[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] Short Term Rental Management. Love you. Glad you're here. There's a couple things I want to talk about today. Number one is that April was kind of tough. It was. I'm going to give it to you. It was a little tough. And the weird thing is May looking a little better. I'm not exactly sure when this is going to come out, but my May has been looking pretty good. I'm really on track to have a better May than 2024. My April was right on par. I didn't look up any numbers, but pretty close. I think I'm. And I do know that I'm up year over year, year to date, six grand over 2024.
[00:00:52] So in general, things are going pretty well. But I'm going to give it to you. April was tough. It was. Didn't see that coming. And May has not been as tough. Maybe it's because we've beat it into ourselves enough now that May is slow that we finally figured that out. And it's actually working. And it worked for me because my May is looking really good, man. I'm looking at all my calendars across the. Across the board, and May looks good. And I'm very grateful for that. It is almost like, I hate to say it, but almost like April was a little harder than May. And that is so weird. I don't think in the 14 years that I've been doing this that that has ever happened. So kind of a weird deal there. But if you had a tough April, I'm gonna let you have it. No big deal. It's a. It's. It. It did. It happened. It happened to me. But May should be doing pretty well. May should be rocking.
[00:01:54] So no excuses.
[00:01:58] And that's not exactly what I wanted to talk about today, but somewhat along those lines, pricing in general. I do want to talk about the fact that if you're not getting booked, it's, you know, I see this all the time, Luke. Or just, you know, Facebook or emails or wherever these, these conversations are coming from, which I'm very grateful by the way. I love the interaction. Please interact with me. I love that. I want to be helpful. I want to provide value. That's what it's all about. It's what we do for a living. We provide value in the form of our homes. Giving these folks a place to create memories on vacation. Okay, got my new weight. My new weight set over here in my Office getting a little cluttered, but you know, when you have kids, you just do whatever you can to. To get it rocking. But, Luke, I'm not getting any bookings. I need a new couch. I need to redesign my entire house. I need the pickleball court. We've had the pickleball conversation a thousand times, but the truth is, is that you don't need a new couch. You need a new attitude.
[00:03:07] You need a new attitude. You're not paying attention. I want you to take and make a log of how much time you spent on pricing in the past month or in the. Forget. Let's forget about the past. There is no past. The past doesn't matter. How much time are we spending on pricing moving forward? Put it on your schedule. Do you not have a schedule? If you don't have a schedule, how can you expect to get anything done in your life? You gotta have a schedule. You gotta work on your schedule. That's why people don't have schedules. They're hard.
[00:03:36] And what I mean by schedule is a calendar. There's a million of them out there. Look at one called cozy. Look at one called a fantastical.
[00:03:44] There's a bunch of them out there.
[00:03:47] But you gotta. You gotta spend time on your. On your calendar, on your schedule, and nurture it and put the seed in the dirt and water it and plant the seed. It's difficult, you know, And a lot of folks aren't willing to put in that time and effort. And that's. That's where the problem is.
[00:04:06] It's not your couch. It's not that your bathroom needs to be redesigned.
[00:04:12] It's that you're not paying any attention and you're not spending any time on your pricing. And it's quite possible, I'll give you this in your defense, you might not know how to price your property. Because we can sit here all day until we're blue in the face and say, you're not trying hard enough. You're not trying hard enough. You're not trying hard enough. And that's your problem. And I do think that that happens way too much, and I'm guilty of that as well. You're not trying hard enough. But the truth is, if you don't know how to try, it's probably just not going to happen. So you got to learn how to. How to do it. And There's a million YouTube videos out there. And of course, we have revenue management training. I'm not. This is not a sales pitch, but we do have revenue management training and short Term Shop Plus. So we can help you with that. But if you're not getting the help, if you don't know how your calendar should look or what you need to do on your calendar to make it function, that's not your fault. You got to learn these things now. You can learn it on your own over time by a lot of enemy methoding and a lot of enemy methoding and a lot of enemy methoding. And I'll give you this, these pricing softwares, they have gotten so sophisticated that if you were a new, brand new operator opening up a pricing software for the first time, I would imagine that that's pretty intimidating.
[00:05:22] There are hundreds of settings in there, customizations that you don't have any idea what they do or why. That's a lot to deal with. I mean, you know, it's very daunting. I can imagine as a new person that has no idea how much you're supposed to price your property at. You open up price labs, you do the help me pick a base rate, you put your base rate in and that's, that's, that's a bigger mistake. If you're one of those people that just says, help me choose a base rate, put in your base rate and then you're done and you're not doing anything else, that is a bigger problem than not knowing what to do.
[00:05:56] In other words, if you're happy just putting in that base rate and being done, you're not going to do well. And maybe you don't need to do well. Maybe you're just a wealthy person with a vacation home. And that is wonderful and I would like to be your friend if that's the case.
[00:06:13] There's a lot of those folks out there. There's a lot of folks out there that don't need to fill in every single night on their calendar because they used the property. It got tax benefits from the property and it was better in some cases than sitting in the stock market or sitting in a savings account and they can take their kids there and create memories.
[00:06:34] That's another thing. I hate to do this to you, but to be honest with you, there's a lot of folks, a lot of your competition, I would say most of your competition does not need it to make money.
