How to Boost Rental Revenue with Direct Bookings

0:00So Liverpool City Center we're in the L1 postcode and that is if you've ever been to Liverpool that's is Lively and we're right on Bold Street which is the one of the most Central spaces in Liverpool and you know you're one minute away from all the clubs and stuff nice so this one's more sort of you know averse to it to be honest but you know I'd say to get around it we don't really like one night stays one night stays is terrible I really do not Advocate one night stays so if you're planning to put your your listing up for example when you do you know one night you just you're just bound to get some troubles so

0:48I do sort of like a structure you know so you do within four nights for example you do two night minimum stay and then within six you then go to like three nights and then between six and 14 you then do like four night and then above that it's then five night minimum by really just try and push for longer term stays because they're the best guests and you know further out you'd want to have longer stats because you don't want to fill your calendar in a month's time with a two night booking because that then wrecks your whole ability to book out a month and when I so sometimes I take on people's units and they've got existing bookings in there and I see they've got like for example now they've got a one night in August but they're like no I really want to keep that one because it's

1:36Double the rate that it's going for now like bin it off you know you don't you don't want that one you know whatever you need to do to cancel it just get that one get that one gone and then we'll just open up the calendar and trust me you will make more the longer term booking strategy now than having that one sort of unicorn night in there because it's only going to be a party or something realisticly yeah absolutely no that's a great point and then in terms of like noise and stuff is there anything you can do to kind of mitigate that between the multiple units so I know you can get like minute alarms we personally don't we've got ring doorbells though and sometimes if if you can hear if you can hear music from The Ring doorbell then you just call them

2:25You know calm it down but for this block in particular it's a bit more of a free goinging building in terms of you know it's because it's ours we you know and the the area we're in we'd have pretty much no custom if it wasn't a little bit more flexible but but yeah it's it's a good block and you know we've got a lot of longer term stuff there but we'd never do less than two nights I'd say our average there is between two and four nights but then we get people in there you know for months at a time as well oh wow okay cool yeah yeah and that so that one is up in Manchester I'm sorry in in Liverpool which is near Manchester right and so for for my us based people who aren't super familiar with the UK geography here

3:14So you're located down in London area which is where I was looking at the map of your properties they're mostly all in the London area but then you've got that one up there so you know one of the big questions that a lot of people I work with have also is around Remote Management you know it seems daunting and seems like it would be very difficult to have a property that you couldn't get to or or couldn't get to easily so you do this from a distance is there big challenges with being remote or has it ever you know been an issue for you I've actually found forcing yourself to be a remote is pretty good to be honest I actually prefer like even my local proper is here I forc myself to be remote from them

4:03okay I try to set up the systems that mean that I don't need to go there just because I'm next to it doesn't mean I should have to go there so it's just building a team everywhere doesn't matter if you're local or it's 100 miles away having a good team is essential because let's say for example I want to go on holiday you know and then that weekend something goes wrong with that property well just because I'm not there have I not built the team that can help solve these problems you know I don't want to be a pinch point in my business because I go away so I I imagine myself you know imagine I'm in Spain will the business still operate if I'm in Spain and if the question if the answer is no then I need to do something to fix that and if it's yes then you know Happy Days but it's it's just building your team I think cleaners are

4:51essential obviously to clean but they just know a load of people so handy men you know a lot of the time they've got good handy so one of are cleaners the husband of that person is a handyman locally for a load of airbnbs and we've sort of just tacked onto that because if you're in the Airbnb space it's very sort of everyone knows everyone and everyone sort of likes to help out as well so just having that really helps and also there's a a thing called task bird where you can just go and say is is there some jobs that you're doing and you find someone you get their number and then they can just help you on repeat so it's just making sure you've built a team locally to each area so that if you're not there then it can still run got it got it that makes sense and what

5:39Does your team look like I know you mentioned the handyman and cleaner beyond that what what is your who else on your team so I've just hired someone nice courtesy of you and your your friend Tyler nice I went through them because that's originally how I found you wasn't it I was looking at how do I structure a business or my my Airbnb business and then you started talking about you know vas and referrals and all that sort of thing and then I found Tyler and I gave him a call we had a chat and he found someone really good girl called Gabby and she's just amazing you know she comes with six years experience wow she's she's actually teaching me new methods and processes on how she's done things with sort of other companies as well so it's it's really exciting like there's I've had a

