Can Owning an Airbnb be a HANDS OFF Business? (What I did with mine)

Hey, what’s up guys? In today’s video, we’re going to be answering the question, Can managing an Airbnb business really be hands off? I get this question a lot with investors I talked to and people that I talked to you that want to start property management companies managing other people’s properties. And the real question they asked me, it’s just like, can I actually have this be passive? Is it really just a pipe dream to think that I’m going to be managing or owning a number of Airbnb short term rental properties? And have them actually be hands off? And the answer is sort of?

Now what I mean by that, is that for you, the answer is yes, of course, it can be completely hands off for you, the owner of the business or the owner of the properties, but it can’t be completely hands off from any human. At the end of the day, you need human beings to operate a short term rental business, you need someone to go and clean the property, you probably need someone to do maintenance of the property. And as much as there are AI tools and software’s out there that can help a lot with guest communication, we aren’t at a point yet, where you can really do without any kind of human interface on your guests communication side of things. So really, you need three different roles, you need your cleaning team, your maintenance, and you need your guests communication. And then depending on the size that you’re at, if you want to be really hands off, and really only put maybe 30 minutes to an hour a week into your whole portfolio, then you also want someone else to act as the glue to hold those different team pieces together, make sure everything’s running smoothly, triage different issues, and just make sure that the communication from those team members isn’t coming to you. So ultimately, the answer is yes, you can be hands off from your short term rental business, it’s just that it’s not going to be by using different automation tools, and software’s and things to just completely remove humans from the equation. Yes, those tools are out there. And they’re amazing. And I highly recommend them for making your operations more efficient. And they even can handle some of the tasks now that previously you had to have humans do. Like I mentioned before, there’s AI tools out there now that are making it easier than ever before to manage your gas communication. And you can have fewer people managing it, you can have quicker response times and you can have really good solid answers. So technology is coming along way. But I don’t foresee a time anytime soon, we’re going to be able to do without maintenance people for the property or cleaners for the property. And so ultimately, there are going to be human elements involved. So here’s the structure that I recommend, so that you can be completely hands off, or at least as hands off as possible, from different stages of the business. So starting with step number one, you’ll want to outsource your cleaning, find a really, really good cleaning team, pretty much right from the get go. I very, very, very rarely, if ever recommend that people do the cleaning themselves at their properties. Sure, if you’re just a hobbyist and you own the property, and you like it and you enjoy doing the cleaning. Great go to it. But for 99% of people, you’ll want to hire a theme team right off the bat. Now for this, I recommend really prioritising reliability over everything else, even above quality. Now, to a certain extent, if someone’s really reliable, and their quality is just crap of the work that they do, then obviously, it’s not going to work out. But I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, I would rather have someone on my cleaning team that is 100% reliable, and does a 95% clean job than someone that does 100% cleaning job and is 95% reliable, because ultimately it’s going to make a much bigger impact on your life and on your guests experience. If you have a cleaner just not show up or not complete things on time, then that you know, one small thing here and there it gets missed on during the cleaning. So I find a really great clean team. Ideally find a backup so that you have someone just in case anything does go wrong, and fairly prioritise reliability there next year don’t want to hire someone for maintenance. Now, this isn’t going to be someone that’s coming to the property regularly. If you have a let’s say a condo unit or some type of property that doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, they may be someone that’s coming to the property regularly, say once a week if you have a single family home. So it does require like yard maintenance snow removal, maybe you’ve got amenities like a hot tub or a pool that needs to be maintained and good chances are with a single family home there’s going to be little bits here and there for them to just maintain and take care of 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 Do properties and actually build amazing cashflow 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. You also want to make sure that one or both of those people are checking for any kind of damages, any kind of maintenance that needs to be done, just repair, maintenance, anything like that. So generally, your cleaning person is going to be the person that’s going to be just overseeing that they’re going to be your real eyes and yours on the especially the inside of the property. And your maintenance person may be that as well. If they aren’t, then your cleaning person is really just going to be relaying that information to the maintenance person as needed, or to you to then relate to the maintenance person. The next person I recommend hiring is going to be a guest communication person. So for this, I