Serviced Accommodation UK (7-hour property investing course)

in this course you'll learn how i went from finishing university to making thousand pounds per month from properties i didn't earn but before we get into the course i need to give you some context on how the strategy works i went into review and i found literally the cheapest apartment i could rank which was a studio apartment for 750 pounds the property also came fully empty like there was literally nothing inside out try to buy everything the next part was pretty straightforward i made an account on airbnb then i made a new listing i took all the professional pictures of the apartment and then i just put those pictures to airbnb i had this booking from this lady she ended up booking 16 nice for 972 pounds and then i had another looking for 15 nights for 962 pounds these people were paying me significantly more per month than i was paying on a monthly basis when my first deal started working i took on another one in the same building and i took more apartments and stephen in well in garden city hartford and i started managing apartments for other people in london and bishop stafford by the end of it i had taken on 40 problems either by renting myself or managing for other people in this course you'll learn the strategy from start to finish by the end of the course you'll have an area where you can do this you'll know how to work out how profitable a deal is how to market your property to get bookings how to systemize your business so you can run it from your phone and so much more now all the modules are timestamps if you click the description button or the chapters button you can essentially see all the modules now if you find this course useful subscribe to my youtube channel because i'm making a lot more content about property investing and also share this with anyone else who's looking to invest in property so now we'll get into the course so in this session we're going to be going through the service combination business model and the three different strategies which work within service accommodation now before we get into the strategies we first have to work out well you know what exactly is service accommodation what type of properties work as service accommodation i think a lot of people think that service accommodation is essentially apartments in the city center or maybe a house in the suburbs or you know maybe i caught it somewhere but the reality is all of those can be service accommodation service accommodation the easiest way to think about service accommodation is essentially short-term rental or maybe even a holiday home rental essentially a place which you're renting for a few days maybe a few weeks or even a few months and all of that is really categorized as still short-term because if you want to you know move somewhere to a different country to a different town and you want to rent accommodation generally you know the contracts are from about 12 months so anything which is below that is you know almost considered short led so even if it was three months four months i mean you know the longest guess we've had is 11 months but you know it's anything which is short-term accommodation and uh accommodation that you can provide where people can stay for a short period whether that means of days or weeks or months that is you know considered serviced accommodation because you're essentially servicing this apartment or this house you might be offering a cleaning service and so on and so on and people get to stay for a short term now why exactly does that business model work and to explain why the business model works i sort of have to ask you this question which is why do people pay for spotify or apple music when you can get music for free so now if you if you think about that for a second you know people can get any sort of music they want for free with us without spending any money you go to youtube you can download music you can do whatever you want but a lot of people including myself you know people end up paying for music services like spotify youtube music apple music when all of that is essentially free so it does beg a question well why are people willing to pay for something which is free and i remember going to a talk by spotify back in 2016 and they said the reason is the answer here is convenience because see if you download music in the normal way and you know you open up a laptop and you search the songs and so on and so on and then maybe download it and get your phone and you know plug the wire into the laptop it takes you know it takes a lot of time it's a lot of effort whereas when you have a service like spotify you press one button and essentially you have the song in your phone and and same with the rest so essentially what's happening is that people are paying for convenience and actually you make money with airbnb you make money with service accommodation exactly the same way so let me give you an example for one of our properties so now this is a two bedroom property that we rented and we rented this for 1200 pounds now when we rented this for 1200 pounds you know we then put it on to airbnb we had the professional pictures we furnished it so on and so on and uh we stuck this onto airbnb now on airbnb we received a booking for 34 nights for 2 700 and twenty six pounds which is you know considerably more than twelve hundred pounds a month that i'm paying so i'm paying twelve hundred pounds a month and you know a guest has just paid me twenty seven hundred pounds for you know just just slightly over a month so my question to you is this if i'm renting a property for 1200 a month and i rent that out to someone else for 2700 a month why are they will to pay you know almost double what i'm paying to my landlord because this is a rent to rent deal which we'll get onto in a second but why are they willing to pay a lot more money and again the answer is because of convenience now you might be thinking well why is this more convenient than renting something else and here's here's a bunch of different reasons as to what really makes airbnb and you know service accommodation convenient and that is essentially where the margin is which is that if you can make something more convenient for someone else they will they will pay you the premium no different to spotify apple music so on and so on so here are some ways that this model of you know renting a place for a few days a few weeks is a lot more convenient so the first one is that there's no long-term contracts so you know think about it normally what happens is if you want to rent a place and you move for university you move for work you know you move for whatever reason that you're moving to a different area if you want a house or an apartment normally you would have to get a 12-month contract minimum you know you might be able to you might get lucky and you might get a six-month contract but generally you're about 12 months whereas with this if someone wants 34 nights they can get exactly 34 nights they don't have to get 38 nights or you know 28 nights there's no there's no limitations you can get exactly what you want so because you have flexibility that is a form of convenience the next thing is everything is already set up for you so when a guest enters a property you know the internet is set up the wi-fi the the bills the everything which needs to be set up is already set up in the property and so there's nothing for them to you know waste their time doing and getting providers and so on and so on whereas again if you rented a property for six months twelve months you then have to you know get the wi-fi you have to get the set up the bills the internet and you know the list goes on and on and on and again you don't have any of that because as when the you know when this person checks in for 34 days everything is already set up so it's a lot more convenient for him to sort of be in and out as he pleases the next thing is cooking facilities so again this is a comparison more to hotels rather than houses which is you know if someone was living in a hotel it is actually not that convenient because if you wanted to make your own food now let's say you're a you know you're in a hotel for a week or maybe two weeks or even a month well your only option is to basically eat out every single day you don't really have the choice of making your own food whereas when you have your own kitchen and you know all those facilities you can essentially make whatever you want so it's a lot more convenient than going out every single day when you can just make your own food and last but not least the family is essentially in one place so again this is a comparison to hotels which is you know let's say there's a family of four there's four people two adults two children and what would typically happen in a hotel is you would get you know two rooms and maybe you have a you know one parent and one child and another parent another child in separate rooms or maybe the parents and children in separate rooms again it's not as convenient whereas if you have one apartment let's say it's a two-bedroom apartment and everyone's in one place it makes it much much easier uh for parents it's a lot more secure because you know the kids are in one apartment as opposed to down the hallway or in separate rooms so again it just makes the whole process a lot more convenient so that is really how the short led business works which is you're making a markup you may you're making a margin purely because while you're you're making a product which is a lot more convenient for people when it comes to accommodation when it comes to stays so anyone who's coming to the area they can pick exactly the number of nights they want and they can pick exactly you know the facilities they need from that particular apartment depending on you know which one they book and it just makes the process a lot easier rather than you know them going to a brand new place and you know taking a rental property and again even when you compare to hotels there's a lot more convenience offered by service accommodation compared to you know traditional hotels so that is a reason service accommodation works that is the reason you have this you know um i i always compare it to this model of there's a lot of people who you know bring a lot of product from let's say china and they get a wholesale so they might buy 2 000 of them and you know they might do about quarter and they get it very cheap so they might get it one pound per piece so for example if they buy 2 000 you know pieces of maybe headphones or something they might get it for one pound each so they spend 2 000 but when they're selling it to someone else the other person the consumer doesn't have to buy 2000 minimum order he can buy one if he wants to he or she can buy one unit and because they have the flexibility the convenience of being being able to buy one they uh you know now they don't have to charge in one pound they can charge five pounds they can charge six pounds and that is how the wholesale work wholesale business works which is you know people are bulk buying and they're sort of restricted to those quantities and then they're selling in smaller quantities and no different to corner stores convenience stores you know if you think about your local convenience store and you think about the prices in a convenience store compared to tesco convenience stores are always colon stores convenience straws whatever you want to call them uh 7-elevens they're always more expensive than you know then tesco and those sort of uh tesco asda those sort of places purely because it's more convenient like for example you know where i'm filming this right now there's a there's a convenience store three minutes away or if i want to go tesco i have to walk about 10-15 minutes and because i don't want to walk 10-15 minutes i'd rather just you know go down in three minutes and maybe have to pay another pound or something but i'm happy to do that because it saved a lot of my time and it's a lot more convenient for me and uh this model works exactly the same way which is people are willing to pay you higher prices than you know what you rented the property at or maybe if you own the property which you rented at normal prices they're willing to pay you more because it's more convenient for them so that's how the overall model works now within the model there's there's three different main three main strategies of how you can go by doing this so the first one is by purchasing property now essentially what that means is you buy a residential property and you operate that as a service accommodation unit now shortly we'll be going through some modeling i'll show you i'll be showing you exactly how these work the second one is rent to rent now rent to rent is essentially where you're renting a property from the open market and then you run that property as service accommodation so now let's say you find a landlord or a lending agent and you rent a property from them once you've rented this you essentially just rent it back out as service accommodation on short term nets and you know charge people are much much higher price because of the convenience and finally you have the management model the management model is very very similar to leading agents so imagine you find a landlord and they want to run their property as service accommodation but they don't want to do all of the work so that's where you come in and you say to them well you know i'll do all the work for you i'll run this as service accommodation and essentially i'll take a fee for that and the fee might be 15 or you know the fee might be 25 around that sort of mark and that is a business model in itself so now if we look at the first model which is the purchase property model with the purchase property model very very simple essentially you know imagine you have imagine you've bought a property so you've acquired a normal property and you're making uh cash flow every single month so you might be making for example in this diagram you might be making 500 pounds every single month on that property so you know you've got a mortgage you've got bills you've got all these costs and after everything is cleared off you might be making about 500 pounds a month you then decide well i'm gonna run this as a service accommodation and because i know i can charge much much higher prices so right now you're making about you know about about 500 pounds a month and you think well maybe i can you know maybe you can charge a lot more money because it's a lot more convenient people are happy to pay more money for short-term accommodation and so what happens is you turn your property into service accommodation and essentially it's a great great way of just boosting your cash flow so you might be making 500 pounds a month cash flow now suddenly you're making an additional 500 pounds cash flow because of service accommodation and your cash flow is doubled so you're making 500 now you're making a thousand and so you've created this margin in the middle where your cash flow just gone up and up so the purchase model is very very simple it's taking your properties which you already own or a property you purchased and then just simply just running that as service accommodation the second model is the rent to rent business model so with rent to rent how that works is let's say you have you know gone to the market and you've rented a property and then you've turned that into service accommodation and your revenue every single month is 2500 pounds so you you know you take a property you rent it from the market and you turn into service accommodation you you know advertise on airbnb booking.com all the marketing strategies that we're going to go through later and you make 2500 pounds now once you've made 2500 2500 pounds the first thing you have to do is pay your expenses so you made 2 500 pounds and then you pay the landlord their rent which is 1 000 pounds so 1 000 pounds is then deducted from your revenue of 2500. so you made 2500 then you pay the landlord their rent which is a thousand pounds so now you're down to 1500. now after 1500 you have you know expenses these will be your bills your laundry your cleaning uh maybe some system costs so on and so on and you know here i put 500 pounds so you had 2500 pounds you then pay the landlord there one thousand pounds you then pay all the bills um you know bills systems so and so on 500 pounds and anything below that is essentially your profit so if you look at the diagram you have your revenue you take all your rent cost away you take all the expenses away and everything left at the end is essentially your profit so that is how the rent to rent business model works which is very very simple you're taking a rental property where you think there's a lot of potential that you can make a lot more money and you know once you make a lot more money you pay all your cost away and whatever is left at the end that is essentially your profit very very simple model we'll be doing a much much deeper dive in this later on and and finally you have the management model so in the management model what happens is that you essentially take a property and you again you know you say to a landlord that i can make you a lot more money than you're currently making so again let's just assume you know the landlord was making uh 1 000 pound rent every single month on this property landlord making a thousand pounds and you say well you know i think we can do a lot better than this i can make you a lot more money if you let me run this as service accommodation and when i run this as service accommodation i'll just take a fee for doing this because well you're going to be making a lot more money anyway so for this example let's just say the landlord's making about you know a thousand pounds every single month on this property now you run this service accommodation the revenue goes up to 2500. so the revenue is 2500 you then take a fee you say well you know my fee for doing this is 20 so i'll take 500 of that um that's you know 20 of the 2500 and so what's left goes to the landlord which is you know 2 000. so now the landlord previously was making 1 000 but now because you've you've supercharged the cash flow they're now making two thousand they're making an additional thousand you're making a 500 pound fee a 20 fee now sometimes that might be 15 sometimes that might be 25 and you know it's a win-win for both because you make money from managing a property they make money because well they're getting a lot more cash flow now now of course you know in these simplistic examples i've left a lot of the numbers out there's a lot of expenses i've left out just to sort of explain the model now when we go through the deal analyzer system and when we evaluate these deals it'll be a lot more clearer as to exactly how these numbers work for all these strategies so you know whether you do rent a rent or you purchase or you do management you can exactly you know you can put this into the calculator it will tell you exactly how much money you're going to be making in every single deal but that is how the model works so the first thing to do is essentially to work out well which of these three models do you want to follow you know do you want to buy properties and turn them into service accommodation do you want to rent properties and then do you rent to rent or do you want to not even have you know the risk of renting um essentially all you want to do is you just want to take a fee for doing it for someone else and there's pros and cons to all the models so for example if you're purchasing the property well you know the benefit is that well of course you're making a lot more money but the the downside is that you know there's depending on which area you're in throughout the country or you know it takes a lot of money to buy a property you have you have two deposits you have legal fees you have stamp duty there's a lot of expenses when it comes to buying your property so even though it makes a lot of money and you have capital growth and you know you control the property you own the property the downside is it takes a lot of money the upside with rent to rent is well essentially you know there's no deposit there's none of that there's a deposit when it comes to renting a property but it might cost you two thousand three thousand four thousand pounds and you can get started and you can start making money and you know so that's the huge huge advantage of rent to rent and that's why a lot of people follow the rent to rent strategy because with you know hardly any money with a you know not hardly any money with a very very small amount of money compared to the money needed to buy properties you can get started and you can be making a lot of cash flow the downside is well you know if you didn't do the deal analysis properly and you didn't find your area properly you are now liable for that rent every single month so the property doesn't perform then well you take a bit of a hit because essentially well you know the deal is not making money but you still have to pay rent every single month so that's the downside of rent to rent which is you know you might if you haven't done the deal analysis property and you haven't taken a good deal you could potentially lose money now when it comes to the management the great thing with management is that you can't possibly lose any money because you're just making a fee for the potential money that you do make so if there's a month where you know let's say you make no money well you you know because you're just taking a percentage if there's no money made yeah you don't make any money but there's no way that you can lose any money either because well you just take a portion of any money which comes in the downside with management is that you know essentially generally you make less cash flow than you do with service accommodation or rent to rent purely because while your margin is slightly lower with rent to rent you take all the upside whereas with management you have to give you know most of it to the landlord and you take a 15 20 fee so pros and cons to each model and really in this lecture in this segment um what you need to do is work out well out of the three strategies you know which one am i going to focus on and it might be that you want to focus on multiple strategies you might you know you might want to buy some properties and do rent rent or you might say well i want to do a rent to rent and some management so you can essentially do a mix now of course it's always easier to start with one and then transition and transition but essentially you need to decide well which strategy is right for me based on you know how much time i have how much money i have to invest in someone and so on so that is the goal of this session here which is look through the three strategies and then work out well which strategy is right for me once you have selected your areas or your potential three top areas we're then going to start doing their research with that area and see well the properties in this area do they make any money or do we have to move on to the next area now in order to do this we need to use this tool called air dna you can access this by going on to a dna.co so once you have made your account on adna you have to go onto this tool called a dna market minder that is this is essentially the main tool a dna has now one of the areas that i've selected is called milton keynes this is in the south of england and as you can see there is a button which says purchase i haven't paid for any data yet everything you see here will be shown to you absolutely free for the areas you select anything which is with this lock icon and on the left hand side here as well that is something you have to pay for in order to unlock but what we're going to be doing is we're going to be using the free information and if we think the area has a lot of potential then we might consider paying and getting some more information in order to do some further research this is what you need to have set up which is your a dna account and input your area then you need to open the deal analyzer system now when you open the deal analyzer it will give you two options enable macros or disabled macros you need to click enable macros because this will essentially validate all the formulas which i built for this spreadsheet now we can just click this one you can just click don't update and simply open up the sheet now the first sheet the first page says the type of property now when we've selected milton keynes we first need to know well what type of property works in milton keynes and because maybe you know a one bet has a lot of potential but a three bet has no potential so we need to see what type of property will possibly have potential in this area so this is the first table that we need to fill in irrespective of which page you are on you only have to fit fill in anything which is in blue so that is the only thing you have to input everything else will be calculated for you so for example if i go on this sheet here anything which is gray yellow red that will be done for you the only thing you have to input are the blue fields so let's open this one here so there are five main types of properties sorry six main types which is the studio one bed two bed three bed four bed and five bit we need to know which location these properties are in in your given area what type of properties are they what are their conditions and well what is the rent that they're going for so i'll get through this one step at a time let me just make this slightly bigger so let's look at the studios first how you do that is if you go back onto air dna here you can see all the properties in milton keynes now this icon here which is the green icon and you might be able to see that here there is only you know a few of these green properties like one or two maybe and the green property essentially means that it is a shared room that someone is renting out now we can uncheck this one because we're not interested in that we're not you know renting out shared rooms this one is a private room in a property again we can uncheck this because we're not really in the market or renting out rooms we're in the market of renting out entire properties rooms are typically rented out by people who have a spare bedroom and so on and so on so as you can see on the left hand side under a rental type shared rooms there's actually only one you might be able to there's a green dot right in the middle turning on and off as i do this private rooms there's quite a few and the one we're interested in is the entire home the entire property in this area so again we can uncheck this one as well now the only thing we're left with is the entire properties so now we need to evaluate with the entire properties now if i uncheck this what it does it gets rid of all the entire properties so now nothing is checked if i go back onto this and click studio then it shows me all the studios which are available now in terms of the location so the first thing we need is the location of the studio well there isn't there actually isn't one designated location when it comes to studios they seem to be you know scattered all over the place so i i will say scattered in terms of the property type well studios are typically you know if i go up here and hover over this this to me okay this is a bungalow this one says it's a tiny house i've never already seen a studio house in my life before but okay this one is a self-contained bed set this is a studio flat this is a unique house okay this is an annex which is really again a flat kind of this is an apartment this is an annex generally they seem to be annexes or apartments so with this one we can select both since you do have some annexes which are technically i guess considered houses to some degree so you can click both if we look at the condition we can't really tell too much from because there's a lot of outside pictures this one seems to be in okay condition this one seems pretty modern this one again seems okay this one seems this one seems pretty cool so so the condition seems fairly good so i will give this around a seven out of ten now the next thing we need is the rent so we need to know what the rental is for studio apartments um in this in this location so if i go into a right move and i search milton keynes and then go on to rent and click studio and go to studio and then generally i will select the lowest price and then i will find the best property for the lowest price something which is in good condition so this one doesn't seem to be an amazing condition it is a house share anyway this is the house share okay this one this one seems in pretty good condition and this one seems pretty pretty good this one seems nice and new and um same with this one this one looks pretty good so i think the studios we can say we can estimate that they're anywhere around this little range 675 to 725 so we'll say we'll say around 700 pounds per month is what the studios are being rented at so now we go on to the next field here let me just make this not bold so now we go on to the next one which is a one bedroom so if i go back onto here and now deselect studio and select the one bedrooms now we can see the one bedrooms are generally around this area here so if i zoom in to see well what exactly is this area there might be a station nearby or a town center so as we can see this is probably milton keynes central station so the one bedrooms all seem to be around the milton keynes central station so if i go back here location train train station this is where they generally are what type of properties are they so so these are apartments mk hub they all seem to be apartment in uh pretty good condition generally they seem to be in very very good condition so modern apartments seem a lot of them seem to be new in terms of the property type we'll say there are flats condition they seem pretty good if i go back to right move and now select one bedroom i'm going to change this to milton keynes central station and we'll go half a mile within the station and we'll look for only one beds so we need something which is in good condition now this is pretty good uh we'll go from again the lowest price so this one seems in pretty good condition seems almost brand new wow impressive cd pack okay and it also comes furnished which is very helpful so they seem to be around 850 pounds 850 pounds now we look at the two bedrooms so again we uncheck the one bedrooms check the two bedrooms and again similar this isn't very surprising that most of them seem to be scattered once again around the train station i think you'll find this in most areas that they will be scattered around a station or an airport or a hospital or you know something something along those lines so now let's look at two bedroom prices something which is this seems a bit old uh so okay this one seems pretty good seems quite modern this one seems quite modern um around 1100 seems to be a good price for this so again they're around you know the train station it seemed to be flat the condition we didn't actually check if i go back here but yeah you can see they're all pretty much new apartments in very very good condition so we'll give this a 9 out of 10 and 1100 is what the rental is okay so now let's look at three bedrooms three bedrooms again you can see they're a lot more scattered so they seem to be a lot more scattered and it wouldn't surprise me if some of these are possibly houses so you can see this is a house this is an apartment this is an apartment this is an apartment this is the house this is the house by the way i know this because where it says three to four bedroom detached house underneath that it tells you that it is a house this one again is a house this one is a house this one is a house house house house see this one says apartment so again they you know generally i suspect most of them are again around the station because they're not scattered all over the place they are sort of kind of very very close to the station again the station's here and they're all in this sort of radius now a lot of them are houses and hence they're slightly further away because you don't get houses back in the town center so i guess you can save both uh in terms of so i will say they're close to the station you have flats and you have houses generally the condition again pretty good condition properties in this area seem to be in pretty good nick so this house is apartment is slightly on the old side you have to scroll down so you can yep see them in pretty good condition some of them are not as modern as you can see but uh pretty good we'll get this at eight so now let's go on to right move and see well how much can we rent a three bedroom property for around the station so you have a three bedroom apartment again slightly old on the you know starting on the old side this is of course very expensive so now again this one here 1600 i wonder if i increase this just slightly more since we're looking at houses as well because see if i go back into the map here there are some of them are slightly further from the station so as you can see they're slightly further so i've sort of increased it to be slightly further on that side as well so even if i open up the map and if you want to see properties on the map you can do is exactly the same exercise so if you want to be around the station okay 1950 1600 1050 some of the houses are slightly cheaper 1800 1100 so okay so we'll pick something around this sort of range which is in good condition slightly modern so some are on for a thousand this one's for 1600 this one 1900 1800 so we'll say probably around the 1400 mark on average so you have a bit of a bigger range because some are houses and you know some are modern apartments but if you if you want to for example look at some of these and you know they tend to be in very very good location i think this is a similar one similar building so you want to go for something modern something which is you know like these as opposed to something which is a bit old so i think the best comparable in this case might be for example this property here but this is a penthouse which is normally more expensive so i think 1400 is probably a good estimate for a three bedroom now we look at the four bedroom properties now there aren't actually any four bedroom properties available in that area sorry i should have gone on to this one first and first seen where they are and again they you know generally a bit more scattered but as you can see the heavy concentration again is within the town center so if i go back here now i can't find any in that area i'll just have to increase this slightly in order to see well what can we get in that area as close as possible so if i look at the station you know there's one here but this is the house share again this is a house share there's a house for 3 000 there's a house for 1400 1400 but these are slightly further away and of course you want something which is in you know good condition similar condition let's see the price of this one so yeah this one doesn't seem bad 1450. so i think we can estimate that you know a four bedroom house probably around fourteen hundred and fifty again they were around the train station they were mainly they were mainly just houses let me just select this again in terms of the condition if i go back here they can get an idea that they're in okay condition they're not as modern as you know some of the apartments so they they seem slightly older than some of the apartments so we'll give this we'll give this around a six out of ten and finally we're on to the final one which is the five bedroom property so again we need to go to the map and select five bedroom so the five bedrooms seem to be a lot more scattered and there doesn't really seem to be many of them so if we go back here they're scattered most likely there will be houses i mean you can't really get five bedroom apartments that's very rare so they're all houses and the condition isn't as modern as the other one yep there are houses the conditions we'll see are four let's see what the rent is for properties in that area so we got five bedrooms five bedrooms so let's see if we can get anything even remotely close to the station so this is the house share so we can't so generally you will find is that as you you know get to the bigger properties it's very very hard to get them around the town center or in you know like very very amazing condition and so on and so on so there there's one here which is a five bedroom house for fifteen hundred or one for sixteen fifty uh slightly further away from the town center but we can we can go with something like this so 1650 around that sort of mark so we'll put in 60 50. so now we have all the information in terms of well what the properties are like in that particular area the next thing we need to do is find a property so if you go back here it doesn't really matter what type of property you go for so we'll put this as close as possible to the station the reason is that most of the properties it seems like the ideal location is around the train station so all we need i'm going to put this down to one bed we just need a postcode of a property in the town center so we can work out um what the forecasted occupancy is what the forecasted rates are so just find anything which is in the town center it doesn't matter if it's a studio one bed it all we need is a postcode of something in the town center uh sorry near the train station because that's where all the properties seem to be um so and i'll show you why we need this so you find a property and then you scroll down where it says broadband and then you click show average broadband speeds in this area and then click compare broadband deals now you might be thinking well you know why are we getting internet but the reason we're getting internet is so we can get the exact postcode of something which is near the train station so mk91dr now you take that postcode and you go back on to airdna now this time we click invest and we click the rentalizer and now when we click the rentalizer we take this postcode which is mk91dr and we put it in here mk91dr so now we search this and by default it has put it to two bedroom and two bars but we're going to change it to a studio studio one bath and we're going to say two guests can stay in that property now what this does is it tells us based on the comparables it's not going to show us because we haven't paid yet but it will tell us what a dna estimates the next year's average daily rate will be this basically means that it rate plus any cleaning fee plus what they think well the next year's occupancy rate is going to be now what we need to do is we need to take this rate and take this occupancy rate and plug this into our analyzer so we take 119 and 52 so where is the average daily rate forecast we need to input this number so it's 119. and where it says occupancy rate forecast we need to input this number which says 52 percent and what that does that is that tells us our monthly profit potential this is how much money we can possibly be making every single month based on the fact that we can achieve 119 pounds per night rate and at 52 occupancy based on the fact that we are paying 700 pounds rent every single month so now we continue doing this for the rest of the property so if i go back here and select one bedroom one bathroom again we will assume that only two people can stay in per room and click update so now it is a hundred and eighteen and fifty two so we put in one one eight and fifty two percent so now you can see it's 412 so slightly lower than the studio so then we continue with the exercise now we choose two bedrooms and maybe we can go 1.5 bathroom now because there's two bedrooms and we assume two people stay in every single room we can change this to for guest click update and the rate is 116 pounds but 65 percent occupancy so we can put in 116 and 65 occupancy and tells us the profit figure now we go into the three bits so if we go three beds and again we increase this to now two bathrooms and we can have six guests since there's two people per room two times three is six 117 62 so 117 62 so now this one the forecast shows that it might not make a profit over the course of the next year now we're going to the next one four