All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

Does Hostaway not grant you ability to create additional, templated pages to your out of box direct booking site? I can see why you’re wanting more, but I’d caution you to “beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.”

If you goal is driving more bookings, perhaps a better way forward’s simply a different platform manager with greater template flexibility? 

More importantly: 

Who’s the ideal guest by region and listing? 

You mentioned StayFi: what CRM and/or mailing list is setup to reach out to those past guests? Is that what you’d like the site or your platform manager to do? What else do you know about your past guests? What did they find most interesting in your listing/area? What might bring them back again? Inevitably, that’s a far cheaper customer to attract than a new one.  

Ultimately there’s not enough blog posts or reviews on the planet to drive increased traffic to a small booking site and that’s 100% OK. What matters is the funnel and system in front of the site. Start with the persona you’re looking to attract. Find out what they’re interested in. Start testing various ad strategies to see what drives folks back to book. 

Hope this helps. 

Hi @Christine Krevalin you’ve taken the first step in reaching out here. Having spent many years investing (and both winning and losing my shirt) in Connecticut I would never go back. I’m sure there’s plenty of folks out there who can share their success stories as a counter-narrative, but my experience is that that your impression of multi families in the state is 100% correct: over-priced, poor appreciation, and minimal returns. If I took what I invested in CT and it put it into either Boston or NYC during the same time, my returns would have been 5x. Happy to share an insights from my XP there if it is at all helpful, so please don’t hesitate to reach out and connect here on BP. The myth about buying in your backyard keeps countless people from moving beyond the fools gold of small M/F homes atop 3-5% down payments to real wealth-building investments. Take field trips to other areas and compare prices to what you see back home. It’s eye opening and will help build a pricing instinct that will guide you well in the years to come. 

As anyone here will tell you, there's plenty of ways to get started in real estate that do not have to involve your own money or even your own investments. Spend some time finding and working with other investors. See how they work and think. Take the good and bad and choose for yourself how you'd like to invest. Learning anything as complex as real estate takes an enormous amount of time and effort and active participation. There's nothing passive about it. I spent years leasing out apartments for an investor nobody's ever heard of because he was too busy doing the work versus showboating on REIA speaker circuits. That experience was invaluable and I would likely have been way better off had I listened a bit better to what this individual shared with me in those early days. Instead I jumped in before I was ready at the worst possible time.

Once you get more comfortable with what you’re seeing, consider partnering with an experienced, trusted colleague on a deal. Never mind the siren’s call of Lone Ranger sunset successes with your first property. Everyone screws up on that first property. It takes time to build processes you need to do well. That’s no different than the hard work and training you’ve invested into education around nursing. 

Be patient with yourself and your education. There’s no rush to reward that did not incur greater penalties along the way, especially in this market. 

Hope this helps and glad to have you here. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to any of the incredibly knowledgeable folks that have posted back here already. 

@Vincent Plant I hope this is a joke because otherwise that’s a hella lotta life-turning-around geolocation-of-Jesus or whatever else you want to call it that someone with that kind of history and connections would need to do in order to not put your life in danger as well. 

@Tynan Dill as Kevin says, the answer here is highly conditional to your situation, neighborhood, and tenant persona (who you aim to attract). 

Personally, I’ve never had “person unfortunately kicked out of their home as a result of property sale” as a targeted persona (kidding), but in my area of the northeast the real “reasons” for any given eviction are rarely disclosed and generally months behind in the court records, making real-time understanding of legal context nearly impossible. 

Even when something’s listed in the court records as terminated early or stay of execution granted, that often only implies that tenant vacated or other agreements outside of the system were made prior to a formal eviction judgement being processed (very common in residential eviction cases). 

@Damon Jackson it’s Springfield: use caution. 

I’d have to agree with others. While the 700+ credit score’s good, I’m more interested in what the PM/landlord before this one kicking tenant out has to say. We all know the stories of current landlords giving great recommendations to hand off a horror tenant. The challenge you face here is even if the eviction’s some form of no-fault / vacant-on-sale clause condition it won’t even show up in court records for months after the fact and you need that context today. I’ve had “professional tenants” use this eviction delay to their advantage in exactly this type of situation: something’s going on that’s pushing them out of their housing, but the story/narrative wrapped around it is altered to look “not that bad.” 

