:13:24] Speaker C: I think if you have a bigger house, you know, five, six bedrooms, anything that might be potentially used as a party, that you should have at least one. And again, your, you know, your insurance company may cover your simple costs. They're not expensive.
In fact, I'm not plugging minute, but I do use them. My device was free with my one year subscription. Plus Airbnb was offering a deal at the time. I think I paid, I think it was 50% off the subscription, and that's continued. Plus I get the insurance credit, so it's kind of a no brainer now. They're rechargeable.
I only have to charge mine maybe two or three times a year, not often at all. And, you know, they stick to the ceiling with a, you know, one of those really strong earth magnets, rare earth magnets, but you can knock it down with a broomstick and then just hop up on a chair and put it back up. It's, it's really, it's been no trouble to have. So, you know, and that's the other part of it. Whenever you add something, you know, even a, even a video camera, you gotta weigh the inconvenience of having it, you know, checking it, making sure it works. What's the point in having it if it doesn't work right? You know, if you've got to get into it and look up something, how easy is it to use? Like in this case, I did want to look at, that passed, and their noise levels were fine before the party, before that, twelve, they started going up, or were just before midnight. So, I mean, I caught this very early, which makes me wonder if I, if I'd caught it an hour later or waited until a neighbor called me or the police called me, how many kids would have been there?
[00:14:55] Speaker A: So the police did get, did they ever call you? Did they ever get involved?
[00:14:59] Speaker C: I had a voicemail from them the next morning. I forget what time it came in, but it was after I'd already broken the party up. They did get a call from a neighbor who complained about the noise and.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: But that was the end of it. There was no ticket, no nothing.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: Nothing. Not even a follow up. I mean, you know, the thing is, you know, communication isn't, it's not two way with the, with our local law enforcement. You know, they don't, they don't have huge staffs, you know, to get back to you on those kind of things. I wouldn't be surprised if when someone called, you know, it was breaking up or already broken up, and by the time a car did a drive by, it was done. Hmm.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: They just said, you know, that's off our radar at that point. Again, of course, we do have to mention that this is going to be a different situation in every market in the world.
Your market might have more regulation than ours. I will say that again. I have a house right down the street from this house in a different county. It's over the line, but this area is, they don't take things too lightly here. It's a fairly big deal for something like this to happen. They do take their business seriously. But it seems in your case, of course, especially with it being spring break, maybe they just had bigger fish to.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: Fry that's possible too. You know, they, you know, I know they were on heightened, I don't want to say alert, but I know they were on heightened enforcement because you did read not only local news here, but a lot of the Florida towns, you know, since Miami and Fort Lauderdale kind of shut down for spring break, you know, prohibiting so many things, kids going elsewhere.
So everybody was watching out, you know, Panama City Beach, I understand, even called in some outside officers during a peak two or three weeks when college kids were in town. You know, we're still in spring break here, but it's fewer college kids, it's more families and their kids and, you know, primary school.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: So yeah, you mentioned collecting ids. Tell me your system there. How do you do that?
[00:16:49] Speaker C: And you know, well, yeah, it's described, and here's the important point. It is described clearly in two places in our listings, every one of them. Now when someone books with us, you know, they get a welcome message and say, hey, we got to collect your security deposit. We need an id. Now normally I don't care about what kind of id. It's just got to be a valid government id. And I tell them they can redact the number. We, we don't need that. What we need is we need the picture and we need the address and the birth and the dates on it. You know, that's the important part. So they can upload it to our reservation software. I do look at them, you know, it takes a couple, because I'm in a reservation software all the time anyways, where I do my pricing, where I do my descriptions, and it literally just takes me a second or two, I click on it, comes up, glance at it. Fine, go on.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: You're referring, I would assume, to Ownorez.
[00:17:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I was trying not to plug.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Them, but yeah, well, yeah, I just want to make that clear because I don't know that any of the other softwares or many of the other softwares are going to make that as easy as Oneorez makes it.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: That's true. I don't know of any, in fact right now, and now I'm not deeply familiar with some of the foreign based ones like logify or a few of those. I kind of stayed away from those for a while, but I try to be familiar with the bigger ones here. I know the hospitable doesn't do it, hostfully doesn't do it, but they have it on their feature list, so maybe by now or soon they'll do it. Another way to do it, of course, is to use a third party service like Superhog or safely or Wavo, one of those companies that will also validate the id. They do the old hold it up next to you kind of thing. That's another way to do it.