bedrooms and we can leave it to two bathrooms i think that's fair and we can increase it to eight guests 132 at 50 and last but not least the five bedrooms so this is by the way assuming that all these properties are in the town center since we've already determined that well the town center seems to be a good location so we have 174 and 55 okay so 1704 55 so green is anything which passes a criteria which is profit over 200 pounds every single month yellow is anything which is between zero and 200 pounds and red which is anything which is negative now this doesn't necessarily mean that well we're only aiming to make 200 pounds every single month what this means is that if we just do marketing on airbnb alone that we should be looking to make at least this now when we take these deals on we'll be marketing on our website on using google and using agencies using booking.com and you know so many different ways so don't expect that this is the occupancy that we're aiming for this is what we're looking to make this is simply the occupancy level we're using to do our deal analysis as a very very conservative figure that if we didn't do any agencies or booking.com or websites and so on and so on then we should be at least making this much and even on that amount we should be making you know at least 200 pounds every single month now like i said that is not the goal that is not the objective but this is how we do area research that even on a conservative level if we assume that everything is very conservative and we're still making money then when it comes to you know essentially doing this properly and by doing all the marketing that we can do we should really be aiming for around 80 occupancy so if i just very very quickly show you i don't want to get ahead of myself but on the rent to rent analyzer when we do our forecast in our profits we we look at the forecast in terms of how much money we can make on the forecast but we also look at well how much money could we make if we achieved 80 occupancy not 52 or 65 or 62 because the aim really is that you know our aim is to get to 80 occupancy by doing all the marketing that are referred to which is the website agencies booking.com so and so on but the problem is that it is very very hard to get you know accurate accurate information from agencies from booking.com because they don't actually release any data the only place which does have data is airbnb so when it comes to deal analysis the only thing you can really do is look at airbnb information because no one else really provides any so this is why we have this metric of 200 pounds just on a b and b alone that if we can make 200 pounds just by doing airbnb if we did everything else we should be making a lot more but that lot more can't really be guaranteed purely because well you can't read it's very very hard to get any accurate information from booking.com from agencies so on and so on so when it comes to deal analysis and service accommodation we have to go with what we have in the best information we have to make the best educated guess and you know be very very conservative so from a conservative level we want to make at least 200 pounds every single month which is 2400 pounds a year and then we aim to make even more on top by doing all the other marketing so that is why the criteria at this stage is that if it makes more than 200 pounds based on these low forecasts then you know this area does have potential and if we did everything properly and we do all the marketing we could then it should be even better so what has happened here is that this deal is you know the studio the one bed in the two bed seems to have passed this is just slightly under so it hasn't broken even you know at 62 so that doesn't that that's not looking great but these three look like they have potential so the next thing we need to do we need to go back on to this go back into the overview and now we need to do some more research to see well do these areas actually have potential or you know like what these areas like historically how these how do these three properties perform in the last 12 months because you see these are four cars these are future predictions what i want to know is well how much money did they make in the last 12 months because if we know well okay this is how much money they made in the last 12 months and this is what they're forecast to make again we can have a much much better um guess or estimate or forecast or well you know how this property type will do going in the future so we have to go back on to this but in order to access this information we have to purchase the information for milton keynes so if i click purchase and you can change this to pounds from down here that you can see is 16 pounds every single month now we only need this for one month because once we've done our analysis we can simply just cancel our subscription so what you need to do is you need to add your card details and and then enter your password again and then click the purchase now button and that will give you all of the access to this area now for some areas this might be slightly more than 16 pounds i believe some areas in london is 29 pounds because they give you even they give you more data since they have more properties in that particular area so the next thing you need to do is essentially purchase the data for this area so i'm just going to do that very very quickly now so once you have purchased this area or your you know selected area as you can see this is taking away all of the locks and it's given some more information it's given us a you know market score get given as a grade and it's taking away all the locks from these areas here so we have a lot more information so now what we need to do is go back into the analyzer and now we're in the historic section because we've passed this and we're on to the next part because we want to validate well what type of properties are good and historically which ones have made money so these are the three things we need we need the rental size the number we need the historic occupancy rate in the last 12 months we need the history adr which essentially refers to the average daily rate so let's do this one first because it's the easiest one which is a rental size so what that means is if you scroll down here on the overview page it says rental size now the rental size tells you the number of properties of that particular type so if we if we look at studios there's 12 studios which represents four percent now if we look at this sheet it says we want the number not the percentage so there are 12 studios in terms of the one bedroom they seem to be the most popular at 134 so one three four the two bedrooms are the second most popular after which is 182 then we have the three bedrooms 36. we have the four bedrooms which are 21 and 14. now let me just explain the color coding here the reason the highest is the green and the lowest is the red is because the more properties there are of one particular type generally it means well this is a very very popular property type and second the other thing it means is that air dna has a lot of data since there are so many of those properties available now when there is only 12 available of something in a big area that really isn't that many properties and therefore when it comes to looking at the data it doesn't it's not always 100 accurate because well there aren't that many properties it's like you know trying to get a sample size and there's only two or three people taking a survey of you know of whatever that doesn't necessarily represent you know that whole population or that whole area because we just don't have enough data so the the green ones in this case are better the red ones are obviously not as good because one this means that it's popular and it also means that we have a lot of information for this particular property type now the next thing we need to do is look at the historic adr in the last 12 months how you do that is if you go back onto this and click on rates now this will tell you the adr which means the average daily rate which basically just means your nightly rate now we need to know what the average daily rate was in the past 12 months i'm not really interested in what it was in the last three years because things change and you know the markets change and so on and so on so here you need to select entire home and then here is already on studio and you need to drag this back so it's on studio and then click apply changes so when you apply changes each one of these yellow bars represents a month so you can see it says august of 2020 july of 2020 june of 2020 may of 2020 and it tells you the average daily rate which was 84 pounds in may it was 40 pounds in april it was 48 pounds in march now what i want to do is i want to know over the last 12 months what was the average daily rate so if i look at the last 12 months so this is august so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. i don't have to i don't know why i to count this of course the last 12 months of september to august so what i want to do is if you look at the average daily rate it is 48 pounds so i do 48 plus 38 we want to add them all up and then divide by 12 to get the monthly average plus 40 plus 42 plus 47 plus 48 plus again 48 40 84 51 55 and 50. so the total is 591 if i divide this by 12 that means the average daily rate the studios achieved was 49 pounds so here we can insert 49 pounds now as you can already see that in the past 12 months the studios achieve 49 pounds which is considerably lower than their full cost of 119 and one of the reasons might be i will show you now is if i go into occupancy just for one second just to sort of illustrate this point and under active listings if i select studio properties then as you can see that studio properties in for example in march of 2020 there were 11 and then there were nine and then there were six and in one month maybe there was only two people renting our studios and then there was nine people and again you know then there were 12 people so i you know and and at some stages there were seven there aren't actually that many studio properties as we saw down here and when you don't have you know that much data on a particular property what happens is sometimes the data isn't very accurate hence i put this at red and put something like this at green and when you have low data sometimes you do get a bit of a disparity between what the forecast is and what their reality is and so this is why this is a very very good exercise in terms of looking at the historic information as well because see they could have predicted that what we think next year it will be very very high because there aren't as many studios available anymore or so on and so on so this is why this is very very helpful now we go back to rates and this time we select one bit and drag this back all the way to one bed and again we want to do a similar exercise which is look at the last 12 months from september all the way to the end here so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go through the one beds and then the two beds and the three beds and all the way up to the five bedrooms and i'm going to put in the historic adr raids in the last 12 months so what i've done here is i've gone all the way from one you know studios all the way to five bedroom properties i've taken the average of the last 12 months and i've put the results here which i'll go through in a second now just one thing to note here is that if you look at the five-bedroom property that they generally tend to be around you know this mark except for one month so generally they're around the 200 pounds 168 200 one month is 613 pounds now again this is a bit of an outlier this is a very very high spike and again sometimes this can be caused because while there's not that many properties of that particular type and therefore you end up getting data which isn't sometimes 100 accurate hence uh i i mentioned this thing here which is you know the lower the number of properties the the data isn't as good because you see in this month of june this is during copy 19 there are actually only i believe two properties on the market as you can see booked properties too which isn't that many at all because well there aren't that many of these five bedroom properties anyway in total there's only eight uh active listings currently so because of this because of the fact that there aren't that many listings i mean the data sometimes isn't very accurate so in this case because i didn't want to include this in my 12 data points i simply got rid of this entry and i got the average of the last 11 so i went from september all the way to here i simply just got rid of this one and rather than dividing by 12 i divided by 11 because clearly this is an outlier and clearly this is not the normal case so if you do have an outlier like this then all you simply do is just get eliminate that one particular spike and then you know divide by 11 months rather than 12 months so if i go on to my forecast here the first one is studio is 49 pounds uh this is another forecast sorry in the last 12 months it has been 49 pounds and again the forecast is 119 so clearly there is a bit of a disparity here this doesn't see this forecast doesn't seem to be very accurate now if you look at the one bedrooms it's slightly better last year they achieved 85 pounds they're saying next year will be 118 so again not not too far off for the two bedrooms last year we achieved 114 they're saying 116 so again that's very close 120 compared to 117 again very close and then the four beds 174 was achieved compared to the forecast of 132 180 and again this is very close at 174. so so a lot of them except for the studio and except for possibly the four bed the rest seem to be relatively close and they seem to be almost the same 114 116 so that's okay now the next thing we need to do is look at the historical occupancy rate for the last 12 months what occupancy have these properties been achieving now we know what the forecast is which is up here but what we need to know now is well how do they actually do in the last 12 months so if you go back here and click occupancy now we need to select 75th percentile what 75th percentile means is that 75 so for example let's look at this point here at 75th percentile the occupancy was 97 as you can see this means 25 of the properties did better than this and 75 percent of the properties did worse than this so the reason we look at so let me say that again 25 percent of the properties are achieved an occupancy of 97 percent or more and 75 achieved 97 or less the reason i look at 75th percentile is because the 75th percentile line shows shows you operators service combination operators who are doing a good job they have professional pictures they're running this professionally they have good marketing so and so on and that is essentially what we are trying to emulate so this is why we want to compete compare ourselves to you know the best 25 of the properties in the area because that is essentially what we're going for as well we want to be in that top 25 percent so we need to see well how did the top 25 do and in summary set the 75th percentile bar shows you exactly that it shows you that 25 percent of the properties did above this line and that's that's where we want to be and that's what we want to calculate so again the same exercise as before select entire home now we'll start from the studio and then click apply so as you can see this has a lot more ups and downs ups and downs compared to the more steady line and again the reason is there isn't as much data when you only have you know 12 listings it is going to fluctuate a lot more so again we do the same thing which is we we start from september of 19 and we add these data points and then we divide by 12. so i'll just do one as an exercise so for example we have 88 plus 90 plus 72 percent plus 58 plus 66 67 82 100 again 100 53 81 and finally 96 so that is a total of 953 now because we've gone through 12 months i will divide this by 12 and the average occupancy in the last 12 months was 80 percent so we go with 80 and that is actually what our target occupancy is like you mentioned before you know we already want to be hitting those 80 occupancies now i do the same thing i move this to a one bedroom and i click apply and as you can see this is a lot steadier there is this weird drop here and again this is because of cobin 19 and at the time of recording this we have we are in you know october of 2020 and we went through a month where you know there were travel bans and so on and so on so this is because of that particular reason here but we can still include it in our average if we want to or like i said before because it is a one-off outlier we can simply get rid of this point count up all the rest and divide by 11. so i'll show you that now so if we look at the one bedrooms i'll do 93 plus 93 plus 83 plus 86 77 79 69 100 and 100 so 100 100 and then i'm going to ignore this one because this is an outlier this is a one-off huge drop this hasn't happened in three years and then i'll move on to 92 and the final one is 98. so the total is 970 but this is only for 11 months not 12 months so this time i will divide by 11 and the average occupancy has been 88 not accounting for this one month of a massive spike and and again like i said this was due to travel bans in the area so now we look at the same thing again this time i won't really you know get rid of too many points because some of them seem to be slightly similar so there's no there's no one huge huge spike they seem to be even though this month is again lower it's not you know too far off these ones so there's no need to get rid of them so if we look at three bedrooms again i wouldn't really get rid of anything there isn't one you know disastrous bike we look at the four bedrooms okay so we can we can include all of this again this doesn't seem to be that much lower than these points here so oh this point so i i wouldn't say this is an outlier an outlier really is when there is something absolutely massive and again even with this one if you you know if you look this is technically the month with the travel bans but some of these months were you know didn't have travel bans and this isn't too dissimilar so we'll include this but clearly if you if you remember the one i showed you with the one bedroom you know the the lowest it has been for three years it was 69 and suddenly it was at 33 so that is a huge spike and so that that was the reason i got rid of this so what i'm going to do now is very quickly i'm going to fill in this information um taking the occupancy rates and getting the averages so very quickly i'm going to calculate those now so what i've done is i've gone through all the types of properties from studios all the way to five bedrooms and i have put in the occupancies over the last year so now as you can see if we if we look at the last 12 months occupancy for studios to five bedrooms eighty percent eighty-eight percent eighty-four 84 79 71 74 as you can see these are all considerably higher than the forecast so one of the reasons the forecast might be low and like i said before at the time of recording we're going to recovery 19 and so they might be projecting a lower occupancy that could be the main reason but again that doesn't really matter too much because like i said before our aim is 80 that's where we want to be and you know that's where we're going to be aiming to be at by using agencies booking.com so on and so on so even if we get a lower occupancy like only 65 even though the last 12 months was as high as 84 percent that's still okay because if we can get 865 percent just from get airbnb alone once we do everything else you know our aim should be to get a lot more than this so what what then happens is by inputting these information that you have just input it will give you your monthly profit historically so historically the studio last year would have made a loss of 68 pounds though one bedroom would have made 675 pounds every single month profit the two bedroom would have made 864 417 1000 for the four bed and almost one thousand for the five bed so what we then need to do is by looking at the forecasting data in line with the historic data we need to see well what is the most profitable type of property here so if we look at the forecast the forecast says well only the studios the one beds in the two bedrooms are profitable so okay so here we you know narrow down to these three but if we look at this it tells us that well the studio last year wasn't actually profitable at all that actually lost 68 pounds every single month and because of that reason and the you know the accurate rate was 49 pound so therefore i will eliminate the studio because well it doesn't well they didn't really make any money last year and again the other reason is again you know this is also read which is that there aren't you know that many data points the properties are a bit more scattered so it's not you know certain which areas sort of work best and we know the train station area works generally best for all type of properties here but you know there isn't that much information so this is a red light and this is also a big red light so we'll eliminate those now if we look at the one bedrooms ideally what we need is you know a type of property which has the most greens really so if you look at the one bedrooms it was profitable it had a good occupancy there's a lot of information and the profit potential is really really good 675 pounds per month now if we look at the next one again the two bedrooms are very good it was the forecast is that it is profitable if you look at historically again it is 84 occupancy there's a lot of information because there's 102 properties and again the profit potential is even better than the one bedroom property now if we look at the three bedrooms the forecast suggests that there would be a loss the last year's historical last 12 months would suggest that you could have made 417 pounds but again there is slightly less information but you know we don't necessarily need to rule it out because even there's no clear clear red signs in this one here but the forecast isn't looking amazing based on a dna and if we look at the last two the profit seems amazing a thousand pounds but again the problem is there isn't that much information you know this even though it says a thousand pounds and a thousand pounds there's only 20 properties and there's only 14 and you know it might be even less when it comes to the number which are currently active and so because there isn't that much information even though we can potentially make a thousand pounds it's sort of hard to say accurately that we will make a thousand pounds here so by looking at the combination of both only then can you work out what a better picture is and i think here if we look is showing us that studio one beds and two beds have the most potential but we know that studios didn't really work and if we eliminate the studios we're really down to the one bedrooms and the two bedrooms and they seem to be relatively close in terms of you know the forecast and the occupancy and the data points and the only thing is that last year the two bedroom properties seem to make a better margin compared to one bedroom properties and by looking at the entire thing this is why i'm more inclined to select that the two bedroom properties seem to be the best type of property in this area not to say that one bedroom properties do not work they also seem to have a very very good potential but one of the reasons i like two bedroom properties is because see when you compare hotel rooms to service accommodation when you have a studio property that is very similar to a hotel room you know in a hotel room two people can stay in a studio two people can stay as well so it's almost on par but the studios are generally by night sometimes can be more expensive than hotels so you end up losing your competitive edge and now when it comes to the one bedroom properties you sometimes find a similar case which is because in a one bedroom property there's only one bed one double bed and if two people were to stay there again if you compare that to a hotel where two people are staying one bedrooms can be a bit more expensive whereas if you look at two bedroom properties because there are two rooms and four people can stay there if you compare that to two hotel rooms generally a two bedroom apartment is always cheaper than two hotel rooms you'll probably find that that is the case in most most places and this is why when you do this area research it won't be surprising if it tells you that the two bedroom properties are the most popular and and there's a lot of reasons for that one because compared to hotels they're cheaper they tend to be in the city center so in very very good location they seem to be new so they're modern so not to say that one bedrooms do not work not to say that the bigger properties do not work because depending on the area they can absolutely work but it is also true that in a lot of areas the two bedroom properties seem to be very very popular and again in milton keynes we can see a similar thing which is the two bedroom properties seem to be very very popular so what we will we will do is we will select that the two bedroom properties are the most popular properties and then we'll simply move on to the next stage and analyze the two bedroom property further so previously we selected that in milton keynes the two button properties seem to be the most popular and now we'll do some further research so if you're going to sheet number two which is render and analyzer and here we need to start filling in the blue details so under location we will write milton keynes in terms of the address well we can take we don't necessarily need an address but we'll just say town center for the time being now the property type we picked is the two bedroom and in terms of furnishings so is this property going to be when we rent this is it are they not furnished are they part furnished or are they fully furnished the reason this is important to know is because this affects how much furniture uh how much money you have to spend on furniture so if this part furnished you might have to spend about 1500 pounds if i select this to not furnished as you can see this increases to about 3 000 pounds or if i select fully furnished it goes down to 500 pounds you might just have to maybe buy a tv and so on and so on so if i go into right move and put in milton key and central station half a mile two bedroom properties see this one's unfurnished this one is part furnished there are some things already in there actually it's pretty much fully furnished this one again seems like it's got a lot of furniture you can't see all the rooms this one again not the best of conditions but if we look at this one again you know pretty much seems to be fully furnished so a lot of them are fully furnished properties which is very good and some of them are completely empty so again for this exercise we'll just leave this at part furnace which will mean that the furniture cost will be around the 1500 pound mark now in terms of the rent we previously input that the rent for two bedroom properties is 1100 pounds and this is automatically plugged in here and you don't have to do anything if you want to change this feel free you can simply just delete this and type in your own number in terms of the average daily rate forecast again this is already plugged in for you from here because you input the average daily rate forecast here and you put in the occupancy forecasts here so all of those are already copied for you so there is nothing you need to do here if you want to change this you can you can simply delete this but uh or the best thing to do would be just to leave this since you've already inputted here and it is copying those details now in terms of the property set of fees this is how much it cost to set up a property you typically have to pay rent advance for one month and so again so if you're renting 1100 pounds this is already you know programmed in for you at 1100 and the next thing is your deposit that is six weeks again so if your rent is 1100 this is pre-programmed for you calculated for you which is about 15-23 most of this stuff already i've already calculated for you if you want to change it you can you can simply just delete this the letting legal fees you know these can be referencing fees those sort of things so that can cost about 100 pounds and in terms of furniture we said 1500 based on the fact that it's part furnished in terms of refurbishment i don't spend any money refurbishing other people's properties on rent to rent so we will leave this at zero and i would recommend you do not spend any money in refurbishment this includes new carpets new paints so on and so on in terms of sourcing fee i don't spend any money on sourcing purely because i source the properties myself and i would recommend you do exactly the same and therefore you can leave this one at zero as well now in terms of deposits depending on some agents sometimes they can offer deposit insurance it's not really the norm sometimes it says in the ads if they do or if they don't but typically you have to pay a deposit of six weeks so therefore i would leave this in at six weeks and i wouldn't really mess with it too much so that means your total investment is 4223.08 this is how much money you need in order to get started with this deal so the next thing is your monthly cost now if i make this slightly bigger so it's easier to see the first one is your ota transaction fees what this means is this is how much commission you have to pay on your bookings now airbnb charges a three percent commission and this is why we have put that in so again there's nothing you have to do there it's already set for you and you might be thinking well booking.com is 15 and agencies are you know they charge 10 15 commission so why is this only a three percent well the reason is that because our estimates are price estimates like 116 pounds are based on airbnb since the information on air dna comes from airbnb these are airbnb prices now i know on booking.com the commission is 15 but as you'll see in the price pricing section down here when it comes to pricing on booking.com we actually increase the prices on booking.com we charge a higher price because we know we have to pay a higher commission so at the end of the day you end up making the same amount of money and this is the reason this is set to three percent the payment gateway transaction fee this is the fee for payment processing in terms of well if you use strike or a payment processor to take the payments you have to pay your fee and that is generally 1.4 percent now you don't have to pay a fee when you process payments on airbnb because they do it for you but even if you put this in it doesn't make a huge difference it's only about 30 pounds so you can you can put this in a 1.4 percent uh it's not going to make too much of a difference the next one is the channel manager transaction fee which is at five percent now the channel manager i use which you will see later on is called gusty they charge five percent if you were not using a channel manager you can simply click this button and put it down to zero and you save that money there but realistically if you're going to scale this business you do need some automation you do need systems in place and therefore i will leave this at five percent the next thing here are essentially all of your bills now if you go into zoopla and click to rent and then type in milton keynes and select milton keynes central station bedrooms select two bedrooms since this is what we are looking for so all i've done is i've gone to zoopla coated uk click to rent put in the location and put in the number of bedrooms we want click search so ideally we need an apartment property type so we'll go with flats and then click search we can just go with any it does it doesn't matter too much so but we will go with this one here as long as it's you know somewhat similar it's an apartment so what you can do is once you've found a relatively similar listing you can go down and it will tell you what the bills are in this area so if we go to the analyzer the first one says council types of business rates so here they say the council tax is 123 pounds so you know it will be around 123. the water is 38 so 38 it doesn't actually give you one for gas i believe that will be combined with energies this will include electric and gas so gas we can just put to zero energy electricity we can put 258 broadband is normally about 30 pounds so we can leave this at 30. insurance is not known generally it's very cheap it's about 5 pounds 10 pounds in terms of cleaning per stay this is where we will have to get some quotes for cleaning in your particular area but generally speaking you know for cleaning you can you can have cleaners for two bedroom properties for about 20 pounds per stay linen again will cost you about 20 pounds as well because there's two bedrooms and replenishments per stay will be you know your tea coffee sugar maybe some toiletries and they normally cost about four pounds per stay so if you have any other costs which are per stay cost you can add them in here generally this is pretty complete there isn't anything more and if you have any other monthly cost you can add this here now one thing to note is that we are putting a cleaning fee of 20 pounds and a laundry fee of 20 pounds and a replenishment fee or four pounds you might be wondering well where the hell did this 130 come from if the cleaning stay is only 20 pounds well if i scroll back up under the inputs which these three were calculated for you based on your previous answers it says the minimum day stay we are assuming that the average stay is three nights so that means every week there are you know two check outs because people stay for three days so you know well technically slightly more than two but roughly two checkouts every single week so that means you know if we have 65 occupancy in a particular month then we're assuming that the property is booked for 30 days multiplied by 65 which is you know almost 20 nights we're saying that the property is booked for about 20 nights and we're saying that the average stay is three nights so if there's 20 nights worth of bookings and the average stay is three nice that means there's between six to seven checkouts in that particular month and if you're paying a 20 pound cleaning fee and there's six to seven check outs then that means that you know your cleaning cost is six to seven times multiplied by 120 and that is how these numbers are calculated so this is why these are per stay and some of these are monthly because of course the monthly cost for example if you have a monthly cost like water it doesn't matter how it doesn't matter if someone stays at the property or not you're going to incur this cost but the cleaning cost is based on per stay per stay that if there wasn't a stay then you wouldn't incur this cost and hence why this is there is a bit of a difference there so once you input all of these details it tells you what your total costs are every single month so now we scroll down to the next section so if you look at the next section it shows us that in terms of the forecast our revenue sorry based on the forecasted occupancy this is so our forecasted occupancy is 65 so it tells us that based on the forecasted occupancy our revenue is 2262 pounds our total cost are around 1857 pounds that means we should be making 400 pounds every single month the annual profits are just under 5 000 pounds now like i said this is based on airbnb alone now if we just if we did this just on airbnb alone that would be still a very very good amount you know almost 5 000 pounds every single year our aim really is to hit the 80 mark we want to do you know all the different marketing to get up to 80 percent but the reason we don't forecast 80 percent is purely because like i said we don't have exact accurate accurate information from booking.com from the agencies so i think it's a very bad thing if you forecast something where you don't have you know the exact exact data but we should be forecasting something which we do have information on and the forecast suggests the occupancy is 65 so this is the number we're going to be using this is you know the forecast in terms of where we are but this is really where we want to be so this looks pretty good by the way just one thing to make a note of one mistake i've made which i've had to correct slightly when it comes to these fields i said they will be already calculated for you but if they for example because you've already input them you know here i actually made a formula so that would be calculated for you but we've had to change that because it doesn't actually do some of the further calculations so in this case what will happen is you will you will see this empty and you essentially look at the type of property so this is the two bet you need to then enter manually the rent adr and occupancy forecast so if you go to the type of property you look at the rent which is 1100 you look at the adr which is 116 and 65 so the rent is 1100 the adr is 116 and the occupancy is 65 so a very very small thing but it's something you'll just have to input so this is essentially what the forecast and the 80 aim shows you that this is you know what we've forecasted to make but this is really where we want to be but for the sake of this exercise we're going to be using the forecast so we can be conservative now we look at the deal analysis criteria now there's two main criteria the first one is the investment returned in year one hundred percent that means we want the full money we invest back in year one so if we look at this deal here the total cost of this investment is four thousand two hundred and twenty three pounds we want to make that back in year one so after that everything beyond that is just pure pure profit so we essentially have an infinite return because we've already made our money back and so year two year three year four is just pure pure profit so if we look at this we want to make sure we get all our money back and we're actually based on the forecast we're getting 115 back so we're actually getting more money than we invested just in year one which is a pretty good deal and that passes the criteria now if we actually achieve 80 this will be significantly higher because as you can see the monthly profits are 404 based on the forecast and they double at 80 percent but for this we're going to be assuming we only make 404 pounds so this one has passed the second one is the monthly break even occupancy should be 50 percent so what that means is that every single month we want to be breaking even at fifty percent occupancy so if we are only renting the property for half a month we still end up covering you know we still end up covering our cost so in order to calculate this value all you simply have to do is press this button and that will calculate it for you so if you press this button which says get value and you click this it will do all the calculations for you and it's actually calculated that with this property at 50 occupancy we actually end up breaking even and we you know essentially cover all our cost now this should be green but sometimes what happens is that because there's decimal places and this might actually be um you know 50.001 it it assumes that it is more than 50 but as you can see 50 that is a criteria and that is passed now for the criteria to pass for the break even we have to be you know 50 or below if you're between 50 and 60 percent it will generally you know go yellow and that's still okay and anything above 60 is red so even yellow isn't too bad which means 50 to 60 percent break even and the reason is that when you're in the south of england your break-even points generally are higher because the rents are higher but we also on average have higher occupancy which compensates so you know you want to be around 50 but if you're in the south of england and you're around 50 to 60 it's not a huge huge deal hence it will go yellow for 50 to 60 percent so this means this deal as a two-bedroom property has passed both of the criterias with a rent-to-rent