getting into Robuild's STR videos, how does he manage remotely?

Question

As a host my biggest fear when running an airbnb is some teens start a party. which is hard enough to prevent if all your listing is clustered in a city (you can hire someone to patrol during party hours). but his listings seem to spread out all over the place. he doesn't even have a management company and instead manages all of them himself.

how did he do it?

Mark Miles · Answer

I don’t like working with offshore companies, I find that they tend to hire low quality people plus I am paying their management overhead. Plus they are constantly hiring and firing people that I need to retrainI have hired everyone individually using those various websites that you mentioned. There were definitely some duds, I had to fire some along the way. But every time you fire someone you learn and improve your hiring process and now I am really good at finding good people and screening out the bad people.I have even trained some of my offshore assistants to be skilled at interviewing new offshore assistants, so I don’t even have to get involved in hiring new assistants anymore 👍

Ryan Moyer · Answer

Software and a cell phone is all you need. Most people around here remote manage. My furthest is 2300 miles away.If parties are a concern, a ring doorbell and noiseaware will help immensely. As will longer minimum stays and higher rates.

Mark Miles · Answer

I pay about 5 to 10% of my gross revenue for offshore virtual assistants. They literally handle everything, I do nothing. Way better than traditional property management which typically charges 20 to 40% of gross revenue and completely wipes out your profits.Also better than managing everything myself. I happily give away 5 to 10% of gross revenue to my offshore assts to have a high earning business on total auto pilot, it is 99.99% passive income. I know I’m gonna sound like a jerk when I say this, but in all honesty, the most amount of time I spend every month is transferring the profits from my business bank accounts into my personal bank account. Because of course I don’t give anyone else access to my bank accounts. I spend like an hour every month going into all my business bank accounts and transferring the profits to my personal accounts. But I usually have a good sports game on in the background so at least I can keep an eye on that while transferring money around. As I’ve said before, my offshore assistants can:- call someone to clear the road of snow leading up to your cabin- call someone to remove a 50 year old tree that fell in your driveway last night and the guests can't depart.- call someone to remove a snake from under the sofa- call someone to remove the trash when it's piling up- help guests find your cabin when it is 1am and they are completely lostAnd much much more! They speak very good English and handle everything for me, I would highly recommend it as a method to try to make your STR business 99.99% passive

Gerald Pitts · Answer

Read through these forums and you will see that self managing is the only way to go with today's tech. You just need to have systems. So much of it can be automated. I actually recommend against living too close like you were saying. Living far enough away will force you to learn who to hire for plumbing, hvac, etc. Being nearby and trying to put all of the fires out yourself is how to create "headaches" as this person is probably referring to. If your car breaks, you don't pull over and fix it. you call a mechanic. You don't go to mechanic school, because you wisely choose to spend your time on something that interested you more. Same thing with a house. If you go to the property every time there's a leaky toilet, that's another 2 hours NOT spent learning how to improve and scale your bsns. So you saved $1500 that year on handyman bills instead of grossing $100k or more on another property you were able to acquire.

Bruce Woodruff · Answer

The key is to a) not allow last minute bookings - set it so that a guest must book a week in advance, b) make your minimum night stays at least 2 or 3....

Luke Carl · Answer

Cell phone and some apps. We all do it

Sean Bramble · Answer

Hey @Mark Miles - I’ve seen some of your past posts about this and am really interested in offshore help. Question: can you give us a sense of what you pay for your virtual help relative to your gross revenue? Just trying to get a sense of it vs traditional property mgmt

Mark Miles · Answer

Not sure who Robuild is but I do the same thing thanks to an army of offshore assistantshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/...

Jason Regan · Answer

I've watched a ton of his things. My 1st Airbnb is in Kissimmee FL and I live in Ma. I have an admin that runs it all for me from PH. We used Hospitable and Price Labs to handle most of the automation and she handles anything else that comes up. It has been eye opening how little work goes into one. That being said make sure you set it up right, visit it and make sure everything is working and in great condition. If you consistently have things breaking then it wont be as easy to run as you are always reacting to broken things.

Scott Schuhwerk · Answer

Mark, @Mark Miles do you use a specific offshore VA team/company or did you hire individually off sites like Upwork, bestonlinejobs, etc?