We also, and owner's has this capability. Since we take a security deposit, we're taking a credit card. We need all the names to match.
Because your ability to legally hold someone responsible, especially in chargeback situation, almost disappears. If the id is from one person, the reservations of another person, and then the credit card is a third person. Owner as actually has a report that will compare all the names and tell you if they're the same or not. So instead of looking at each and every reservation, you can just go in maybe once a week or so and just run that quick little report. It'll tell you if there's any exceptions. And in this case, it was. It was dad's name on the account. It was dad's name on credit card and it was dad's driver's license.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Did you ever think to call the parents?
[00:19:03] Speaker C: You know, I didn't. Well, I did. No, I take that back. I know that night because the phone number I had was dad's phone number.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: I would assume it was dad. Yeah.
[00:19:11] Speaker C: Yeah, but nobody answered.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Oh, you did call.
[00:19:14] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 1215. I was hoping I could solve it, but with a phone call.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Well, you would think that dad would squash this rather quickly as a father of a. A daughter. I have a daughter. If my daughter was trying to rager in Destin and somebody called me at 1230 in the morning, I would fix that right now. You know, you would think.
[00:19:35] Speaker C: But you know that other party we mentioned that made the news, you know, in Destin, mom and dad rented this house specifically for their kids to have a party.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: No, these are not the same type of parents as yours truly.
[00:19:47] Speaker C: No. And they were actually staying in another house a few doors down. So, yeah, this. This is not my parents. Probably not your parents either.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: No, it's not myself either. I mean, I. Listen, I partied hard in my twenties, but there is no way I'm going to facilitate a rager for my kids at somebody else's house. Now you want to come to my house and have a little bit of a party? Okay. Maybe we can hang there. You know that as long as I'm there. But yeah, this is not something I would be interested in. So, anyway, back to the damage insurance thing. That's something you do with every guest. Can you tell me? I think again, not to sound like an owner as plug here. And I will mention before you get into this, I don't do that. I don't do third party insurance of any kind. I'm comfortable not doing that. I do get signed rental agreements and I have a system to do so, which is a topic for another day. But tell me about your damage insurance system and how all that works.
[00:20:42] Speaker C: Sure. Ownorez has an arrangement with rental Guardian where they get a master policy and then you can buy into that master policy at various levels and they have a regular package and an enhanced package. Regular package is simply damaged insurance. You can pick one of, I believe it's four different levels of coverage from a couple, a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars. The enhanced package is basically the same as that, except it also includes an extra $1 million of liability coverage as well as bedbug coverage. And it's not that much more. At one point in time I changed insurance companies to one that offered bedbug coverage. Because you get bedbugs the wrong time of year, it's not just expensive getting rid of them, but then the downtime or the potential lost rent from having bump the next I had bedbugs cost.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Me $4,300.01 time, mostly because the two reservations I lost on both sides of it, there were big heavy summertime reservations and the treatment obviously not that inexpensive. It wasn't anything too crazy, but man, between the two bookings and yeah, it was $4,300 and that was heartbreaking, man. I was like, you know, that's a big chunk of your profit for the year there, you know, in some cases. So.
[00:21:56] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah it is. So, you know, in this particular house, my larger places I go with the enhanced coverage, more beds, more bedrooms, more chance of bedbugs.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: And this is, this is a third party. I could get this if I'm not.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Using owner s. There are other companies that offer this, I mentioned them earlier, safe, safely, wavo, super hog. And there's at least two others who for some reason their names just don't stick in my brain.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah, but, but this rental guardian goes directly through Ownorez. Yeah, if I wanted to use rental guardian and I'm not using Oneorez, could I do that?
