Counterintuitive Hack to Eliminate Guests’ Complaints

Start Growing your
BNB Business Today!

Get inside access to our professional courses, hosting community, and much more!

Hey, what's up guys, in today's video, I'm going to share with you the one simple hack that allowed me to virtually eliminate all guest complaints from all of our short term rental properties all over Airbnbs overnight. And that is regular maintenance. That's a weird one. I know, I know, it's probably not what you're expecting. But hear me out. In this video, I'm going to talk about why regular preventative maintenance on your property is way better than curative maintenance, and how you can structure it properly. I'm going to talk about the biggest mistake I see people making in this space that will leave you completely high and dry and inundated with guest complaints. And I'm going to share with you how to find really great reliable maintenance people all that in this video. So stay tuned. Let's start with why this is such an amazing hack for me and why regular preventative maintenance is way better than curative maintenance. And I'll share what I mean by those two terms as well. So when I first started out managing properties on Airbnb, I largely looked at as okay properties need to be maintained when something breaks. So if something breaks, it needs to be fixed. And I still see a lot of people having that mentality, and I can't fault them. That's the way that I thought about it when I first got started. And what I've come to realise is that unless you're in maybe a condo where there's just very, very little maintenance seem to be done. Any freestanding home is going to have wear and tear and you're going to need regular maintenance of some sort. So there's typically going to be a yard that needs to be maintained, whether that's cutting the grass raking leaves, ploughing the snow in the wintertime, there's typically going to be like little small things that need to be done here and there. And so what I've found is that in the past, what I used to do is have my cleaning team go into a property that I had on Airbnb that has a short term rental, and they would do the turnover. And if there was anything broken, they would then let us know to have a maintenance person go in there and fix it. And so we were always in reaction mode, we were always fixing problems. And that's what I call curative maintenance. Only curative medicine, right, you're going in because something is wrong, you're not going in eating healthy and going to the gym, you're just going to the doctor when something has already gone wrong. But good chances are just like with our personal or physical health, if something's gone wrong, if we hadn't taken the right steps a couple of weeks ago or a couple months ago, we probably could have prevented that thing from happening in the first place. And I always had this mentality of well, it would just be way too expensive to have someone going in there regularly and just doing odds and ends and maintenance when it wasn't necessarily needed. So things like going in unclogging drains, even though they weren't fully clogged up just going in there and clearing them out going in there and making sure everything was in proper order that if any little thing was out of place, they would just fix it up. If a shelf was hanging off a wall a little bit, they would screw it back in, tighten it back up, fix that change this out, you know all these little things. And what I've found is that the complete opposite is true, it costs so much less to take care of your property when it's a short term rental with preventative maintenance as opposed to curative maintenance. Now, for some things, we see this as being obvious, like for example, the roof of the property, we know that the roof of the property, we don't want to wait until there's water leaking in through the roof to replace it, we know that we need to do preventative maintenance there and replace the roof before it becomes an issue. But for other things, I find that property owners and investors are often looking at it in the opposite way where they're trying to do things in terms of just solving problems as opposed to preventing those problems from happening in the first place. What I found is that we can virtually eliminate guest complaints and guest issues by having someone go into the property once every week and just do a once over do a check, make sure everything's in proper order. Sure, sometimes all they're going to do is go by there and mow the lawn a little bit and maybe isn't going to be necessarily the best investment of their of their time for the time that it takes them to actually go out there and they only Speight stay for a short time. But other times they end up just catching things that need maintenance, before it becomes an issue. And that means that we're not going to have to deal with the guests complaining about it, we're not gonna have to deal with the guests being inconvenienced by it, we're not going to have to deal with the negative review that it gets from the guest, we're not going to have to deal with downtime on the property that causes because it's happening when a guest is there. And so all those things add up to a whole bunch of additional earnings, we can get better views, which means more bookings, less downtime, which means more bookings, and just overall have a much less stressful life because we're not dealing with issues that have come up and it's an emergency way to deal with them. But we're actually going and taking a more stabilised approach to it. What I found as well as that is really, really helps to avoid the biggest mistake that people make. That really just leaves them high and dry. The number one mistake I see people make when it comes to maintaining their short term rental property is that they have a really hard time finding good reliable maintenance. I'm going to talk about that next how to actually find really great rely on maintenance people. And if you've ever tried, I'm sure you found out that it can be pretty challenging, especially if you're in a more rural location with your property. And so the biggest mistake I see people make is they put all this energy into finding a good person. And they're constantly calling them with emergencies. They're constantly calling them last minute when the guest told them that something needs fixing, and they're getting them to go by last minute. And that meant that obviously, is just going to burn that maintenance personnel. Nobody wants to drop everything they're doing on a moment's notice and jet out to a property to fix something when a guest is there, and the guest is upset, and they're going to be frustrated with the person that is just an awful scenario to be in. So that's a huge mistake, because what's going to happen is you're going to lose really great maintenance people because they just don't want to work with you, because not worth their time to have to drop what they're doing just to go and attend to your property that wasn't maintained properly, that something went wrong. Now, sure, you are still going to have these emergencies come up. But I have a solution for that. 