6:28Lot of my properties just in my head so I know everything in my head about a property but she's then was like Ollie I have no idea about any of your properties I need to learn I was like all right I'm yeah I mean that that makes sense so she started building this knowledge base I can't remember what she's building it on it's this is it like fresh desk or something like that and it's just incredible so she'll just come with me would ask a load of questions that she needs about who contact details are about like boilers fuse boxes where's the location of everything what's the codes for the second lock box in case there's a lockout you know what's the strategy in case something happens BL and she's just created this whole knowledge base and I've just sort of put all onto onto the sheet but it's just you

7:16Know having a having a team around you now is is sort of where I'm expanding into really just trying to grow grow my team and just grow the number of properties I'm able to manage comfortably and also confidently because I wouldn't want to expand to say 5050 on my own and these are spread super thin I'd rather stay at 30 have you know me and me and Gabby and then work out that we're okay together and then we can expand into 50 and then we can expand to 100 and then 200 you know just grow the team like that instead of instead of spreading ourselves too thin that's awesome that's amazing so you got up to 30 properties with just you handling all of the bookings all the questions checking instructions lining up the cleaners so basically everything except for boots on the ground you doing the

8:04Entire business M and it takes so long you think oh it's going to take 20 minutes to do something on this one listing you turn up by 30 it's a whole day yeah or I'm doing my payouts at the minute for February yeah oh my God even just doing that it takes days just to do the payouts for your for your owners you're saying yeah for the owners yeah having someone like Gabby who can actually run a portion of it and she can start doing you know maybe we're slacking on one one area maybe we need to do more promotions maybe we need to do early bird maybe we need to do bigger monthly discounts maybe we need to just play around with the listing in some which way which he's able to take on and then you see an improvement in how everything's performing as well yeah so it's but yeah

8:52getting to 30 I wouldn't recommend it on your own that I mean I give you so much credit man because I we have 30 34 right now we're about to have 39 we're working on a five unit right now but and we have four full-time people that are helping us with all the bookings and everything and they just trade off and and we're to be fair we're not involved really at all in the day-to-day anymore so that's like basically fully fully outsourced but I cannot imagine having 30 of them with no support doing everything because just like you said like just the payments alone to cleaners I mean it would take several hours you know on the first and 15th we pay all our cleaners and now that process is really automated and you know the more of those things you can automate

9:41it just freeze you up so much for other other activities so yeah I mean automations they're the biggest thing so yeah we had a a call the other day and we were talking about turno and you're cleaned a sort of automated on turno and mine weren't it was all just manual so I'd get an invoice from this one this one this one I'd go through and double check and you'd find that a cleaner might have tacked on a cleaner here or might been wrong here and suddenly you're just checking all that and I thought this is crazy and although turno take a fee I think it was your advice just say just swallow the fee you know just for the the you know the reassurance that each bill is going to be correct and there like one or less thing to worry about and I also use this thing called sweet op so

10:30it's a a guest portal it's really good and on there it's got checkin details it Provisions like smart locks for example with different codes it's got pictures so you can say here's how you get into each each unit you can see the Wi-Fi details you can do UPS sales through it like early and late checkout damage deposits and waivers ID rental agreements you can put videos on there so a lot of the questions I have especially sort of in the winter is how do I use the heating or the boiler's gone how do I reset it or something and there's just a catalog of videos on this portal so I think we really spend a lot of time just developing this portal and making sure that it's fully locked in so that if there is a question that comes up it's just a refer back to the portal

11:19sort of thing if there's a question we haven't answered in it well then we'll just get the cleaner on her next run to take a video or picture and then we upload it and then it's basically a full FAQ you know there's local attractions of what to do as well wow that's that's called sweet up you said sweet up sui op oh sweet okay cool yeah we'll put a link to that is do you know does that is it just in the UK or is that in the US it's an American company oh it is okay I think it's American there's a lady called Ally over there she's American got but yeah there's it's it's good I think I was one of the first people in the UK to get it which is quite exciting and now sort of everyone over here is starting to use it set a trend it is it's unbelievable I don't think I could

12:07Live without it to be honest I'm not sponsored by it but it's honestly for the scale and the usability and you know just what you can do with it it's it's essential for our business interesting and do you use a separate property management system then to manage the the actual properties themselves yeah so I use host away okay so it's basically Lo of softwares that just come together and integrate so that all I really do in terms of sort of the operations is well this why I've got Gabby now is to make sure that each listing is fully optimized and its full potential and also that the guest communication is on point too so I think I need to start getting some more team members as well just for the guest coms because at the minute you know the weekend for example it's my phone that

12:55Rings or after six o'clock it's my phone that rings so it's just sort of yeah developing developing the team out but you know that will definitely come once I've learned how to work with one team member I'm sure we can then you know learn to scale as well it's just a learning c yeah exactly and that's I think you've done it the right way that's what I recommend to people is like organically grow with the company like when we did our first one it was in our basement and we turned it into a one-bedroom apartment and my wife was down there cleaning with a one-year-old attached to her you know and we did everything we like just you know with one property we just figured it out as we went and then organically as we scaled we started to add processes and I was just like you I was like you know I was local to the property so I was doing a lot of