[00:22:32] Speaker C: I don't think so. I don't think they go direct yet. I don't think they want to deal with, you know, hundreds or thousands of hosts individually.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: I got it. So they want to use, they want to deal with one res.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:43] Speaker C: But I've had it for years. It's been easy to use the claim process is easy. You just check a box in owner's to add it. And just like with health insurance, you have to do it on almost all your reservations. You can't just pick and choose. So because, you know, you got to, just like they used to explain with, you know, Obamacare that you had to, you got to spread out the risk across the higher risk and their lower risk population in order to make insurance affordable. And it's the same here. So in order to keep the cost down, you got to cover all your reservations or none of your reservations. There's exceptions to that. They know that Airbnb does the air cover and that sort of thing. So you can specifically exclude the Airbnb reservations if you want. And if this other otas do the same thing, you'd be able to exclude those, you know, they're not going to make you buy insurance for something that you've already, you already think you have coverage for. So, um, but it's easy. We're at about 200, and I lost track of our number now somewhere around 240 claims, since I don't.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: I would not, I wouldn't want to do that. I just don't have the. I don't have what it takes to facilitate all these claims. I just, I don't know. I. It's not my thing. I don't think you're wrong in any way. I think there's a lot of folks that would have a great interest in this. But again, I just want to reiterate the point that there's a million different ways to landlord. There's no wrong way to landlord here.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: And I'll also say that I just, I'm very minimal when it comes to that kind of stuff. Now, I do get a signed rental agreement. That's something that my organization has had meetings about. And we feel comfortable that we feel more comfortable having a signed rental agreement, which, for those that don't know, is basically a lease, except for it's not a lease for short term where they don't have a period of time. And, you know, that's, you're going to have to explore this stuff within your, your, you know, within yourself or your family or whoever you're getting involved with here to find out what makes you feel comfortable. I. I'm not going to go filing 210 claims with insurance. I'm just going to move on. Uh, sweep, sweep up the mess, clean up the puke, uh, replace the lamp and move on. That's just my style. I probably in Chuck in a lot of ways Chuck's doing it better than I am. And. And I applaud you for that. But again, no, wrong answer here, I don't think.
[00:25:01] Speaker C: And you're right. And it's a balancing act, even with it. You know, someone breaks two wine glasses. No, I'm not going to put in a claim for it. I'm just going to grab them out of stocking and put them in. But someone breaks the lamp, I got to go buy a new one. So there's my receipt, you know, my receipt in two minutes online, and I'm done. I just go to that reservation, damage insurance, say, what happened? Lamp broken. Here's the receipt. And the money shows up two weeks later.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: And the guest never finds out about this.
[00:25:29] Speaker C: No, and that's the better part about it, is they don't involve the guest, so there's no risk of it affecting your review. So. And we actually even put it in our listing that we have this accidental coverage for them because we want them to tell us if they break something, not hide it, you know, because we don't want the next guest to come in and find something broken that didn't. Or missing that didn't show up in the clean. A lamp could be an example. You know, it's sitting there and it looks great, but maybe the cord got pulled out of it. You know, your cleaner comes in, they clean it, they make sure it's set nice on the table. Next guest comes in and tries to use it, and it doesn't work. I'm trying, you know, part of this is trying to avoid that situation by getting ahead of it. And we make it clear that for them to be covered, they have to report the damage during their stay.
So I think it's helped. It's. It's my belief. I'm gonna. I'm gonna go with that.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: How the hell do you break a golf cart? That's insane. They must had so many people on that thing. It's crazy. So that's a big deal there. Like, how are you gonna go.
[00:26:27] Speaker C: Who.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Who's. Where? Is this the same rental guardian dealing with this golf cart? I mean, golf carts are like 20 grand.
[00:26:32] Speaker C: Yeah, they are. No, it's. Right now it's over in Fort Walton beach at a welders. The company that I get the cart from took it over and to be repaired.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Oh, it's a rental.
[00:26:43] Speaker C: Yeah. Actually, at least I lease it by the year, you know, and then provide it with. With, uh, it's. It's free for three.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Was the busted frame covered by them?
[00:26:52] Speaker C: No. Um, well, they exclude motor vehicles, so there's. It's. This is still up in the air where they're going to cover the golf cart, but if they don't, then this is going through Airbnb. Air cover.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: So what do you mean, exclude motor vehicles?
[00:27:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: What do you mean that. So, like, the rental insurance from the golf cart place doesn't cover golf carts or what? I'm confused.
[00:27:12] Speaker C: Uh, okay, my. My accidental damage insurance doesn't cover motor vehicle.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: Yours. Okay.
[00:27:16] Speaker C: I got now, the stuff from the rental company, they'll cover. They'll cover damaged, you know, windshields, uh, seat tears.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Yeah. But not a freaking broken frame. That's obviously not their problem. I mean.
[00:27:29] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:30] Speaker C: And that's not accidental.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: I agree with them on that. That's not. That's not cool, you know?
[00:27:34] Speaker C: Yeah. And I wouldn't ask them to, uh, you know, and since I've got two options, you know, I. Everything is being clearly documented for Airbnb. I've. I've notified Airbnb, but I haven't officially filed the claim yet. I also notified dad, who still has not taken my calls, but he really.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: He's ignoring you.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: But he has responded on Airbnb or somebody on his account has.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: It's probably the daughter.
