All Forum Posts by: Boris Mordkovich

Hi @Caleb Wilson,

We own and run a short-term rental property in Minneapolis. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

My biggest advice is that I’d recommend not to mix personal and business properties. If you want a successful short-term rental, focus on that -- rather than trying to find a place that you also want to vacation in yourself. Oftentimes, what you want/like is not necessarily what makes the best short-term rental. 

It’s also worth noting that a multifamily can also be a short-term rental. There’s no reason why you can’t have multiple properties in a single apartment building rented out on a short-term or mid-term basis.

There are definitely a lot of great tools available for market research. AirDNA, AllTheRooms and Mashvisor are the top 3.

The best way is usually to find a channel management tool that also offers a direct booking website as a part of their offering. 

For example, if you use a tool like Uplisting.io, it will sync your calendars between Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, but also give you an option to create your own direct booking website. It’ll pull the data from your Airbnb listings, re-arrange it and automatically generate your own site with that info.

@Pablo Flores

One resource you may want to check out is FurnishedFinder.com. It focuses on the traveling nurses demographic (although not only) who typically look for 1-3 month furnished accommodations.

And yes, just doing a 30-day minimum on Airbnb can also work quite well.

@Jake Tucker

We have found all of our remote team members through Upwork. It has actually been a pretty good resource, as there are a lot of great and talented folks out there who already work in some capacity in real estate. With the current setup, we have 7-day a week coverage which works out quite well. 

@Sofia Sharkey

Ah, I understand. So we extract the data so we can better organize it.

For example, we extract reviews from individual review emails, so we can better track them, monitor review trends, and be in a better position to act on negative reviews or when we receive constructive feedback.

We extra reservation and payout data, so we can organize it in a database and then create better reports on our revenues, nights booked, ADRs, and so on and on. Essentially because the reporting functionality offered by Airbnb/VRBO is not great at scale, we choose to create our own reports based on what we deem are important metrics.

@Joe S. We are always happy to help others setup these systems and walk you through the steps. Feel free to DM me if you wish to discuss it further.

@Nancy Bachety If you're looking for a direct booking website + calendar syncing, you'll find that some channel management tools like Uplisting offer a free direct booking site as a part of their overall service offering. They have more details here: https://www.uplisting.io/home/...

They make it possible to be up and running within an hour, their design and layout is pretty good, and they automatically sync your calendars between direct bookings and Airbnb. You don't have a ton of control over the design, but their default option is actually quite good.

Hey folks!

Just wanted to go through and address some of the questions.

I also wanted to provide a bit more context. In this particular post, I focused on the software side of things. It's worth noting that we also have a small team in place -- in every market, we have folks that we work with on the housekeeping and maintenance side of things. We also have two individuals who are based remotely who manage the day-to-day tasks and are an important part of our team. 

So I think it's worth highlighting that with more properties, software alone won't solve all of the operational tasks. Software will, however, allow you to keep the team lean, minimize manual tasks, reduce errors, and just run a better operation as a whole.

@Joe Cassandra - in terms of doing this yourself vs. hiring a property management company. In the STR space, most management companies charge between 15-30% of the gross revenue for their management services.

This is far above the costs of doing this in house. Moreover, setting up these systems early on makes it very easy to scale to more properties while keeping costs relatively flat whereas outsourcing it to a management company will keep getting more expensive. 

I do think that management companies are great and they serve a very important purpose and they are useful for specific types of investors/vacation rental property owners. However, I figure it's worth knowing that there are options for people who do want to do it themselves. The actual pricing will vary quite a bit on the number of listings you have -- could be less, could be more.

@Brian G. To your comment, I think I should have separated the tools into two broad categories:

Category 1: Tools that improve the front end short-term rental operations (communication with guests, pricing, channel management), and

Category 2: Tools that improve the backend and workflow for the team. All of the tools and processes mentioned after the GSuite are mainly focusing on improving the workflow for our remote team - folks working on the ground and virtually. It helps with:

* Coordination of work
* Management of maintenance
* Coordination of supply ordering
* Filing damage claims with Airbnb and other channels
* Overall reporting

... and so on.

With more and more listings, there are just a lot of moving parts and things to keep track of. So this just helps with keeping things organized, preventing errors, and preventing manual copying-and-pasting.

@Sofia Sharkey

What guest data would you like to collect? One neat tool that we've considered but haven't used yet is this one: https://stayfi.com/. 

Thanks everyone!

@Kenneth Garrett 

Hey Kenneth,

For most of our properties, we prefer to pay our housekeepers on an hourly basis. It depends on the market, but it would typically be about $20-25/hour with a 2-3 hour minimum per visit. This usually works well for high-turnover properties or locations where we can pretty much guarantee at least 5 days of work per week.

For larger properties and in areas where we only do 1-2 turnovers per week, the housekeepers typically prefer a flat fee. For example, in Nashville, we pay $140-160 for a turnover of a 4-bed, 4-bath property.

Naturally, all of the additional work outside of a typical turnover is also billed extra, usually on an hourly basis.

Hope this helps!

@Carrie Torrey I think that Mashvisor is a pretty good tool. I would also recommend that you check out Airdna and AllTheRooms. We've been using these 2 for analyzing all of the markets we've setup short-term rentals in. 

For long-term rents, I also really like Rentometer.com. They are excellent at giving you a good idea of what a property will generate as a long-term rental.