like to leverage virtual assistants. And you want to find someone that can give you a lot of coverage, especially in the busier times for guests communication, which for most properties tends to be in the evenings when guests are checking in maybe a little bit in the mornings when guests are checking out and on weekends when generally properties are more popular. So again, that is going to depend on the property that you have in location it’s in some properties are more booked up during the week and less booked up during weekends, you’ll have a good idea of that for the properties that you own or the properties that you manage. And you’ll want to hire guests communication person that can give you the coverage where you need it most, a standard nine to five, Monday to Friday probably isn’t going to be that helpful to you. If you find someone if you have, you know, people mostly communicating with you when they’re checking into the property after 5pm Or when they’re staying there on weekends. So be selective. And you can really leverage different time zones to make it so that those hours that are generally a little undesirable evenings and weekends are more desirable for the person you’re hiring because of the timezone they’re located in. So that’s really the third person that I recommend hiring. And that’s going to largely get you out of all the day to day operations. And you can generally do that very profitably, even with just one property. And now you don’t have to get interrupted by guests communication, when you’re at dinner spending time with your family, these sorts of things. And you don’t have to be jockeying any of the actual day to day operations. What you’ll find, though, is that one property or two properties, maybe even three, that managing the triage between different people is pretty straightforward, pretty easy. And for most people, it’s not going to take up enough time that it really becomes an issue. But once you start to grow beyond that, somewhere between three and five properties, typically, you’re going to start to feel like okay, there’s just a lot of triaging happening. And clean team lets me know that something needs to be maintained at the property, I then have to relay that to the maintenance person, make sure they actually go and do it, follow up on the invoice, make sure that gets paid, you know, I have to follow up with maybe the hot tub maintenance person and make sure they’re putting chemicals in there keeping it clean. And then I have to you know, make sure the guests communication person has all the information and is in touch with the cleaning team if they’re running late, or different things happening, right. And so at one property to properties, there’s probably so little of that, that it just doesn’t take up much of your time. But at three, four or five properties, it gets to be more of a burden than you probably would like. And so that’s when I’d recommend hiring the final position, which is going to be a portfolio manager or an executive assistant, basically someone to just take care of that triage. Now, you want this person ideally, to know your business and your properties kind of inside and out. They really want all those details about those properties so that they can relay information answer questions on your behalf effectively, I recommend giving them some kind of authority to make decisions on purchases, so they don’t have to constantly coming to you for approval on maintenance, expenses, things like that. And then from there, just get them really dialled in with the rest of your team. And ideally, you also want to train that person on how to do the guest communication role. So they can give additional coverage for any hours that your main guest communication person isn’t taken care of. Now, again, depending on volume and guest communication, you may be able to just take your guest communication person and upgrade them into this role if they’re suitable for it. And they have enough bandwidth to be able to do both. So there’s a few different ways to structure that. But that portfolio manager position the executive assistant, they’re going to be that final piece of the puzzle, wherein you now really just have to check in with them once or twice a week to make sure everything’s running smoothly and answer any questions they have. At that point, the

only thing that’s going to be left on your plate is really, in my my opinion, my recommendation is you would keep your pricing optimization on your plate. Now not everybody does this. Some of you like to have you have different tools and in my opinion in my experience, I’ve just found that pricing and keeping a handle on pricing and really knowing what you’re doing having good strategy, that is a really high leverage activity that can really make a difference of 1000s and 1000s of dollars in a given year. And if you’re doing it the right way, with the right strategies, then pricing, one property should take no more than maybe 10 minutes, maybe maybe, maybe 15 minutes, if you’re really going in depth with it per week, not per day, per week, it really doesn’t take a whole lot to optimise the pricing on a property. And so it really is something that in my opinion, is well well worth the time that you’re gonna spend. Because number one, it’s very minimal time, especially for the amount of money that you’re going to make from that time that you’re spending. And number two, it’s easy to schedule it in, it’s not like SQ indication, where it’s something that happens at random times that maybe aren’t optimal for you and aren’t really convenient, you can literally just schedule it in for recurring time each week go in there, when it’s convenient for you get it done doesn’t really matter what time of day, or what time of week you do it as long as you do