Hey, what’s up guys, let’s talk nightmare guests. This is a pretty timely video because I actually just had a pretty awful guest stay at one of my short term rental properties. And so I get people asking me all the time about how to deal with this, how often it happens. And people just concerned about having those nightmare guests out there short term rental. So I thought this was a pretty opportune time to talk about it and share my experience of a bad guest that stayed with us recently, and share my thoughts on how much of an issue this is on the platform and how to avoid it, things like that. So let’s start off by saying, this is just super, super, super uncommon. The reality is that if you actually look at the numbers, I’m not speaking from just guesswork, I’ve literally looked at the numbers, and it is a small fraction less than 0.1%, it’s a fraction of a fraction of 1% of all guest stays on Airbnb, actually result in damages or other trip related issues, like what people would call bad guests. And it’s an even smaller fraction of that, like we’re talking, it’s like, you know, getting struck by lightning, dive likelihood that you’re going to have an actual terrible guest that does significant damage. And even then you’ve got $3 million of liability insurance protecting you from Airbnb, you’ve got your own home insurance policy, you’ve got all kinds of protection for yourself. So yes, it absolutely does happen that you can get bad guests on Airbnb. But the reality is that in years of hosting, with, you know, hundreds of different listings that I’ve had my hands and managed owned, there’s really just a small handful of issues that have happened in the almost eight years that I’ve been doing this. And so the thing is, most people overestimate the severity of the issues, and the the commonality of the issues. Because naturally, what you do see in the media is the nightmare guests, what you don’t see is the millions and millions and millions of stays every single year that have no issues at all. So first and foremost, I just want to start by saying that guest issues at all are a huge rarity on short term rental platforms, especially if you’re hosting properly. And the likelihood of them being catastrophic is next to nothing, especially again, if you do the right thing. So let’s talk about this experience. This is a guest that stayed with me recently, and we have a fire ban out our property. Because naturally in Quebec, if people have been watching the news, there’s a lot of forest fires going on. And that’s why there’s been smoke everywhere. And so I’m my listings are in Ontario, not too far from Quebec. And so naturally there is a ban on fires because we don’t have the resources to fight those fires because we’re already over there fighting back. So make sense pretty logical, any reasonable person would understand that we can’t have a fire. But unfortunately, this guest did not want to adhere to the fire ban and had a fire up the property anyway, in spite of our team telling them that there was a fire ban in effect, they then got really mad at us because they said that the fire was what they were the only thing that they were looking forward to doing. And now there’s absolutely nothing that they could do at the property given that they weren’t able to have a fire. By the way the fire department actually came by made them put out the fire because they were obviously not following the rules. And there’s a big bill of smoke coming from the fire. So naturally the fire department came over. So they were really upset with us about that. Now, keep in mind, this is a property that has outside in the backyard. It’s got a hot tub. It’s got a sauna, it’s got bocce ball. It’s got Spikeball, it’s got cornhole, it’s got kayaks and stand up paddle boards. Inside, there’s a movie theatre, there’s a fireplace inside the house, even, there’s so many things for this these people do. There’s a ping pong table, there’s arcade games, there’s so many other things for the person to be doing that by no stretch of the imagination. Would you ever consider the firepit to be the only thing to do at this property. Now, because we’re courteous and we want to make sure this guest has a great stay. We offered them a small reimbursement for the inconvenience, but also stood firmly that it was obviously outside of our control. This is a mistake that I see a lot of people making is that they take full responsibility for things that were ultimately completely outside of their control. And that will leave your guests having a lot more power and a lot of situations and you don’t necessarily want to do that. So it’s not that you want to go on a power trip and get angry at your guests. But you do want to have a bit of a given a take there where you’re doing them a favour, but also making it clear to them that you’re not admitting that it’s your fault that there’s a fire ban, but you’re saying hey, look, I understand it’s an inconvenience for you, and I want to do something really nice. So we did that. And the guests decided that that wasn’t enough, they weren’t happy with it. And so they proceeded to trash our listing. Now the reality is that most people when they have in their mind trashing their listing, they think like breaking down the walls like the place on fire. I’m talking about they took one of the chairs inside they left it outside $250 there that that’s going If that’s going to going to be an impact, they haven’t they made a bit of a mess on one of the carpets. And now we’re going to have to get it cleaned. And so all in the total damages there were about five to $600. Now, the nice thing is, again, I’m going to talk in this video about how we actually deal with that. And we’re going to get all that money back, including some additional money for additional cleaning fees. And just for the headache of all this, so really, I’ve no sweat off my back. And I’ve spent a grand total about five minutes even thinking about this issue. So I want to share with you guys how I can do that as well. 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. 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’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 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. It’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.