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 Airbnb 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, there'll 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 asset 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 links in the description down below, that will 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. What I recommend in terms of how to find really great reliable maintenance people is look for someone that really knows their way around the property and is kind of a jack of all trades. So someone that can do a little bit of plumbing, maybe a little bit of electrical, maybe a little bit of maintenance here and there can cut the lawn can do all these other things so that you can get 90% of all the issues that come up, they're going to be able to solve sure you are gonna need tradespeople from time to time if there's like a severe plumbing or electrical issue, but most often that person is going to kind of be able to take care of it. Have them go out of the property on the turnover when the cleaning team is there once a week. So if you have a turnover two times in a week, they only really need to go by once a week. And if you have a two week booking venture, they can go by just once every two weeks, or they can go by while the guests is there, if you want to keep up with the once a week cadence once a week I found is really good because there's typically at least something for them to do on a weekly basis, whether that's raking leaves, cutting a lawn, ploughing the driveway, whatever it might be, there's always something they can do. And while they're there, make sure they do a once over to just look at the property as if it were their own. And check to see if there's any maintenance needed. Now I find that the best people to get for something like this is someone that's retired, that's looking for some extra work to do that's handy. But that isn't necessarily looking to go in and do this full time because that means that they're going to be a lot more available. And you can give them a nice steady flow of work. But the absolute worst thing you can do to that person is give them emergencies to deal with no one goes into their retirement thinking you know what, I want to put out someone else's fires for the rest of my retirement years. So what you want to do instead, because you are still going to have emergencies come up from time to time I telling you right now they're going to be way less frequent than what you're dealing with. Now if you're not already doing this regular maintenance, but for the emergencies that do come up, have yourself a list of 357 10 different people that are maybe in different trades that you can have go by on an emergency basis and just expect that you are going to pay a premium and the you are going to potentially burn through these people if you're using them for these emergency tasks. But Do yourself a favour and guard the person's time was doing your regular maintenance at all costs, because they're going to be a really great asset for you in your business. Now, I know this is a bit of a counterintuitive way to think about maintenance and a lot of people are stuck on an I formerly was stuck on just only fixing things when they needed to be done and I'd hire a yard maintenance company to go by and do the yard maintenance but they would never look at the rest of the property the rest of the property would only get attention when something was broken that needed fixing. I've since found that it's just so much more effective and more efficient to have someone go by there and take a full real look at your property and not just the cleaning company because a cleaning company isn't necessarily going to know what to look for and the cleaning company if they find something likely won't actually be able to fix it. And you might have a really handy clean team. And that could be a really big bonus. But most often, you're going to want to separate those two things. And what I found is that this costs us much less in the long run because we have a less fixing maintenance that needs to be do less things that break, we have better reviews from our guests, we have less issues come up, so the peace of mind and the additional bookies that we get more than happy to pay for itself. So again, this is something that I've just learned recently over the last kind of year or two that I found has been a really, really big difference in my hosting and how stress free and how successful it is. If you found the same or if you have thoughts, questions, comments, anything you'd like to share, let me know in the comment section down below. If you liked this video does valuable if you thought was an interesting point of view, then make sure you hit that like button give this video a thumbs up it really does help me out with growing this channel and reaching more people. And last but not least, if you're interested in staying up to date with the two new videos, we post every single week on this channel about all things Airbnb, short term rentals and how to perform well. Whether you're investing in short term rental properties, you're managing it for other people, you're hosting your own space. If you want to stay up to date with all that make sure you hit the subscribe button so you can stay up to date we post two new videos like I said every single week. So if you want more of those, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Until next time, I'll see you next video.