Beyond that, even if it’s all true, why does current landlord/PM feel the need to force the tenant out? Why not offer them a check to relocate? Why is the legal lease the tenant’s currently in not binding to the new owner? Why did tenant not accept whatever deal the current PM/landlord offered? Why is she/he staying and risking a pretty negative blemish on their rental history? 

I’m sure I miss a few good tenants, but one of my key qualifiers in screening tenants is urgency of move. Do you need to move in < 30 days? If yes, you’re at least bad at planning ahead, more than likely getting evicted for something that’s not being shared. 

Hi @Marcos Carbi congratulations on making the big move to listing your place! I’ve not used Innago, but so long as they make your rental acceptance criteria visible to applicants and there’s a step where interested parties can enter initial screening info before paying the application fee then go for it. Two reasons why:

1. One of the biggest mistakes early investors make in screening tenants is making acceptance criteria some “secret sauce.” Sure, everyone’s smart and, over time, develop instincts for applicants that may be hiding things. However, you absolutely need to have every element of your formal screening criteria/qualifications written down and auditable at all times to protect yourself against warranty or unwarranted claims of housing discrimination. Many new to the field of managing property fail to recognize that the legalities of running our business don’t have to be right, wrong, or fair: it’s just claims and lawyers. 

2. It’s also just good business practice to avoid interested parties paying for an application fee  before they’ve even seen your place, only to find out it’s nonrefundable and they’re allergic to something they spot within 30 seconds of walking in the front door. Now you’re stuck spending all your time explaining the fine print someone clicked through so they can get a refund on a $35 application fee while you miss out on other qualified tenants with the one your online application charged in advance. 

Hope this helps and good luck on this exciting new direction!

@Michelle L. I’ve not moved any of my STRs over the 30+ days because here in the northeast that puts seasonal stays in the same risk bucket as long term renters and I’m on those long term rentals I am absolutely collecting 1-2 months deposit, full identity check, background check, and a call with at least two former landlords who’s address and lease term are verified before handing over any keys. 

3-6 month evictions on long term rentals where tenants pay utilities and leave their junk for you to pickup after they leave are one thing. 3-6 month evictions on seasonal/30+ day rentals where you’re paying utilities and having your furnishings destroyed after they leave are an entire other level of headache. 

My $.02: screen as thoroughly as you can if your state’s laws treat 30+ day stays the same as 12 month rentals in the courts. 

@Paul De Luca everyone who’s screening tenants or handling turnovers will encounter this at some point in time. It’s not if, but when. 

One of my favorite fraudulent tenant stories was a guy who moved in, paid rent for three months, then stopped with that “every reason in the book” MO for nonpayment. Long eviction, finally get kicked out, leaves a huge mess behind… including overlapping photocopies of paystubs with every form of name and date modification imaginable. The guy was a pro you’d never see coming if all you were doing is checking IDs and asking for paystubs - he had both fully forged. 

A few services that appear to offer some additional coverage for tenant screening reports: 

https://www.turbotenant.com/te...

https://www.tenantmagic.net/re...

https://www.myrental.com/

https://www.tenascan.com/

 Great observation James. Formal, uniform tenant screening matters. Exactly what I’ve used for over a decade of turnkey, fully-automated, remote tenant leasing. Happy to connect and see if I can offer additional insights. I’ve sold houses this way. Shockingly effective. 

This is actually not true at all. Airbnb, like the Ubers, GrubHubs, and other VC backed imposters pretending to have a business model simply used the same play of pouring cheap money into flashy marketing and lofty, if empty, claims about changing the world. In reality all AirBnB was doing was what others have done for generations: trying to push out competition by subsidizing the cost of massive losses on the platform in the early days in order to try and exploit platform effects later. 

Read enough other short term rental operators posts and you’ll see they failed to establish that monopoly and now have to show profits, which have been a challenge and will get far more challenging unless things improve with their image and operations over the next 1-2 years. Airbnb sees hosts as simply an inconvenient overhead, instead of the actual foundation of their business.

This is even more true now that they’ve pivoted into designer properties, which is basically just a fast-follow to what Hilton and Marriott have been doing in allowing smaller boutique hotels/brands to book off their main sites, without the rest of us even knowing it’s not a Hilton or Marriott property. 

As several others have posted here the future of short term rentals is owning your own platform and becoming your own Airbnb. This is actually not that hard, but does involve more than 10 clicks on a platform website that’s not acting in your best interest anyway.