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Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:05] You are listening to the Thanks for Visiting Podcast. We believe hosting with heart is at the core of every short-term rental. With Annette’s background in business operation–

Annette Grant: [00:00:14] And Sarah’s extensive hospitality management and interior design experience, we have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries, earning us over $1,000,000 and garnering us thousands of five-star reviews.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:28] We love sharing creative ways for your listing to stand out, serve your guests and be profitable. Each episode, we will have knowledgeable guests who bring value to the short-term rental industry.

Annette Grant: [00:00:39] Or we will share our stories of our own experiences so you can implement actual improvements to your rentals. Whether you’re experienced, new, or nervous to start your own short-term rental, we promise you’ll feel right at home.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:03] Hello, listeners, welcome back. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: [00:01:05] I am Annette Grant, and together we are–

Both Sarah & Annette: [00:01:07] Thanks for Visiting.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:08] This is an AMA episode, Ask Me Anything. If you head to thanksforvisiting.me, in the upper right-hand corner is a red button. You can press it. It’ll take you to a page where you can record your question, your voice, have it play here on the podcast and we’ll answer it so that everyone can benefit from our thoughts. Sometimes we bring in experts to record their responses. It’s a really fun episode. So today we have Kara.

Question: [00:01:31] Hi, Annette and Sarah. My name is Kara and my Instagram handle is @hummingbirdwynona. I’m just loving your podcast, and I’m just soaking it all up. Thanks so much for all the helpful information. My question is regarding direct booking sites. I’m a brand new host who’s been open a couple of weeks. And once I kind of get my feet on the ground, one of my priorities is to focus on getting a direct booking site. I know you guys talk about this a lot.

I know that it’s best to get all the specific detailed information with a lawyer and all of that. But I’m just curious about what other things I need to be thinking about when setting up a direct booking site. Do you have a guest fill out a specific booking agreement with you? Do they need to sign anything separate? 

Again, I know I’ll get the official answers from a lawyer, but I’m just curious about how I should be making– what I should be putting on my to-do list and what I should be expecting to get set up in order to have a successful and professional direct booking site. Thanks so much.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:02:27] I love our audience.

Annette Grant: [00:02:27] I know. Kara, congrats on your new place. I love the name. I’m going to admit I just went through and liked every single picture that you had on Instagram. That was me. So I love that you’re already thinking that. And listeners, this is what everybody can start doing today. This is like the precursor to even having a direct booking site is you got to have people to market it to. 

And some of the best people to market it to are people that have already experienced your property. So I would look into collecting emails from your current guests that have already stayed or going to stay. Anybody that you’re chatting with right now about your property, get their email address so you can market to them once you do have your direct booking site live. 

Because I see a lot of people– if anybody’s watched our workshop, you know that Sarah and I, we wish we could go back years. We would have thousands of emails and thousands of people to market to and we didn’t get those. I’m still very sad about it. But anyways, starting now, so start now. Even though you don’t have a place to send them, you can be collecting the emails for when you do.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:03:30] Yes, and a great way– the collecting of emails it’s like if you get something from someone, have something to give back to make it juicy. So whether it’s the top three things to do in your area or the perfect day in your area, here’s what you do, like just some sort of freebie that you can give in exchange or discount.

Annette Grant: [00:03:45] Tell them you’ll give discount on their stay.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:03:47] Discount of their stay, all those sorts of fun things. So I love that. And Annette, that was a great catch. 

Annette Grant: [00:03:51] You can start that today.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:03:53] And then I think the second thing, I do want to say this to everybody. When you have one property, you don’t have to get anything crazy robust. I don’t want you to think that you have to invest in a property management software. You can– what do you call it? Like you can be– 

Annette Grant: [00:04:14] Scrappy.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:04:15] Scrappy. That’s what I was like. I was like, gritty.

Annette Grant: [00:04:18] Scrappy doesn’t mean sloppy. It just means you don’t have to go full-on PMS, on direct. You don’t need all these connections, all of these things. You can make it simple.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:04:27] Giving you super simple to make it simple. But here are the things that you– it sounds like, Kara, you want to know what you should be concerned about. And you’re absolutely right. You want to chat with your lawyer so they can draft up for you a rental agreement that is specific to your property. You may have some amenities, you may have some safety issues or things that your lawyer might want to know about and have it be in that rental agreement. And ask him, too, does everyone need to sign once you have a hot tub, you have a trampoline. 

So make sure when you chat with your lawyer they understand everything about your property and then they will help you draw up an agreement. And there are lots of ways people can sign the agreement when they book. You could send it as an attachment in email. You could leverage like Hello Sign or DocuSign or something like that. There’s a lot of ways to do that. 

And then the other thing I would be concerned about is making sure the person booking is who they say they are. That might be honestly, before you invest in any other technology, invest in something like that. And there are so much tech out there that helps you do that from the traditional long-term landlord options out there where they have someone go through a really simple screening process to make sure they’re who they say they are. Some of these processes take less than 3 minutes.

Annette Grant: [00:05:36] And listeners, I want to let you know, most likely the people that are going to be direct booking with you in the beginning are word of mouth, people that have already stayed, friends and family. So a lot of times you will actually know who this person is. That’s the best place to start.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:05:53] And I would say really simple, have them send a picture with their phone of their driver’s license. That’s a really great start to if you want to leverage technology just quite yet. That simple process of just having them send you a picture of their license with their signed rental agreement and then you can give them the code to your home.

Annette Grant: [00:06:08] And then, Sarah, I think last but not least, the one thing that everybody asked us about is the payment method when they’re doing a direct booking.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:06:13] Again, you know, talk to you or talk to your accountant. But there are so many ways to do this as well. As long as you’re reporting everything correctly, I don’t see any issue with PayPal. I don’t see any issue with Venmo, with Zelle. You could leverage things like Stripe, which is what we use to collect for our direct booking sites.

Annette Grant: [00:06:31] Super simple to set up.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:06:32] You could meet them the day they check in, check their ID, make sure it’s who they say they are and they can give you a check. You what I mean?

Annette Grant: [00:06:39] The real old school vacation rental.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:06:40] I just want to give you permission to not get tripped up on all that fancy things. And there are fancy things out there where this can be completely automated.

Annette Grant: [00:06:49] Start simple. 

Sarah Karakaian: [00:06:49] But for you, Kara, start simple, start small. And I hope these tips from us have helped give you some ideas of what you should do next. And with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: [00:06:59] I am Annette Grant, and together we are–

Both Sarah & Annette: [00:07:01] Thanks for Visiting.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:07:02] We’ll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to the Thanks for Visiting Podcast. Head on over to the show notes for additional information about today’s episode. And please hit that subscribe button and leave us a review. Awesome reviews help us bring you awesome content. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to hanging out with you next week.