All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

Blessing in disguise? If you are going to put up with the “luxury” of living on the other side of the wall from your tenants the least the property could do is pay for itself with you living there. 

If not, keep looking. Plenty of investors that would argue the best investments are rarely the ones you live in. 

Thanks @Julie McCoy. I have my listing managed through Porter, but it took me a good 2 weeks to setup the initial listing. In trying to refine the payment options to ensure I wasn't forced to meet someone in person to handle their default collecting payment in cash policy (?!), I appear to have now activated Payments by Booking, which adds yet another % fee atop their existing 15% commission and when I follow the steps to find out what that is for my unique listing, it just sends me into a page load and re-login loop. 

So in the end I'm just tossing on a 30% surcharge atop my existing Air/VRBO rates to the Booking.com listing and leaving it up for anyone that chooses to go that route to make it worth my while to deal with the bloatware that is Booking's 10k switches, knobs, and poor website UX. 

@Ken Latchers I'm glad to hear some folks have figured it out and perhaps you have more patience than I. As I said, my STR is in a location with no postal mail service so their antiquated means of mailing me a love letter to verify the property address is a nonstarter.

Answering my own question, I did finally figure out how to reach Booking.com support, with a not unexpected 1 day turnaround time. Additionally, since the host fees appear higher than Air/VRBO, I added a 20% premium to the rate schedule to ensure I'm not paying more for less. 

Still welcome others XP on the platform and tips on what you have found working/not-working. 

In the midst of the Coronapoloclypse I thought it might be a good idea to re-open my property for rent off Booking.com in order to prepare for an inevitable slow down off the AirBnB and HomeAway channels. 

What a mistake. Not only does there appear to be no actual way to reach customer support, they also keep trying to post mail me a super secret code to the listing address that cannot actually receive postal mail. Truly, I've never seen a site/service so uninterested in helping its partner as this. 

Before I simply deactivate the property on their site yet again:

• Are any of you actually successfully using Booking.com with your properties? 
• If so, are you using a channel manager or their native extranet/Pulse app? 
• Any tips for actually reaching support (all the instructions they have in their help site just send you back through a login loop that never actually connects you to anyone)?

@Terry Harris I lived in what could be that area myself as well for several years. I moved out when I had a bullet go through my bedroom window and was woken up by a drive by shooting the street over. This was a few years back when gangs in the north end were pushed out and ended up flooding the south end of the city. People talk a lot about rough areas in other cities. To this day, I’ve not seen anything as bad as what those areas of Hartford experienced at that time. As with many cities it was block to block. Downtown was and remains today walkable, safe, and vastly underrated, but I’d be cautious and ensure due diligence in areas around the peripheral.

@Daniel Denning What @Lucas Carl said. You're overthinking the worst case scenario. Emergencies in STR are no different than LTRs: call the police, fire, ambulance, etc. You can setup a free or low cost voicemail system through a service like Google Voice or American Voicemail and have those systems ping you when you wake up or set off sirens in your home if you'd like, entirely up to you.

Set the expectation up front with guests on how you can be reached and for what reasons to save yourself headaches down the road.

Most importantly enjoy the ride!

Agreed @Ricardo P. The blanket moratorium on evictions is a poor response. In many states these have been in process for months and in other cases there are factors in play that put other tenants at risk by allowing bad actors to remain in place. There’s a better compromise here that does not assume all evictions are a matter of wealthy landlords kicking poor tenants to the street.

Well you probably want to move fast if you are planning to evict since it may soon be illegal in many cities across the US:

https://www.mercurynews.com/san-jose-mayor-calls-for-moratorium-on-evictions-during-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2020-03-12/coronavirus-housing-temporary-eviction-moratorium-tenants-los-angeles-san-francisco

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/as-coronavirus-slows-seattles-economy-landlords-tenants-advocates-work-to-prevent-evictions/

https://ny.curbed.com/2020/3/12/21177133/nyc-tenant-eviction-moratorium-coronavirus

Looks like the Internet caught on to your recommendation Karl, Boxed.com now sold out on TP as well.  

Cannot wait for the TP hawkers to start selling rolls on the streets like the ones selling generic water bottles at summer concerts for $3/bottle. 

Vacancies and reserve accounts are a part of every investment in real property. As a host, I am remaining completely transparent with booked guests on what their rights are around cancellations. Similarly, it's incumbent on us to educate guests on both the standard processes we have in place for disinfecting all switches, surfaces, and countertops with every turnover, as well as the reality of what we know on how/where COVID19 spreads and how long it can survive on surfaces, which appears to be somewhere between several hours - 3 days in one study versus up to 9 days in another. 

In short, for those of us following standard procedures of having cleaners wipe down all surfaces between weekly turnovers the risk to the average guest (even in a space where an infected individual just left) is still likely quite minimal.  

And in an environment where we have to have a thread on where to buy TP because people's worst fear about the end of the world is an inability to wipe their bottoms, a little guest education on risk profiles of staying in our homes never hurt anyone.