analyzer i just want to show you one more thing in terms of how this number is calculated so all you have to do is simply press the button and it does the calculations for you but i just want to show you how this works so if i was to go on to the occupancy forecast and put in 50 and go down you can see that it actually it makes a loss of 2.56 every month so basically it breaks even that at 50 percent you don't really make a loss but you don't make a profit either there's a loss of two pounds but that essentially means you're broken even so the formulas do work and you simply have to trust the calculator and the formula and all you have to do is press this button and it will do everything for you so you don't waste a lot of your own time now so this deal in milton keynes has passed the rent analyzer test as a two bedroom property so now what we will do is we'll move on in the next stage into the further analysis for this deal to do some further digging to make sure while the deal stacks and the numbers look good and this is a good area and also a good property type so once you have shortlisted your areas we then need to do further reset on that particular area so the first thing you need to do you need to go to a website called airdna dot co you don't have to make an account on a dna and you will come onto a page like this now when you come onto this page you need to search your location so one of the locations that i have shortlisted is luton which is again in the south of england so now once you have selected your location you will have to purchase the data and depending on which area you win you're in it will cost you around 15 pounds per month now we only need this for you know one month essentially because we just have to do some quick research and then we can cancel the subscription but it will cost 15 pounds or 16 pounds or maybe slightly more depending on which area you're in i think some locations in london can go up to 25 pounds or 29 pounds or something along those lines but you need to find your area and then purchase the information so we can do further research so now in this case i've purchased all the data on luton so in this session what we need to do is we need to say okay well we've selected luton but what type of properties are going to be best within luton which type of properties should we be looking at so in order to do this we also have to open the deal analyzer system which is the excel file now when you open this up it will give you two options enable macros or disable macros you need to click enable macros because this will enable all the formulas which i have used to create a sheet so you can use the formulas in order to do the deal analysis and then you need to move on to the first sheet which is the type of property now in the type of properties we have different types of properties on the top here and then you also have some information which you need to fill in now one thing to note by the way is that whenever you go through this sheet the only fields which you have to plug in are the fields in blue everything else you can ignore so if it's green if it's gray you can completely ignore that so again even on this sheet you only have to fill in the information which is in blue that rest you can ignore and that will calculate everything else for you so we're looking at luton in this case and we have different types of properties studios one beds two beds three best four beds and five beds and we first need to know well where are these properties generally based and what is the standard of these properties because when we look at similar properties to rent or even to purchase if that's what your strategy was we need to know what is happening in the market what type of properties are working well so when you go into a dna you will see a map on the right hand side on the main screen and within the map you have a few different options now this option here refers to shared rooms now when we are doing a service accommodation business when we're running this business you know we're not in the market for shared rooms and these are private rooms what that means is someone has let out a spare room in their property now again we aren't doing room by room rentals and we aren't really renting out spare rooms so we can check this one off now the properties left are essentially all the entire properties so these are all the properties which are entire apartments or entire houses now if i zoom out you can see a better picture of all the properties within luton now i can also make this bigger for you so you can get a better view but i lose some of the options which i will show you in a second so you can see that here is the town center and predominantly all the properties are around the town center there are some properties scattered here and there but they generally seem to be around the town center there's the airport there's the main station here and here is the town center so if i exit out of this and i'll show you why i did this is i want to know where these properties are located because that is the first tab we need to complete and also what type what standard are these properties so if you hover over this and click this button it unchecks all the properties now it gives me a few different options so if i click studio it will now only show me where the studios are located and as you can see the studio seemed to be pretty scattered so there's a couple here a couple here a couple here so there doesn't seem to be one place where the majority of the studios are and if we look at the standard sometimes you know depending on where it is it can show you so this one doesn't really show you many pictures it's just a floor plan this one is not in very good shape at all this one again you can't really tell this one seems to be okay again you know the pictures aren't that amazing no pictures and again it does not seem to be great you know at all so for the location i would say it's scattered and for the standard i would say probably a five you know probably not even a five i'd probably say about a three or a four it doesn't seem to be in good standard at all and i would just say that to i would switch that to um not you know not professional so you can rank these however you want you can rank them as numbers or you can add some description it doesn't really matter too much so then we move on to the next one you then need to uncheck everything again and then check the studios sorry check the one beds so now as you can see the one beds are slightly different because there are some scattered but predominantly they seem to be around the town center they all seem to be around the station the town center location and if you just hover over some of them you can see that there are a lot more modern there are apartments uh they seem to be a lot of them seem to be brand new apartments and as i go through them they seem to be yeah new build apartments predominantly so they seem to be in very very good condition i would say for the one bedrooms the location is town center and in terms of the standard i would say modern apartments they're modern apt apartments and then we do the same thing for two beds so again this seems to be less two beds but predominantly they seem to be again around the town center area there are some scattered here or few here but generally they seem to be around the town center again most of them you can see are relatively modern their new apartments they seem to be in pretty good condition around the town center so we then continue to do this exercise with three beds and again three beds seem to be a lot more scattered but i would still say they predominantly seem to be around this town and you can you can see that these are now houses these not really apartments so with two bedrooms we had apartments with three bedrooms we've seen that these are a lot of houses and hence they're which makes sense which are there they're close to the town center but not exactly in the town center because it's rare that you get apartments within the town center so let's fill this in so i think with the two bedroom again it's a town central location and they're modern apartments the three bedrooms again i would say they're around the town center there's less of them but their houses and again they're in they're in good condition houses in good condition so then we move on to the four beds four bits again you can see that there are they're trying to be around the town center there's less of them but most likely they're probably houses again so yeah once again they seem to be houses as opposed to apartments so they're close to town center but there are houses and again generally seem to be in not as good condition as the three beds so i would i would say i would say town center and i would say houses and you know this one will give maybe a 5 out of 10 and i i think for the three bedrooms they're in pretty good condition we'll give it a 7 out of 10. so you can rank these however you want it's just to get a general idea of what type of properties there are whatever standard so you can rank them out of 10 or whatever helps you because we need to know what the standard is because when we're looking at properties to arrange or to you know purchase ourselves we need to see if we can match that standard because we can match that standard then it's a lot more accurate and we can sort of charge the same rates so you can make a note of standard however you like whichever way helps you and then you finally go on to the five beds again you can see that couple are around the town center one here one here a bit more scattered there are houses and they seem to be in okay condition but they don't seem to be in bad conditions so i i would say there are a lot more scattered houses it seems to be an okay condition now i would again give it a six out of 10 so around that sort of mark so these are the locations we need to look at these are the type of properties and standard we need to look at so the next thing to do is now to work out well how much can you rent these properties for so in order to do that you need to go on to right move and because the first one is scattered and generally seem to be around the town center where you're going to just focus on luton town center as that's where it's there that's where you know most of the properties seem to be if i check this back and show you all the properties they predominantly do seem to be around the town center or they seem to be around the main luton station so if i if i put in luton let's see which options it will give me so it gives me luton station and i think generally what will happen is you will have to find a station or a particular postcode in the town center in order to get this i think generally i don't think it will give you town luton town center as a location but it will give you luton station as a location and then you can click to rent now once you have clicked to rent you can select a radius we will keep this within one mile and for the first one we are looking at studios and again the studios they do seem to be flats as opposed to houses so we search studios one mile within the town center so we already have some studios we're looking for something which is in okay condition and we can set this from newest listed or we can set this from the lowest price first there's only 18 listings so it's not going to take you too long now we we find something which is in okay conditions so this one seems to be in pretty good condition and you can essentially take the rental for this and the rental for this is 520 pounds per month so we put in 520 pounds ignore these for the time being we will get on to this shortly so then we simply just move on to the next one we now need to know well what is the price for a one bedroom and again if you look at something which is in good condition or one bedroom so you need to ignore this one because this is a professional house show this is actually a room as opposed to an apartment so again you can look for something which is in something which is in you know good condition and see what the what the price would be for that particular property so again you know this this one this one doesn't seem bad it's 765 this one seems to be in new condition so let's let's pick this one here because it seems to be in much much better condition or even or even this one here which seems to be relatively brand new close to the station in the town center so it seems it seems like they seem to be around this 725 pound mark for you know a modern one-bedroom apartment in the town center so this is 0.10 miles from the station which is pretty much bang in the middle of the town center so we'll go with 725 okay so that is the rent there two bedroom properties and again you're you're doing the same thing which is you're you're looking for something which is in good condition hence since all your competition has properties in you know very very good conditions so again you have one here which seems to be a very nice building modern so we will close to the station two bedroom apartments so yeah nine about 900 pounds again there's another one for 900 pounds so 900 pounds seems to be the going rate and now we move on to houses since the three best four bears and five beds for houses we simply go to the top the property type we can change to detach semi-detached terrace get rid of this and select bungalow since these are all types of housing change this to three bedrooms three bedrooms and again we we do the same thing which is we just look for something in good condition around the station there seems to be three different properties this is possibly in the best condition out of the three i would assume and for the rest you can't really see that many pictures so this last one here this might be an okay condition as well but it seems very very cheap compared to the rest so we don't have that many available it does a three bed luxury house i'm not entirely sure why it's luxurious but uh the rent seems to be around this sort of mark so this is on for 1050 this is on for 1300 so we'll say something around the 1200 mark so around 1200 and then very very quickly i'll just you know do the four bedroom and the five bedroom so i'll just select this to four bed there might not be that many available we might have to branch out slightly okay so this one is being fully renovated so again that that's pretty good it's going to be brand new this is one for 1400 this is on for 1500 so around that sort of range so we'll say we'll say 14.50 and finally we have a five bedroom so five bedrooms seem to be a lot more expensive this is in good condition this is 1800 so we're putting 1800. so these are the reins for these particular properties now the next thing we need to do is do this row here i know we've sort of missed this one out but we'll come back to this in a second we need to do the rental size what that means is if you go back onto a airdna and this is your main screen if you scroll down it shows you the rental size that basically means the number of properties on the market for each of these types of properties so if you look at the studio there's only three studios which is two percent now if we go back onto this sheet it says the rental size the number the absolute number as opposed to a percentage so the absolute number of studios is three so we put in three we then look at the one beds there's 86 86 the two beds there are 36 the three beds there was 19 17 and five so you have 19 17 and five now let me just explain these colors now the higher this number is it will go green and the lower it is it will go red so it's really a color system going from green to red the reason that is there is because if for example there are only three studios and we go through all this analysis the data might not necessarily be the best because there's only three entry points there's only three properties so you know those three properties might be really badly or you know it's just there's just not enough information when there's only hardly any properties but when you have properties which there's a you know there's a lot of property time for example there's 86 one beds 80s and 36 tubers and even even these two aren't that bad 19 and 17. that's pretty good in terms of looking at data and saying well you know there's a there's a lot of these type of properties so that could be that the data is more likely to be accurate so ideally the more information we have on a particular property the better this doesn't necessarily mean that oh we'll go with one bedroom since there's most of them because we we don't know what occupancies they achieve or what rates they achieve but just for this one particular particular point one particular um one particular row this seems to be this seems to be the best out of out of their vest because it has the most information available and the more information available something has the more accurately we can work out well is this going to make money or is this not going to make money so that is a color system with this one that the more properties there are the better now we now we move on to filling out the remaining two details which is the historic adr which means the historic average day rate put simply that basically just means what is the nightly rate these properties are able to charge and this one means the historic occupancy rate that what occupancy have these properties been achieving so if i go back onto this and click occupancy this is again on the first page under research now it will show me the historic occupancy rate so this is the first one we can fill out or we can fill out this one it doesn't really matter too much but we'll go into the historic occupancy rate first now once you want to the historic occupancy rate you need to select 75th percentile now what 75th percentile means is that if you have a occupancy rate which is for example 90 at so the 75th percentile is 90 percent that means 25 of the properties achieved a higher occupancy than 90 percent and 75 achieved a lower occupancy than 90 so 25 are above this point and 75 are below this point the reason i pick 75th percentile is because what we want to know is that the good quality properties the ones which are professionally managed they're marketed properly they have professional pictures you know the the airbnb hosts who are doing this well what are they achieving because we're going to be try we're going to try to achieve something similar we aren't really competing with people who have bad pictures or they're not marketed properly and so on and so on so we're not competing with people who are not advertising their properties properly so that's why we look at 75th percentile because the 75th percentile really represents people who are doing this well and that's essentially where we want to be as well so if i look here it says what is the historic occupancy rate for a studio in the last 12 months now i don't necessarily want to know what's been happening over the last two or three years i just want to know what's happening in the last 12 months because that's going to give me the most accurate picture because things do change over time so you need to select entire home and then with bedrooms it's already on studio and you need to move this one all the way down so it's just studio selected and then click apply now once you apply this you can see how the graph has massively changed now now this seems a bit weird because there are so many spikes up and down whereas before it was a lot more stable see the reason is that there's only three studios and this is essentially what i was trying to say that when you don't have much information and you get weird stuff like this you get weird spikes and the data sometimes can be a bit inaccurate because of essentially there's not that much information to go off so we'll still use the information they have and we'll still plug this thing for the sake of this exercise so what you need to do is you need to look at the historic occupancy rate in the past 12 months so how you do that is you go into here and you can see that the very last month this is showing me is august of 2020 i want to know what has the average occupancy been from august of 2019 all the way to august of 2020 so the way you do that is you start from august of 2019 so i think we're here and the occupancy is 54 so you take you take a calculator and you you add up all the occupancy rates for the last year and then divided by the number of months so you take 54 the next one is 82 so 54 and then you add 82 look at the next one 48 so you add 48 the next one is 91 so you add 91 the next one is 80. the next one is 52 the next one is 62 56 100 45 back up to 100 down to 62 down to 27. so what you've done is you've started from august 19 all the way to august 20 you've added them all up now if i go back to august 19 this was the first point we started now we need to divide by the number of months so we had 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 and then we also had this 13th one here because we counted well from august 19 to august 20 and including that month so there's there's 13 entry points so then you divide this by 13 and you get the average occupancy for the last 12 months which is 66 so here we can write 66. so 66 has been the occupancy and then you simply move on to the next one and then but you do that by going back here and then selecting one bedroom and again you want to do the same thing that you want to start from august 19 all the way to august 2020 so you'll start from around here we go you start from around this point and go to the end so i'm going to very very quickly do this now i'm just going to add from here to here and then divide by the number of months which is 13 months as opposed to 12 months 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 because essentially you are you're starting from august and you're technically you know ending in august as well but if you want to last 12 months you should have started from september because well that is how 12 months work so you can do 12 months or you can do 13 months it doesn't really matter too much i like to go from you know from not all the way from that exact month all the way back so i'm going to very very quickly do this now for the one bedroom and then when you want to change you can go to the 2 bedroom 3 bedroom 4 bedroom and five bedroom and then i'm going to add all of these here so i filled in all the information using these points all the way up to five bedrooms and by recording the data here again you can see it goes from green all the way to red if his high is green if it's low it's red the reason is because well with occupancy rates the higher the better like the higher occupancy you're achieving the more money you're going to make in the process now i have also by the way changed this to past 13 months because apparently i can't add 12 months so you can do the past 13 months even if you do the past 12 months it's not going to make a big big difference it's only one month off but i like to do from august to august or september to september and so on and so on so this gives me now the occupancy rate now the final thing we need to do is calculate the historic adr so what is the historic nightly rate which is being achieved on these properties so if i go here and click rates again we do exactly the same exercise now we select studios go all the way down to studios and we look at again the last 12 months or the last 13 months since i didn't count 12 properly or you can just do one two three four my months are really bad five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve so yeah you have to start from september already not even august so you you look at the adr which says 51 pounds in september 55 pounds in october 55 pounds in november so on and so on and then again you do the same exercise which is you add up the months from you know august all the way to august here and then you divide it by 13 and that will show you what the average daily rate achieved has been in the last 13 months so i will quickly do that now and this will be done exactly the same way as what we did for the other one so we'll go from studios all the way down to five bedroom properties so i will do that quickly now so now i've gone through all the five property types or six property types from studios all the way down to five billion properties and i've calculated the average daily rate for the last 13 months now just in case that wasn't very clear essentially what i was doing was hovering over these yellow bars and when you hover over the yellow bar it says as you can see it says august 19 and it says the average day rate adr which is 126 and then it tells you the number of properties and the number which is 126 that is the number you need to essentially add up and then divide by 13 because that is the number of months we are looking at so that's what i've done here and if you look at this row the historic adr i put in all the numbers the studios were 51 pounds a night the one beds were 62 pounds a night the two beds were 92 107 120 and 122. so now let's look at what has happened in these two rows here the first one says rent divided by adr so if you look at the rent and you look at the average daily rate this number basically tells you how many nights you will need in order to cover your rent now i know this is not an exact calculation because there's commissions and other cost and so on and so on but just for the time being what's very useful to know is that how many nights would it take based on these numbers to cover your rent and the lower the number of nights it takes the better because that means we can make more money for example if it takes you you know a full month just to cover your rent you have no chance in hell of making any money in this deal because even if you're fully booked all you're doing is covering your rent whereas if you look at the studio if it's rented at 51 pounds a night for 10 nights you essentially end up making your money back and then beyond the 10 nicest potential profit now like i said this is not all inclusive there's other bills but it's just we need to know which which property type takes the lowest amount of nights in order to you know make your money back so if we look at these numbers then by the way these are automatically calculated for you and there's nothing you need to do with the studio it takes about 10 nights with a one bed it takes about 12 nights two bed takes 10 nights the three bed takes 11 nights the 4 bed takes 12 nights and the 15 sorry the fight bed takes half a month just to cover its cost before it even you know gets into profitability and again with this one green is basically the lowest number the lowest the lower it is the better it is so in this case green is essentially what is low and if it's really high then it's red because that means it takes longer to make our money back and again the last one is similar to the one above but this one tells you your profit potential what this is saying is based on all these numbers you know what is a profit potential what is revenue how much money we can make less the rent so for example if we look at the studio here what we're saying is the rent is 520 so that is our cost but the revenue is potentially we can make 51 pounds a night we'll be booked for around 66 percent of the month so two thirds of the month and if we book for two thousand a month that's about 20 nights and we're making 51 pounds uh we're making about 55 51 pounds a night and therefore if we if we if we look at the month and we say we're making 51 pounds a night for 20 nights let's just say roughly because that's 66 percent of the month 20 nights out of 30 that's about 1 000 pounds but our rent is 520 so if we take away 520 we're at about you know just under 500 pounds so 500 pounds is basically our potential but now you know this doesn't include the fees and uh sorry the bills and you know any systems cost and so on and so on so again this has potential it has a 500 pound margin but obviously some of that's going to be eaten up by the bills and all those other costs so again we need we need a property type which has a big margin so we look at the one bed the margin is the potential profit is around 800 900 pounds the two bed has a lot of potential at fifteen hundred the three bed one one seven five so again that's pretty good the four bed which is eight hundred and fifty four and finally the fight which doesn't have a lot of potential at all at only 286. so again with this one green is you know the highest value because we need to make sure we make a lot of money and the one which makes more money has more potential so so this is essentially what is some of these we have input some of these that have been calculated for us and now by by looking at this data we need to find one which has the most greens because the greener it is the more likely it is to work and i think it's very very apparent that in this case the two bedroom properties the two bedroom uh property type seems to have the most green now it is lacking on the first one but again that doesn't really matter too much because it has 36 properties which is which is you know a lot of information a lot of data which is which is good because the more information we have the more it supports this information here so it has good amount of data it has the highest occupancy joint highest with the one bed which is good it takes the lowest amount of nights in order to cover its rent so this is rent divided by adr stroke the nightly rate and it has the highest profitability margin potential so it's very very easy in this case to say well two bedrooms have the most potential but sometimes you might be in a situation where you know two different types of properties might be very very close in that case you might have to select the top two and then do further analysis on the top two now one thing to note with the two building properties and why you know in most areas they tend to be very very popular is because imagine you have a studio you have a studio apartment now if someone's looking to book a hotel compared to a studio apartment the studio might end up actually being a bit more expensive at times because you know a hotel doesn't a hotel has economies of scale meaning that they have 50 60 rooms and they can spread the cost whereas when you only have one studio it can be a bit expensive the same thing can be said for a one bed which is you know if it's a couple and they they don't want to sleep on a sofa bed or anything and they they want to use the main beds then you can only really get two people into a one bedroom property which is the same as a hotel room but again the one bedroom compared to a hotel room might end up being more expensive whereas once you get into two bedrooms onwards if you compare the cost of two bedroom properties i.e two legitimate bedrooms with two hotel rooms the two bedroom properties most of the times tend to be cheaper than two hotel rooms whereas the same cannot be said for studios in one bed in most cases but as you have more rooms you know from two onwards the cost compared to hotels is is much much better so you have you know a much better uh competitive edge when it comes to two-bedroom properties and more purely because well you have two legitimate rooms so in this case it's very very easy to say that or to make a decision that two-bedroom properties seem the best and two-bedroom properties is what has the most potential in luton and we clearly have a very very good margin here to work with and now we'll do further analysis on this to see what do the numbers stack and can we take a two bedroom property in this particular area so once on the rent to rank analyzer both the criterias i've passed we can simply move on to the further analysis now when it comes to the further analysis the further analysis isn't necessarily data driven it is more what i call anecdotal evidence in the sense that you know it's it's opinions it's feedback it's doing a bit more research about the area and so on and so on so you aren't necessarily going to always get a score out of 10 that you know this is a 8 out of 10 area or this is a 7 out of 10 area it's more that well once we've done the analyzer and the numbers do stack up we just want to do a bit more research about the area in terms of who the businesses are and you know other uh many big agencies operating there so on and so on because they're all if you know if we get a positive response from the further analysis that just only adds to their renter analyzer and just confirms that well this is a good area and this is an area where you know these deals can work but you won't necessarily get a score out of 10 it's um it's a case of looking at the evidence and looking at the feedback and taking it from there so right at the top we have one thing which which kind of is data driven in the sense that we have the occupancy rate in average daily uh rate now the forecast is 65 for the two bedroom properties and the average daily rate forecast is 116 pounds now if you remember we did this right in the start with the type of property so we had 116 pounds for the two bed and 65 so that's that's what the forecast was now the historic last year the last 12 months the occupancy rate was actually 84 and the average daily rate was 114 and again if we go back to the first sheet you can see that here we did that right at the side which is 114 pounds for the two bed and 84 or 84 occupancy for the two bill in the last 12 months so what this shows that the occupancy which is forecasted is actually 29 less than what it was in the past 12 months and the forecasted rates are just slightly higher it's actually two percent higher now the criteria i have said is that what i don't want is for example you know let's say the forecast was 65 percent and the forecast rate was 116. if the for historic occupancy was only 20 percent and you know the historic nightly rate was only 40 pounds then i think that would be a cause of concern because if it was only 20 last year how is this suddenly 65 so as long as the forecast is a maximum of a 20 increase of the historic then that is okay because you know when you sometimes there's economic growth and so on and so on and that can justify for higher occupancy but in this case they both pass anyway because well the forecast is much lower than the previous year and the rate is pretty much the same it's only two percent higher but i think the point still remains which is that if the forecast is 116 in last year it was only 50 pounds so kind of like if i go back to this you know the forecast is 119 pounds for the studio but last year it was only 49 pounds so to me that doesn't seem very valid because well if last year was 49 how can it how can it be more than a hundred percent increase you know if i double this we're still only at 98 this is more than double so i i think as long as the as long as the forecast in the historic are relatively similar or as long as the historic is higher than the forecast then that's okay but if we have a situation like this where you know the forecast is ridiculously high and the historic is very low then then you clearly know there is a bit of an issue or maybe there's an issue with the data so this is again already calculated for you so you can see the criteria is here the criteria is passed if the forecast is less than 20 increase of the historic rates now this is not a 20 increase this is a 29 decrease so that's okay and this is only a two percent increase so this will be calculated for you now the next thing is the agency feedback so let me zoom in what i mean by this is that in the marketing section we will be covering a lot of different service accommodation agencies now you can actually get in touch with these agencies and you can request a lot of information about the area you're looking at so i did this exercise with a location which is called bracknell i believe it mentions it here so we have bracknell here and i send them an email asking them for some information and what i will do in the task guidance section i will include an email template so you can see what type of email you need to send now you don't always get a response because a lot of these companies are very busy and there's probably a lot of people emailing them so you might have to chase them a few times so you won't necessarily always always get a response and another thing to note is the more agencies you can email the better because not all agencies cover all areas exactly the same way so in this example we are for example with this analyzer we're looking at milton keynes now silvador might not be a big operator in milton keynes but situ might be a big operation in milton keynes so again take it with a bit of pension a pinch of salt so with bracknell we sent an email and they told us the number of inquiries in the region 120 the average length of stay was just under a month 24 nights the conversion rate from inquiry to booking is higher than the average at about 35 percent which is actually uh which is really good actually that's that's what the person had told me so what i would do is under the agency feedback i would write down silver door 120 inquiries in a 24 day stay 35 conversion and they're saying that's you know really good for the area and then i would just continue doing that for the rest of the agencies which is um situ sacco and so on and so on now like i said when you get feedback from them it's it doesn't necessarily give you a score out of 10 because well you know 120 amazing or you know how good is 120 you you won't necessarily know because there's nothing to compare it to but at least you have some information and for example we did this with one area once and they said i can't remember the area exactly but i believe they mentioned that you know there was an area with you to get a lot of bookings and now since some employers have moved out there aren't that many bookings anymore so again that's you know very very good insight so the more insight you can get from agencies the better but like i said you won't always get a response to them and sometimes it might be reluctant to keep information out it just depends who you catch on the day and if you chase them a few times and so on and so on and that's essentially how a lot of this works but i will include an email template and i will include a list of agencies in the task guidance section so these will be silvador situ sacco bridge street and the list goes on and on and that is the objective here which is to get agency feedback and if the response is positive it only further fuels our research and just indicates well this is a good area and we can make money with this area the next thing we need to look at are the major hotel chains so again this is if there are major hotel chains in the area this is again a positive sign because if major hotel chains are in the area it means they've done a lot of research they know there's people coming they spend a lot of time working all this stuff out so if i go on to google what i've done is i've searched milton keynes hotels so again if i go back a step you can just put this into google all i've done is search you know milton keynes hotels because that's the area we're looking at and then click maps so now this will this will show you the milton keynes area let me just zoom in for you slightly and i believe this is this is the area we're really looking at which is the town center area so we have we have a hotel here which is a novelty so again novato is a big chain hotel so when it comes to my shoot i can write novital and then we have we have a premier ring we have an easy hotel we have another premier inn a whole day in a jury's in which is again a big chain a travel lodge i believe let's have a look at this one here i believe this is just an apartment company city apartment limited or entirely sure about this one and then we have some some apartments i believe there might be two juries in that's what it seems like unless they've got something wrong okay there's another travel lodge so as you can see a lot of again hotels this is a big chain i believe this is a big chain a big chain of apartments possibly um and let's see what this is oh another premier in so there's there's i i think you know i did this very quickly but there's three premier ends there's a holiday in there's two times you know travel