[00:00:02] This is Short Term Rental Management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl.
[00:00:16] All right, well, first of all, I would like to acknowledge myself and the fact that I have received a YouTube award.
[00:00:26] Very exciting stuff.
[00:00:29] Very exciting stuff. So there it is. I'm trying not to touch it because it's stainless steel or whatever it is and it gets fingerprints on it, but there you go.
[00:00:41] Hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. Huge deal. Now my kids think I'm cool.
[00:00:50] My five year old, my seven and five year old, they go around telling their friends at school that their parents are YouTubers, like we're Mr. Beast or something. So anyway, very exciting. Thank you so much. Thank you. Huge deal.
[00:01:04] YouTube award. Well, look at that. Who would have guessed, man? How cool is that? I'll get it up. I'm actually working on a new office. I'm gonna have a new office probably by the fall, and I'll put it up there on the shelf, which is very cluttered right now. Sorry about that.
[00:01:22] And the reason I bring that up today, even though this is also going to go on my podcast, is because there's going to be a lot of screen share. Today. We are going to talk about AI. I've been getting into the AI a lot. I've also seen a lot of people kind of talking crap about it on Facebook, which of course I realize that's what Facebook is. Facebook is people talking crap. And no offense to you, if you hang out on our Facebook groups. We have a very large Facebook group called Smarter Short Term Rental. We would love to have you there. It is awesome. We do a great job with it. But it is, you know, I hate to say it, but there's not a lot of wealthy people hanging out commenting on Facebook.
[00:01:58] Did I go there? Did I go there after I just celebrated my YouTube award? Did I. Did I say something about Facebook? Maybe I did. But I love you anyway. Please join our Facebook group, Smarter Short Term Rental.
[00:02:10] But I've seen people in general, I'm way off topic here. Sorry. I've seen people in general kind of talking crap about AI on their rentals. You know, like AI messaging is what we're talking about and they're wrong.
[00:02:23] It's just like everything else. I've been spending a lot of time on my AI messaging and I'm loving it. It's doing great.
[00:02:32] It's really just great. But it is time consuming. I will say that most people, I would say that 99% of operators are not going to go through the trouble that I've gone through to set up my AI and I still have a lot to learn, but I've spent a ton of time on it and I've studied it and I've really like paid attention to what it's doing and how it's replying. And then I go in and changed my replies based on what it said. And I said, well, I don't like the way it responded to this section, so I need to update that. Where did that come from? Let's go fix that over here. So that's what I've been doing. And it's, it's. I be honest with you, I enjoy it. If you're the type of person that's shot out of a cannon, which we do see that a lot in this business, you'll. You'll enjoy it.
[00:03:13] All right.
[00:03:14] This is part of a series. I've had several podcasts and YouTube recordings recently on AI. I did hello, Host recently. That was great with the, with the founder.
[00:03:25] I did do a private piece for short term shop plus that you can find on stsplus.com and did a Facebook live recently on Smarter Short Term Rentals, which you can go watch that. But I just wanted to. Oh, and I also had a Host Buddy guys. I had the Host Buddy guys in here recently and did a lot of screen share with them. But today I wanted to take it a little like a step further, basically, like with a how to how I did it basically with my. I'm using Host Buddy.
[00:03:51] That is not a plug. I do want to mention that I'm not going to give you an affiliate code of any kind. We are very proud of that here at the Short Term shop. It'd be very easy, as easy for us to just say, here's my affiliate code. I'll get $20 on the back end. And that's why I like this product.
[00:04:06] We don't do that. We feel that it's a little bit sleazy. And to be honest with you, I do have a Host Buddy affiliate link of some sort. I don't know how to find it. I don't care. I want you to use it if you feel it's good for you. Hello, Host is also a great option.
[00:04:22] Also. Host Buddy has, I think they got two weeks free on their dashboard right now. Anyway, that changes all the time. So go check them out at hostbuddy.
[00:04:30] I met those guys in real life. They're great guys. So again, this is no plug. I'm not giving any sort of plug or I'm not getting compensated for this in any way. I do want to make your vacation rental management and ownership journey easier so that you'll buy more houses with my company, the Short Term Shop.
[00:04:51] But again, no affiliate codes.
[00:04:54] When it comes to buying and selling your first or next vacation home, you need to work with the best.
[00:05:02] Do not compromise. Call the Short Term Shop.
[00:05:07] Our agents are laser focused, highly trained, and many of them also own their own short term rentals.
[00:05:16] Find
[email protected] all right, so here again, this is Host Buddy, Host Buddy's dashboard. And I'm just going to kind of give you a general overview of how I'm using it and what's working for me.