[00:28:00] Speaker C: Probably.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Dad probably doesn't know. That's probably not even his phone number is what it sounds like.
[00:28:05] Speaker C: It's possible.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: But if that's the case, then could you. Couldn't you get Airbnb involved and say, hey, this was booked with a fake profile. I need somebody to stick up for me here.
[00:28:14] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm waiting to get. I'm waiting to get the repair number. You know, one thing I've learned with Airbnb is the few times that I've ever used their air cover is you got to have everything right in front of you or they'll blow you off and they'll. Because they're hoping that you'll wait past the 14 days, you know, so I'm supposed to actually, as of the date where we're recording this, I'm supposed to have the estimate today, so.
Golf cart with a golf cart. Yeah, it'll probably somewhere in 2500, 3000 range.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: That was what I was guessing, maybe five tops, I think is probably even way shooting at over.
[00:28:49] Speaker C: Could be. Yeah, it could be. This. This was a recent model is only a year old.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: My goodness. All right, so how do we get upstream of this? All right, so if I'm brand new and I'm scared to death, oh, my gosh, I'm gonna have a party in this house. And what are your. I'll do, I'll do my systems as well. But what do you do for, you know, preventing this before it happens?
[00:29:08] Speaker C: Well, I mean, let's be clear about one thing. The majority of people in this space, if there's somebody who really is going to, really has it in their mind to rent your house for a party, it's going to happen. You know, unless you, unless you're just hovering over them every minute. You know, almost anything you put in place can be circumvented. So, you know, let's get past that. There's no hundred percent answer. But communicating with the guests, in our case, you know, we have, we have the signed renter agreement. We make it really clear. It's clear in the listing, it's clear in the agreement, it's clear in our communications. In our case, where we collect an id, it's helpful. At least we know there's an adult involved somewhere in the process. Even if they don't know they're involved, we got somebody to go back to. Despite what's happened, I'm still not going to spend more time on my video cameras.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Right?
[00:29:55] Speaker C: Yeah, no, life's too short.
Now. In this case, this happened to be my house. That is not far from where I live. So I'm here in town. I could handle it. But if this had been one of my places in another town, like the smokies, for example, how would I have handled that?
You always need to have a trusted person wherever your rental is located. It might be a housekeeper, it might be a friend, it might be a family member, it might be your handyman, or in some cases, a host service company that host support services kind of company that offers that.
But just because you're 100 or 500 or 1000 miles away still doesn't alleviate you of the responsibility of solving it. After all, you're the owner and you're the manager at the same time. So you need to make sure that that arrangement you have with that person is clear and that they could be needed at any time of day and that you've discussed with them and even written down how you want them to handle it and that you are available by phone to consult with them on handling it.
They may be hesitant to make some decisions because of some sort of liability or legal ramifications, and you're the one that needs to make those decisions. You don't abdicate the responsibility by having a person.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Yes, 100%. And also, if you're new, you will meet those connections over time, the longer you stay in a market and longer you stay in the business. You know, as I hear Chuck talking about this, I'm thinking, like, I got like twelve people in every town that I could call because I've been around for a while and you just meet people and, you know, your network is your net worth, as they say, and, and all those things will come with time. So. Excellent point there. I think to a certain extent this is just the name of the game, you know, I mean, fires are possible, you know, floods are possible.
We just do our best to, you know, prepare for the worst and hope it never happens. And I mean, really what you have here is no different than owning a whole foods and hoping that nobody ever comes in and runs their arm down the aisle and drops every piece of glass juice bottle on the ground and breaks everything, you know? Right. It's like, oh, I'm not going to open a grocery store because some guy's going to come break all the grape juice. You know, you gotta, you gotta just get over that. And again, if I'm speaking to noobs right now, for the most part, you're gonna have wonderful people and you're providing great memories for just hard working folks that spent all their hard earned money on their vacation and chose your house. And it's a wonderful, amazing experience. But it's no different than just wandering around in life in general. There's gonna be assholes out there, you know, unless you're going to hide under a rock the rest of your life, then, you know, that's about your only option to avoid the assholes, I suppose. So I. For me, I don't. Basically what Chuck said, I just make it very clear that I don't allow any shenanigans. And I've never really had any problems. Actually, I heard Avery recently on a podcast say in the however many years we've been doing this, we've never had a party.