lodge there's a jew raising and i think i probably missed some as well but the point is if there are a lot of big hotel chains it's a very very positive sign that there's people coming into the area especially when you have three premier ends right next to each other if there weren't you know uh a lot of demand for short-term accommodation short-term states premiering wouldn't necessarily open three right next to each other and the same goes for travel logs they wouldn't be opening two hotels right next to each other there's also an easy hotel so again this will you know change by area to area some areas are bigger some areas are smaller if you only have one premiere and that doesn't mean your area is bad it might just be a smaller area but again you know if your numbers have come out that well yeah the numbers in this area are good and when we do the further analysis it just it's just sort of like the cherry on top yes it's just confirming that yeah there are people coming because there are big hotels here and um you know the agencies are also saying well yeah we do get bookings here we do get conversions so that's the next thing you need to do which is write down all the major hotels in the area you're looking at so again with the milton keynes example we were looking at this town center area so we want to know what the hotels are in that particular area now last but not least the next thing we need to do is look at well what is the economy like in this area are there any major businesses because again if there are big businesses that can justify corporate travel and that is ideally the market we need to be tapping into to get you know to getting these long term bookings one month two months three months so if we can have an area with business travel it always does help from that point of view so how would you find out about big you know major businesses startups those sort of things well there's two main ways you can google your area followed by the word businesses and you know that will give you that will give you for example some information just by scanning around and there's no there's no one website which has everything you just simply do a bit of a scan so you know i can already see there's kpmg here which is a huge company so i will put down kpmg and you know the list goes on and on so even if i can say something like list of businesses in milton keynes maybe that will give me some more information and you can simply just have a bit of a google and you know see what comes up so there's another website here which is alphabetical list of businesses milton keynes you're really looking for the big businesses the second thing you can do is you can go on to wikipedia for your location and generally for most locations there is an area which says economy economy business and demography so if i go into this you can see it says the major businesses so now milton keynes has consistently benefited from above average economic growth ranked as one of the uk's top five cities so again that's very helpful to know it is ranked fifth in the uk for business startups so again that's you know very very good information that there's a lot of business happening and then he goes on to tell you that milton keys is home to several national and international companies like our girls domino's marshall mercedes benz suzuki volkswagen red bull network real yamaha santender uk and open university so a lot of big businesses and a lot of startups so again that just confirms that milton keynes is a good area there's likely to be corporate uh corporate stay here and that also now explains why there are so many hotels there because while there's so many there's so much business happening that people will be traveling in and out for business reasons so again like i said none of these will necessarily give you a score out of 10 that yep this is a 10 out of 10 area or this is a 5 out of 10 area but it just further confirms well there are people coming here there are businesses there are big hotels the agencies are saying this is good now the final thing in terms of risk mitigation for further analysis this will come into play when we actually look to take a deal on but two main things we have to look at when we are actually taking the deal so this is not something you can do at this particular stage but one of the things we need to do is make sure we have a break clause in our contracts this is for rent to rent deals what that means is that let's say you take on a three-year deal now you want to have a break clause that after a certain number of months if you want to end the agreement you're allowed to end the agreements with just a two-month notice so if you have for example a six month break clause and you will negotiate this with a landlord or you will negotiate this with a letting agent you know once you get to that stage where you're taking on a deal that you want if you have a six month spread course that means that after six months at any stage you can give a one or two month notice depending on what you've agreed and you can terminate the contract now the reason that is good is because for whatever reason the deal doesn't work the economy is in bad shape you know whatever happens you aren't tied up in that contract for three years you can simply get out after six months and if you were to occur any losses you would massively limit your losses because you're only in there for six months so you can simply select your break clause the one you have negotiated if you have a six month break clause that's green which means it's really good sometimes you have to do a nine month which is again okay 12 months is also okay hence is yellow and if you have no break claws that turns red purely because well you know ideally you should have a break clause otherwise you could be in a situation where you have a three-year agreement and if anything goes wrong you can't get out so ideally you want to be around the six months sometimes agents say you have to have a nine or twelve month mark and again it's not too bad but obviously six is ideal the second thing you want to make sure is that the property is acquired at market rent so you do not want to be paying more than market rent for these properties the reason is for example again if the if the amount you know service accommodation didn't work or there was an issue you should be able to just rent the property out for a few months at a normal rate maybe you just rent it out for three months or six months to someone else and that will cover all of your costs for you and that way again it stops you making a loss so now let's say you had a six month break clause and for some reason the deal didn't work you can simply let the property out for you know let that out to someone else for six months and they will cover all your costs and it will prevent you making a lot so again if you if you have a quieter market rent click yes and that's green if you have paid more than market rent that will go red purely because well you know that's not a situation you want to be in so but typically that doesn't really happen much typically people do just acquire them at market rate this is not really a big deal but it's just something to be aware of so that is essentially what we have done in the further analysis section and we've we've looked at the forecasted rates and we've looked at the historic rates and we've made sure they're almost in sync or they're not overestimated they're not over exaggerated once that is passed we contact the agencies get their feedback on the area what the situation is and you know how many inquiries they get so on and so on we then look at the major hotel chains well are there any big hotel chains which is again a very very good indication we then look at well what is the economic situation and this doesn't necessarily just mean big companies it could be for example the startups and employer growth and so on and so on so anything which supports the fact that there is a good economy and then finally we've looked at risk mitigation by making sure we have a six months break clause and also that we've acquired the property and market rent now if all of these come back positive and the rent around analyzer also gives us a positive indication that all the criterias are passed better that is a very very good sign for these areas and you can move on to the next stage where we will start to acquire properties in this particular area in this video we'll be covering the pricing analysis and how to set your prices so the first thing we need to do there's only two things we have to input in this in order to work out what the prices should be so the thing we have to input is called revpar which stands for revenue per available property it doesn't really matter too much about what that means or what is relevant as we don't necessarily need to use it we just need to know what these numbers are in order to calculate what the prices are so if we go on to back onto a dna and we click onto price and then click onto seasonality it will give you two figures here the revpar and the weekend revpar so now you can select the two bedroom properties since that is you know the property we are looking at and again it doesn't really change it too much in this particular case anyway now what revpar is the revenue per available rental which is divided by uh divides daily rental revenue by the number of listings available to rent so they look at the you know the revenue generated by all the properties in the area divided by what the number of properties in that particular area so this doesn't necessarily mean the rates that we're charging is just stands for the total revenue divided by the number of units because while not every single unit is booked on every single day well i would assume 100 occupancy so i'm not entirely sure why this is you know required or i think it is something which hotels use more so than apartments because i guess it might be more relevant to them to look at well how much revenue did we make um you know how how much revenue did each room make for example if you have a hotel with 50 rooms or 100 rooms and that would be useful to them whereas when you only have a few apartments i can't really see why this would be relevant or useful but it does it does help with one aspect which is clearly in this area we can see that you know the rev power is lower on week weekdays and uh higher on weekends so what we will do is take these numbers 64 and 77 for the weekday and the weekend and we will plug them here 64 and 7. so now what that does is that will start to give us all the numbers we need in terms of pricing so now i will go through this step by step and show you exactly how the prices are calculated so the first thing which is calculated is essentially the average daily rate without the cleaning fee so what that means is that so far if i go back onto the rent to rent analyzer we said that the average daily forecast is 116 pounds we can charge 116 pounds but if you look at air dna and if i go back on to rates for example or even if i go back to overview if you look at the average daily rate this is the average booked nightly rate plus the cleaning fee so when we have the 116 pounds this actually includes the cleaning fee as well but now we know that the numbers we have set is the cleaning fee is you know 20 pounds for the cleaning 20 pounds for the laundry and four pounds for the replenishments so if i go into pricing that we can see that the cleaning fee really needs to be 44 pounds per stay because well it cost us 20 to clean 20 to do laundry and four for the replenishments so when you have 116 pounds which includes a cleaning fee we also know that the average stay is three nights so if if people book for three nights and they were paying 116 pounds every single night that would mean we have 116 multiplied by three which is you know 348 pounds but if we take away the cleaning fee because well 44 of that 348 is actually it's actually the cleaning so if we get rid of the cleaning fee we only have 304 pounds left and across three nights that is 101 pounds so again it's that is how these these numbers are calculated which is that every number we've looked at in terms of pricing previously included cleaning now we want to separate the amounts to say well this is my nightly rate and this is my cleaning rate so we have to separate them out so that's essentially what has happened here which is the cleaning fee is already calculated for you based on the fact that you put in your cleaning numbers here i will just go through this in a bit of a weird order so next we have the extra guest fee now with service combination pricing for the first two guests there is they're included in the base price so for example the base price here is 101 pounds so if only two people were booking they would pay 101 pounds but now let's say you have a two bedroom property which sleeps you know four people so what would happen is they would pay 101 pounds plus anywhere between 15 to 20 pounds for the guest for guest number three and guest number four so that's why i say three onwards so for example for two people it would be 101. for three people it would be 101 plus 15 so that is 116. and for four people it would be 116 plus another 15 which would make it 131. so essentially from guess number three onwards you can charge another 15 to 20 pounds per guest on top of your average daily rate so this is your cleaning fee this is how much you can charge extra per guest now on airbnb this is very very easy to do under pricing you can simply set this as an extra fee if you want to set this on booking.com you will have to contact your account manager and you will have to tell them that you want to set a 15 pound fee on top of your base rate on top of your booking.com base rate and they will have to do that for you just let them know that you know for anyone if we have more than two guests so guess number three four five six we want to have another 15 pounds for every single increase so those are those two fees the next we have is let's go through this section here so airbnb i've already mentioned to you that the reason is 101 pounds is because the cleaning fee is deducted the average weekday rate is 91 pounds and the average we can rate is 110 pounds the way this is calculated is because you know as you can see there is a bit of a difference that weekdays is cheaper we weak ends are higher so these are calculated you know in the same proportion the same ratio as these here so by as you can see the difference is you know relatively the same in terms of percentage so for example you can see there's a bit of a difference here and the same difference is is shown here as well because you know as we know that we days are cheaper and weekends are higher in this area and i've done some calculations to adjust these numbers for you so if you wanted to say weekday rates and weekend rates these these are what the rates would be now this one is really really easy like i told you before if i go into the rent to rent analyzer we have a three percent transaction fee now the reason we have a three percent fee is because airbnb charges a three percent commission now you might be thinking well why is it three percent booking.com charges 15 so shouldn't this be higher and the reason i told you before that it's not higher is because on booking.com we actually charge a higher price so even though we pay more commission at the end of the day it turns out to be exactly the same so if i show you here on airbnb the nightly rate on average is 101 pounds but for booking.com we actually have a markup of 16 pounds 16 what that means is that we price booking.com pricing 16 higher in order to you know include the extra commission and also if i go back to the rent to rent analyzer in order to include this fee here now on booking on airbnb we don't actually pay any transaction fees to strike but on booking.com we have to pay a 1.4 fee so because we have to pay extra commission and because we have to pay for the strike fees we have increased the price by 16 percent so the money we receive at the other day is exactly the same so this this column here is essentially 16 more of the airbnb pricing we then move on to discounts again the discounts are calculated for you so the weekly discount you can set to six percent the monthly 10 percent early bird 10 and last minute 10 and now the way these are calculated is essentially for example you know if we if our aim is to get 80 occupancy and someone books for one month so essentially we have 100 occupancy we can give them a bit of a discount and still end up making more money than we previously would have so that is how those numbers are calculated again you know very very simple but these are the discounts you need to set so again this is all calculated for you early bird we offer 10 last minute we offer 10 percent now finally we get on to the last thing which is the pricing software we will be using some pricing software it's for for example beyond pricing price labs and when you use pricing software it generally asks you for two prices which is well what is the base price which really means what is the average price you want to set and the average price you want to set is essentially the same as the average airbnb price which is 101 and they also ask you what's the minimum you're willing to accept and again we will actually set the minimum as the same as the base the reason is because we've already set out discounts in airbnb and booking.com we don't want to offer more discounts on top of the discounts we've already set so if you use a pricing software then essentially what you need to do is make sure your base and your minimum are the same because the discounts have already been set now and with a lot of these software so for example we will get onto guestie which is the channel manager we will use to set the pricing there is a section for booking.com markup and we will set a 16 markup now if you're not using a pricing software and you're just you know just setting one price or one base price or you're using the channel manager to set your price then the price you set is essentially this one here you ignore the weekdays and you ignore the weekends you just set one average price which is this number here and you also select your markup of 16 now what that what i will do is that will give you a very very good average across all your rates so that that would be the easiest way and when you're starting out when you're making your airbnb listing and when you're making your booking.com listing i would suggest to you you just start off with the average base price which is 101 pounds in this case and on booking.com of course there is a 16 markup so when you make your airbnb account and it asks you for a price you will set this and for booking.com you will set this one here later on when you start using pricing software you can you know set these at the base and as the minimum now you might have to watch this video a couple of times because there is a lot going on there's a lot of different numbers you need to you don't necessarily need to understand how the numbers are calculated but you do need to get a good idea of you know what the numbers reflect but to put very very simply and to give you a bit of a summary all you have to do is fill in these two here when you make your airbnb account this is the number you plug in when you make your booking.com account this is the price you set for airbnb and booking.com you set a cleaning fee of 44 pounds for extra guests beyond two so after two you set an increase of 15 to 20 pounds and these are the discounts you need to set and down the line once you have a pricing software you can simply have the airbnb price as a base price again the airbnb price as the lowest price and have a booking.com markup of 16 so watch this video a couple of times watch your two three times just to get a good understanding it can be a bit confusing at first but you'll get the hang of this very very quickly and i will make a summary of this in the task garden section as well so you can simply copy and paste the pricing so i believe in the first thing you need to do is essentially just get up and running and set these prices and over time you can if you need to tweak them you can tweak them so that is all you have to do for the pricing section which is complete these two fields here and everything all everything else will be calculated for you with the pricing analysis so finally if you look on the last sheet on the deal analyzer system you have what is known as the occupancy table now there isn't anything ready you have to do here it's just a table which shows you the different amount of profits you can make based on your frequency and it's just something you know good to see that where you sort of stand with this particular deal so as you can see on the in the first column you have occupancy again from zero percent all the way to 100 and then it tells you well how much revenue can you make uh based on well you know these occupancy so if you were fully booked you would have a rental income of 3480 pounds then it tells you the total cost based on those occupancies and then finally it tells you the profit now we want to be at a stage where we're breaking even around 50 percent now you know in the south of england sometimes this can be around 55 percent or just slightly higher than 55 percent hence if i go back onto the rent to rent analyzer we have you know the criteria is to break even around 50 but if it's between 50 to 60 you know depending on the area can be okay so but ideally we want to be around this mark here which is the 50 break even the closer we are to this the better that means in half the month we cover all our cost so the break-even is 50 and again it does seem to match because i mean for example the loss is only 2 pounds 56 let me just make this bigger for you the loss is only 2 pound 56 which essentially means we break even you know we're covering all our costs at 50 now the target occupancy like i mentioned before is really around the 80 mark that's really you know where we want to be when it comes to our service accommodation business and if we got to 80 then we hire we are essentially here which is you know the profits of 811 pounds every single month i believe if i go back to the rent to rent analysis the forecast is around 65 percent based on airbnb so the forecast is saying we are roughly around this area here which is 404 pounds every single month but this is where we were you know where we essentially want to be so this is just a quick summary of you know essentially your deal and so you can quickly see where you sort of sit so break even the forecast is here and then the target is here and just to sort of sum up on this as well that yes of course the is indicating you know this level here so let me just write the word forecast but this is based on airbnb information alone this assumes that you know if we weren't doing anything else but if i go into the further analysis you know we really want to be well looking at well what the agencies are saying you know um are they getting much business there we really want to be tapping into that we also you know look at the past data and we see that historically well occupancy was much much harder so that potentially it could even be higher but again when we do our numbers we want to be conservative we want to at least make you know a good amount of money based on the forecast and anything above that is a bonus but it can never really be guaranteed because you know when it comes to agencies you don't necessarily always get information from from them and you know you can't exactly compare data so that is essentially how we do deal analysis in summary which is we look at airbnb we base our numbers on airbnb but really we want to be around that target here and that's what we're hoping to get based on the fact that we've done further analysis and it's shown as well as companies there's big hotels there's a lot of agencies you know in this particular area and even at the forecast forecasted level if i go back onto the rent to rent analyzer we have two criterias and you know both these criterias essentially have to pass based on you know the forecasted levels not at high 80 levels but based on forecast so just to quickly sum that up again in you know the main criteria is that in the first year we want to make all our money back the investment we have spent we want to make it back so in year two year three year four it's you know entire entire profit and in this deal we're actually getting more than the money we've spent and you know while we're on the subject one more thing to note here is that even though you know we are essentially looking to make all our money back in year one this is where service accommodation gets good that for example if you look at your property set up fees and in terms of your investment in this case is four two to 3.00 well the reality is that is actually technically you know not your full investment like in the sense that let's say you go in you know buy some camera equipment because you want to film videos and you spend 4 223 pounds on camera equipment well then all that money is essentially you know kind of your money is tied up and you won't necessarily get that money back because you spend all that money on camera equipment and you're looking to turn that into a profit by making videos and selling videos but if you if you look at this case here the property set of fees we have spent 1100 pounds on the rent advance but when we give the property back this rent advance actually just comes off the last month's rent because you know for example think of a tendency you sign for maybe yourself or your family or if you have kids you know when they go to university you've signed a tenancy or you know whatever whenever you have a rent advance that is actually just the last month's rent they just wanted upfront so technically you know what will happen is your last month's profits will just be inflated by 1100 pounds because you won't have any rent to pay so i personally don't really consider this as an investment i know it is a setup fee and we need this money in order to get started but technically it's not really an investment because you simply just get it back whenever you give the keys back and the same actually applies for the deposit as well which is you pay a 1500 pound deposit but as long as you don't damage the property you also get your deposit back so the only thing you don't get back are the fees and the furniture cost because well you know once you've bought a sofa and the surface a couple years old and you can't really do anything with it the only thing you can do is you can bend the sofa so really the four two two three you've spent this is really the only money is technically cost you because this money you just get back whenever you give the keys back so your investment isn't even four two two three it's actually only about sixteen hundred pounds maybe you lose some of your deposit because you know they have to maybe this clean the car pace or you know lick of pain here and there so maybe let's say you lose a few hundred pounds of fat that means your investment might be 1500 plus 100 that's 1600 let's say you lose 400 of your deposit so your total investment is only about 2 000 really because a lot of the money you're getting back when you get the keys back and in the first year you're making back about 5 000 pounds and so that is just another way of looking at it that is how i personally look at these investments but it is still important to know that you know this is how much it's going to cost to get up and running and we still want to be making that back you know the criteria is we want to make the money we spend back so year two three and four are pure profit and when we give the keys back whenever that is we also get a large portion of this money back so that is how i look at deals this is how this is why we you know do the forecast and we have the target occupancy so on and so on but this table is just very very helpful in knowing essentially where you are with this deal and where you sit when it comes to the criteria so for example this is the break even this is where we want to be and currently we sit around here so it just gives you a quick summary of the entire deal nothing really you need to do here per se in this video we'll be going through the service accommodation deal analyzer if you are purchasing the property or if you already own the property that you're looking to do service accommodation in so for simplicity and so you get a better comparison i've actually kept the numbers exactly the same so we're essentially looking at the same deal as we were in the rent to rent case which is the two bedroom flat in milton keynes so i've kept the numbers exactly the same so you can see how the deal would look if you did a rent to rent on that property compared to well what if you already owned the property and that was your your you know your own apartment so how would the numbers differ how would the deal differ so again the property detail situation is exactly the same which is milton keynes we're looking at the town central a two bedroom property part furnished so exactly the same property and the inputs i've kept exactly the same as well which is well the forecast we said was 116 pounds the minimum occupancy was 65 percent and the minimum day stay was three days so three days minimum so like you like you can see the numbers are exactly the same as before and i think this will make the comparison a lot easier because you'll be able to see well as it render rent we were making this much and as you know as an a as a property that we own how much could we potentially make now one difference here is this section here which is last time we had a section about you know property setup fees which included your deposit your rent advance and letting agent fees all those things now you don't have that if you already own the property so we've eliminated that section and we've replaced it with ast cash flow the reason we have aest cash flow is because we want to know well if the property is making this much which is 337 pounds 69 every single month as an aest property well how much can i make as a service accommodation property how much more money can i make in the process and if i make a lot more money then it might be worthwhile converting that property into service accommodation and you know if you if we can massively you know boost the cash flow so if we go through this the first thing you need to input is the rent and to input the rent here your mortgage so how much are you paying in your monthly mortgage cost you have your management fees so these are typically your leading agent fees and uh you can select zero percent five percent or ten percent now if you a typical leading agent will charge about ten percent so you can put ten percent if you have a you know normal vetting agent if you're self-managing the property so you don't have a lending agent you can simply change this to zero percent but typically a leading agent charges about 10 so we'll leave this at 10. then you have the service charge which is a monthly service charge now this is only for flats by the way this doesn't exist for houses so if you are in a flat and you pay service charge every single month which you know you will will do if you are in an apartment building so you can input your monthly service charge here you can add your ground rent in this box here now the ground rent is typically paid annually or is paid every six months so you can put the annual ground rent here and it will calculate how much that is every single month and finally you have voids so awards essentially means that you know it's very unrealistic the property is going to be rented out every single day over the course of a year unless you have a very very long tenant who stays for you know two or three years or so so avoids essentially means the period that property is empty for because well there is a switch in the tenancy so now let's say you have a tenant who uh moves into the property and they they then leave the property so they vacate the tenancy there might be a couple of weeks before you you know get all this stuff out maybe do a bit of a paint and you know prepare the property for the next tenant and do some marketing to get someone else in there and that person might take about two weeks so we assume that two weeks every single year the property is empty for voids now you can switch this if you want and there's three options you can say well you know my property is never empty so zero uh two weeks or four weeks now two weeks seems about right it seems pretty common so we will leave this at two weeks so a fair monthly cash flow if you own this property in the case of milton keynes because we said you know the rent was 1100 when we were looking at this as a rent-to-rent deal you can safely say that the mortgage not the mortgage sorry the net monthly cash flow should be about 337 pounds every single month now this can be higher or lower based on whatever your mortgage is but that is the number i put in for the time being which seems about right for a property in that particular area so this is the monthly cash flow you're receiving every single month now we go into the next section and as you can see the next session is exactly the same as before nothing changes you know because the running cost of the property is going to be exactly the same in terms of your bills and your transaction cost and so on and so on so that stays exactly the same finally we have this segment here which again though the formatting remains exactly the same in terms of the layout but as you can see your profits are now considerably different your monthly forecast your profit the monthly forecasted occupancy are now much much higher i believe in the rent to run case this looked like around 400 pounds every single month 404 and now that's jumped to about 900 pounds every single month the reason for that is is that because your costs are now much much lower when you are doing rent to rent your monthly cost you know just a rental loan is eleven hundred pounds whereas when you're when you own the property because your mortgage is always much much lower than the rent you also have an additional buffer for that particular reason so in this case as you can see that previously it was about 400 pounds i think 400 pounds and now it's increased by 500 pounds which is you know 900 pounds profit almost every single month so again the format stays exactly the same but profits are massively higher compared to before purely because well now you're paying a mortgage rather than paying monthly rent and then we get down to the deal analysis section and again you know we have the criteria of the monthly break even occupancy so the criteria is 50 if you press the get value button it will tell you what it is in reality and if in this case it's 32 and even this you can see it's massively decreased in before purely because well now you're paying mortgage as your cost rather than rent so because there's a 600 pound difference which you don't have to necessarily pay every single month in order to break even your break even occupancy is you know much much lower and finally we have this last table here which shows you a comparison so as ast this was making 337 pounds every single month now we can see that just up here when we looked at the ast cash flow now at the forecasted occupancy which is in this case 65 percent because well that is the number we input here at 65 we should be making around 894 pounds every single month which is 165 increase compared to what you would have made on aest so it's more than doubled it's 165 increase and if we look at the service accommodation income at the forecast sorry at the target occupancy of eighty percent so if we look at this column here we should be making about thirteen hundred pounds every single month now if we make thirteen hundred pounds that's almost a thousand pounds more compared to what we were making as aest now that is a percentage increase of 285 percent so that means you know your income is almost tripled when it comes to running this as service accommodation and achieving the target occupancy of 80 now that is essentially how the purchasing analyzer works it is pretty much the same as a rent to rent analyzer except for a few small differences when it comes to everything else it remains exactly the same and the pricing remains exactly the same the occupancy table again is slightly different because now your costs are much much lower so we wanted to break even around 50 percent and i believe on our rent-to-end deal it was around 50 percent but now you can see you're breaking even at about 35 so the rest of the deal analysis stays exactly the same except for the analyzer sheet itself and it this will show you exactly how much money you can make on a property if you purchased it compared you know purchased it and run a surface combination compared to a property you either purchase or you already currently own and uh you were running this as a normal aest a normal a long lit and this is essentially the main table which you need to be looking at when it comes to making a decision well should i run this property as service accommodation or should i keep it on a normal long tenancy and if you can make you know one and a half times the amount of money increase or essentially you know almost three times the amount of money it's actually even more than three times the amount of money because it's 285 percent so it is considerably you know a lot more money than before so that is how you analyze the purchasing deal compare it to ast and essentially make a decision while should i run this as ast or should i convert this into a serviced accommodation property so this is how you find cleaners in any given area so when you go into facebook first thing you have to do is import your town or city name in the search bar now when i do that a whole bunch of stuff comes up the next thing i need to do on the left hand side is click groups now once i'm in groups what you have to do is try to find a group which is relevant for you so for example in this case i guess if i'm looking at peterborough what i would do is possibly look at this one here which is peterborough small business advertising you might be able to post in there and ask for any cleaner recommendations that might be one way of doing it best jobs in peterborough you might be able to post in there the rest don't seem too relevant to essentially what we're looking for again you know you have jobs in around peterborough so that might be another good place or even the peterborough business hub so that's one way of doing it which is finding groups now this might be better in some areas compared to others it doesn't work every single time but if you do have some pages and it can be a great way of you know essentially putting some posts out in your local area and seeing if there are any cleaners or if anyone has any recommendations for cleaners so that's the first thing you can do the second way of hiring cleaners in any area and this is this has a much much higher success rate because this platform is designed exactly for this reason which is care.com now on care.com is essentially a website which you can use for hiring anything to do with care essentially you have tutors child care elderly care pet care and you know the one we're interested in which is housekeepers now you have a whole bunch of people here but this is not exactly how we're going to be doing this what we're going to do is if i put in pe one yeah we have some peterborough postcodes i am an individual or a business it doesn't really matter too much higher employees so essentially what you're doing is you're just uh how many people are i think it might even be easier if you just search as an individual rather than as a business so it's like i'm an individual you're finding care you're not you know finding a job and then essentially you need household help what you need is a housekeeper and uh you can take what you need floor cleaning window cleaning laundry if you want to you know select some more stuff which is relevant for you uh then you essentially select those i would just leave it pretty generic to be honest maybe even click this one which is end of