[00:05:33] So like I said, it looks like they're offering two weeks free. So you can give that a try. I think it's, listen, I don't work for them, but I think it's 20 bucks of property per month. Something like that should tell you right here. I'm not going to get into that. That's not what we're doing here today.
[00:05:46] Okay, so let's get logged in. I'm going to basically show you the things that I like about it.
[00:05:55] All right. And it's not perfect, it does have some flaws, I'm not gonna lie. But it's really cool and it does a lot of things right. All right, so the first thing I want to talk about here is messaging. That's what we're doing here.
[00:06:06] You can do your inbox from, from Host Buddy or you can do it from your management software. You can see future guests inquiry, future, past, past, etc. And then you can also come in here and see the messages and you can see who sent the message. So actually on this one, nothing from Host Buddy at all.
[00:06:24] These are all from the host.
[00:06:26] There's a Host Buddy message. So you could simply look at this and say, okay, do I like this?
[00:06:32] Oh, it's a review request.
[00:06:35] That's great. I actually just, just turned that on. So that's a new thing. That's actually, that's called a journey. So you'll set that up in here and there's a bunch of journey options and I have journeys set up here. This is actually a great way to set up something like what you would use as an auto message on your management software. But it comes with a trigger. Right?
[00:06:55] So for instance, pre state gap, night, early arrival. And those are all.
[00:07:00] You can just click this as a template and add it in there. Of course you're going to want to make changes to it. You'll come in here and make changes to this journey based on whether you like what it's saying or not. And here's, here's the message. And I do want to mention that these messages that you're typing in here, you're talking to the AI, not to the guest.
[00:07:18] This was all canned, by the way.
[00:07:21] I did change a couple of things in here.
[00:07:25] Yeah, here we go. I changed this. Let them know that this is. This date is also being offered to other guests and may not be available for long. In other words, this. We're already way further in the weeds than I wanted to be. But basically, when you're sending them a message that says, hey, the night after your stay is available, would you like to book it for this much money? You know, this is offering them 20% off. Sometimes they'll say no, and then when it comes time, they will, they'll say, hey, nobody's staying tomorrow. Can we check out late? So you have two ways to fix that. You can say, this date is being offered to other people, so please scoop it up quickly. The other way would be or if you feel like you may want to check out late, you could also book this night. Or we could give you a different price for that. Right, so you want to bring that up because otherwise they will bring it up later. And things being brought up later is my worst enemy. I do not want things brought up later.
[00:08:20] Right. So two options there as far as the offering them the. The night before, the night after, so that they don't say, well, you didn't. Nobody booked it anyway.
[00:08:29] Got it. Okay. Everything's a system.
[00:08:32] So that's what journeys are. You would also maybe make one for see early check in and check late checkout, upsell. It'll do that automatically for you where you can have it say, hey, for. In other words, you could use that in conjunction with that one. Well, you want to check out late, no problem. It's 50 bucks or whatever, you know.
[00:08:51] Now trash. That's a good one to have in there. Weekly trash reminders.
[00:08:56] Now, the, the, the auto templates are good, but you are going to need to fix them, especially as messages come in. You're going to need to make some tweaks. Now, speaking of tweaks, if you're nervous, you can test all of your messages.
[00:09:11] You can just come in here to the property, hit test property, and then start asking questions as if you are a current guest, an inquiry, a future guest, or a past guest that wants to know the reservation stage, which makes sense and you could say something like, the ice machine is broken. And see what it says. Sometimes it does take a minute.
[00:09:29] Now it's coming through everything that I've told it to do and my SOPs, which I'll show you here in a minute. And also, I've uploaded my guidebook. I'm a touchday guy. Right now you can't integrate with touchday. I'm sure that'll happen soon. So you have to download touchday as a PDF and then upload it to host buddy or whatever the terminology is. And if you make changes on your guidebook, you would have to redo that. They do have a direct integration with, I believe, with hostfully.
[00:09:55] So taking a minute here on the ice machine.
[00:09:58] Okay, this is a really good answer. It's not perfect. And it tells you where it came from. Like, which confirms refrigerator and freezer are available. Property questionnaire, guidebook. It doesn't say anything. I don't know where it got this ice trays from. It doesn't tell me.
[00:10:15] It's gonna be a slow podcast today, guys. It's slow video today on YouTube because, you know, I gotta go through all this. I'm doing it in real time here. This is pulling everything from my guidebook, which is the PDF.