But before we do that, I want to talk about how we make sure that this is our nightmare guest because a lot of people have nightmare guests that are a lot worse than this and a lot more frequent than this. So I want to talk about some of the things that we do to prevent this so that once every few years, we have a couple $100 where the damages, as opposed to once every couple months, we have a few 1000s. So the way that we do that is number one, first and foremost, by having a nice listing that can command a higher nightly rate and keeping our nightly rates high. The biggest mistake that I see people making is that they don’t have a good pricing strategy and they end up having to underprice their listing. And that is the number one way to attract low quality guests is to lower the price of your listing. So make sure you have a minimum that you will not go below so that you don’t have bad guests more frequently. And make sure that you’re optimising your listings pricing so that ideally, you’re well above that minimum pricing threshold at all times. So you get higher quality guests, because the truth of the matter is the people that pay more tend to care more respect more, they just tend to be much better quality guests. The other thing we don’t allow is one night stays, I never allow one, it stays in any of our properties. For some clients that I work with. I do make exceptions to that with really small units in metro areas, things like that. But generally speaking, almost a blanket rule to not allow one night stays because like I always say not all one night stays are going to have issues, but almost all issues are going to come from one night stays. So by eliminating those one night stays from your portfolio, you’re gonna eliminate 90% or more of all the issues that you’re going to have in your portfolio. Because remember, when someone’s booking the place to throw a party or something like that, they’re gonna search for just one night stays. So naturally, your property just doesn’t even show up in the search results when they do that, which is a really big bonus. So the other thing we like to do is make sure that we screen every single one of our guests that stays with us. Now Airbnb helps us to automate that process whole lot by making sure that we can only allow people to instant book if they have a verified profile and positive reviews from past states. So that’s another way that we do that. Now if someone does reach out and they’ve got a profile that don’t have reviews on yet, it just means that we’re going to be a bit more critical, we’re going to ask some more pointed questions about why they’re there, what their group is that they’re travelling with these sorts of things, so that we can make sure that we’re getting a good quality guest staying at the property. And then sometimes things like that, we get a good group of people that just do some stupid stuff like this, but it’s really, really rare. And again, we have house rules that really specifically do protect us and ensure that guests are adhering to those rules. Sometimes guests break them, they’re human beings, we can’t do anything to control that. But it is obviously very rare. And guests are generally going to book a place, if they want to break rules, they’re going to go to a place where it’s not explicitly laid out so they can hopefully get away with it. So by having the house rules clearly outlined for them, it does act as a good deterrent. And it also just protects you as a host. So those are a few of the things we do to just prevent a whole lot of the issues. There’s some other smaller stuff as well. But those are definitely the main ones that we take action on to make sure that we’re avoiding most issues before they even happen. What about these few $100 in damages? Well, first of all, this is a property that’s going to do over $100,000 a year in bookings so it’s really a pretty small drop in the bucket. But the nice thing is, we don’t have to take that drop out of our bucket. Because we’ve got protection, we’ve got a security deposit from the gas, we’ve got $3 million in liability insurance coverage from Airbnb. And we’ve also got our own home insurance policy if we ever need to go to it. Now, the reality is, we wouldn’t probably go to that for something small like this. But we certainly could. And the number one reason why we’re almost never really never have ever had to go beyond Airbnb is because if you know how to actually go about getting a reimbursement for Airbnb, it’s pretty well foolproof. I know a lot of people talk about Airbnb, leaving them high and dry. I’ve just never had that experience. Nor have I had that experience with any of the hundreds of different people that I’ve worked with. Because the reality is, if you do things correctly, you will get a reimbursement that’s really straightforward. So in this case, I have my team that takes care of