tenancy cleaning but it might eliminate a lot of people so you know play around with these settings and see what you end up getting so click next and this is where you have to make your own account now care.com is a paid service but it is a very very useful i've used it a few times and every single time it does seem to work really well because it is paid you end up getting you know much much better people on there because even the people who advertise their services on that they have to pay in order to be there in the first place so those are the two ways you can hire cleaners they both work i believe facebook is a good way but you don't always succeed whereas you don't necessarily have to pay so it is worth doing and you can get some good local recommendations and if that doesn't work for you simply use care.com and import your area and find cleaners in your area now this also i believe has reviews and so on and so on so you end up getting someone who's really good you only need to do this for about one month in order to find someone so i think it costs about if i look at pricing maybe they mention pricing here okay i believe it's not mentioned but i believe pricing is something along the lines of 10 pounds a month or 15 pounds a month but you only need this for one month in the first month when you're finding these cleaners so you only have you only need it for one month 15 pounds and you can end up getting someone who is already really good what i would do is find as many good ones as possible interview them and then trial them and see one with you know which one fits the best and uh which one is you know worth working with in the long run so alongside cleaners another person you need on your team is a good maintenance person now you know with service combination you do have small niggles here and there might be a leaky tap which has to be you know fixed very quickly uh there might be a heating issue water issue so so nothing major but you do need a person who can sort of attend these and if there is an issue someone who can fix these very very quickly so other than cleaners the second person you need on your team is a good maintenance person now where can you find a good mentions person again two main ways the first one is through recommendations similar to cleaners and again very similar to cleaners the second one is through facebook groups so what you want to do is if you know a local you know handyman mentions person or maybe you use one or again you know reach out to people in your in your friends and family circle and see if they know someone who can do the odd job here and there or if you don't know anyone then again using the same strategy as cleaners we go on to facebook groups and we put out some you know some posts saying well you know are there any maintenance people in this group any handyman or does anyone know any and again you're sure to find some and again you have two or three on your books and when there's an issue you can send them to have a look at that problem you want to make sure you know they can fix these small things so you want to know uh you know what sort of experience they have when it comes to you know heating water or gas those sort of things so again they're not engineers they're not doing anything big but they know how to fix small things so you need a good maintenance person on your team and those are the two best ways of finding one so one of the things that you need in your service accommodation business is the linen quite you know obviously and there's essentially two different options when it comes to learning you can either one high linen or the second thing you can do is you can buy linen so now well what is the difference well if you're hiring essentially what you're doing is you're renting linen and you know every week a new delivery comes with not brand new linen but of course it's you know commercially clean commercially pressed and it's just like very very good quality linen or the other option is that you you know maybe buy three sets so i think we mentioned this before which is you buy three sets and you have like a rotation policy which is there is one set which the guest uses which is on the bed uh one set so for example the cleaners come in they take that off they put into the washing machine they leave it out to dry um and then the you know you have another set which then goes on to the bed so it's like a bit of a rotation policy that one's on the bed one is uh being washed and dry and one is ready to go and uh every time there's a checkout the cleaner comes and you know that one goes there that one goes there and it's like a rotation policy there's pros and cons with of course both now the good thing about buying linen is that it can be cheaper if your cleanings are sort of yeah you know just washing it themselves and you don't have to worry about minimum orders and so on and so on because when you hire linen you can't just say to them well i want you know one one sheet a week or uh one set a week there's minimum orders that you have to comply by whereas if you're if you own the linen yourself and all you have to do is well every time there's a checkout just wash and dry then there's no you don't have any sort of restrictions or you're not sort of stuck with any sort of you know limitations well you know i have to order minimum three a week so on and so on so that is the positive when it comes to buying linen the problem with buying linen though is that i think a lot of linen especially towels and so on and so on once you wash them a few times the quality isn't the same and you know if a guest gets makeup on them or a lipstick or you know spill something on them a lot of the times it's very very hard to get the stains out whereas if you hire linen that's not really your responsibility because they know it's gonna get dirty and when it goes to you know get uh commercially cleaned and pressed by the time you get it back it's in very very good condition so the problem with hiring lending can be the fact that it's a bit more expensive but at the same time it's much much better quality your guests will leave you better reviews they won't complain and over time that would be worth it and especially as you get you know more properties more apartments more houses what will happen is that cost will be spread out amongst more uh more properties and therefore the cost will go down over time anyway so my personal recommendation would be to highlin rather than buy linen purely because the quality is much much better you'll get better reviews and again if you sort of you know find a good company which has a low minimum order initially then that will help you massively as well so i would personally recommend high linen is just much much easier um when it comes to your cleaners again they might not want to you know do the washing and drying and ironing whereas again if you just give it to a company by the time it comes to you it's you know it's very very nicely laid out it's flat packed it's iron pressed everything so i would personally say go with the hiring approach now when it comes to hiring what are the options so the first one is a strawbridge linen now strawbridge linen is one of the biggest linen providers is a commercial linen provider across the uk and they will essentially supply linen in most places so what you would have to do is go into their website and enter your area and get a quote from strawbridge or if you don't want to use soil bridge now the second thing you can do is essentially get a quote from a local company so now let's say you live in petersburg what you need to do is google uh peterborough linen providers or peterborough linen hire or peterborough linen and see which companies come up and you know you say to them well you know we're similar to a hotel we have apartments or we have houses and uh we need weekly supply of linen and then uh get a quote from them tell them you know we have a property which is a three-bedroom house we have uh three single beds and two double beds and we need this many towels you know what's the minimum order you have what are your rates and then take those rates and then compare them to the rates of stall bridge and essentially work out where you can get the best deal now from experience if you can find a local linen provider it is generally better and is cheaper than going with a national company who again is you know a very very big outfit there they are good but sometimes they can be a lot more expensive as well so if you can find a lending company which is local and again if you you know it's one of those things that if you get a small local company you can sort of um grow with them as you get bigger they're a lot more flexible they're a lot more uh willing to help you out with things whereas when you go with a national provider they they sort of have set ways of doing things you know so for example we use a local company for a lot of our apartments and sometimes if we end up needing a bit more linen or so on and so on i can just call the guy or my team can call the guy and it's just much much easier to deal with whereas if you go with a big company you know there's there's um you can't just change orders quickly and so on and so on so there's a it's a it's a bit more rigid so ideally what you need to do is you need to hire linen and either use stallbridge which is again a very good option i'm not taking anything away from them or you can use a local linen provider get a quote from them and uh compare the two quotes and essentially find a linear provider who can cater for your properties so in this video i'll be showing you how you can set up a virtual phone number and essentially set up an answer phone answer service now the reason you need this is because you know when you have a business for example you might be at work and you know the guest might be calling you or maybe a landlord or a letting agent might be calling you because you know they have a potential deal and if it goes to your personal phone number one it doesn't you know look very professional and second you might end up missing a lot of those phone calls because you might be you know maybe busy or having dinner or maybe just to work and so on and so on so the first thing you need is a virtual phone number so it seems a lot more professional and the second thing you need is a way off someone picking up that phone for you rather than you picking up that phone yourself because well you might be busy so now in terms of getting the virtual phone number and i will put a link to this as well the web company we use is called e receptionist dot co dot uk now once you're on the main page you can simply click the button here which says get started risk free now again when you might sign up it might say something else but that is essentially what you need to click and the package you can go for is the cheapest package here which is a pain you pay as you go package now all you really need is the phone number you don't necessarily need these packages because you can you know you can use your own phone to make the phone calls you don't necessarily need minutes and so on and so on so you can essentially use this service here which is get a number with pay as you go and if you click sign up now now that will tell you you know in which country you pick and then you can pick three types of numbers you can take a local national or free phone i would recommend maybe it's best to go with the national number purely because if you you know let's say you operate in peterborough but you end up taking a deal in london so you know because you haven't found your area yet and you haven't already found which you know properties are going to be taking which areas then it might be difficult to take a local number since you don't know which area you're going to be in whereas if you take a national number it sort of applies to any place in the country really so if you select national and then pick any 330 zero number three t3 um i would recommend a three number as opposed to an eight number so because people with eight numbers aren't always sure if it's free or if it's paid but uh you can take a landline number which is a three three zero number or if you know which area you're going to be investing in you can just go for a local number and essentially pick you know the city you want to be in and essentially get a number from there so if you're unsure about your area pick national if you know exactly where you're going to invest for example in london then you can just go for a local number and pick the correct area code now once you have that you essentially put in your own number and you simply check out and from there on you have that virtual number now once you have that virtual number you have to go to answer.cod.uk again i will put the link for this and how this works is you forward that you use that virtual number and you input it onto answer.code uk and what will happen is when you have that number on your website or you give it you know maybe let's say you put it on a business card or someone and so on anytime someone calls that number it won't go to you it will go to answer dot co dot gk and answer code uk will take a message on behalf of your company so you know let's say your company is called zoom they will say um hello zoom apartments or resume accommodation uh how can i help and they will take a message and once they've taken a message they will send you a text message and they will send you an email with the person's phone number their name and the message they left on the answer service and then you can get back to them whenever you uh please like you know whenever you have time so the way astrology uk works is they have different pricing plans i would recommend you go with top top up bundle one which is for 25 pounds and roughly each call will cost you one pound 20. so you know every time someone calls this number it charges you one pound 20 which isn't too bad because you're not going to be getting a ridiculous amount of calls anyway but you do need a way you know whereby you can take all the calls and take all the messages without you having to deal with that yourself all the time so essentially you can pick one of the bundles you can click get started fill in all your details fill in your phone number and you know simply simply use your new version number to input onto here those calls will then uh be passed on to you by text message and email again very very simple process if you need any help you can always ask them questions through faqs and by you know contact them so they can help you out with getting started but those are the two things you need you need e receptionist in order to get the virtual number followed by answer recorder uk in order for someone to pick up that number every time someone calls so in this session we're going to be setting up our website and also our email address so now in order to set up our website the first thing we need to do is buy a domain a domain essentially means you know your website name or your website url whatever you want to call this so now the platform i use is called godaddy you've probably heard of it they have ads on the tv all the time so essentially you can go to godaddy.com and it might take you onto a page like this now when you're onto this page you can click domains up here or click domains here so essentially we need our own www dot uh followed by your company name essentially so you click on this and now it says well you know what sort of name do you want so maybe your company is called zoom accommodation so let's say we put in zoom accommodation it starts finding it okay so you can get zoom accommodation dot color uk for 4.99 every year and then it might renew it might be a bit more expensive in a couple more years or something along those lines so uh you essentially buy the one which is dot code uk since you're in the uk or um you know if you want to change your name and call it something else so zoom let's zoom stays or whatever your company name is now this doesn't necessarily have to be the same as your company name a lot of companies they have you know they're limited companies called one thing but the website is called something else and at the bottom for example you know let's say your let's say your company is called zoom travel stays limited but you want the name zoom accommodation so you would get zoom accommodation and at the bottom of the website sometimes people say you know the trading name is something else so uh you can't just put that disclaimer so my point is you don't necessarily have to get a domain with domain name which is exactly the same as your company now i would advise you have something like just the name of your company rather than your company followed by the word limited or some people you know or some people have zoom accommodation ltd i don't think it looks very professional having the word limited or ltd in your company name everyone knows it's a company since you have a website so i would just leave it at that so once you've done this you select here uh sorry not this one because you don't want zoom accommodation.com as well you just want dot cod uk you click add to cart and uh once you've added your cart you continue to cut and you simply check out now you don't you don't need any privacy and protection i personally don't really tend to get these i just select no thanks to anything additional and then i click continue to cart um once i'm in cart i normally just select one year because you get a bigger discount on one year and you can just automatically renew the following year anyway and then you click checkout and essentially that domain name is yours so i'll start again from checkout so once you have your domain the next thing you need to do is get your email address with your company name so if you go into google and google custom gmail it takes you to this website here and i will add a link to this below as well once you go to this click get started now and essentially what this will do this will give you for example you know a custom email with your company domain so for example um priya at your company or joe at your company and so on and so on so in our case it will be priya at zoom accommodation joe at zoom accommodation so click get started now input the business name which will be zoom accommodation uh whether it's you or it might be you in a business partner you and a live partner so and so on so you click two or nine or click just you you know whichever one you need click next you input all your details so i i put in my details here now if i go back here does your business have a domain yes i have one that i can use and here so let me just show you this you have to click yes i have that one i can use and then that is where you enter your domain so it would be zoom accommodation dot co dot uk you click next and you simply follow the process it says this hasn't been purchased yes because i had purchased yet because i haven't bought it myself but essentially once you put this in you click next and it will take you step by step so you can connect this domain that you've just purchased with your google account and that way that way you will have a email gmail account that sounds a bit tricky email gmail but uh essentially you will have your own email account with your custom domain so what you've now done is you've now bought a domain from godaddy you've then used that domain to also set up your custom email account the next thing we're going to do is set up your website now in terms of website the easiest and the fastest way to do this is by using squarespace and it's efficient it works really well and i highly highly recommend this so you can go to squarespace.com for stroke templates and again i will add a link to this below as well and essentially what you do is you find a portfolio not a portfolio a template that you like and what i would suggest is if you're you know getting a properties or getting a website for this particular business you can go to something like real estate in properties that might be a good one and once you go to real estate and properties you know you have some different websites here different themes so for example if i you know open this one preview this one here you will see what this looks like so if i scroll down you have you know pictures of your properties you have some descriptions and so on and so on and you essentially have a very very professional looking website which is you know which doesn't cost a lot of money i think this costs about 10 pounds a month and you're up and ready very very fast it works on your desktop if i turn this into an ipad this is what it looks like on an ipad again optimized perfectly for my well and then if i go on to the mobile view again it's you know very very professional very very cheap it's just good to go so the thing you need to do is you need to select a template that you like so you can pick any template you can go to a different one you might prefer a different template that you like so maybe you go to professional services now it would be and you can find something like this whichever one you please so essentially find a template that you like and then we're going to be using that template to make a website now this is a website template i have already created and if you would like to do something similar i would recommend just copy and paste this the reason we need a website is because when we start pitching to landlords start pitching to agents sometimes they say well you know can you send me your website can you send me your details so i can have a look and you know see see just gets just get some more information about your company and of course if you have a website it just adds a little bit more credibility so i've already created this website now as you can see that on this website there are no locations mentioned because at this point you don't currently have any apartments or houses so this is just a generic website which just explains what you do without actually mentioning any locations so you have a front page you explain exactly you know what service departments are or service accommodation the reason i say apartments predominantly we do apartments but you can do houses exactly the same thing then you have some more information here some features about you know exactly what you're doing we have information about our clients you could probably even take this part out since you technically don't have these clients yet and we have some more information and essentially you would replace this part with your own company details and then you go into the about section and in the about section it just explains a bit more about you know why serviced accommodation followed by some benefits of service accommodation so it's just a very very uh small professional looking website and then you also have a contact page of if anyone's looking to book or make any inquiries you have that there so essentially what you would do is you would just change this to your own details and have something up and running very very fast now i would recommend to you the best thing to do would be i will add a link to this website as well the best thing to do would be to simply copy and paste this and use essentially the website i've already created for you now if you want to make your own feel free that's absolutely fine but if you want to use this and copy all these details and copied the text and the images and so on and so on feel free because i think that will just help you get started just a little bit faster now if you want your own logo as well so we have skyline service departments the easiest way to do that is by going onto a website called fiverr.com so we're going to fiverr and you click you search here logo now once you have a logo you essentially find you know you look through some of these people find someone with a lot of reviews so this person's starting at eight pounds this person's starting at 80 so you know it's a bit more professional i would recommend for the time being you just need something cheap and something just to you know get you going so i wouldn't spend more than five ten pounds maybe even something like this well not exactly this because this seems to be sports based but uh essentially find one that you like maybe spend 10 pounds 15 pounds on getting a logo so essentially you know let's say you like one of these you click onto this you look at the ones you know different available options i would say just go with the basic one click continue and that as you order to card you just send them your company name and they will make a logo for you and if you have any designs that you like you can send them the designs and they will essentially not try to replicate that but use that as some sort of inspiration to create your design so that is essentially how you create your website and your email so when you start pitching to landlords you start pitching to agents and so on and so on it looks very professional you look credible and you have something which is up and running and you know you can show them well you know this is what we do this is what are about so what we've done here is we've used godaddy to get the domain we've then used google gmail to get an email we've then used squarespace we first got a template the template that you like and then we've you've either replicated this website and copied everything or just returned it yourself whichever one you please and then finally you've got a logo and a logo which you can then essentially add onto a business card or you can simply put up here so that is everything you need to do in this session to get up and running and add that credibility to your business and have everything set up so this screen recording i'm just going to take you through some of the ways in which you can get a service accommodation serviced um apartment units one of the ways that you can obtain a service accommodation unit is direct to landlord um so this is going direct and to the owner of a particular apartment and one of the ways you can do that is through a site called open rent i'm going to type in wellington city um i'm going to filter for two bedroom apartments because that's what we're we tend to take on so if we click on this apartment here this is um it looks quite nice i can imagine it doing quite well as a service accommodation unit um it's a bit different so you just have a look at some of the photos it's new modern open plan kitchen diner good condition yeah so this could work well um you just need to furnish it so one in gone city two bathrooms two bedrooms maximum tenants four so this is one of one of the really you know kind of good things about um open rent is that you can basically contact the owner directly so it's best to actually make you know make a viewing you know message the landlord or request a viewing through the platform you want to meet them in person get to know them see what they're looking for you know viewing the property meeting the owner seeing you know how long he's been trying to let the apartment out has he had any offers what is he looking for but you also need to make sure that you've done your research as well so throughout this course we we've kind of said that you know when we first started we had a look at the type of bookings that we wanted to achieve and receive and we wanted to target the corporate bookings corporate bookings you know you know who's coming it's a corporate um they're professionals the nightly rate that you can charge is usually higher they tend to stay for a lot longer they tend to be in the apartment very little so they tend to spend most of their time at work and they generally come back to the apartment just to sleep so in a lot of the corporate bookings as well with silver door um seiko prestige you know the payment is guaranteed as well so there's not that risk that these are the type of corporate bookings that we tend to go for and these are the types of areas that we target we target you know areas that we know we're going to receive the corporate bookings you know we do we do our research so for example you know we'll contact companies in the local area so in wellington city for example there's tesco's head office there's paypal there's actually a shire business park and there's lots of other big businesses in the area this is what we do we tend to you know focus on areas where we know there's the corporate demand the corporate bookings the nightly rate is higher there's that likelihood of getting any damages is a lot lower um you're kind of dealing with professionals um so that's why you know when we know which area we're targeting we have a look on open rent we try and approach landlords directly and open is a really really good way so another way if we um we can use rightmove so if we go to rightmove we can do click property to rent so i want to have a look at you know who are the agents in the area so we've got belvoir heart portico um mcconnell's rights rain and co so i just want to have a get a feel for the different agents that are in the area and then i want to have a look at which agent has the type of the types of apartments that i'm after really so if i go back up to the top so i know this development the stonehills house these are quite these are um used to be offices converted into apartments they actually are really nice so yeah in this instance what i'll do is i'll contact those two agents for those two apartments and i'll set up a viewing you know i won't pitch over the phone i'll actually want to meet the agent at the property have a look at the property service departments we work with the local employees in the area we provide them with accommodation and we normally say that we're after a number of apartments because we normally are um we've already done the research to show that you know there is a demand we're going to have you know quite a few inquiries so in moneygone city for example we had tesco's um and they said that you know we need 10 apartments you know we didn't have 10 apartments so you know that's how we started we went out and we worked for the local agent and said look we've got an enquiry for a number of apartments can you work with us can you help us and we went on to take i know seven or eight apartments through just that one agency so a lot of people do get put off and get very nervous about having to pitch but it it it's one of these things that you know maybe 80 percent of the agents will just say outright or sorry we don't do that we don't do that but it's just about meeting you know the right person you know always go and view the property never pitch on the phone and depending on who you meet at the property and so if you meet say for example a branch manager which on some occasions you do you know let them know what you do you know who which employers you work with what type of bookings you receive how long your bookings are and that you'll look after things like that minor maintenance you'll keep the property in really good condition you offer weekly cleans to your corporates so the property has all will always be in immaculate condition so that's what you need to kind of bear in mind again you're just looking for all you know nice clean apartments that you think all run well a service department so this for example it will work well as a as a service department yeah so again you know just looking for nice clean tidy apartments when you go to view these properties then anyone that you meet for example the branch manager is more likely to you know give you one of their apartments maybe as a trial but so either through open rent which is literally direct to the landlord or through the agents a final way is through family and friends and you'll probably know someone uh maybe you could join venture with them and say look you know you have the property you know let me manage it and run it as a service department and we can go you know maybe 50 50 on any profits so that's that's always an option as well taking these properties on regardless of you know if it's rent to rent or face management what you really have to do is you already have to explain the benefits to the person you're dealing with so if you're dealing with a landlord you have to tell them what the benefits are of working with you if you're dealing with a leading agent what's the benefits to them of working with you because you can talk all about you know how much money you're going to make and what you're going to do with the property so on and so on but if you can't communicate that in terms of how that benefits them then it might not necessarily work so these are some of the benefits to the landlords the first one is obviously the property is going to be tenanted for a long time you know with your typical contracts it might be one year two year three years so you're taking this on for a long time so what that means is there's no voids in the property because if the landlord has someone who's moving out every nine months or you know that sort of duration then obviously there's a tenant fine fee they've got to find someone else there's a void in the middle and so on and so on so you're you're getting rid of that another thing you're doing is you're maintaining the property to a very very high standard because if you think about it typically a landlord if they rent their property out then to like a normal house a normal family or something it's not exactly kept in the best day whereas when it's rented a service accommodation it might be getting clean one two three times a week professionally cleaned it's like how often do you know normal properties get cleaned and obviously everything is kept in good condition because you know from your point of view you're only going to get bookings if the property is kept in good condition so that's another benefit to the landlord which is that the property is kept in very good state another one is the minor maintenance so another thing you can say to the landlord is that you'll take care of all the minor maintenance so for example if there's an issue with a tap or a light bulb goes out you know those small things obviously the border goes then that's a big expense which the landlord will have to pay for and that's something they'll be responsible for but when it comes to all the smaller sub you can take care of that because see from a from from a landlord's point of view one of the you know one of the biggest hassles is those small you know minor maintenance and the management of the property if you can say to them though you'll take care of all the minor stuff you'll take all the hassle away essentially because they're getting long-term rent they're getting paid on time is well kept and you also do the money maintenance then essentially you're reducing the hassle for them and that's really all the benefits of our you know for them and again even though the list is only about four bullet points if you can take away a landlord's hassle and have a good long-term tenant that's really all they want you know they get their monthly cash flow that's pretty much all they're looking for the reason i say higher cash flows the last point is if you're doing management obviously if you're doing rent to rent they just get the rent if you're doing management then they might possibly also make a lot more money in the process if you if you've done your numbers right they should be making a lot more money in the process so now they've got less hassle property is well maintained and they're also making more money without them doing anything because see typically when you're dealing with a landlord the landlord is trying to save some money by not going to our letting agent that's essentially what's happening they're trying to save that 10 percent well in this case they're saving the 10 percent but rather than them doing the management you're doing the management so so there's like an additional benefit in that and you know they're trying to save money but now you're making them extra money on top because you're running the property as service accommodation so you know those are the benefits to landlords which is contracts with the agents my thing is you should not submit your own contracts to agents you should use their contracts and amend it as opposed to sending your own contracts because think about it if you send your own contracts and it's 20 pages they now have to read through 20 pages of what's in here there's only really two three main things that you're already concerned about one are you allowed to do shortly and second who can stay at the property a lot of the times it says employees you have to email them and you have to say we have to change the word employees to clients because we work with these companies and they're not our employees or our clients it is far far easier to get them to change one word from employees to clients then submitting a brand new deck of contract with 15 20 pages with all these words listed everywhere yes it's it's a company let through a company and their employees um you or the landlord requires a specific you know basically one who you've got to tell us which employees are staying there yeah so okay okay so some companies will say you have to let us know which which employees are going to be staying there from different companies or and you have to submit their id and so on and so on all that sort of stuff i feel like i have come across it as some point a while ago but again you know it might be a case of going to a different agent because again if you're in an area and there's 10 agents you're only trying to get one agent so if you can't get through to someone you simply just have to move on but at the end this is why i like to play with the agents because all you're trying to do is get one in that town or in that city you just want the one who says yeah we'll change it from employees to clients and i've done that many times just gonna change one word see we're looking at two main things here it should not be restricted to employees and it should allow short leds if a contract says minimum 99 lets then obviously that's not really going to work for you because you're going to be having people in there for a few nights at least sorry at the minimum i don't know i don't know i don't know what that word is but employees and short-lived again it says just some sort of disclaimer that you can always check with your solicitor because i don't want to get sued by anyone but you know check me just let's say what's right but the point is short let employees and it's far far easier to have a contract amended than a brand new contract submitted far easier and if you do those steps of get a viewing first as opposed to pitching on the phone you see some properties you you tell them a bit more about what you're doing so on and so on you tell them you're interested in four or five properties you name some of the big employees and say these are the people we're going to be working with making it the whole thing very very professional that has always worked for me now i like i said the day i went to paddington i must have done about 15 viewings with maybe nine agents eight nine different agents and i think a lot of fear when it comes to pitching is just about how you pitch it's not even about what you say it's just how you come across in the pitch if you come across as like you know if you're a bit nervous or you're mumbling you're way out of it and so on and so on then even they become a bit hesitant but if you if you speak confidently about what you're what you're doing and the sort of you know business you run i've never had business cards i've never had i've never sent them to our website i've never won some sort of shirt or like some professional stuff or any of that the first deal i took on my company was registered like seven days before we took the deal on there was no email there's no nothing because i feel like if you just explain it and you you follow the steps and you sort of like do it with a bit of confidence and you don't believe in what you're trying to do here then you'll you'll be okay whereas if you come across as you're unsure yourself then it it just it just comes across the way you speak just the way you say stuff and it just makes the whole thing slightly harder so but that's what i would say it's those are some guidelines which i would follow and again i'm saying don't pitch on the phone and then people