3 Clever Ways to Cut Back on Your Airbnb Operational Costs

Hey, what’s up guys, in today’s video, I’m gonna be sharing with you three clever ways that you can cut back on operating expenses for your short term rental property. So that you can without having to negatively impact guests ultimately keep a lot more of the money that you make through short term rentals. As short term rental investors, there’s obviously a huge motivation towards making a lot more money with our short term rentals. And oftentimes, I find that investors look at that in terms of getting more bookings, and getting higher nightly rates on their properties. And that is definitely a big part of the equation. And we have tonnes of videos on this channel that are going to help you do exactly that. But another side of the equation that I think is often overlooked by investors is the cost reduction side of things. Because ultimately, it’s not just about how much money you make, it’s about how much money you keep, after all your expenses. And so in this video, I want to share with you a couple of clever ways that you can cut back on some of those expenses. The first way that I really love that is a zero impact on anyone negatively, it’s just an overall net benefit to everyone is going to be energy efficiency. I’m a big, big proponent for getting energy efficient appliances, energy efficient electrical set up in your property, whether that’s just going to be putting your lights on LED lights, whether that’s something like getting a more energy efficient furnace, and one of the big ones for me, and I’m sure as a lot of people that are more experienced hosts out there, they know that short term rental guests tend to be notorious for jacking up the AC in the summertime, and jacking up the heating in the wintertime. And well, I’m all for that. And I honestly am a believer that people should be able to adjust the temperature to whatever makes them those comfortable. It is ultimately a really big waste of energy and a really big waste of money to have that running when they’re then checked out of the property. So something I really like to instal on my properties is a smart thermostat is a big one for energy efficiency. I like to use nest just because it’s easy to control from anywhere. And the really nice thing there is you can set it to it to be an eco mode to where when there’s no one in the property and nest detects that there’s no one in the property, it’s just going to automatically lower the temperature back down to a more reasonable level, or raise it up to a more reasonable level depending on what season that you’re in. So you’re not just cooling or heating an empty home, that one to me is a no brainer. And it ultimately makes a pretty big difference on your energy bill at the end of the month. So that’s a big one for me. Now shifting gears to a second pro tip for saving some costs on your operating expenses, that’s going to be hiring a really, really good cleaner, and actually paying them a little bit more. Now I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, how can you possibly reduce your costs by paying someone more. And it’s because your cleaner is really kind of the main point person for preventative maintenance awareness. What I mean by this is they’re the person that’s going by the property constantly. And they’re letting you know when problems arise at the property when the yard needs to be maintained when something’s starting to break when somebody is starting to experience more wear and tear and getting to the end of its lifecycle. And what happens is, if you don’t have a really great, great cleaner, or you don’t pay them enough, you try to cut corners and and kind of undercut their pricing. So they’re not going to have as much time at the property to be able to spend and still make the kind of money they want to make well, then ultimately, a lot of those things are going to go missed. And what happens is that the cost of replacement is obviously going to be a lot more in most cases than the cost of proper maintenance. So rather than maintaining something, you’re gonna end up having to replace it because no one told you that it needed to maintain it in the first place. And the added kind of cherry on top of that equation is that with short term rentals, if you have something important that breaks down, usually a guest is going to be asking for a refund. And in a lot of scenarios, you actually be wise to give it to them. So for example, if you have a picnic table in the backyard, this is one that happened to us recently, our cleaners went by there and they let us know right when they noticed that, hey, some of the screws are starting to loosen on the picnic table, it’s getting towards the end of its lifecycle, we’re going to want to have someone come in and just reinforce it. And then we’re likely going to want to replace it within the next year. So our maintenance person was in that email thread. They went by the very next day, and they made sure everything was nice and tight on it. And they let us know the expected lifespan before we’re going to need to replace it. And that’s really beneficial because obviously, with something like that, the more that it gets us the closer and closer it’s going to get if it’s not maintained to just breaking and falling apart. And once it’s broken, we’re probably not going to be able to put it back together in the right way. And we’re just going to have to buy a new one and it’s going to be a lot more expensive to do that. Now the other kicker on that is that the guests would have had a really bad experience. If they sat down on the picnic table and it just fell apart. They could potentially get hurt. They’d probably be wanting a refund. There’s going to be issues they’re probably not going to give us the grace review all these different issues that arise from just not doing proper maintenance. To me, that’s one of the most important team members you have to have put in place to really be doing a good job is going to be your cleaning team. And trust me, having someone that’s actually really good is going to save