[00:06:44] If you're looking to buy a beach house, a lake house, a mountain house, a vacation house, a short term rental, a vacation rental, a second home, please contact your friends at the short term shop. We are a family owned business and we operate in all of the best vacation rental markets. In America, including the Great Smoky Mountains, the Emerald coast with Destin, Panama City Beach, Orlando, Florida, the Disney Market, Gulf Shores, Blue Ridge, Outer Banks, Carolina Beach, Western North Carolina, Scottsdale, Arizona, Broken Bow, Oklahoma. The list goes on. We are the best in the biz and we want to earn your trust. Please contact
[email protected] vacation homes, second homes. These things are for wealthy people. They are.
[00:07:45] And if you got yourself in a situation where you need every single night of the calendar booked to pay your mortgage, that's probably not a good thing.
[00:07:58] If that's the case you put, you should have found a deal that needed rehab and rehabbed it and did the old school brrr method, which is difficult to do in a vacation town because most of them are functioning vacation rentals. They're being rented when they're not being used. So they're usually in pretty good shape now. They usually also in vacation towns were slapped together when they were built like builders in vacation towns, they just, they're in a hurry. They just get to the next one, get to the next one, get to the next one. And they're dealing a lot of times with people that live far away and they only visit it four times a year, so they don't even notice that it wasn't like, you know, superior craftsmanship.
[00:08:40] It's just a vacation town way. I live in a house exactly like that. I got a guy working on the house I'm in right now on the back door because it won't shut, right? Because some dumbass put the door in wrong 15 years ago or whatever, you know, so, you know, you got to be careful. You got to be careful with the cash on cash way of doing things. There's a lot of your competition, they don't need it, and that makes it difficult for you, especially in high dollar markets.
[00:09:10] Not that it can't be done. Of course it can be done. I guess my best advice there is take your time finding the deal that works for you. Take your time, slow down. There's no reason to be any hurry, you know, And I know I'm bouncing all over the place here, but after you've been doing it for a year and you're sitting there like, oh, my property's not doing well, my couch is the wrong color. No, it's not.
[00:09:38] It's not. You're not trying hard enough. And guess what? You don't have to try that hard. And sometimes I see people trying too hard, which could be even worse if you're trying to. I had a Meeting the other day with a lady, she said she's spending 45 minutes a day on pricing one house. I'm like, how's that even possible? I can't spend 45. I got, I got how many properties? Hundreds of properties.
[00:10:11] Nine short terms right now. I don't think I could come up with 45 minutes worth of things to do on my properties.
[00:10:18] This tells me right there, this is somebody who's struggling. So she's reached out, she's asking for help. We're getting her the help she needs. Somebody needs to help this person. And it's. It happens to be us in this case, and we're glad to do it, but the couch color is not the problem.
[00:10:38] It's not. You got to go back and look at my old YouTube video called the Pyramid of Pricing. Go revisit that one. It's classic, classic cash flow. Carl coming to you today from the cash cave on short term rental management.
[00:10:54] Remember I told you it wasn't all about cash flow. Bullshit. Pardon my language. This is a kid friendly show.
[00:11:01] But anyway, you gotta spend some time really evaluating what you're looking to do here. Be honest with yourself. Stop blaming the market. Stop blaming the color of your couch. Stop blaming Airbnb changes. I see that all the time. Oh, Airbnb had this change. Airbnb is now doing the all inclusive pricing on their, on their listings. And now the, the cleaning. That's the, that's the new crybaby thing going on right now, though. The, the cleaning fees all wrapped into the. And the taxes are all wrapped into on Airbnb. And now nobody's booking my house. Well, guess what? That's a horseshit excuse.
[00:11:39] The people were still in back when. Before the Airbnb changed. That Airbnb change. There's a change every month. It seems like people could still click to find out exactly how much they were going to pay. It's not like we were hiding from them how much they were going to pay. And then they eventually got a credit card bill in the mail and they're like, oh, that was more expensive than I thought it was going to be. That's not how it worked.
[00:12:00] It's actually a lot cleaner and sexier the way they do it now. So I think it was a good move. It was kind of difficult for them. I think it took, you know, a couple years worth of talking about it to make it actually happen. If you don't know what I'm talking about. Airbnb changed things recently where the full price of the vacation is listed on the calendar section when you're just clicking around and shopping rather than having to go all the way to checkout. So in other words, now people can find out how much it's going to cost a little easier than they used to be able to. This is really is the only difference. And I've seen some people freaking out, oh, I'm not getting any bookings now. It's because you're not paying any attention.
[00:12:37] Hello.
[00:12:39] You need to go back and reread Extreme Ownership.
[00:12:43] Hold yourself accountable and get the job done.
[00:12:49] Now I realize that the folks listening to my show are not the problem. You're probably not the problem.
[00:12:55] And if I might offer you some advice, please be positive. Remain positive.
[00:13:03] If you're gonna run run around posting in all these short term rental Facebook groups. Don't say negative stuff. It doesn't help. It's not helpful.
[00:13:13] I'm trying to lose 15 pounds. You're never gonna lose that weight. Just stop trying. What is that? What is that? How is that helpful?
[00:13:23] Long story short, your couch is probably not the wrong color. And even if it is the wrong color, just switch the damn couch. It's not that big a deal. Stop blaming your calendar on your couch.
[00:13:33] Move on with your life and get it done.
[00:13:38] Gonna leave you with a quote Short term rental management. And the quote is as such as the the mission is always the same, right? It's to provide wonderful houses for our guests, to create memories.
[00:13:51] But the quote of the week with cash flow. Carl, the reverend of real estate is the difference between a pest and a guest is an invitation.