go and pitch 20 agents on the phone then they say well i haven't had any luck for x y and z reason so on and so on but again i don't believe in pitching on the phone i'm not saying it doesn't work because people have pitched on the phone and they have got deals there is with most things there's always exceptions and it's not like it's not black or white there are gray areas and some things work for some people something works for other people some people do cold calling some people do email everything does work but i just feel that by doing this in person and building you know speaking to someone one-on-one and then seeing you face to face so on and so on just makes it much much easier because you can build rapport much easier in person as well it just makes the whole thing easier the person is a lot more invested compared to just being on the phone and i find the conversion is much much higher from personal experience and it's the same reason you don't leave the cinema because you're so invested you're like i might as well stay and it's the same play here which is that the agent doesn't simply just get up and leave they're willing to listen and that's all you really want they're not going to be like okay fine done but it's just i'm talking about percentages here you only need one out of all the agents in your town and you're done you're done you've got all the leads so that's how i would go on to acquire your sales combination properties okay so with agents this is this is the process that we recommend um this is the process i would recommend for agents right in terms of finding a property and doing this whole process the step one is find a property on right move that says right move so you find something the right move that you're interested in the second thing is you call and a book a viewing you wanna you wanna say i wanna see this property and you have to get the viewing you have to you have to book a viewing i don't go into the letting agent shops because again the problem is that they're not invested the same way because they haven't spent any time doing anything they were at their desk you came along they said we don't do that it's the same as the phone the principal is the same as a phone number three is viewing and number four is you pitch at the viewing so find the property call and book a viewing for that property do the viewing and then pitch add the viewing that is the process of how you would uh pitch your leading agents generally at the end off you've seen all the areas yeah you can say oh what we're looking for is for this yeah you can pitch at the end or you can start to explain the concept while you're sort of viewing the property and so on and so on but yeah you generally you would see the property first and then you you can pitch at the end so the question is what if they say i don't understand what this means which actually happens to a lot of people and i should probably mention this in the slide because here is the big killer word jargon right what that what that means is that if you say something to anyone in any industry for example if someone's an i.t specialist and i don't know there's a thing called hdmi if you talk about a hbmi or whatever which basically means nothing to anyone when they scan their head for a hbmi that means nothing right it's blank they know what a hdmi is they have no idea what a hbmi it doesn't it doesn't exist in the head so now they're confused as to what the hell is hbmi because it makes no sense because see what happens is people try to use all this complicated stuff because it makes them seem professional that you know look at me i know all this stuff but all it does is it confuses the other person so you have to step them through whatever you're trying to explain see if you say to someone oh we do rent a rent the first thing they're going to say is oh isn't that subletting because rent to rent implies subletting rent to rent and they have no idea what that means they don't know what service accommodation means no idea you go to most leading agents you say i'm going to do service accommodation they have no idea what that means so now already in their head they're like what the hell does that mean or like or rent terrain seems like a bit of a scam or isn't that subletting they know what company that means they know what corporate that means you have to use the information they know and play with that information if you start saying stuff which means nothing to them their head goes blank the whole thing is too foreign to scary so on and so on so the classic analogy in property is if you're trying to do lease options right so if you're trying to explain these options to an agent it's a confusing process because you're basically saying i'm not going to buy this property using a mortgage i'm going to pay the uh i'm going to cover the the seller's mortgage every single month and then five years later i'll make one big off payment and i'll buy the house that seems a bit messed up because no one does that right that's not not a normal process but if you say to a letting agent um you know how you can buy cars on finance where you just make a monthly payment and five years later you just pay the whole car off and you get the car everyone knows what that means everyone knows what everyone knows how finance works on a car and then you relate that and say well that's basically what i'm trying to do with the property at least they get it they because they they understand what's happening here so you have to you can't use words like rent to rent or service accommodation you have to use words they understand and when you do your pitch it has to be based on those words and you will never get someone saying i don't know what that means because it's just basic terminology they all know what a company net is they all know what a corporate is but you can't confuse them so yeah that's a good question if you get the inexperienced one or the one that basically has to do with the viewings and the basically the the person who makes the decision the lettuce manager whatever or director's back in the office and i guess at the viewing you explain it to them and basically then it's up to them to go back to refer it to the whoever it is and then you try and speak to your mates decision i guess i okay so the question is if if i'm create if you get a person at the viewing who's like a someone who's not the manager i suppose how do you sort of pitch to that well you would still have to pitch the normal way and they would have to communicate the message and you would have to go from there now i've i've had people like like the junior viewing people and stuff it's never really been a big issue i mean uh it might have been an issue with some people i don't know but it's never really been a big issue for me personally so but that's that's what you have to do you would have to pitch to whoever comes to the viewing and this is why when it comes to the pitch it has to be as simple as possible and it should not include stuff like this because if you confuse the person of the viewing who is just a messenger is kind of like chinese whispers that by the time the message goes around by the time the last guy hears is completely different to what the first guy said so this is why it has to be so simple in the terminology that they understand that even if it is someone who's like like a new staff member or whatever or a junior person they can still go back and communicate their message does that make sense yeah so any other questions when you get there and you know you haven't really had much feedback on if you told me that before i said you know we this landlord won't do company we don't even do company let's as an agency we just don't do it if you told me before i would appreciate that and not sort of come out and done this okay so you'd get that question so okay so okay so this this is my take on this take that approach this is this is this is my take on this when um this is my take on when people say that well you know the scenario presenting basically that if you had told me before that this is what you were going to do i wouldn't have shown it to you blah blah blah my take is a comp every letting agent has two contracts a ast and a company that contracts so first of all they do do it they might not know they do it but i've never come across a letting agent which doesn't have a company net agreement i've not seen one yet maybe there is but i've not seen one so most of them do do it the second thing is i'm not saying you're playing games but if you try to buy a property in this country with any leading agent and i've done this many times you say to them i'm looking for two bedroom x council flats they will show you seven two of them will be two bedroom x council flats five will be private one-bedroom flats and studios right is isn't that what they basically all do because their players well let me hang out with them let me show them basically everything we've got so on and so on they might buy something so it's exactly the same thing that when you do seven viewings they show you two you're interested in and five you were never going to buy or they were like let's just you know sneak one in on the way or they say we're we're going this way i happen to have the keys why don't we pop in and see it so it's exactly the same thing so like i'm not trying to you know play their game or whatever but my view is they all have this agreement if they don't do it why do you have the agreement in the first place why do you have this piece of paper in your office which says compliment agreement if you don't do it so i'm simply going by that so and if someone says to me we don't do it you should have told me before i assume that everyone does it because i know that everyone has a company yeah you can you can say that i assume everyone does this since everyone has it or personally i'm just not too fussed i don't get offended easily you can say whatever you want to me i don't you know i'm not too fussed from that point of view i just want to do 20 viewings and i want to get one agent on board because once that one agent was bought you can get on with the next one one thing which has worked weirdly i don't even know how this happened i can't remember it it just was a weird convenient coincidence even i went to foxton's once and i i can't remember why like i don't know if i was renting a property or for myself or if i was trying to oh no no i was trying to buy a property or something and i had some foxton's brochures so i had all these foxton brochures and then i was gonna go and speak to some leading agents to do this whole service combination stuff but because i had all these brochures the guy thought i was working with foxton's and they were giving me deals as well so he he made a comment referencing fox jones and somehow he just went really well because in his head he thought i was about to get all these deals from foxton's because i like all these brochures from foxton it was i i didn't do this on purpose but it sort of just happened but he he clearly thought i was about to get all these aj flats from foxton's so he started showing me flats they had uh to rent out her service accommodation it was a weird one but that happened um and you got something from them i got like honestly i can't remember this is this is the paddington one right we did get one that day but i just can't remember now it was so long ago but we got one that day but i just can't remember um but i i just remember i just remember the agent being just really interested because we had we had the focus on the brochure they were just a lot more interesting for some weird reason because it's like competitive and stuff um but you know that's something to consider something to consider but this is this is really what you're trying to do here this is really what you're trying to do i i would follow these steps take a weekend out or you know monday tuesday and you can probably get 15 agents done you know it doesn't take long 15 agents you can do one in day and you're just trying to get one and this is the reason i went to paddington and i didn't just call agents in paddington because i knew if i spend one day and i get one agent on board i've got unlimited deals and i'm done in paddington i never have to go paddington again in order to get another deal and that's time well invested so i yeah i booked the views before i went to paddy tonight about 10 15 viewings before i went to paddington and and sort of went from there in this video we'll be going through how to make an airbnb account and also how to optimize that account in order to get the most bookings so in order to make an account you have to go to airbnb.com2k and on the top right hand side it says become a host now when you click this it will take you to this page here where you can enter your address the type of property how many guests can sleep and then just click start your listing and then it will just ask you for more details like pictures and so on and so on now at this stage you might not have the professional pictures because the property is not up and ready but you can just upload any pictures you have from write move or any pictures you took at the viewing so it will help if you have some pictures of the property it doesn't really matter which condition because at this stage all we're doing is simply just getting everything up and ready so when you do have professional pictures all we have to do is simply swap the old pictures for the new pictures and you're pretty much good to go so go through this follow this process and that will help you make your listing now once you have your listing you will come onto a page like this which is where you can simply edit your listing and make any sort of amendments now i'll be going through exactly how you can use this page in order to optimize your airbnb account in order to get the most bookings as possible so the first thing you need to do the first thing you do is make sure that you have professional pictures so if i go into my listing as you can see they're professionally taken and the reason you want to have professional pictures is because well that is going to be that is going to give your property the best chance of attracting a lot of bookings so if you have pictures which don't look that good it's unlikely people will book your listing whereas if you have some amazing pictures of the same property you're much much more likely so because you know when you book an apartment or a house or a hotel the main thing people go off is the professional picture so make sure you have the professional pictures now again you won't have them at this stage but it is something you can check off later so that is something you need to do which is make sure you have professional pictures of your property the second thing you need to do is you need to make sure all your descriptions are completed you have this segment here about description so you have descriptions details about the space guest access guest interaction the neighborhood getting around any other things to note you want to make sure you fill this as much as possible make it look um make your property look appealing so people want to book but one of the reasons you want to fill this is because if it's completely filled out you know it gives a much much better impression to potential guests because they can see that you've taken you know you made an effort and you're professional host you've filled all the details in you've answered any questions which they might have before they you know before they're looking to book their property and it's just it's just much better than when you come across a listing which hasn't had any descriptions so i will copy these descriptions into the task garden section so if you just want to copy my descript descriptions when it comes to you know the space and guest access and how i've done this i will add a link below so you can simply just copy mine if you want to but or if you can write your own but the point is you have to make sure you have good descriptions then there it's one so they sell the property and second so it adds a little bit of credibility so when people arrive on your listing they see well you know this person is professional they they seem to be taking care of their property so on and so on it just has a much much better impression the other thing is airbnb also likes completed listing because the more of your profile you complete a lot of people think the more you complete the more likely they're you know willing to show your property to other people because if there's a complete listing it's more likely someone is going to book and you know similar to booking.com the more people that book your listing on airbnb the more money they end up making in the process so it's a win-win for both so the next thing you need to do is make sure all your descriptions are completed fully completed and now in the task garden section i will copy and paste my description so if you simply want to copy those and make some amendments based on your own description uh your own property i mean then it is very very easy to do so the next thing you need to do is make sure all your amenities are also complete so if i go back on to the listing if i scroll up there is a segment which says amenities and by clicking show more there will be a button which says edit the reason i don't have the button is because my airbnb account is listed is connected to my channel manager and if i want to make any changes i make those within my channel manager but for your account there will be a button similar to this which says edit you can click edit and make sure you go through all the different variations and all the possible amenities and see which ones you have to offer now of course you can't check all of them because it's unlikely your property has a pool and a jacuzzi and so on and so on but the ones you do have make sure you take them off because if anyone is filtering for those amenities you want to make sure you come up in the search criteria you want to make sure you come up in the search rankings so again if you go through all of them and take off the ones you have you're more likely to get bookings because anyone filtering for those specific amenities you will come up and therefore they were more likely to book your property if you haven't checked off those amenities it's unlikely you will come up because well people will assume you don't have those images and they will not book so click the edit button which will appear here and make sure you have as many amenities check off as many amenities as you can of course if you can't check something off because you don't have it then you simply do not have it the next thing you can do in order to get a lot more bookings is by turning on instant booking so if i go up here and go to booking settings it says how can guests book and i've turned on instant bookings which means guests who meet your requirements can book instantly and they do not have to send a request the reason this gets more bookings is because well people who want to book straight away they don't want to go back and forth and ask questions and so on and so on they just want to book straight away and because a lot of people want to book straight away and that is typically how you book hotels so on and so on it gets a lot of bookings if you don't have instant booking turned on a lot of people might get put off because they don't want to go through this delayed process and wait hours and hours for you to reply and so on and so on and it prevents a lot of bookings so if you have instant booking on it is a great way of getting a lot more bookings and if you get more bookings airbnb makes more money and they end up promoting your property now one thing to note here by the way is that you do not turn on instant booking while you're doing this step by step purely because you do not have if you do not have the professional pictures right now or if you do not have accurate pictures of your property so for example you know let's say you don't have any pictures from the viewing or any old pictures of the property and you've uploaded pictures of a random property you do not want to people booking your property when it's not the correct property if you're if you do have pictures of the property from the viewing or from right move ads or whatever then you can do the state because when they book the property i know the pictures aren't great but at least they're booking what they see do not turn this on if you do not have the pictures of your property only turn this on if you have pictures of the exact property that you are marketing now when you turn this on you can also turn on some guest requirements that they have to have these requirements for them to book instantly the one i have turned on is which is called government issued id again your extranet will be slightly different there will be a edit button here somewhere and you can click edit and turn these on and off this is the main one i'm interested in for instant bookings which is i want to make sure they have a government issued id before they're able to book instantly so i would also turn this feature on using the edit button which you will see around here or around here somewhere so make sure you have instant booking in order to give yourself the best exposure and the chance of getting bookings the next thing you can do in order to get more bookings is restrict your minimum night stay so have some have a low minimum night restriction so again very similar to booking.com if you have already watched that video which is the more restrictions you impose on guests the less likely they will book so now let's say you say to your guests that well they have to pick a minimum of five nights anyone who's looking to book one night two nights three nights four nights they can't book your property because well it's not available because you have a minimum five night restriction and therefore a lot of people can't book and if a lot of people can't book that means you're not you're not getting any bookings and therefore airbnb is not not making money on your listing and therefore they're less likely to promote your listing so if i go to availability and if i go down here minimum stray i've got a minimum stay of two nights maximum stay it's you know as long as you want really but i've got a minimum night stay of two nights and again you will have a button here which says edit and you can simply edit all these details so i would say have a minimum night stay of two nights now in terms of advanced notice i have same day they can book on the same day i don't really need any preparation time because my my property is prepared all the time availability window is all future dates now this takes me on to the next point which is you want to make sure you have as much availability as possible because again if i go back on to this and let's say you've restricted people that they can only book one month in advance or two months in advance anyone who's looking to book maybe three months four months five months in advance they are unable to book your property because well there are no dates now again you know that means you get less bookings purely because people can't book in advance and if you guess less bookings airbnb makes less money and they're less likely to promote you so i always said this to all future dates in order to make sure that i get as many bookings as possible and that way i will get promoted higher up so make sure you have availability turned on and set to all future dates again there will be a button here which says edit and you can change these so in terms of the check-in time and checkout time my check-in time is after 3 p.m i would recommend you set the same as this and my check out time is 11 a.m now this gives you a four hour window to do any cleaning in the middle i was set exactly the same on booking.com as well so these are the standard check-in and checkout times which you can set now i don't have anything set here or here because i do a self checking so they can check in whenever they want and they can simply check out whenever they want as well so it's not exactly something i need to restrict so that is what you need to do in terms of availability the two main important points here are have a minimum two night stay and make sure you have as much availability as possible the next thing you can do in order to increase your bookings and promote your airbnb listing is by having promotions and discounts so if i go on to pricing you can see that i have a weekly discount a monthly discount an early bird discount and again a last minute discount so these discounts are created using the pricing template in the deal analysis section and i would turn on all these discounts and put in the discount accordingly based on the spreadsheet that we created in the deal analysis section the reason for this is that again if you have these discounts your property gets more promoted it gets a bit more exposure because airbnb will put properties in front of people which offer some sort of discount because it's another way of enticing people to book and again if you have a discount and others don't you're more likely to get those bookings so under a pricing you can simply set these on i would under smart pricing i would turn that off this is not a feature we need to use and i believe everything else is pretty much the same if you go down to standard fees in charges you can upload your cleaning fee your security deposit any ex extra guest fees and so on and so on and again i would when it comes to the editing button you can simply edit most of these using airbnb and it will be a button which allows you to edit now one more thing that you can do in the pricing section is you can also have extra guest pricing so if you are going to turn on extra guest pricing what you need to do is there will be a button which says edit and you can have a additional charge so typically it's about 15 pounds or 20 pounds so set a 15 to 20 pound additional charge for any guess beyond two so the first two are included in the normal price and above and beyond two you can have an extra fee of 15 to 20 pounds per guest and again you will simply set this on by turning on the edit button so set a additional charge 15 to 20 pounds for any any guess which are more than two guests so for if there's three four or five or six people booking but the first two are included in the price the next thing you can do in order to get more bookings is by having a cancellation policy by having some sort of flexible cancellation policy here we go so if you go to booking settings and scroll down all the way you have your cancellation policies now again you can edit these policies and these are some of the different policies that you have available you have flexible which is a one-day refund and then beyond that you have moderate which is a five-day refund strict which is a 14-day refund or you have super strict and so on and so on now i normally set it anywhere between these two which is strict or non strict or non-refundable which means that if they booked a non-refundable they they get a 10 discount but they can't cancel it anytime and they have the option to do so it's always preferred to go with one of the non-refundable options because that gives guests more options and therefore they end up booking more because they have the flexibility well they can take the normal rate or they can take non-refundable now when i'm starting out at this stage you are at i would probably go with a moderate cancellation policy which is up to 55 days or up to a strict policy but i wouldn't really go anything beyond that the reason is when you don't have a lot of reviews you want to get people to start booking so you can start building up your reviews and building up some sort of momentum so when i'm starting out i would be very tempted to go with this option here which is moderate or non-refundable just so you can start getting some traction and once you build some traction then over time i would move to strict or non-refundable because i don't want people canceling before you know within five days but again it's one of those things when you don't have reviews and you're starting out you want to make sure you're getting bookings and you know people are in the property and so on and so on so start from moderate or non-refundable and over time change to strict or non-refundable once you have done you know once you start getting some bookings so those are all the ways which you can essentially optimize your airbnb listing to make sure well one you have a complete listing with all the pictures with all the details and so on and so on and also to make sure that your listing is in front of as many potential guests as possible so airbnb shows you're listening to as many people as possible in order to make sure you get as many bookings as you possibly can and make the most amount of money in this video we'll be talking about how to make a booking.com listing and also how to then optimize that listing so the first thing you need to do you need to go to admin.booking.com and once you go on to this website essentially it will take you this page that you're currently looking at and here you can either log in or you can click this button here which says create your partner account that is essentially what we need to do because you currently will not have an account so once you click onto this you simply put in your email address and so on and so on it will then go on to ask you about your property details and then you simply ask for your property you put in your property details and so on and so on now it will ask for pictures of your property when you're uploading and at this stage you probably will not have pictures but if you have any pictures from when the time you viewed the property or maybe some pictures from the landlord or from rightmove you can simply just use those pictures for the time being it doesn't really matter which pictures you put up the reason we are doing this exercise is so we have everything up and ready so as soon as you have the professional pictures you can simply swap the old pictures with the professional pictures and you're ready to go everything is already set up rather than waiting for the professional pictures first and then starting this process see one of the reasons is that one it takes a bit of time to get everything up and ready and second especially with booking.com more so than airbnb booking.com can take up to 16 days in order to open your account because typically the process works that you make an account you enter your property details and they will send a letter to your property with a verification code because they want to make sure you actually have control over that property and you're actually operating from that property and then you input that code onto the website and it opens your account now in some areas and sometimes you know they don't actually send a code and they just open your account straight away but the point is it can take up to 16 days so you want to start this process as soon as possible just upload any pictures you have if you don't have any pictures whatsoever you can even upload pictures of a different property we you know we don't necessarily even need to open the calendars and start taking bookings right now we're simply just setting up the account so if you have any sort of pictures from viewings and so on and so on great if you don't not the end of the world you can just upload any pictures for the sake of this exercise now once you've made an account you will essentially come on to a page like this this is called the booking.com extranet the booking.com extranet is essentially a place where you manage all your bookings see your rates see your reviews so on and so on and it's just almost like a central hub for booking.com so in this central hub i'll be going through ways you can optimize this central hub to make sure you get as many bookings as physically possible so the first thing you need to do is make sure you have a 100 paid score so what that means is if i click on to property here and then if i click on to quality rating property paid score as you can see this property has a 100 score that means i've completed everything they wanted me to complete i have all the information available that booking.com request now the reason this is important is because if you have completed all the information that means a guest who's looking to book the property they have everything they possibly need in order to make a decision well shall i book this property or shall i not book this property when there's information missing they might not book because well they might not be certain about some things and that causes people to lose bookings so when i go through this optimization whether it's airbnb whether it's booking.com the key principle you need to realize is that the way optimization works is that essentially booking.com wants you to do things or airbnb wants you to do things which will help you get more bookings because if you get more bookings they make more money because of course they're charging commission if you're on if you aren't getting bookings and your listing isn't good and you know that is costing booking.com money because they're they're using their website to put your property in front of people and then no one's booking that property and whereas you know they could have put someone else's property in front of them and if they did book they would have made money so all these hacks you know you have to think about well this is in the favor of me as the person running the property and also booking.com because well i make money and you know as a result booking.com makes money as well so that is how they've come up with these ways of optimization which is these are the ways they think people will get more bookings and clearly that makes sense i mean if someone does have a paid score of 100 that would indicate they would get more bookings because they have a complete listing so that's what you have to keep in mind so make sure everything is complete the way you do that is again everyone's page here will be slightly different based on the information missing so as you can see here here there is a cross that means they think there is something wrong with this one and i can just click and upload update so similarly when you go to this page for your listing you'll see some more things and maybe some more crosses and you simply just click and you know add the pictures add the descriptions add in whatever they want you to add in and they will essentially take your score to 100 so that's the first thing you need to do in order to make sure your property gets seen and gets booked as much as possible the second thing you need to do is turn on non-refundable rates non-refundable rates means that imagine you're booking a hotel or an apartment and they have rates whereby if you were to cancel the booking you do not get a refund i.e non-refundable or you can book a different raid which has which is a cancellation rate so maybe a hotel or an apartment has a cancellation policy of 10 days before arrival five days before arrival but if you cancel within that period you you know sorry before that period you can have your money back but with non-refundable it doesn't matter when you cancel you can cancel one year in advance you still have to pay hence it's non-refundable the reason booking.com likes non-refundable is because they have two types of clientele one who are unsure if they're going to be going ahead with their stay and second people who are 100 percent they definitely need to be at that place and because they they know they they're 100 going to be at that place and they're not going to counsel they want to be incentivized by having some sort of lower rate and so booking.com realizes there's two types of customers and therefore they want you to turn on non-refundable because again from think about it from their point of view if a guest goes on to your apartment or a house and they see that oh well you don't offer non-refundable and uh they they realize that while other people do have a slightly cheaper non-refundable rate they might just simply go to someone else purely because well they they have a better deal so again you've lost booking then if you lose bookings that means booking.com has potentially lost money as well so again they want you to turn on nonrefundable so you get more bookings and you actually benefit from this as well purely because well if someone does cancel you still get paid and you can simply just let the property back out again and of course they benefit as well purely because well they are making money every time someone gets a booking so in order to turn on non-refundable rates you click property and you click policies now under policies you can see that it says non-refundable so under non-refundable you can simply make any edits here i already have this set up so it doesn't give me the edit option so you can simply set up your non-refundable rates and by doing that you will have that double rate plan so you will have your normal rate plan and the non-refundable rate plan and you can have a discount so normally the non-refundable rates are 10 cheaper so you can set a 10 discount in order to do that the next thing you can do in order to get more bookings is uploading unlimited availability unlimited availability means that your customers potential guests can book any time in advance now some people only let people book one month in advance two months in advance but by having unlimited availability people can book whenever they want the reason this is good is again from booking.com's point of view if you only let people book two months in advance anyone who wanted to book more than two months in advance now can't book your property because while it's not available and therefore booking.com doesn't make money you don't make money and so that they do not want to promote your property as much compared to people who do have availability because well they make more money and servicebooking.com so in order to do this you have to go on rates and availability click adjust rooms to sell so once you're on there this is a really interesting point which is all these things that i'm showing you by the time you go to do this they might be in a slightly different place but you know because booking.com is always moving things around so for example it says this page will soon be removed permanently so in the future they will delete this page and it's actually gone somewhere else now this is very very common with booking.com so for the sake of this exercise you just need to know what exactly you need to do ie the ways of optimization but they might be in a slightly different place in the task garden section i will add the best booking.com contact number so you can contact them give them your property number and they can log into your account and show you exactly where everything is because the other problem is that a lot of people have different accounts because as they update these extranets some people get the update first some people get it later on and so on and so on so because everyone's account's different sometimes things can things can be in a slightly different place so if these things are not exactly what they're supposed to be i.e they're different to what is being shown in the video currently then just simply contactbooking.com tell them i'm looking to upload unlimited availability what's the best way of doing this so in this case i believe it is moved here so once you once you go on to this you can simply edit your availability and make sure that you have unlimited availability now again your screen will look slightly different because my my calendar is currently connected to as you can see is connected to a channel manager and hence my screen will look slightly different to your screen but there will be an option to upload your availability all you have to simply do is select this button here so you know you have availability from and up to and including you can set this up to one year in advance and then just click set period again it might be slightly different but this should do it for you so that is how you upload unlimited availability the next thing you can do in order to get more bookings is by updating your