all this. For me, the only reason I know about this issue even happening is because they like to update me on what they’re doing to take care of stuff like this. So again, if I’ve spent maybe five minutes on this total, even thinking about it, I’m spending more time on this video than I have on just actually dealing with it. My team handles it all for me. So that’s really, really important, especially as you grow your portfolio is to have a really great team that can handle this stuff, so that you’re not involved in the day to day. But basically what they did is as soon as the guest checked out, my claim team went in there, and they took photos of everything. That’s step number one, make sure you get photos of absolutely everything get as much proof as much evidence as possible. And right away, we filed a reimbursement request with Airbnb, which obviously the guests declined, we asked for reimbursement for the things that were damaged. The guests declined that and then it goes to Airbnbs resolution centre where they act as a mediator, and they get the guests to pay out or and whether or not the guests pays out, they will pay out if they deem that the reimbursement request is reasonable. So we gave them evidence of the chair that was left outside, we showed that it got wrecked by the rain, we showed an invoice for exactly how much that chair cost to replace. And then the carpet different stuff like that. So my team assembled all that sent it over to Airbnb, and now we’re just waiting to hear back from them. We’ve done this on smaller things that were you know, $100 here and there. Over the last few months, it’s always gone smoothly. And obviously in the years I’ve been doing this, we put in ones up to a few $1,000 for different damages. And we have always been successful. So again, as long as you do it properly, you follow their process, you shouldn’t have any issues with getting getting your reimbursement from Airbnb, the things where I’ve seen people make mistake is that they either don’t take photos don’t get receipts, they just ballpark a number. And then obviously they’re not going to get reimbursed for that from Airbnb. Now the nice thing about this too, is that this host left us a one star review. And were able to get that ticket down because it was a retaliatory review, they only reviewed as one stars because we requested reimbursement from them for the damages. And because of Airbnbs policies, that means that our retaliatory review, and were able to get taken down so that’s not going to impact our listing whatsoever. So that’s another big bonus as well. And again, that’s it my team took care of for me completely so that I don’t have to be involved. People are always shocked when I tell them that things like this happen. And I just am not involved. I don’t have to deal with it. And the reality is that when you’re investing and you want us to be passive income and focus more on active income, that’s what you have to do, you have to have the right teams and systems and processes in place to make things super streamlined, whether they’re going really well or really poorly. You also want to make sure that you’re just mitigating a lot of the risk and that’s what we really focus on is making sure that the downside is always minimised and so there’s a couple of things that we do to make sure that all in this whole thing is still going to make us money we’re still going to make profit on the booking we still made a got a really good nightly rate sure we had a troublesome guest and we’re going to have to have our team spend a little bit more time on dealing with reimbursement but all in we’re getting it all up and running and clean team went in there got everything right for the next guests who checked in later that day, no issues there, everything was resolved and we’re gonna get our reimbursement for that within a few days here so that’s my thoughts on Airbnb damages what happens like my little story of this happening recently and how we dealt with it and as for actual reviewing they will leave a detailed review detailing this so the next host doesn’t have to deal with this troublesome guests and this issue again in the future. That’s my thoughts I want to know yours leave in the comment section down below if you liked this video if you found it helpful or valuable for me sharing this experience then make sure you give a like button there just hit the like button really does help me out getting these videos in front of more people so I can help them improve their short term rental investing hosting management. I will post two new videos here on the channel every single week. So if you’re new here or you’re not yet subscribed, make sure you hit that subscribe button as well so you can stay up to date with those two new videos we post every single week. And with all that said, I hope you enjoyed the video and I’ll see you in the next one.