All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

Connecticut just followed suit with NY (I believe) in extending the moratorium on residential evictions until July 1st, 2020, with trivial hat tip to owners by allowing them to use security deposits as rent, which most of us on the owner side already know is an awful idea because it’s rarely if ever paid back. Here’s the nitty gritty: 

https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/...

Online education is the market shift that many colleges have been trying their hardest to ignore because there’s too much money to be made in traditional on-campus lodging. I cannot speak to the impact to local businesses, but of all my rentals, the ones I am least concerned about are the college rentals, which have, along with almost anything associated with higher education, had a fat enough margin to survive far longer than a 1-2 semesters of unexpected vacancy. 

And frankly, having lived in Boston and competed against endless armies of students throwing $3k+/mo at tiny 2BR apartments I cannot believe any PM or owner in the city would not be similarly well enough off to ride out the downturn. 

We’re also ignoring the fact that many students sign multi-year leases or have other reasons to be in the city other than just in-person classes. 

Currently using Cozy for rent collection, but for past experience with C-class properties I  used National Association of Independent Landlord’s rent collection/monitoring service, which had the unique advantage of actually automatically calling tenants when rent was not paid on time, which was great for tenants that were not great over email. 

At this stage, most rental management suites, even the small ones like Cozy are offering some form of rent collection. 

I’m already looking at what Zillow Rental Manager has been doing in replicating most everything Cozy has done, atop a far larger syndication network for advertising my listings when vacancies arise. Cozy’s development has been effectively dead in the water for the past year plus. 

@Rachel Hughes I’ll play the devil’s advocate here and say you don’t prevent guests with bad intentions. All the ideas above are good and minimize your risk for getting a bad Apple, but ultimately you cannot completely prevent it other than, as you indicated, being right next door or having neighbors who know they can call you at the first sign of problems.

I had some kids with great reviews stay in one of my rentals with security cameras at the front door. They rolled a keg in the back, dropped in the tub, and my cleaners spent an additional hour of the turnover cleaning out the empties and scrubbing the tub down from all the beer.

My first indication that anything was wrong? The instant five star review on checkout and request that I reciprocate.

For rentals at a distance you can also look into noise alert products like NoiseAware or Roomonitor that respect guests’ privacy while

alerting you for noise levels above X decibels, but at the end of the day it’s just risk mitigation versus outright prevention.

Hope this helps and glad you caught this one before there was any real damage.

The state of New Hampshire has followed suit: no vacation rentals or motels unless housing essential workers or other specific groups until May 4th:

https://www.governor.nh.gov/ne...

While there's no one tool for everyone, keep in mind that most of the STR tools out there have a core set of capabilities in common which really should be considered the lowest common denominator for offering a product in this space. Things like automated messaging, unified inbox, calendar sync, ranking optimization, and direct booking. These capabilities exist on most of the major players in the space, with providers like SmartBnB offering differentiation through things like AI messaging or (in Porter's case) a truly mobile-first interface

@Julie McCoy +1 to hearing more on what you learn about Lodgix. While I'm always looking at options for improving my operations/tools, I also found some of the more comprehensive solutions like Beds24/BookingAutomation (same product, different name) ultimately got to 10k features by completely ignoring usability, which was not something I was willing to sacrifice. If you're one that likes a lot of options though, they do offer one of the most extensive channel manager lists, a WordPress plugin, and more integrations than you can shake a stick at, without (to my knowledge) charging additional percentage fees by channel, as Lodgix appears to be doing. 

Having been one of those nuts that actually did build my own website, setup my own customer mailing list, and promote direct booking I will also be the first to admit it's not easy to keep a website of any kind  in sync with your listing if it's not already integrated to one of the PM suites. Granted, for many of us here listings may well be set it and forget it, but in my competitive market I find small tweaks in listings, photos, and pricing over time can make a big difference in booking rates and search rank.