Knock on wood. Now, my definition of a party is different than your average Joe. I owned a bar in Manhattan for twelve years and there was some partying going on. So I don't mind if there's a couple of little, you know, things happening in shenanigans or whatever.
Maybe some things being smoked that probably shouldn't be or what, you know, just little stuff is not a big deal to me. I. I was behind. I was behind a bar for like 16 years of my life. I saw all kinds of nonsense. So this vacation rental where these people are paying two grand a trip, I'm like, man, this is some, you know, these are some high dollar folks. They're not breaking beer bottles and stuff, you know? So I guess I do have a little bit of a different tolerance for such things. That being said, I do not tolerate noise or annoying my neighbors in any way at all, even though my neighbors are all rentals and all my properties. We are not going to be the black sheep of the neighborhood. We are going to be, you know, we run a clean operation. I make it very clear. So I basically just lay it on the line. Hey, if you're planning to bring extra people, this is not a good house for you. If you're planning to hang out after 10:00 at night, this is not a good house for you. And if you, just in case you missed those, you know, missed that earlier on, feel free to go ahead and cancel. You got 24 hours. They'll give. We'll get you a full refund within the next 24 hours. Just in case you were planning to bring extra people and stay up past 10:00 at night. This is not the house to be doing that. And with that very simple, you know, process in place, I've had great success over the years and never really had too much. Now, I will also add one more thing. You do got to be a mind reader, you know, and you'll become. Even if you're not good at it right now, being a judge of character, and again, bartending waiting tables is the ultimate way to become a great judge of character, in my opinion, at least in my experience. If you're not yet, you will become a good judge of character by necessity. It's just part of the gig. And if you plan to be in this business for a period of time, you'll get better at judging these folks, um, which we don't want to use the word judge, but, you know, just making sure that you're not, uh, attracting the riff raff by responding to the questions that they're asking appropriately. If they're asking some dumb question that has to do with, you know, how many Dixie cups can I fit in your cabinet, then that's probably not somebody that you want, you know? So, again, just for me personally, over the years, I've just been very simple, streamlined. We don't take any crap at this house. If you're looking to party, no problem. Just go somewhere else. Full refund, you know? So anything to add to that, Chuck?
[00:35:54] Speaker C: No, that's. That's exactly right. And, you know, we. We have done that. We've. We've had people that you know, for whatever reason, kind of set off the little alarm bells and, you know, we just. We. We find a way to cancel them or move them. This is not our first party. Literally, it is not our first party, but. And it may not be our last party, you know, but everyone's a learning experience and gives you a chance to hone your processes. You know, I've spent some time kind of going over this several times in my head. What could we have done different to prevent this? And you know what? Really, there. There is nothing.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think there's anything. I think you're right about that. You are. I mean, I know you a long time, and you've been doing this a very long time, and you're a rental real estate expert, and this is not something that slipped through the cracks. And matter of fact, I don't think you could have possibly handled it any better. The cops didn't even show up or care, you know, so good for you. And I do want to mention, though, make sure you are, you know, doing things right by your local law enforcement and make sure that you know the regulations in your area. If you're the type of host. And again, I got to mention, Chuck and I are not the type of hosts that are okay with this.
So if you're the kind of host that is okay with throwing parties, well, I would assume you're probably not watching or listening to this podcast, but that's not what we do around here. You know, we run clean organizations that are for the betterment of our communities and of the vacations of these folks that are coming to spend their hard earned money at not only our home, but in our communities. And that's extremely, extremely important to both, to the both of us. Anything to add? I will say that Chuck is available. He's on staff at the short term shop. You can find him if you end up purchasing a home with the shop. We have a private Facebook group called the Client Club. Chuck is in there answering questions on a regular basis, as well as I. Chuck at the shortterm shop.com, Luke at the shortterm shop.com. But I think we did a great job. Anything we missed? Anything. Any closing notes there, Chuck?
[00:38:00] Speaker C: Truthfully? No. No.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: I think we nailed it. The ultimate how to defuse a party podcast here at short term rental management. And I'm going to give you a quote which came from Chuck Kramer. And the quote was enhanced package. I think that was the best thing said all day today. Enhanced package. I had to bring that back up one more time with my twelve year old humor. But anyway, thank you so much for. For hanging with us on behalf of the shop and short term rental management. As always, don't overthink it.