cancellation policy the reason this is important is because the more flexible you are with your cancellation policy the more bookings you are likely to get the more strict you are the less bookings you're likely to get because you know some guests are not 100 sure if they're going to be coming in those particular days there might be a slight change of plans so one and so on and the more flexibility you can give them in their decision making the more bookings you're likely to get and again the booking.com rewards you for that so if you go to property and go to policies on the top left hand side you can see your cancellation policies currently i've set this to 14 days which is flexible if you edit this you have a few different options you can have one day two day three day five days seven day fourteen day thirty day i would keep it anywhere between fourteen or thirty you don't want to have a very very short window for cancellations because if someone has a big booking and they cancel seven days in advance then you potentially have an empty calendar which can be a bit of an issue so i would go 14 or 30 i'm currently set to 14. i think one of the important things is when you're starting out you set it to 14 because you don't currently have reviews and you want to build that momentum so start off with 14 once you get some traction once you get some bookings over time you can simply move it to 30 days before arrival but i would not go any less than 14 days for service accommodation purely because well if someone if someone was to cancel a day before two days before you might not be able to fill up your accommodation and therefore you might lose a lot of money so go with a flexible cancellation policy this will give you the best chance of getting a lot of bookings early especially when you're getting started the next thing you can do is have a minimum of five reviews a minimum of five reviews is very very important on booking.com not so much so on airbnb but very important on booking.com the reason is if i go guest reviews and click guest reviews here on the top right you can see when it loads up that either 8.9 score based on 11 reviews the way booking.com works is they don't actually show you they don't show guests your reviews until you get to five reviews so when you only have one two or three reviews the guest actually doesn't see the reviews the problem with that is that when a potential guest is looking to book and there's no reviews they aren't sure if the property is any good or if anyone's ever stayed here before or you know what the condition is and if the pictures are actually you know like you show them and so on and so on so it's very very important you get to fight reviews as fast as possible now there's two ways of doing this one you can simply wait until you have five people who come and stage your property and leave your review and that could take a bit of time or the second thing is if you have some friends and family who want to test out your apartment you can simply get them to make a booking using booking.com for your apartment and get them to leave a review see what they think see what they think about the cleanliness value for money so on and so on in that local area and that way you can get five reviews very quickly because you have five people stay on five consecutive days and simply you can get five reviews and therefore it will give you a much much like i i can't stress enough how important this is because unless you have if you have no reviews people are very very hesitant in booking so make sure you get your five reviews as fast as possible in order to get more bookings the next thing you can do is update your opportunity center to make sure you capitalize with as many as many opportunities as possible so how that works is if i go into booking.com and click opportunities and then click opportunity center that will take you to this page here and what this is this is saying is ranking this is the percentage of searches you're seen in when your customers search for dates when you're available so this particular property actually isn't doing that well compared to some of the other properties in this area and so what you have to do in order to improve this score your ranking score is by taking actions on as many opportunities as you possibly can now the reason this score is slightly low compared to similar properties is because a lot of these opportunities are actually designed for hotels service accommodation can't actually accept a lot of these opportunities so it's going to be likely that your score is lower to similar properties because similar properties they typically mean hotels as opposed to other accommodation units purely because in most areas there's a lot more hotels compared to apartments and you know houses being used as service accommodation but nonetheless you can always improve your score slightly even though it might not be as high as this you can still improve and by the way this is exactly what i meant when i said uploading unlimited availability because this says this is a percentage of searches you're seen in when your customers search for your dates now if people search for dates and you don't have any availability because well you're not letting people look for more than one month in advance then they're not going to see your property and the rankings are going to be lower and lower so see which ones you can accept and which ones you can't accept so for example with this it says end the year with a boost in bookings now attract guests traveling anytime before 4th of january by offering a special discount now if i want to do this i simply click take action and it will take me to the opportunity page where i can simply accept this opportunity and then essentially what they want me to do they want me to run a promotion from the 10th of march 2020 to the 4th of january 2021 and they want to have some sort of discount so now they want they say please set a discount between 15 to 99 so i have to set a minimum 15 discount in order to apply for this and then you can simply select for which property you want this and for which dates and then you can simply if you want to go ahead with this you can simply put those details in and click review your promotion and that will add it now i particularly don't really want to add a 15 to or 20 discount for these particular dates so i'm going to leave this one for the time being if you wanted to have an additional 20 discount then essentially that is what you would do you would set a discount here and then click review your pro promotion and that will add that promotion so if i go back to opportunity center for a second the reason i don't necessarily want to do this is because if i have a 20 discount once you do the pricing section your prices are way too low and that will impact the revenue and that will impact the amount of money you make it doesn't impact hotels as much because they might have 50 rooms 100 rooms and offering a discount might not be the end of the world but what you when you only have one listing or two or three listings you can't really afford to give a 20 discount on you know the rates which actually make you any money so this is what i meant when i said that not all of these will apply to you the next one says reach more guests with a weekly rate plan so introducing weekly race this is essentially having some sort of weekly discount i believe so if i click take action the minimum length of stay for this rate plan is seven nights minimum and if i go through this you select for which cancellation policy would you like this would you like it for your sorry for which rate plan would you like this discount and i'll select for my normal rate plan i.e the flexible 14-day cancellation and then it has a whole bunch of information you can go through and again they want a 15 or more discount on your cheapest daily rates so again i don't really want to set a 15 discount on top of what i'm already doing so i'll leave this one for the time being so you simply you simply go through these these opportunities and you simply accept the ones which need to be accepted i would typically avoid the ones where you have to offer a discount because we've already gone through pricing and i don't really want to lower my prices any more than that so i will essentially leave all of these and the ones which you think you know you can cater for you simply select those but as you can see a lot of these tend to be around discounts rather than anything else and if you go into page views there are there are more things you can do there and again they seem to be similar so have a go through these go through the opportunity center to see which ones can you can cater for which ones you can apply and the ones you can apply simply accept them and use the opportunities in order to get a higher ranking and that will that way you will end up getting a lot more bookings the next thing you can do in order to get a lot more bookings from booking.com is by having minimum night restrictions as low as possible so what a minimum night restriction means is that a lot of people have restrictions like you can the minimum booking you can do is three nights the minimum booking you can do is four nights so if someone wants to book your accommodation they have to poke a minimum of a certain number of dates now again if you think about it from booking.com's point of view the higher the restriction so for example if you say you have to book at least five days so my minimum night restriction is five days well that means that people who want to book one night two night three night four night they're unable to book your property so when they search for properties in your area your property will never come up purely because well you have a minimum night restriction and they can't book that means you're not coming up you're not getting bookings booking.coms are making money and therefore they will not show your property as much so what i would recommend is i would not recommend having a one night stay for service accommodation purely because that can lead to parties and so on and so on i would have at least a minimum two night stay so again this is one of those things where we have to be we have to try to be as flexible as possible but making sure our business still operates again this is different for hotels they have they don't have any restrictions but with service combination we have to be a bit more careful so if you go into an availability and again this might have moved by that point if you go into calendar and once this loads up if you click your standard rate you can see here it says minimum length of stay so i've got a two night minimum length of stay which you can simply change and you can change also two as well again if the setting is not exactly there or if you're unable to edit it you will have to contact your booking.com account manager and i will provide a number in the task guide in section and you can ask them well how do i change my minimum night stay to two nights minimum the next thing you can do in order to get more bookings is by running promotions now this is slightly different to what i mentioned that i don't really want to be doing in the opportunity center in the opportunity center those are one-off promotions and those are special deals that booking.com introduces here and there there are some sort of promotions which you can run all year round and this goes back to our pricing analysis we did in the deal analysis section which is early bird discounts last minute discounts weekly discounts monthly discounts those you can set all year round whereas i'm not a huge huge fan of stunning setting a lot of promotions above and beyond because it impacts your rate so if i go into promotions and then click add new promotion now with add new promotion it gives you all the different campaigns or you know for example the different deals so if i click on to set a promotion under deals then you have you know these different discounts here which is you have the basic deal which just means well it literally just means a basic deal it's just a random discount i'm not even sure why it exists then you have last minute deal you have early booker deal you have a limited limited time deal and free nights so which one the ones i would set are the last minute deals and the early booker deals now with last minute deals i would set it to again the what they have given here which is three days or fewer before check-in and i will set a 10 discount on my normal rate so not a non-refundable rate but on the normal rate and again with the early booker i would set it to what they have which is 30 days so if someone was to book more than 30 days in advance i would also set a 10 discount so those are the two main promotions i would run essentially all year round because i calculated this in my pricing section and again if you know i want to optimize so for example if someone is if my calendar is empty if i go back to last minute my calendar is empty within the last you know in the next three days i want to have some sort of deal in order to entice people to make sure i get a booking for those three days so for the time being i would simply just turn on these two here which are the last minute deals and the early booker deals that's all you need to do at this stage the next thing you can do and this might come slightly later on is a genius program and also the preferred partner program so if i go back onto booking.com and click opportunities you have two tabs here you have the genius pardon program and the preferred pardon program if i go into genius now this is not something you can do straight away because you almost have to build up to this in order to in order to get onto genius and they have a ranking score and different properties come on at different times so what i can do with this property here is i can click activate and that will activate the genius discount so as you can see here it says guests will see the genius logo on your property page score so when guests go on to book your property they will they will see that this is a genius property which is really a thumbs up from booking.com that this is a property which you know travelers book again and again it's a good property it's a trusted property it's essentially a symbol of trust so if i click activate and click activate now what will happen is it will give guests a special discount so essentially we'll give guests a special discount but what will happen is that people will see a lot more properties and the benefit of having genius is that you end up getting a lot more bookings because well it is like i said it is a bit of a trust symbol so once i'm up there it says on average you'll enjoy 18 more bookings when compared to non-genius properties you show up higher in the ranks more visibility so on and so on so it does have discounts you can't you can change the discount slightly it's typically around 10 to 20 percent now if i go back onto that is how you set up genius and again you can't really do this day one what happens is you have to there are criterias you have to meet so the criteria i believe it just it just depends again it changes all the time so you have to have a good property page score and sometimes it might even be reviews you know you have to have a number of reviews and and so on and so on so you won't have this option day one necessarily but you might have this in a few weeks time or a few months time once you've had some bookings so you don't have to do this for the time being you can do this later on the next thing you can do is go to opportunities and go to the preferred partner program again you won't necessarily have this day one but this is something you work up to so if i go in there and if i look at look at this here so there are two criterias which is the first one is your performance score and second is your review score so my review score is fine it's 89 percent my performance score is only 40 and therefore i do not qualify for this performance score and therefore i'm not eligible for the preferred partner program now with what preferred pardon program what essentially happens is you get a thumbs up next to your property which means that anyone who's looking to book they see well this is a thumbs up property and therefore again it is a bit of a trust symbol now you might be wondering well why do i not qualify why can i not improve my property pay score sorry my performance score in order to get listed now once you get further down into this program you'll see that the main way we do marketing or a lot of the ways we get bookings are the long-term bookings in one month two months three months and so on and so on because there's a lot of money there they're much better clientele in my personal opinion booking.com is great but if i can get someone in there for four months it's amazing because they pay you by the night their companies paying so on and so on now with the downside of getting four-month bookings i don't think this is a big downside but it is technically a downside which is every time i get a four-month booking i have to block my calendars for four months because well of course i've got a full month booking and when i block my calendars for four months it impacts my availability on booking.com because anyone looking for dates within those four months can't book my property because i've already blocked it out because i've got a four month stay from my company and therefore my performance score goes down because for a lot of the dates booking.com on booking.com my property is not being shown because well i've already booked it with someone staying for two months three months four months and that massively impacts the performance score however if i compare the two that would i rather have the preferred partner program or would i rather have a four month booking i will still go with a four month booking so this is not the end of the world if you don't have this but again if you can get this it's just an additional thing which helps you get slightly more booking so don't worry too much about this but it's one of those things that if you have a lot of reliance on booking.com and if you rely you know on booking.com airbnb a lot then you want to make sure you get these you know tiny hacks here and there in order to get more bookings but once you get to a stage where you're getting two months three months four months five months bookings then your performance score will go down but you will have four month booking so you know there won't be anything really to cry about so that's what you need to do again you won't be able to do this day one because like like i say you have to have a good review score and a good performance score and you won't necessarily have this day one so again come back to this slightly later on but for the time being everything else i mentioned you can do that to start getting more bookings so that is a summary of how you get more bookings on booking.com which is have a 100 page score have a non-refundable rate unlimited availability a flexible cancellation policy make sure you have a minimum of five reviews use the opportunity center where you can reduce your minimum night restrictions to two nights i wouldn't really go much beyond that run promotions like early bird discount and last minute bookings and when you get to that stage of having genius and preferred partner turn those on and that will also help you get more bookings on booking.com now once you have airbnb and booking.com set up this is a very very important step you need to go to your airbnb listing and click availability now once you're in availability you scroll to the bottom here and it says sync calendars you need to sync your airbnb and booking.com calendars because otherwise what will happen is if the calendars are not synced you might end up getting double bookings i.e you know you might get a booking on airbnb from monday to thursday and you might get a booking on booking.com from tuesday to thursday for the exact same date because well they aren't really speaking to each other and they don't know what availability you have and don't have so very important so if you click export calendar and you take this link and you copy this link this is basically your link to your airbnb calendar and then you go onto booking.com and click racing availability and you click onto your calendar again it is slightly different on mine because my calendar is connected to my channel manager which will do at a later stage but essentially what you need to do at this stage here what you need to do at this stage here is there will be an option which will give you an option which will say sync calendars and you need to take this link that you have copied and simply paste it wherever that box is now i've also found this article which will which i will upload in the task garden section which shows you exactly how to do this which is once you log into the extranet click calendar or race your availability tab and then select sync calendars and i will show you exactly step by step how to do this i can't show you my one because mine looks different to how yours will look but essentially there will be a box which says sync calendars you simply copy and paste a link it's very very easy to do and what that will do is that will sync your airbnb and booking.com account so whenever you have dates available on airbnb they will match exactly with booking.com and vice versa so you do not end up getting double bookings so if you can't find that box again speak to your booking.com account manager i will include their details in the description below as well in the task garden section but that is essentially all you have to do it will take only a couple of minutes but it's a very very important step when it comes to long-term bookings and your marketing this is by far the easiest and the best way of getting huge long-term bookings which also make you a ton of money so now what i'm referring to is essentially service accommodation agencies now these agencies the way they work is imagine you have you know a big company like barclays bank or hsbc or uh pwc and you know gsk whatever the companies whichever industry it's very very hard for you to go to a big bank and say well you know i've got two apartments in london or i've got two problems in canary wharf like are you looking for some accommodation now because these companies are so big you know two apartments don't really mean much to them whether it's a big corporate company a big relocation company a big insurance company you know that doesn't really mean much to them whereas when you have a service accommodation agency which i'll be going through in a second they have a lot of providers on their books so they might have your two apartments and you know one of your competitors two apartments and another area five apartments ten apartments because they have so many apartments from their books they can go to these big companies and get these contracts for example when a big company needs let's say 10 apartments in london they will then find their providers in those areas get in touch with them and say well you know we're looking for 10 apartments in this area do you have anything uh which is suitable and that is how service competition agencies work and that is why it's by far you know the best way of getting these bookings because essentially what you're doing is you're tapping into their uh clients and their um you know stuff which they have already built up rather than you going out there finding businesses and clients and so on and so on the way they work is you similar to airbnb and booking.com you pay them a commission on any booking which comes through the commissions are generally from 10 to 15 but you know no different to airbnb and booking.com but i think it's a far better business model so i'm not saying you only do agencies you do agencies alongside everything else we're doing but uh it is a great way of getting huge long-term bookings i previously mentioned this the longest we've had is 11 months we've had nine months we've had seven months you know more often than not it's generally about one month two month three month four months around national range which seems to be a lot more typical so now with these agencies there's three main types of bookings that they cater for the first one is your corporate bookings now corporate booking means imagine you know a big company barclays bank hsbc pwc gsk and uh you know they might have contractors coming into an area they might be doing some sort of project work and they might need accommodation for a month two month three month and uh a lot of the time what you find is you know even with research parks and science parks again that sort of falls into the corporate branch uh with you know how i've sort of characterized this so you have imagine you have an engineering firm or a research facility so again cambridge is you know quite big with these having a lot of research facilities and science facilities and you know or you have some sort of i.t company and what happens is you might have a i.t contractor coming from a different country so for example with the i.t sector you have a lot of contractors coming from south india because the labor is much much cheaper they're very skilled so what a lot of companies do is they they bring labor from south of india for project work here because they're much much cheaper they're very qualified and they might stay here for one month two months three months and the company will pay for them they will pay for the accommodation travel so on and so on and that's where you come in you you cater for those people who are here for corporate stay for business stay and you essentially provide accommodation for them so that is the first type of booking you can get when it comes to corporate agencies and um so the reason we had this 11-month booking was because there was a person working at oracle and he actually booked for two months he only stayed for two months and the problem with contract work especially with companies is that you never quite know when it's going to finish it might finish early or it might just go on and on and on so he booked for two months and then he extended one more month because the project got slightly delayed or you know they wanted to do some more stuff and he got extended extended extended and he ended up staying for 11 months now that doesn't always happen like you said it's normally one month two month three month you know around that sort of timeline but that is how the corporate bookings work which is if you want long-term corporate bookings you have to essentially find these agencies that you can work with the second type of booking is insurance bookings so for example imagine you have a house or an apartment and there's a a flood a fire or uh they find some sort of asbestos in the roof or you know within the building then what happens is you contact your insurance company and you need you know temporary accommodation emergency accommodation while your house is being fixed now the insurance industry calls it temporary accommodation you know temporary combination or emergency accommodation and we call it service accommodation but it's the same thing which is the insurance company has to house those people that family into a different property and that's again where you come in through these agencies which is you provide accommodation for them so insurance bookings do tend to you know be quite long because uh it's very very you know it does take a lot of time for works to be finished to a property especially if there's been a flood or fire or even asbestos because it takes a while for them to remove that stuff and so on and so on and you know again the way these insurance companies work is uh the person the family makes a claim and there's a back and forth and uh you know then they have to find a builder and the works have to be done and it's a very very long process and while this long process is happening they are staying in your property paying you by the night paying you very very high rates because again it's not really them paying it's the insurance company uh paying because they've obviously made a claim and it's the insurance company who pays out so again a very very you know uh great type of booking because again it's very very long and you make amazing rates now with insurance bookings very similar to corporate bookings in the sense that you might get a two-month booking but more often than not it gets it always gets extended purely because you know the builders said the work's going to be done in one month or two months and the work's slightly delayed or the insurance company hasn't you know got all the claims back and so on and so on it always just takes a bit of a while so again if you insurance bookings one month two months three months four months again it's very very common finally the last type of booking you have are what is known as relocation bookings relocation bookings basically means imagine you have a person moving from one area to another area for work so we had a person who moved from leeds all the way down to in garden city in hartfordshire and the company put him up in one of our apartments for three months while he was you know buying a new home so when people are relocating into the area in the uk it takes about three months to actually buy anything and uh while they're sort of waiting for that you know waiting for the buying process they end up booking an apartment or booking a house and if it's relocation a lot of the times is the company who pays for it rather than you know the person themselves so that is relocation bookings so and the way you get these bookings is through service accommodation agencies now this is a list of all the major agencies that you can work with the first one is silvatore situ sacco bridge street oakwood esa apartment select apartments prestige apartments apartment network apartment service worldwide so these are the main agencies that you can you know start working with and start getting these bookings now in a video demonstration i'll be showing you exactly how you can sort of get listed with them and some of them do have a minimum requirement in terms of number of apartments and that depends on where you are located which area you're in so some might say well you need a minimum of two apartments to work with us minimum three minimum four minimum five and some of them have no minimum restrictions at all so it just depends which area you're in but in a video demonstration we'll be going through how you can sort of list your properties with these agencies now apart from these agencies you also have medium term rental platforms so they're not really agencies they're more like airbnb and booking.com where you can essentially just list your properties and uh prospective clients perspective tenants they go on to these uh portals just like airbnb and booking.com where they're looking for medium term stay so this is generally one month plus and again it's a great way of getting long-term bookings so the three main ones are spotter home housing anywhere and home like and again in a video demonstration we'll be going through how you can get listed with these portals in order to start getting long-term bookings for your apartments so this is how you get listed on service accommodation agencies the first thing you need to do is you need to go onto the website for that particular agency now there might be two ways of doing this the first one is depending on you know the agency itself the first thing you can do is find their phone number and essentially contact them and tell them that you have service accommodation units in a particular area and you're looking to on board with them and a lot of the times you have to speak to the supply chain team but again it's one of those things that you know different agencies call them different things so you could ask for the supply chain team or quite simply you can call them up and you can say well i have this many service accommodation units in peterborough in london in victoria you know wherever your location is i'm looking to get listed with you guys i'm looking to work with you guys i'm looking to become one of your partners and they will send simply send you some forms they will email you some forms you fill out those forms and that will help you get listed now once you are listed and again it depends on which agency you're with when you scroll to the bottom for example with silvador if you click property partner login you can simply log into their platform and just upload any future properties you have and it's a very very simple and easy process but essentially that's what you need to do either you can simply phone them or if you go to contact us all agencies have a contact us section and again depending on the agency they might have a partner email you might be able to do a partner email now in this one they don't so silvador only has an email inquiry i believe these are if you're looking to book an accommodation unit rather than if you're looking to partner up with them so those are the things you need to do you need to find an agency you need to go to the website you can either call them or you can email them and uh say to them i'm looking to get listed onto your agency and i'm looking to work with you guys and this is what i have to offer so if i give you this example here if you go to situ.com which is another one of the agencies again you know they're all slightly different so for example with situ if you click this menu button here there is actually an option for suppliers this is essentially what you're interested in if you click suppliers they have a bit of a notice currently for covet but essentially you can if you would like to become a supplier please apply online you simply click online and you add all your details and you simply just go through all of those details now public liabilities so on and so on you would have already had done these so all you have to do is simply fill in these forms so it just really depends on you know the agency and what their process is so it might be just the fact that you have to call them or email them and they might send you some forms or even better like situ they might just be an online process where you can simply get listed so essentially what you need to do here is you need to find the agencies and find out what the process is for that particular agency and use that to start getting listed now the last one you have is the medium term rental platform they're not necessarily agencies they're more like airbnb and booking.com but for longer term bookings so essentially for example if you go to spot home and it says already publish a property so it's not like silver door or situ where you have to apply or you have to call them to get onboarded you can simply just like airbnb add your property details so you click publish a property and you follow it you know follow the process step by step and start listing your properties so again a really good way of doing it some of these platforms like spotter home might be location centric so you might not take properties in every single location right now some do and some don't but that's how you on on board with the medium term platforms which is no different to airbnb and booking.com and with the agencies you simply find out what their process is by calling them emailing them or simply filling out a form on their website and that will help you get listed now keep one thing in mind that when it comes to the agencies so i'm referring to salvador situ they can be very very slow they might be a bit you know unresponsive but all you have to do is you have to taste them a few times essentially what i find is that with a lot of these companies they're very very short stuff so what happens is you send them an email a few times you might not get a reply that doesn't mean that i want to work with you or they're not interested it's just i'm not entirely sure why but they just seem to be very very slow to response i've been working them you know working with them for years and it's always been the case so don't get disheartened if they don't you know reply to you straight away chase them two times three times four times five times test them as much as you need to in order to get listed you know because that is essentially how some things work so don't get right if they don't reply to you straight away keep calling keep emailing and um you know depending on the season and maybe they're short stuff they might have a few people away in holidays or at the time of recording this this is you know through covet so maybe covet has a bit of an impact in terms of the number of staff that you have but you know these agencies do you want more property they do want to work with people but you do have to chase them a bit in order to get listed so that is how you get listed with agencies and medium-term rental platforms this in my opinion is one of the cheapest and one of the best ways and when i say cheapest i mean free this is possibly the best way of getting bookings with service accommodation where you simply set something up once you don't have to do a lot and you can end up getting very very big bookings i've had bookings over ten thousand pounds for example a single booking of more than ten thousand pounds so many times using this particular tool here which is called google my business the way google my business works is for example you know you have this shop or restaurant cafe here and as you can see they have a pen on google so for example if someone was to you know go on to google and they were to search something like i don't know i can give you an example um food near me or something what will happen is that you see all these pins and essentially will show you all the restaurants and cafes in the area which have good reviews and that is how you know a lot of people use google they search things and when locations pop up they simply click on that location find out more information you know maybe see alternatives go on to the website once it loads up you know you can reserve a table and so on and so on so google my business is that's essentially what it lets you do it lets you pin your property on google maps so when someone is searching for your particular business you come up and you end up getting more business so that's exactly what you need to do with your service accommodation business which is you need to go onto this page which is google my business and i will add a link to this below in the task guidance section and you need to it will say manage now or sign in or so on so on you need to make an account on google my business and upload the details of your property now when it comes to the address you need to make sure it's the address of where the apartment or house is located not your own business or home address you need to have the address of where people are going what they're booking so imagine this is a hotel you won't have the address of the head office you will have the address of that particular location so once you click manage now sign in and you make your account and you essentially upload the pictures you upload the address you upload all those details what will happen is i'll give you an example with one of my properties you for example i've got a apartment in stephen if someone wants to google stevenage serviced apartment so you know they might be coming into the area or a company might be looking for service department units so they come and google stevenage service apartments what happens is there's a bunch of adverts from you know booking.com trivago some company called luxury hotel guides and as they scroll down on the map this is exactly what i'm referring to with google my business the first listing is my company here scotland service department stevenage and if they click onto this they can see pictures i've uploaded and so on and so on and they can you know go onto my website or they can call the company and they can do all those things in order to make a booking so but the good thing about this is that well i'm on the first page of google and if anyone is looking for serviced apartments or service accommodation i'm going to come up and they're more likely to book me so it is an amazing amazing way of getting visibility now here is a top top tip which is the way you craft