13:43stuff that I realized all a sudden this is not the best use of my time I need to treat these properties as if they're on the other side of the world and how would I act if they were and now there's properties I haven't visited in over two years that are 20 minutes down the road because I don't need to we have a really good system in place which is a great thing to to have so so I think that's smart to just like scale to a point where then you start to Outsource certain aspects instead of trying to say well I'm going to build this massive machine from the start when you haven't done any of it yourself and you don't even know what to look for so yeah I think it's it's definitely just building your processes you know I think you you have to learn some of them yourself like we now have if we have lock boxes we always have a second lock box remember I was down here and we had someone it was 11:00

14:32on a Sunday in Manchester it's about 250 miles away and they left the key in the Uber and we didn't have a spare key oh and I was like oh God it ruined by night did you drive all the way there no no no so the homeowner lives luckily about I think it's 10 miles away from there so I called him I was like Luke you're going to need to pop over he wasn't too happy we we did it we did we charged the guests sort of a cool out Fe so he got you got paid for it a little bit yeah but now every single place before I take it on have you got a second lock box no yeah well you're getting it before before it goes live just because you get a little bit of trauma a little bit of scars from each thing absolutely absolutely I've been there so I want to talk about direct bookings because

15:20most people I know that do this say they get 80 90% of their bookings from Airbnb or verbo or or booking.com and then a tiny bit of direct bookings but you're kind of opposite it looks like I saw on your website it says 54% of your bookings are direct which yeah that's a huge amount that it's 54% of Revenue is direct oh okay so I try to get you know that you I think Airbnb and booking.com are really good marketing tools you know they spend billions on marketing so that people book through their website you know now there's there's different tactics to make people book direct hope they're

16:09not listening around but there's different there's different different different tactics you can do to to to you know make sure you know if if it's on a on a tile for example I don't know it's there's definitely tactics you can use to make sure that they come Direct yeah yeah well I know that like a lot of people like I mean even on your listing pictures I see The Branding of perfect booking right on the front you know so if people a lot of people if they see that they're like oh perfect booking maybe I'll just Google that and see what comes up and then they book directly because it's a lot cheaper for them a lot for example you can have your logo and really present as a company and then in your bio you might say

16:57hey I'm o i run perfect booking have you explored us you know have you explored to see what else we've got and then they might you know search perfect booking or you know if someone is looking for something to do perfect booking in wherever and then I I'll be at the top of the top of the the page so it's I think in terms of the name as well I've got I quite like my name because where's the perfect place to stay or where's the perfect l or you know but there's definitely ways to do it you know even if you just speak to speak to them and say Hey you know are you looking to extend your stay it's good you're staying with us now for these two days or whatever but would you like to extend and they'll say actually yeah we only booked two days because we we wanted to extend you know direct and see what you could do yeah

17:46so you got to really reach out to every single customer but it's also the repeat business as well is a major thing so in this sweet op it's got a section which is sort of additional questions that you ask and I ask everyone what's your first name last name phone and email and are you here for business or Leisure and now I've got two lists of business people and Leisure people and I've got I know exactly where they've stayed I know their first name last name phone and email so I can just do direct marketing to these people and we then get a lot of repeat business because you know a lot of roofing companies for example or flooring companies or carpentry or there a I don't know if you've got nandos or anything over there it's a chicken shop it's a really famous chicken shop and they I've got a five

18:35Bed house in tumber dwells and they just put their whole crew in there you know and they they actually found us direct because they searched perfect booking you just search the name on Airbnb or my air Airbnb name is perfect booking you just go into Google you search it and then you can find the property it's it's not hard to to do it but it's just making sure that people you know you don't push them through the door but you make sure the door's there yeah just so they can go through but yeah a lot of repeat business making sure that if someone's in like we've just had someone for example he's been on and off for a week he's doing he's in the process of buying a house but he's staying at one house for you know one time and then coming back to ours for a week at a time and he booked an Airbnb to start but then we've had him for

19:23The last three weeks just direct so in terms of Revenue yeah is about I think is 54% but in terms of bookings I think it's probably maybe 30 30% of all bookings but it's just the the reconversion that we get and also we try to do it for the bigger because obviously these companies don't want to be spending loads of money like doing month at a time just spend all those fees so they maybe do like a week and then you sort of have a chat with them and they say all right we want to extend and then you just you capture them from there oh