Passive Airbnb Investing – Step by step (How to)

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Hey, what's up guys, it's James here. And in today's video, I'm gonna be talking to you about how to make Airbnb short term rental investing completely passive. And when I say completely passive, I mean, once the properties are up and running, you can get them to the point where they're, you know, operating, everything's running smoothly, they're profitable, and you're only spending maybe a couple hours per month, managing a bunch of properties. Now, you can also make the actual purchasing part relatively passive. But ultimately, if you're investing, you're going to want to make sure you're doing your due diligence on deals, making sure you're the one running the numbers, make sure making sure that they all make sense. So it certainly isn't going to be completely passive, nothing is but you can make the management of these properties incredibly passive. And you can also outsource and automate a lot of the onboarding and properties like renovation work furnishing interior design, I've actually got another video on the channel that I posted recently talking about how I was able to purchase list launch, do a minor renovation, furnish it launch a property with only two in person site visits, I'm only actually seen the property twice in person, and I managed to get it purchase, get a smaller renovation done, get it furnished get it photographed, clean listed, launch everything with just those two site visits. So this video is going to really talk about how to make the management of your properties passive, and that really comes down to your teams, your systems, your processes, your software's that you're using to make sure that it's not you know, who's the one doing the day to day management. Now, before we dive into the details of that, I just want to interrupt this video quickly to say, you know, just really plug the sponsor this video me, you should check out the free trainings that are linked down below. We offer these trainings completely free for you guys to help you invest in short term rental property. So again, that's the only thing I have to plug in this video is just the trainings in the description down below. So make sure you check them out, they're gonna help you to invest successfully in short term rental properties. We're gonna give you a free analysis spreadsheet, check it out, link is in description down below. Also, while we're on the topic of clicking things, click the like button, click the subscribe button. So you can help this channel grow and help stay up to date with the two new videos that we post every single week. So that being said that out of the way, I don't grow sponsors oh man advertising, but links in the description down below. Let's jump into it. Let's talk about how to make Airbnb investing passive. So the first thing you're gonna want the easiest lowest hanging fruit is the right software. So personally, I am a big, big fan of two main software's that helped me to manage the property passively. One of them is host away, the other one is host fully. So the simpler one is host family, I just use them purely for their guestbook software. It's really, really nice because I can basically create a digital guestbook for every one of my properties that has all the answers to commonly asked questions, all the details about the property, just cool attractions nearby, the Wi Fi, all that stuff all in a digital guidebook, and I can send that out to my guests. Now the other cool thing about hosting these guest books is I can basically make it so that the guest has to input their email address in order to access that guest book, which then allows me to collect guests email addresses so that I can remarket to them in the future to get them as repeat bookings in the future. So that's the software that I use for that. And that helps to make sure that the questions that guests have, they can answer on their own using that guest book as opposed to reaching out to I guess, communication team. So that certainly just cuts things down. As far as timing. Now, the, you know, bigger software that I use for channel management, that is an absolute must have is host away. Now there are other channel management software's out there. But for anyone that's investing seriously in Airbnbs, and owns more than a few, I would recommend checking out host away, it's a really, really great tool that allows you to do everything that a channel management software should, which namely, is taking all your listings from all your different platforms, all your different properties and putting them into one centralized back end, where you can respond to all your guests messages, you can do all your pricing updates, you can you can schedule out, maintenance and create maintenance tasks and then farmed out to your team, you can give access to, to the software to your different team members and give them different levels of access to your guests communication, people can access the guest messages, your cleaning team can see the calendar, all that stuff. There's all kinds of really great functionality there. But it basically is your main one operating hub for your whole business. And so host way is a software that's going to really make things a lot more streamlined, if you're just doing them yourself. And then as you build your team, it's also going to make it really possible and easy for your team to get set up properly. So host a is a must. Now the other thing you want to have is a pricing strategy and some tools to support that pricing strategy. So for me, we use our own custom built pricing spreadsheet that tells us exactly what to do. Again if you want to learn more about things like that you can check out the link in the description down below. Not allows us to go into each one of our properties once a week. So once a week we go into our properties, we update our pricing, I'm not a big fan of dynamic pricing software's, because from the testing that I've done, I'm usually able to outperform them on most properties, when I'm optimizing it manually using the right strategy. So if you aren't actually going to use the right strategy, and you're not going to price your property effectively and have an actual pricing strategy around it, then yes, dynamic pricing, software's will do a better job than you and you should use them. But if you're looking at optimizing, you want to get those extra few $100 Every month, because at the end of the day, that really starts to add up, then you want to do your pricing with the right strategy. Sometimes that pricing software can do a good job, but in most cases, I found that I can outperform them. And so you want to basically have a good pricing strategy and use one that you only have to do go into, you know, once a week. So for our 789 properties that we've got, we're