[00:10:28] So if I'm. If I'm not super psyched about the way this is worded, which I'm not crazy about it, because there's definitely no trays in this freezer. You would have to create an SOP for the ice machine and say, if the ice machine is broken, just tell them to go get some ice. Which it did. Do that. Which is what I would prefer that it says, we don't have ice trays, to my knowledge.
[00:10:51] So there is a little country store to red down the street that has ice. I like this answer as a whole, I'll probably leave it because to me, it's not worth creating an SOP just to say, hey, we don't have ice trays in the freezer. They're gonna be able to see that.
[00:11:05] So just come in here and test things, and if you don't like what you're seeing, you go over here and you see where it came from. A lot of times it's your guidebook, or you need to create an SOP and fix it.
[00:11:20] I'm sorry to hear you're seeing water near the sink.
[00:11:26] So, first of all, the exclamation points, there's probably too many of those. I don't know that this is something I want them to be all excited about. So I probably will change that. I'll change that over here. Give me a second on that. Please check that the faucet handles are fully closed and the sprayer is seated properly in its holder. If the water persists, please call our office for immediate help, which that is in the how to handle a maintenance and emergency. I already know that. I'm very familiar with the water leak situation. If we've. We've told her that there's a water leak or a fire to please obviously call 91 1. But you can also call our office for help. That's the only time we ever tell it to call the office if it's a water leak. We do want to know about that right away, you know, so the exclamation thing, that's actually going to come from AI preferences, which, for lack of a better way to put it, this is what I would call the brain, which is the customized tone section. You have 3,000 characters here. You can see I haven't even used half of them. And I feel like I've done a great job telling it how I want it to act.
[00:12:33] Although there's an exclamation right there. That's actually one of my favorite ones. I'm giving you all my secrets right now. The guest is always right, but the host is never wrong. Because I did see a couple of times where it would say.
[00:12:45] It would basically make it look like we were at fault. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The host. The guest is always right. Always. But the host is also never wrong. And I'm also going to add another new note right now because I've seen two in a row.
[00:12:57] Please don't use X exclamation points. Except.
[00:13:03] And yes, I'm going to have a lot of spelling errors here. I'm just running and gunning. Okay, so just let me be.
[00:13:10] So it's doing too many exclamation. I don't think we want it to be excited that there's a leak in the kitchen sink. Right. So I'm going to put that in my customized tone that will go across all properties and basically just. You're setting the tone for how it's talking. Right? You're basically telling it.
[00:13:25] This is its personality. You're telling it what kind of personality you want it to have.
[00:13:30] And the problem here is that most people are just going to sign up for something like this and integrate it into their systems and they're going to use it for two weeks and they're going to say they didn't like it, it didn't sound right. It was doing the wrong things. It's because you didn't put any effort in.
[00:13:43] You have to tell this thing what to do.
[00:13:49] I will say that.
[00:13:51] Keep it short, one to three sentences. All this stuff's really good.
[00:13:58] It's taken me about a month to get this thing where I want it to be. Between testing, running lots of tests and make sure I save settings there. I'm gonna save it again just in case. There we go.
[00:14:11] Over here. On the properties where I test the property where, you know, running lots and lots of tests, but also keeping an eye on the messages as they come in. It's been about a month of that and every time a message goes out, I'll come here to my inbox on Host Buddy because your inbox and your management software won't like. Let's say it's been several hours since you've looked at your inbox and you don't even know if it's Host Buddy or an auto message or you don't remember or you got a lot of properties.
[00:14:37] Your Host Buddy inbox is best for that because it'll tell you who sent the message and where that message came from.
[00:14:45] So in other words, you can run tests, you know, for all day long. It's kind of fun actually. And figure out where that answer came from and then go tweak your answers.
[00:14:53] Or you can and. Or you can wait for messages to be auto sent and then you can come back into your inbox and find those messages.
[00:15:03] There's a Host Buddy message right there and you can click this button and it'll tell you where it came from. Again, from the Guidebook. A lot of it's coming from the Guidebook. Unless you have an SOP set up now. Am I suggesting that we are no longer going to use our management software inbox? No, I'm not suggesting that. I would say that. I'm mostly using my management software inbox, especially now that I have my AI kind of where I want it to be.
[00:15:35] But I will say that as I was building this, you know, and getting things where I wanted them, I was definitely on here a lot. I'm not on here as much now after a month or so of doing this and getting things where I wanted to be, I think moving forward, I'll probably be mostly on my management software inbox rather than on Host Buddy. But I do come in here.
[00:15:57] It's not as convenient. I'll say that you would definitely not want to be in A hurry if you're coming into here rather than just hitting the management software app on your phone or whatever.