it on at least a weekly basis, then you should be good to go. And so at that point, really the time that you’re spending on your portfolio is maybe you know, couple minutes to an hour, maybe you have multiple properties per week, taking care of the pricing optimization. Honestly, I think an hour is really aggressive. I think for most people with most reasonable portfolios, maybe 30, maybe 45 minutes tops on this. And then you’re going to want to do a touch base with your portfolio manager once or twice a week, that can generally be 15 to 30 minutes as things get up and running. And they get just kind of operating as usual. And they’re gonna have less and less questions as they go. And then so at that point, you’re really maybe only spending a max of an hour and a half on your portfolio every single week. And to me that’s considered pretty hands off, especially because it’s also just an hour and a half of time that you can schedule in it works really well for your schedule, it’s not coming up at random, weird times. And so that is how you want to approach becoming hands off from managing the portfolio. And that ultimately is going to be what allows you to take more of your time and your focus and put it into working on the business or on your portfolio as opposed to in it. Because ultimately, I find that a lot of these things that keep property owners or property managers involved in the day to day is just their fear of losing control. But when you start to realise that if you let go of that control, it may cost you $50 here or $100 there, but it frees up so much time and energy that you can focus on going and making 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of dollars by signing new clients buying new properties, and just growing your overall business your overall portfolio. So that’s my recommendation for how to structure things as you grow. Now, if you are outsourcing right off the bat to a property management company, then they’ll basically take care of all this stuff for you. And so that can be a good way to go. And if you are a property management company, or you’re looking to grow one, then we’ve got links in description down below to teach you how to do that as well. But bear in mind that if you are hiring a property management company, you are going to be paying a premium over what you pay to build your own team internally. Now, for my experience, generally speaking, if you have one or two properties, it usually is going to make more sense to just hire a property management company, because then you don’t have to go through the work of building your own teams. And the difference in what you’ll pay is going to be pretty minimal. Once you start getting a larger portfolio 3456 properties, then the savings from having your own internal team become a lot more significant. So it can make a lot of sense to build this team internally to help you manage your portfolio and give you a bit more control. In any case, if you are hiring a property management company, it is super, super important to make sure that they’re a really good property management company. I always caution people that in short term rental management just like in any other business, there are good people and they’re bad yield good service writers. Boucher’s virus, you can hire a good painter and a bad painter, just the same, you can hire a great property management company or a really bad one. And and that’s even more true in my experience with short term rental property management companies than with long term rental management companies. Because there’s just so many more moving pieces and so much more room to make mistakes with a short term rental property than with a long term rental, you’ve got a lot more guests coming through, you’ve got a lot more to do in the way of pricing optimization and making sure that you actually get bookings to hit the revenue targets you’re aiming for. So if you are looking for a property management company, it’s super, super important that you work with someone who knows how to actually screen to find a good one. So whether that’s working with us, and we obviously help a lot of investors to do exactly that. Or just going in learning for yourself. It’s just so so important. I think so many people overlook it. They think well, I’ll just hire any property management company will do a good job. But really, it is important to know exactly what to look for what questions to ask and how to screen to find a good property management company because a bad one in addition to charging you their fees, they can also cost you 1000s And I’ve even seen 10s of 1000s of dollars every single year and just missed opportunities, mistakes that they make things like that. So that’s my thoughts on how you can actually become a hands off in managing your short term rental properties. I’d love to know your guys’s thoughts in the comment section down below let me know any questions you guys have any thoughts you guys have as always if you got value from this video and you enjoyed it if it was helpful for you it was educational if you learned something today or if you just like watching these videos, then please do take half a second and click the like button down below the video it just shows me that you actually are getting value from these videos shows me what you guys want to see more of. And it also really really helps you out with growing this channel and getting these videos in front of more people. So for any of you guys that hit the like button I really do appreciate it means a lot to me. And last but not least, make sure you subscribe as well. We post two new videos every single week on this channel talking about all things Airbnb and short term rental investing in property management. 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