Also my experience is that most of the tools that offer WordPress plugins are using it mostly as a marketing ploy. Many of these are little more than a snippet of PHP code to create a webpage embed and additional inbound leads from the existing WordPress dev community, while offering little more than a link back to a small subset of functionality of the primary site/service. I know some of the more expensive suites like Lodgify and (maybe) Hostfully have more flexibility in building out custom pages off their direct booking website template, but you'd want to trial them out to really know if it would meet your needs.

@Luke Carl happy to chat further on this topic. I have an entire spreadsheet I used to compare all the major platforms before deciding on Porter. I’ll send you a connection. Mentioned in other threads as well, but spent months comparing the different tools, lost more time than I care to share, and at the end of it could probably write a book on them that would find its way to that 75% off shelf over by the registers at the local Barnes & Noble.

Like you, I started off on iGMS exclusively. Once I realized I wanted multi-channel sync/management and saw their approach for pricing and that meant I’d be spending $30/mo (appears they now have more dynamic pricing) I started looking at other options. Plus the app’s not really an app at all, but rather a web frame embed of their mobile site, which was already terrible, particularly as new features were just piled into the kitchen sink. 

I landed on Porter because I really wanted something that was easy to get running, worked well on mobile, and didn’t either (a) charge me an arm and leg for a pretty design/marketing or (b) forget that design/marketing even existed and tell me to RTFM.  

I trialed a ton of the solutions, found BookingAutomation/Beds24 to be the most feature complete, but Porter as the best compromise in ease of use, price, and features. 

I was also super impressed with their team’s flexibility in extending my trial as long as I needed and answering my annoying daily questions. Been great so far and I actually enjoy using the product, unlike iGMS which I dreaded. I send in almost weekly suggestions for product improvement and have seen a few of them get implemented a couple releases later, which is nice. 

I’ve also become addicted to checking my weekly search rank off AirBnB (which I had done myself before even using Porter). As you can see, it’s pretty quiet on the future bookings front since I’ve traditionally focused on last minute bookings with a short availability window. 

Hey @Paul Sandhu granted we don’t have any pinup magazines or suggestive wall decor to clean up, I have always had our cleaners do the standard turnover the same day or day after tenants check out, even if we know there are no future bookings on the schedule for several days (or weeks in this case) ahead. 

While it may make more economic sense to wait until just before the next guest arrives for “freshness,” there’s just no way of knowing what folks left in the fridge, if they took out the garbage, etc so better to have to send them back in to do a quick 30m once-over than dealing with an EHS apocalypse because we waited several weeks. 

Additionally, I’ve heard a lot of chatter on this forum and AirHostsForum around cleaning procedure, recommended chemicals, etc. Given the slow anticipated rate of bookings the weeks/month ahead we’re actually just skipping the guesswork and instituting a minimum 2-3 day delay on cleanings after a guests checks out, since the prevailing wisdom seems to indicate that COVID-19’s “shelf life” on most surfaces is somewhere between several hours to 3 days. Since most of our bookings are weekends, that gives plenty of time to have guests check out on Sunday AM, cleaners come in for a safe turnover on Wednesday, while keeping both our cleaners and future guests out of harm’s way from any probability of picking up the virus. 

Ironically, even given these procedures, a really good team, and ridiculously OCD turnover checklist, we’ve already had the last guest request extra paper towels in < 24 hours from check-in, which I suspect means they either spilled something they did not want to tell me about or were doing their own wipe-down procedure as soon as they arrived. 

Thanks Patrick. Totally up for that. I have a current Podio install and messed around with it about a year ago, but ended up dropping it since I didn’t have the time to invest in setting up the workflows the way that I wanted to versus just getting going for a task management and project management as I have done with Basecamp in the past. I’ll send you a connection request and we can chat more. Thanks!

Basecamp. You can get started with a 3 project limit for free and the impetus for the service is something that strips away the complexity of most PM suites and focuses on what really matters with managing projects and (specifically) the communication involved around those projects and tasks. I’ve even used it with contractors who have no idea what they are doing around a keyboard since it automates emails to them on outstanding tasks, which they can just reply to in order to pair back a response in the site.

Yes, there are more dedicated services that can be customized to real estate (Podio, etc) but you’re often then paying someone to customize them versus just getting going on day one.