only going and spending maybe an hour a week actually optimizing the pricing. So that strategy, that system around that is really, really important. Now the first thing you're going to want to outsource in terms of building a team to make things passive, hands down is cleaning. If you're doing cleaning right now for your Airbnb, you got to get that off your plate. Maybe you like it, you know, if you're retired and you enjoy it, you like it, that's fine, but you should at least have someone in place. So they can do it for you so that you don't have to do it, you can choose to do it if you really want to, but you have to understand that it's a really low leverage activity for you, your time is going to be better spent figuring out better investment properties to purchase, then going and cleaning the property. So outsourcing to a good cleaning company where that's their specialty, that's what they do, that's going to really free up a lot of your time, that's going to make things way, way more passive. I know most people are already doing that. But that should go without saying. And when it comes to finding the right cleaning team, there's a whole lot about it, you know, having the right systems for them, so that they can actually operate without you having to tell them when to go in, you haven't kind of micromanage them. So if you want more about the strategies for how to do all that, you know, finding the right people training them, giving the systems, the tools, everything else like that, again, check out the link in the description down below, we've got all kinds of content and training and everything on exactly how to do that. So again, link is in description down below for that. Now, next up after that is going to be your guest communication. So when you've got your cleaning outsourced, and you've got everything else set up, and good softwares, basically, you're going to be spending your time doing guest communication, and effectively triage. So that means that when the guest tells you Oh, hey, this needs to be about the property, you're going to be the one that goes and tells the cleaner or tells the maintenance person or calls a plumber or whatnot. When the cleaner says oh, there's damage, you're gonna go and contact the maintenance person and go and fix it, whatever it might be. So that part of your role is largely just triage. So obviously, you want to have a good Rolodex of people that you can triage things out to. And then there's going to be guests communication, and there's going to be pricing. And so guests communication is typically the simplest one to outsource next, and it tends to be even more time consuming than the triaging because triaging, really, you're only doing anything, once there's actually work to be done, you know, maintenance work, things like that, that's gonna be a big one. Now, you may also depending on the type of property you have, have a gopher right around the beginning as well like right in sync with your cleaner. That's going to be your general maintenance person. Now, if you have a condo, you're probably not going to need that person who's going by regularly to do maintenance. But if you have a single family home, there's probably going to yard maintenance to do maybe pool maintenance, there's going to be just general maintenance, it's going to be needed to be taken care of at that property. So make sure you account for that as well. That's something that you'd want to bring on board right when you're bringing on the cleaner because again, you don't want to be going by to the property in person, that's going to take up a lot of time, a lot of energy. So you want to get that stuff off your plate first. So guests communication for that, you're going to want to hire a virtual assistant. Now there are platforms like guestkey that will do this for you, but they charge an absolute arm and a leg and don't do a very great job. But what you want is a guest communication person who you can interact with who's going to understand the nuances of your property, and you want to be one single person that is going to really know your property inside and out. You don't want to farm it out to a company that's going to have a team of people that there's always a different person communicating with the guests that's gonna get really frustrating for the guest you want one single person do managing your property. So if you are giving an out to accompany you want to make sure that company is assigning you to one single person who is going to manage your property, not a whole bunch of different people on shifts managing your property. And so the guest communication role is really just going to be answering guest questions, giving them the information they need, and then relaying information that they that the guest gives to the guest communication over to you the triage person. So that if the guest says hey, we need more towels that and they're gonna get in touch with you and or the cleaner. They may do some of that triaging themselves, but for the most part, they're going to send the triaging stuff over to you still. And so at that point, now you've got a lot of automation setup. So you'll also want to at the same time just set up automated mass images so that a lot of the messaging can be taken care of, you can do that right off the bat. That's pretty simple. You can do it through Airbnb through host away any the different platforms out there will allow you to automate the sending of messages, and also create message templates for frequently sent messages. So that's going to be really, really good. But then obviously, the guests communication person is going to be your last level for any of this stuff that can't be automated templated, that sort of stuff. And the nice thing there is that guests communication tends to happen at all hours of the day and night. And so having a guest communication person means that you really get your time freedom back, you're no longer bound to your phone, you're not checking your messages, because response times matter. And so you want to make sure that someone else is taking care of that. Now, your role is really just triage. And so at one property two properties, even three properties, triage is going to be such a minimal part of your role, that it probably won't make a lot of sense to outsource it. Once you get to three to five properties, that's when triaging things starts to come up more frequently, and you're probably going to want to put someone in place to manage that, because you got to imagine with one property, there's just not that much that goes wrong, you know, maybe you have one or two issues a month you have to deal with. And so it's pretty minimal the amount of actual triaging you have to do but when you have one or two things a month times five properties, that's like one thing every week, maybe two things every week, that starts