When running a business, automation and delegation can make your life easier and amplify your success. This is even truer for the real estate industry. If you’re in the short-term rental (STR) business, you might have realized by now that STRs are one of the most management-intensive real estate classes.
This, of course, is because of the high volume of people coming in and out of your property. But even though STRs require more time and resources to manage, that doesn’t mean you or even someone else needs to be completing those tasks.
As my business grew, I wanted to see which pieces I could start delegating to other people as most other entrepreneurs would do.
But, instead of finding the right people for tasks, what if I could find the software or tools that can take over these time-consuming jobs without hiring people?
After all, I wanted to delegate three things:
- Messaging
- Pricing
- Guest Services
All of these can be covered by automated software. In this article, we’ll discuss those applications.
Automated Messaging
When it comes to any online travel agency (OTA) like Airbnb or VRBO, at the end of the day, they are a search engine, and outside of keywords, their algorithm rewards specific behaviors.
One of those behaviors is how quickly you respond to your guests. The quicker you respond to a guest, the higher your account is placed in the search results.
So, the first thing I wanted to do was automate the messaging for my business.
Before automating, I would manually send booking confirmations, check-in instructions, a check-up message once the guest checks in, a pre-check-out message, and a review request message. That’s a lot for one property, let alone managing others.
To make my life easier, the first tool I found was Hospitable. For a starting price of $25 per month for up to two properties, this tool allows you to integrate with Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com, and it can handle all of your messages automatically for you. They also…