[00:16:08] Okay, so we've already talked about journeys a little bit. Let's talk about SOPs. We're going to go back to the properties for that. And again, how do I know what SOPs to put in there? Well, time, patience, running tests, waiting for messages to come in. But you're going to go to Property Setup where there's all sorts of awesome stuff you can do in here is where you link your management software, etc.
[00:16:32] Put in your property data that's going to come from your guidebook and all that kind of stuff, right? And then you're listing information. This is coming from, this is your, you know, all your listing details from Airbnb and vrbo.
[00:16:49] What's your Airbnb cancellation poly? What's your verbo cancellation policy? So when they're asking questions, it knows that stuff.
[00:16:56] This one is the most important is why I brought you here right now. The SOPs and some of these are going to be canned. They'll just be in there automatically. But you do need to be coming in here and adding a lot of them, especially to the other section.
[00:17:10] So I put the guidebook in here and we do say, hey, you know, send the guidebook when you feel necessary. Which is a great reason to have a custom URL from a guide for a guidebook which is only like 25 bucks to buy that on, you know, godaddy or whatever.
[00:17:24] I left this one blank. Haven't felt the need to use that one. What do I do when they ask for early check in?
[00:17:31] This is up to you. The way I do this. This is this pipe. This video is not about showing you what I do.
[00:17:40] Your SOPs will be different than my SOPs. If you're looking for sops, you will find that I'm happy to give those to you on on your short term shop/ dashboard sts+.com we have an entire folder full of videos where I've created SOPs and you could basically just type those in here and it will act on them for you.
[00:17:58] Again, the guidebook. Here's the hot tub. That's a big one. This one is lengthy.
[00:18:04] What to do when it's not working right, Ba ba ba. All that kind of stuff. What do you do when they say it's dirty?
[00:18:11] Actually I have a separate section for that I believe. How does the fireplace work?
[00:18:15] You can see this is fairly lengthy. You need to be very detailed. You're talking to the AI not to the guest. Very detailed about where your fireplace is, how it's plugged in. Don't mess with the plug right here.
[00:18:30] Do not recommend that they try looking for the plug or plugging it in or anything to do with the plug. The plug is not even visible to the guest. It is hidden behind the wall for safety reasons.
[00:18:41] And I probably put that there because at one point the AI said, well, make sure you look for the plug. It's electric. It's probably unplugged emergencies. That's where that leak think came from that you saw earlier. How to handle utility outages.
[00:18:55] This property is. This is the website that has the electricity and it says here, please refer to the guests to this website where it'll tell them that yes, your power's out and it will tell them that hey, your power's not out anymore or you can flip the switch and when the switch is back on, you'll also know that the power's back on. But people like the warm and fuzzy of the electric company, you know, so how to handle weather related emergencies. All this stuff, a lot of this stuff is canned. But then a lot of the stuff I have added, add more as the need arises. And if you're the one of these Facebook people that's sitting there complaining and bitching and moaning, it's because you didn't come in here and do anything. This is a lot of work. It's a lot of work.
[00:19:35] It's a month's worth of work for me in the grand scheme of things. I don't even have that many properties. I don't manage third party. I don't have a hundred properties.
[00:19:46] All right, so that's really what we're talking about here. In essence, it's just do your work, do your job, come in here. Mostly you're going to be messaging, checking your inbox and seeing if you like the responses. And if you don't like the response, click this button, figure out where it came from and then you go fix it either in your, in your AI preferences, if that's like the personality of the AI as a whole, or in your SOPs or again, I think the most important thing here is a lot of times you need to create, it's going to be under properties and SOP in the property setup.
[00:20:26] Anything that it says that you don't like, come in here, create an SOP and tell it what you do like and then still test it, test it, test it.
[00:20:40] Topics to avoid like here's your section where you, I don't have any in here. But you, if you have things that you don't want it to reply to, you just put them in here and it won't reply. Here's another good trick.
[00:20:50] We have two sets of actions which is going to be right here under Inbox preferences. Right? So I've got the default which runs all the time. And this is how it runs.
[00:21:06] It's that the signature is disabled. Here's how to contact us. Although we have an SOP that says don't contact us unless there's an emergency, I prefer right now, I'm preferring that it embodies the host. In other words, it sounds like me. I am, I am not telling people that this is AI, with an exception. We'll get to that. During business hours.
[00:21:26] I have this disabled.
[00:21:28] This is an interesting one here. I've gone both ways on this one, you know, because we've heard recently that the platforms do reward algorithms are rewarded for the amount of messages that are going back and forth in your inbox, which does make sense.