you a bunch of money by making sure that preventive maintenance gets taken care of ahead of time, but also just by making sure that your guests are constantly satisfied, so you’re minimising the cost of refunds throughout the year. Now the third and final pro tip that I have for guys just want to take a quick break here to say that for those of you watching, who want to build cashflow, and long term wealth by purchasing Airbnbs, and short term rental properties, there’s a link in the description right down below for a free training that will walk you through my exact strategy for investing successfully in Airbnb ease. Now, if you’re not ready to actually buy properties, and you want to get started managing other people’s properties on Airbnb the same way I got started and build a full time income managing other people’s properties, there’s actually another free training linked in the description down below as well, that will be a really great fit for you. So whether you want to invest in short term rental properties and actually build amazing cash flow and long term wealth by acquiring the assets, buying the properties themselves, or you’re looking to earn a full time income managing other people’s properties on Airbnb, we’ve got some awesome trainings that are linked in the description down below. That’ll definitely help you out. When you sign up for the trainings, we’re also going to send you a few other tools and resources completely for free just to help you get started. Again, the links to sign up are in the description down below. And both trainings and all the tools are completely free. So make sure to register for the trainings, links in the description down below. Now the third and final pro tip that I have for just increasing your your profit on your property, decreasing your expenses is going to be starting to leverage technology better. Now specifically, I want to talk about one tool that I’m just starting to explore and play around with more, which is a I guess communication. Now I said at the beginning of this video, I wanted to focus on things that weren’t going to negatively impact guests days. And that’s why I’m giving this one a little bit of an asterix. I’m still currently in the process of testing out some different software’s. There’s a few of them in the marketplace right now. But ultimately, I think that within a very short period of time, we’re going to get to the point where if we’re not there already, you can significantly decrease your operating costs by really just winding back if not completely eliminating altogether, your guest communication team through the use of AI. Now there’s tonnes of different software’s out there that serve a myriad of different purposes that you can use to make your operations a lot more efficient when it comes to running, owning managing short term rental properties. But this specific use case to me is one of the most exciting ones being able to use it to communicate back and forth with guests. Because AI can do some things that humans just, it’s really, really tough to get them doing it really, really well. So for example, having a less than one minute response time to guest inquiries, it’s going to be really challenging for most people to get their team operating at that level. Whereas AI can do that no problem 24/7 guests communication coverage for human beings, that means that you’re going to have like three people working shifts around the clock, in order to get you that kind of coverage, not really realistic with a single or you know, maybe two or three short term rental properties, you’re not going to have the margin to do that. Whereas AI obviously can do that around the clock, no problem, they can also answer a lot of the different questions just as effectively as a guest communication person would. And so once this software gets to be where it’s actually really, really great. And we might already be there. Like I said, I’m just starting to experiment with a few of these right now. And I’ll report back to you guys with my findings. But once we get to that point, it’s going to be game changing for short term rental management, because it’ll mean that we can provide an even better guest experience but with a significantly reduced costs. One of the biggest operating costs in terms of just labour, human labour with running short term rental properties ends up being excommunication. Because even if you maybe only have a couple messages to respond to each day, you still need someone monitoring for ideally 810 1215 hours a day to make sure that guests are getting responded to in a reasonable amount of time. So it ends up being a pretty significant labour expense if you want to get it completely off your hands. And so being able to use AI to do this and only be paying, let’s say $60 a month and I’ve seen a lot of software’s that are a lot less than that in and around around the 10 to $15 a month mark that is going to be game changing. So stay tuned for more details on that and upcoming videos, I’ll definitely be putting together some videos diving into these tools and sharing my recommendations for which ones are the best. But those are some of my recommendations for you as a short term rental host to be able to just keep more of the money that you’re making and ultimately decrease expenses and increase your profits so you can make more from short term rental investing. I hope this video was really helpful if it was make sure that you hit the like button down below. Make sure you subscribe to the channel to stay up to date with the new videos you post every single week here on the channel. And let me know in the comments section if you have any thoughts, comments, concerns, anything you want to share with me just let me know in the comment section down below. If you have some tips or some tricks to increase your profit as a short term rental investor or host or you just have thoughts on AI, anything that I’ve talked about in this video at all, just let me know in the comment section down below. As always, thank you so much for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.