to get more more substantial. And so you'll want to offload that to what we would call a portfolio manager. Now the portfolio manager is going to be another virtual assistant, more than likely, you can have a domestic Portfolio Manager. But really, what you're going to want is just someone that is going to be able to, you know, essentially just take over that triage role. So the really cool thing here is that this person in the end is likely going to be able to help you with a lot of other stuff when it comes to actually onboarding new properties. So they're going to be able to help you order furniture, source the furniture, they're going to be able to help you find your contractors, because they're going to be largely finding the maintenance fuel for your maintenance needs at the property. So they're going to build up this Rolodex, they're going to help help you with that, they're going to be able to help you with facilitating and kind of coordinating and organizing and your renovation projects need to be done, because that's what they do is they manage contractors when they're going by and doing the repair work. So they're gonna get trained up and have a really valuable skill set and actually helping you to grow your portfolio as well. But initially, you're just going to have them be that triage person, they're just going to be the one linking everyone together and kind of being the glue that connects the maintenance person or the Gopher, the cleaning team and the guests communication team and the guests. It's just that glue that holds everyone together, make sure that communication is happening effectively, make sure that maintenance tasks are being tracked, everything's being done properly. And that's really just going to leave you with pricing optimization at that point. Like I said, for five properties, that's going to only equate to about an hour per week. So it's pretty straightforward. You can schedule that hour a week for a time when it's convenient for you as well. It's nothing reactionary, it's all proactive when you're doing this. And so you do want to have it be at a consistent time every week, make sure it's scheduled in the calendar there. But that time can really anytime that you choose. And so that means that now, to match five properties or more, you're really only spending like an hour a week managing all of those. And then at the end, you can ultimately get someone else put in place for that if you really want. So then you're really just now wearing the cat full you've investor no longer doing any operating and you're just reviewing monthly statements at month end, I should note as well, you want to have a bookkeeper that's preparing your financials at month end. But that should be a given you should be doing that. For any business, any investment, you don't want to make sure you know the financial standing at all times. So that's basically the whole process. Now that portfolio manager is a really key person. And that is really, again, if you want to learn more about exactly how to find that person, how to train that person, what type of type of stuff they're going to be doing, then just check out the link in the description down below, that's going to go over a whole bunch of stuff and show you how you can get access to our trainings on all of that sort of stuff, how to hire all these different team members, train them, give them rights systems. But as you can see, you know, if you have this setup, you effectively have your own property management company that you own, and that you're no longer even an operator in. So you've actually gotten to a level higher than most property management companies, because a lot of property management companies, their owner run right, the owner is also the operator. And so that, you know, they hired that portfolio manager, they would largely be able to be removed from the day to day. And so that's really the level that we're getting to. And the reason I was able to build this is largely because I have the experience of having built that property management company. Now the cool thing about this is that you can build this relatively easily, you have way, way more control over the performance and everything of your properties than if you outsource to a property manager. And you can save a tremendous amount of money. If you just think about if you have five properties in your portfolio that are averaging $100,000 a year in gross income and you're paying a 20% management fee that's $20,000 per property going to a property manager that's $100,000 a year I can tell you right now that this whole setup between the software, the guest communication person, the portfolio manager, everything the property manager will be doing, that's really only going to cost you a few $1,000 a month, like we're talking maybe $2,000 a month to have all this going. So instead of paying $100,000 a year, you're now paying $24,000 a year, you're profiting an extra $75,000 on five properties, and you have way more control, you're gonna be able to make sure that you, you prioritize your properties way better than a portfolio or that property management company typically would. Now again, you can find a really, really great property management companies. And I want to also be clear in saying that, setting this all up is much, much more involved than going out and just hiring a good property management company. If you want it to be really really passive right from the start, then hiring a property management company is the way to go. But if you're planning on building for the long term, and you are okay with putting in the time and energy now in order to to save yourself time money in the future, then building your own kind of internal property management company is a really great way to go. So again, let me know your thoughts, questions, comments, anything you want anything you think anything your, your, you know, whatever whatever's going through your head, just let me know in the comment section down below. If you want more training on exactly how to hire these different people how to set up these different software's how to manage everything, how to just invest successfully in short term rental properties. Make sure you check out the link in the description down below for that free training. It's going to walk you through everything step by step and give you some really great tools to help you get started on that journey. Again, it's totally free. Check it out link in the description down below. While you're clicking buttons like we say make sure you hit the like button hit the subscribe button to stay up to date with the channel and help the channel to grow. Hit those three buttons the subscribe the like button and make sure you check out that free training after you're done clicking buttons have a fantastic rest of your day. And we will see you in the next video.