[00:21:45] And therefore if you turn this off, I mean, if you hit no, it will always be the last one to respond, which means this, theoretically you might have more messages in your inbox, you know, but I have it off for right now. I've gone back and forth on that one. But. But again, this isn't about me showing you how I do this.
[00:22:04] This is not about, oh, I need to copy and paste Luke's host buddy.
[00:22:10] No, because your properties are different than mine. Your personality is different than mine. The way you run your business is different than mine. We are property managers and you are free to manage your property how you see fit. And also, same thing with buying houses. I see that all the time. Like there's houses that I have purchased that other people would never purchase and vice versa. I've got very close friends where I'm like, I would never buy this house. I wouldn't say that to them, but I would never buy this house. And they're probably thinking the same thing about some of my houses. Everybody's different, you know, same thing here. The way you run this is totally up to you. I like a 1 minute delay, minimum and 1 minute max, 5 minute max. This makes it sound a little bit more like a human. But we're also not going to make anybody wait. Like the auto instant one where it's zero minutes, that is very obviously AI. So I do like waiting at least a minute there. I like that one. I've been doing that one.
[00:23:04] And then here's the again this is where I found the customized tone, the. The person how to tell, you know, how to, how to teach it, how to have a personality.
[00:23:11] Okay. But I also have another one over here.
[00:23:17] It's called a configuration for after hours. And I have that set up for all my properties with business hours.
[00:23:28] And I do have it. I have this turned off, but it has a different personality. And down here it says, please do tell the guest.
[00:23:40] Here you go. Important business hours, 5pm to 7, blah, blah, blah. When responding outside of these hours, which is what this configuration is, tell it that you are AI and we will open at 9am that's just how I run my show. I run my show with business hours.
[00:23:55] A lot of folks want to be 24 hours. Nothing wrong with that.
[00:23:59] All right, so after hours it's going to say, hey, I'm an AI, how can I help you? And you can ask me any questions you want. But the office is not open until 9am but during business hours, it's responding as if it's one of my employees because it is.
[00:24:17] Just doesn't get paid much.
[00:24:19] It's not a human.
[00:24:21] There we go. That's what I was looking for. Right here. Configure timing. If you click this one, it will configure basically the time of day and days. I'm not going to click on it because it scares me that I'm going to mess it up. It took me forever to get that the way I wanted it to be. But you can click on this and have certain times of the day that it will operate and certain times of the day that it will do certain things. Obviously, this is my after hours configuration, so it's configured for after business hours. That's the way I like to do things. Again, we have business hours in my company.
[00:24:50] Not everybody should do that. It's not for everybody, but that's how I'm doing things.
[00:24:55] And so, in other words, the AI is saying different things after hours than it is during business hours where it's taught to act like an actual human.
[00:25:05] So that's a pretty good trick.
[00:25:08] So again, you know, I don't work for this company.
[00:25:11] They're nice guys.
[00:25:12] It's working for me. I really like the job that it's doing for me. It's going well, but it has taken literally, I would say, over a month of working on this a lot with my whole team to get it to where I want it to be. And it still needs little tweaks here and there. But I will be honest with you, most of the time if I go look through my messages, I'm like, damn, I did a good job.
[00:25:35] And it's because I told it what to do. I took the time and effort to go in there and really make it the way I wanted it to be. It is really not a lot different than Price Labs, but it's new. Like, people kind of are. You know, they know what Price Labs is. They're used to it a little bit. Price Labs is what you make of it. You can't just set your base rate on Price Labs and leave it and expect results. You're going to be mad. You know, Price Labs sucks. And that's what we're seeing right now with AI with hello, host and host buddy.
[00:26:01] Because it's new and people don't know anything and people are lazy. That's the truth. You want to know the truth? These people complaining on Facebook. You're lazy.
[00:26:10] You're lazy.
[00:26:14] If you don't like the way it's working, fix it. It's AI. Tell it what to do.
[00:26:22] You know, I'm pushing 50 here, and I'm having great success with it.
[00:26:27] I don't know that age has anything to do with it, but I don't know. It is a little intimidating when you're getting my age and you're playing with this AI, But I'm really enjoying it. I love it. So, long story short, it's awesome. Put the time in. Put the effort in. Yours will be different than mine. This is not about a cut and paste from Luke's host buddy to your host buddy. That's not what it's about. It's about running your damn business the way you want it run.
[00:26:51] And for 20 bucks a month, you can have this thing sending messages for you, and it's fantastic.
[00:26:57] All right, that's my story. That's my opinion. I love you. Don't overthink it.