your company name on google my business you want to make sure you have these important keywords so think about your area so in my area which is stevenage people will google stevenage service apartments or maybe stevenage service accommodation you know that's what people will search and i want to make sure those keywords are also in my title so it says stevenage service apartments because if they search this here i want to be coming up for their ranking now if you look at something like this listing here which doesn't have any reviews or anything it is called if i open this up for you it is called okay so comfortable in deep cleaned apartments in stevenage but see apartments that could be rental apartments that could be anything so again if i go back here that that listing actually doesn't really work whereas this one this one i've created it does work purely because you know i realized that i want to make sure i've got these keywords in the name so it comes up so that's essentially what you need to do which is you need to go on to this page here make an account it will you will be done within 10 20 minutes you simply add in some pictures add in some descriptions adding when you're open well you're essentially open all the time because well it's it's like a hotel it serves accommodation there is no real closing time you add your website you add your phone numbers you add your address very very easy to do and by the end of it once you have some reviews as well so you know when you don't have reviews sometimes you don't always get rankings because a lot of these rankings are based on reviews so again if you if you once your guests stay at your property you can you know say to them well you know if you can leave me a review on google we'd much appreciate it or if your friends and family have tested your apartment you can get them to leave a review based on their experience based on what they thought and it's a great great way of getting a lot of reviews and that will only boost your listing higher and higher up so make sure you get a google business page set up as quickly as you can that way you will end up getting a lot more bookings now one more thing to note here is that if i go into my listing if i scroll down you can see the booking.com reviews as well now a lot of people ask me well how did i link booking.com to my google account and the reality is you can't actually link this yourself there google somehow finds out maybe they have some algorithms or something they actually find out themselves which accommodation units are you know listed on booking.com and they actually do the links themselves which is pretty cool but also a bit weird as to how they figure this out but essentially you can't really control this yourself any additional details which you're saying so for example you know people can actually search availability and book this says this hotel has an availability for a two-night stay and they're the prices again this is not something i've personally done this is something which booking.com sorry ab google has plugged from booking.com and they've put my data in and this automatically just happens over time as you get more reviews and so on and so on so make sure you have a google business page up and running you'll be done within half an hour and it is by far one of the best ways of getting a lot of bookings so when you just finally book this property how exactly do they check in how do they enter the property now that is the whole content that we're going to be covering in the check-in process so essentially there's four different ways of ways of doing check-ins the first one is meet-and-greet the second one is key nest third one is lock boxes and the fourth one is coded door handles and we're going to go through step by step of how you can apply all of these in the different variations of how you can apply these so the first one is meet and greet essentially meet and greet means that either you yourself or your cleaners or your mentions person or someone else that you've hired basically meets the guest at the property and helps them check in so you say to the guest what time are you going to be arriving they say i'll be there at you know 4 pm 5 pm you make sure there's someone there with a key at 4 5 pm and they um you know they check them in they show them they give them the key they show them the apartment so and you might have it have experience with this yourself which is i recently went on holiday to turkey and you know the person said what time are you arriving was at 11 p.m and the person was at 11 p.m with the key showed us around answered any questions and that is one way of doing checking the problem with that is that well you need a person to do that and whether that's yourself or someone else you either have to pay them or you have to spend a lot of your time doing the check-in which is something i personally you know will not want to be doing i would want it a lot more automated but that is one way of doing it which is meeting read meet people at the property and uh check them in again very i think there's a lot of limitations you know for example even if you've hired someone if they're ill or if they're running late or maybe the guest is running late the flight's delayed there's a lot of back and forth and it can be a bit efficient but that's one way of doing check-ins which is meeting people at the property the second one is by using keynes now the way keynes works is imagine that you have a local shop around your apartment or house and what happens is if key nest operates in that area or in that shop you can essentially leave your keys there and the guests can go to the shop and essentially pick up the keys now there is also a video tutorial which is going to follow on from this using uh by keynes themselves and they'll be explaining a lot more detail exactly how qns works but it is a great solution if you have a key nest shop near you which is that you can basically in a very very secure way and the key dance tutorial will explain this you can leave your keys at a shop the guest goes to the shop picks up the key and essentially checks into the apartment very very good way of doing it so if you don't want to do meet and greet that is the first alternative to meeting grid which is again an automated way of doing check-ins the third option is using lock boxes so now i've shown you two different lock boxes here the first one is a lock box which is essentially drilled into the wall so you know with these lock boxes the way they work is you sort of put them there you know put the lock boxes there someone into the property the guest comes in and they essentially you know punch the key codes and the key comes out and they sort of enter the apartment or the house and it's uh you know pretty simple pretty straightforward so now the first variation is you can essentially drill it into the wall that is shown by the left-hand picture and if you look at the right-hand picture it is actually pretty much the same thing but it has a almost like a bicycle lock padlock type of hook and uh the reason you can use you know the reason you have those is that a lot of times you can't you don't have a suitable place or a good place to drill something whereas if you have something where you can hook this onto again it makes it very very easy to do check-ins because you can essentially hook this onto the door to a bike share to a railing we have a property in victoria where essentially there's a there's a plant pot right next to the main door and uh on the plant pot of course another plant plot is sort of like hanging you know on the wall and it comes with like all this stuff for the plant pot uh kind of like this metal thing which holds up the plant i think you get the point and we we have a padlock which basically hooks on to that so you have the main door and right literally right next to the door you have the padlock and again a very good way of doing it so because that property was a management property you know it wasn't a property that we owned the landlord wasn't happy about us drilling this onto the wall but he was fine with of course you know us just hooking a padlock because it doesn't damage anything you don't have to drill anything so it's a very very convenient way when you can't essentially drill something onto the wall but you have a bike shed or railing or you know any sort of thing which you can basically hook this lock box onto so again lockbox is the second way of doing this i think it's one of the best ways of doing this because essentially it takes out any humans in the middle even with kidneys of course you know you have to go to the shop and you have to speak to the shop owner and you have to get the key whereas with this one if you have a good way of doing check-ins and check-outs then you know the guests can arrive at their time if they're running late it doesn't matter if they get there early you know as as long as it's you know within your check-in time period uh for example if they said to you know you know let's say your checking is from 3 p.m onwards and they say to you well we'll gather a five even if they get there four it doesn't matter because you know the key is going to be there they don't have to keep going back and forth with you in terms of communication uh it's efficient you know so on and so on so there's a there's a lot of benefits of doing a lock box if you can't either drill into the wall or alternatively have it basically right next to the wall on some sort of padlock now the last way was the coated door handles so again if you look at this image here this is a yale lock and what happens is that you have a keypad and there are no keys essentially what happens is they you give your guest the code for the door they uh press the code and essentially they can use that code to enter their property so with this solution again it's it's an amazing solution because you know there's no keys and if there's no keys no keys can ever get lost now again this solution can be hard depending on your strategy if you own the property yourself then it's relatively easy because you can change the door handles whereas a lot of time if you're doing rent to rent or if you're doing management the landlords might not want you to change their door handles and in that case that sort of rules out this option but the reason we've gone through these four different options are because well it doesn't really matter which type of property that you have because whatever the type of property is you can always find a way of doing a check-in there's no point in really thinking about you know how to do check-ins until you sort of have a property but once you have a property you can you know you can look at it and evaluate so for example you know the first thing i would ask is well you know can you have a coded door handle and if the answer is no then you move on to the next solution which is well can i can i put a lock box somewhere and if you can then that's great and if you can't put a lock box then you sort of move on to the next one which is well you know is there a key nest or is there a shop supported by keynes where i can leave the key and again if there's not then you sort of move on to the last one which is meet and greet but again if you be a bit creative with especially the padlock the padlock um lockbox then you'll find that generally you know a lot of times you can find somewhere where you can hook this it might be a one minute walk from the property might be a two minute walk from the property and that's fine because they're still a lot more efficient than communicating back and forth or them going to a different place to pick up the key and so on and so on so generally i think what you'll find is that when it comes to the the padlock it can be a great solution and uh within a one meter you know one minute distance or two minute walk you can generally find a place to you know put these on and they they work really really well so the the last thing when it comes to keys and lock boxes are well how many keys do you need and i think this is a list of how many keys you really need and the reason you need these keys so the first one is you need one main key which is the guest key which is going to be in the lock box now whether when i say lock box it could be a lock box or it could be at a key nest or it could be you know with your meet and greet person but essentially there is one main key which is the main way of doing a check-in the second key you need is for any sort of spare lock boxes so for example let's say you use the lock box methodology you have to have your main lock box and around that property somewhere or maybe underneath it or to the side wherever you can you have to have the second lock box which has a spare key because there will come a time where you know a guest might call you and they say well we've lost the key and you might not be able to get there to give them a new key but if you have a lock box right next to it or somewhere then essentially they can just use the spare key now or for example this doesn't just apply to lock boxes if you use key nest you just make sure you have two keys at the key nest the first one is the main one and you know if that was to ever get lost you would just use a backup key and they would sort of uh just go to the key nest again for the spare key now what i would say is you need to in your terms and conditions which we will go through this that we have a 150 pound charge if someone loses a key so for example if someone did lose a key they would have to pay you 150 pounds now they could pay that or that could come out of their security deposit but uh yeah there's a 150 pound charge for any lost keys but the reason i mention this here is because well if they do lose a key there has to be a spare key somewhere so they can enter their property so make sure that you have two keys at least because the second one is for the spare now the next key is your cleaner key so i believe your cleaner should also have a key so for example they don't have to you know go somewhere to pick up a key and then put it back and so on and so on and again that saves them time and that will save you money as well and that will make sure always have all the keys they need in order to enter a property leave a property so make sure your cleaners have a key that is the third key that you need and finally the last key is the backup key so the reason you have a backup key is well imagine you have the main key the guest loses the main key so they open the spare lock box so they get to the keyness to get a spare key so now technically the guest has used up the first two keys your cleaner has the third key and now you should have a backup key the fourth key because well if you now need to make a key card or replace a key well you have to have another key in order to go and make a keycard so all the properties you have make sure you have at least four keys the main key the spare key the cleaner key and any backup key to make sure you can get keycards and copies and so on and so on in case one does get lost and that is how you do check-ins you make sure you have four copies of each key and then based on your building based on your property you essentially work out shall i do a meet and greet shall i do key nest shall i do lock boxes or should i do kodi door handles but regardless of whatever type of property you have you will always find a solution with one of those variations everyone i'm florian co-founder of keynest keenest is essentially a network of locations where keys can be stored and then securely be picked up by guests cleaners contractors whether it's tourists business travelers etc and that's why i was asked to give you a quick presentation and a bit more information about how you can effectively provide a secure but also convenient check-in for your guests but also your staff so why i was asked to give this presentation is that we were um partnered by airbnb so airbnb approached us and wanted to partner up with us because they saw that we are actually providing a very convenient but also secure solution to airbnb hosts short-term rental operators like yourself that allows you to really scale up going from one property to potentially five to ten twenty or even more which we're all doing we basically now have a network of several thousand locations all over the world where already over one million guests are greeted and every 45 seconds a guest is coming to a network to collect or drop a key so i'm just going to give you a presentation about the different solutions that are out there so obviously it's not only us there's also different solutions and there's different advantages but also disadvantages i'm just going to give you a bit more information about all of them so that you have more information to decide when you have two properties what you're going to do with your third one or with going to fifth one or what you can change in your access solutions to potentially even scale up further so one of the first solutions is using a greeter many of you have probably done that and using a greeter is not a bad idea it's very friendly when you have a friendly greeter they can meet the guest at the property they can show them the apartment they can show them around what's there what's in place how to use the um the washing machine etc and also i give them a few tips about the area for example where's the local restaurant so it's a very friendly service many of your guests were probably appreciated some might not as much because they just want to be left alone but quite a few will probably be happy to be greeted by a friendly face um it's also very professional you make a very professional impression to guests they're coming where someone is standing there saying hi i'm john just to show you around to give you the keys and just to check in that everything is okay however it's very expensive everyone of you who does it probably knows that um you can probably pay your cleaner but it's very difficult to pay less than let's say at least 15 pounds per check-in and usually it's even much more when it's after 8 pm for example i mean very late check-in even after midnight also greeters are usually getting a bit frustrated when a guest and everyone probably can relate to that comes a few hours late it's probably very hard for for example an american a guest to tell you we're landing at heathrow at three i don't really know when we're at the flat so sometimes the greeter has to wait for several hours because the guests are just simply delayed their flight is delayed there's traffic there's something happening which makes them delayed by several hours and the greeter has to wait there all the time so whereas it's a very nice solution in some regards it's also very expensive and it makes it very difficult to go from the initial few apartments to really scale up and being able to manage the processes from your dashboard from your computer while still scaling up your business while still having more apartments while still really growing your business a second solution is using a lockbox a lockbox is quite the opposite in some regard from using a greater in that it's very cheap um you spend uh 40 50 pounds you get a lockbox and you probably can install it yourself you don't even need a contractor to install it but it comes with a big downside which is that it's very unsecure it's not hard to open the lockbox with a paperclip or to open a lockbox with a hammer for example and also once it's opened the thief knows where this key that was stored in the lockbox belongs to that also leads to your neighbors being very concerned about it they see a lockbox outside and they know okay what happens someone takes it off or cracks it open they can just go into the front door and they have access to a whole um block of flats it also can't be used everywhere because of this um reason so if you have a block of apartments and you don't have anywhere to really put the log box it doesn't really make sense if you have to hide the lockbox very far away from your property sending your guests like long instruction to go several streets on the left right have a few blocks and then it's under a lamp post it's very difficult because guests will get annoyed as well especially imagine you're arriving at 11 p.m it's raining it's dark and you have to find this little small box also um another issue um that lock boxes always often have is that you can't often attach them to public property for example like railings etc there's many councils now not only in london but also in edinburgh we heard from quite a few cases where local consuls actually removed log boxes because they didn't want them on public land posts or any public property there is a third solution and that many people are using probably some of the viewers as well which is using a smart lock smart locks really come in many forms so it can either be giving access to someone with an app so they downloaded an app before they get access to the property or it can just be a padlock with a number combination but it's just basically a smart lock is just um a overall description of something that is installed in the door and someone can get direct access without having anything physical so the advantage is that it really tracks your keys or it tracks your axes so whenever someone goes in out of the apartment there's usually most of the smart locks track this so you're always in control and you know what happened when someone has come in when someone left the problem is it's very expensive it's not only the cost of the smart lock but often you either need to spend a lot of time and expertise to install it or you even have to pay a contractor to install the smart lock it also can't be used anywhere everywhere so again imagine having one apartment in a block of flats it's quite unlikely you get permission to put in your door put a new lock on the communal door um or you have to pay for two doors but it's more likely that the building manager just tells you you can't do that so it's very difficult to install them everywhere again this leads to you might be able to use it here or there the problem is again it's nice to have one solution for several apartments which basically means you can scale up quicker than having different solutions everywhere so having lockbox here having a smartlock somewhere another apartment where you greet everyone because it's very difficult to keep track and then there is an issue having to remember okay that's apartment a i had a i had a lockbox there so maybe the lockbox was taken off so if you have one solution that is bulletproof it's much better to scale up really so my co-founder was an airbnb host i was a guest back in 2015-16 and we realized there were many issues um with all these three solutions that i just told you about so we were actually using the three different ones so um there's a greeter that was used that led to problems for the reasons i said guests came very late or even sometimes early and the my co-founder hired was stuck in traffic so telling the guests sorry but you have to wait for an hour or sometimes even longer because we want to greet you it's not very convenient you often have business travelers as well who just don't want to be met they just want to get access to their flat and it's okay they know how the washing machine works they will find the light they don't need someone to show you around the same thing that you don't really need someone to show you around in your hotel room to show you how the tab works you probably just want to get into your room relax and not having someone around and it's a bit awkward and we also use the lockbox and for this exact that reason with um kind of already being a bit concerned about security and neighbor of my co-founder came very quickly to him and said sorry but uh what are you installing here first of all i don't feel safe with it and also what are you using this for uh how many guests are you having are you doing airbnb so it was just you know not very pleasant conversation with one of the neighbors the others might have been supportive that one neighbor that is not very happy with you just providing a safe space to your guests can lead to problems we thought about oh my co-founder thought about installing a smart lock but again exactly like i described here the problem was it was very expensive but that's not the only problem with the smart lock it's also that quite often unless you own the apartment or own the house where it does make sense then to install a smartlock when you know that you will use it for many months or many years even for short-term rental guests for cleaners or different access it's very difficult to justify installing a smart lock in a property you don't necessarily own and then for some reason you stop hosting there or the landlord decides no actually i terminated the contract with you you can't manage the flat anymore and then you installed a very expensive smart log in one of the properties and you have to take it off that cost money or time again if you're not in that city again it's very difficult to scale that because you will just run into constant problems so we thought about there must be something better for us as hosts and i mean that's why um you hear listening as well and there you have there are different factors that have to be met so it has to be um trackable so all of us want to know where are the keys are they where are they are they safe who has them also you want to know whether your guests have checked in there's nothing more annoying than having to spend varying hours trying to call the guests sending the messages have you checked in have you arrived and then you get a call at 1am or 2am just saying yes i just arrived having this trackability of your guests have just arrived is super important again to manage something from your dashboard from your laptop from your mobile phone really to see guest has just checked in you know everything is fine um it's a much better system and it's very important all of us also want to appear professional none of us want to hide the key under the doormat or i want to hide the key somewhere in an unsecured space where the guest already has a bad feeling imagine showing up somewhere in the property and it's a very weird place where the key is hidden you probably don't really feel safe and you have a very bad impression immediately because your host just appears unprofessional so that was important for us as well also um the third factor we looked at which was important is that it just has to be cost effective as every one of us wants to stay as a scale um has also periods of time which are not just the june to august period but has more periods where it's a bit less occupancy we want to have a solution that's cost effective and that justifies our efforts and there's still a margin for businesses which allows us to grow which allows us to further invest so um we came up with a system of keynest and how it works is just you can drop off your keys in any keyness store whenever you want to you can send a six digit code to your guests or your cleaners or your contractors and all they need is this code to collect your keys they don't need to download an app they don't need to necessarily speak english all they need is the location of the store where you dropped your keys ideally super close to your property with good opening times and they will get your keys and you will be notified whenever it's collected or dropped off so i'm not going to all of this just a bit more information so we designed this process to have a maximum of security have very happy guests for you um and give you peace of mind as well so you don't only have happy guests you're also happy hoes who again can concentrate on finding the next thing can have the next apartment can concentrate on the next niche getting business travelers potentially having the best pricing strategy other than just continuously worrying about how are my guests checking in just a quick information about us we started in the uk in 2016 with 10 partner locations we now have thousands globally as you can see in europe we're in several countries we also launched in the us and canada and australia recently and it's just really a effect of many of our hosts even users in different geographies so we have customers having used us in the uk but then they said actually i know this one person who has two or three apartments in paris they're really interested in me managing them because they saw how successful i am in london and through our system they were able to do so because they had a place where they could just store the keys and then they could give remote access by being hundreds of kilometers away these are our contact details if you have any other questions about the different solutions that are out there as i said there might be a few cases where it makes sense to use one of the first solutions that i told you about for example if you have a house that you own or that you can manage for you know you can manage for several years it might make sense to install a smart lock and some other properties you might need to meet your guests personally these are all different variables that come into play if you want to have a chat about it or of course about our solution just reach out to us here's our email address also our phone number we are 24 7 reachable so any questions anytime please give us a call thank you in this session we'll be covering how you can furnish your property what are the different options where you can buy everything from and also we'll be going through the shopping list the things you need to essentially purchase at the end of every checkout not necessarily you have to purchase at the end of every checkout but the things you need to replenish after every checkout so when it comes to furniture there is essentially three main options the first one is ikea and amazon now ikea and amazon are very very good essentially because well the products are very good quality and they're also lower price when it comes to competitors so in the task garden section i've also included an excel file which goes through all the different pieces of furniture you need to buy so think of this like a tick list essentially just go through everything and select you know essentially everything you need for the different rooms so you have the living room the bedrooms the kitchen the bathroom and so on and so on and this will go through every single thing you need in your property so that is the first option you can use amazon and ikea now the things i've included for ikea you know you can use this list as more of a checklist rather than buying the exact same items so for example you might go to the bedroom section and you you might not like you know you don't necessarily have to buy the exact same wardrobe but the exact same chest of drawers you can simply just buy something else that you prefer but at least you know well these are the things i need and it turns into a bit of a tick list now not everything might necessarily fit in your property so for example we have a chest of drawers now we don't necessarily put in chest drawers in every single one of our properties because a lot of properties do not have space in order to put this in and you don't necessarily require either people are there for short term stays and as long as you have a wardrobe that is normally sufficient if you have a huge room and you have space to put these extra things then feel free to add them maybe even add in a desk and you know chair so if people have work to do they can do so you don't necessarily have to buy every single one of these things but it is a complete list of everything you could possibly need and then you simply decide well which ones you need and which ones you do not need so i will add a link to this excel file in the task guidance section so you can either buy the same items or use this as a checklist in order to know exactly the things you need the second thing is using a company called fusion furniture now fusion furniture is a done for you service which essentially means that you know you simply place an order on their website and they will do everything for you they will bring the furniture to the property they will build it they will clear all the rubbish so if you if you don't have a lot of time and you want someone else to you know do all of that for you essentially you want to outsource everything fusion furniture is a great example of that and that's exactly you know that's exactly the service they offer and i will include more details about them in the task guidance section so that is the second alternative and finally the last option is by hiring an interior designer so if you have an interior designer they will essentially pick all the furniture and they will pick anything you need for the kitchens and bathrooms for you so you won't necessarily have to go and find all those items now that possibly might be the most expensive option out of the three purely because sometimes you know you end up buying bespoke items or items from not mainstream shops so that can be a bit expensive but it does result in a good product something which is designed very very well so you know in summary ikea and amazon tend to be the cheapest option followed by fusion furniture again one of the reasons that is a bit more expensive is purely because well they're they're doing it for you everything is done for you you simply give them the keys and like i said everything will be done and finally you have the higher end interior design option which is the most expensive one but you do end up with a very very good looking property if you have you know got someone who's a very very good interior designer so that is essentially what you need to do when it comes to furnishing your property now in terms of the shopping list there are essentially three main items the first one is your basic so for example your tea coffee and sugar and i wouldn't really offer anything else beyond this so for example some people have milk and those sort of things but i in my opinion they tend to go off very quickly you can get carter milk which doesn't go off as much or i believe it's called uhf or uhc milk or something which again doesn't go off but i don't really tend to put those in i tend to put in tea coffee and sugar and leave it at that if you want to put in some extra bits like some mini cereals feel free or even some biscuits which we've done in the past feel free but those are the basics that we essentially put in tea coffee and sugar the second thing is we put in toilet packs now toilet packs are essentially i can give you a very very quick example here on out of eden this is the website we use again i will put these links in the task garden section so you essentially have these mini toiletries which you can you know leave for your guests so when they when they check in you essentially they essentially have these many toiletries and they can essentially you know use them for their stay it just seems a bit more professional and you know you end up getting better reviews so for example a set like this you know you have a body wash a shower cap those sort of things and again they're very very cheap it's only three pound 54 including you know v80 per stay so very very cheap that is those are the toilet packs we use and finally toilet rolls so you do need some toilet rolls in the property so again i will add the links to these in the task garden section but those are the basic things you need from a shopping list so tea coffee sugar toilet packs and toilet rolls which have to be replenished at the end of every single stay i think most people will agree that possibly one of the most important things in rental properties in service departments and hotels has now become the wi-fi and essentially one you need good wi-fi and you need to make sure the wi-fi is there before the first guest checks in so this is something you should do as soon as possible now if you want very very quick wi-fi and good wi-fi these are your two main options the first one is virgin wi-fi the reason virgin is good is because their connections are very very fast they generally most of the time depending on the location they can just send you a box and you sort of plug it in and you're you know you're pretty much good to go i think so um that is a very good option the second option is for example if you go with any other broadband or you know any other uh internet provider sometimes they can be a bit of a delay so they might say well you know we'll come out in two weeks time and we'll sort of plug everything in but what you don't want to do is you don't want to leave your property empty for two weeks while you don't have internet and what you also don't want to do is you know get people in there and they realize well there's no wi-fi because you will get bad reviews so if you have a bit of a delay what you can do is you can use that ee pay as you go dongle now this thing is basically imagine like a small device the size of your phone and it normally comes with 30 gigabytes or 40 gigabytes it's not cheap but essentially it's this tiny thing you can use for internet and a guest checks in and they sort of just connect their phone or their laptop to this tiny dongle it's very small it's like smaller than the size of your hand and yeah as soon as you plug this into the wall uh you you know you basically get internet it is only as a temporary solution it is not really designed for a long-term solution because it is so expensive and it's literally just used for you know maybe if you're on the road or something you need some good wi-fi and you know those sort of things so but again it is much much better than having an empty property or having a property with no wi-fi so make sure you get the wi-fi as soon as possible and uh if your provider says there's going to be a bit of a delay until you get the wi-fi if you already have the property live and you know there are guests who've already booked then make sure you have at least an internet dongle in there which they can use on a temporary basis until you have the proper internet connection one of the most important things when it comes to marketing is by far the professional pictures so if you have good quality pictures you will get a lot more bookings and if you don't have very good pictures when you know guests arrive onto airbnb booking.com your website wherever this is if they see bad quality pictures they're less likely to book and i think this is possibly the single best investment you can make it's very very cheap but essentially it makes the biggest difference which is hiring a professional photographer to come and take pictures of your apartment now you know you might think well i'm good at photography or i don't need a professional i can sort of just do this with my phone i'm telling you like the people who sort of do this as a living as a day job they will make your property like 10 times better or even 20 times better than you know what you sort of can do on an iphone or with some you know basic photography and at the end of the day people book these properties based on the pictures if there's a good picture there they will book and if the pictures aren't that good they aren't going to book so make sure you get professional photos of your apartment now with the professional photos there's another thing you need to get when the profe you know when their photographer comes in this is the list of pictures that you need uh from your photographer so when they when they come in you say to them well yep you know take the pictures of the apartment or the house uh of you know whatever you're photographing and essentially you also need this list of pictures and i'll explain why you need them in a second the first one is well of course the property itself after you've taken the pictures of the property you also need pictures of the entrance and the check-in process so you want to you know you want to say to your photographer like almost act as if they're checking into the property so okay well this is the picture of the main road this is where the lock boxes are or you know this is where the key nest shop is and uh you know if this is a lock box will essentially you know have a very clear picture of where the lock box is in relation to the property and then you basically have a step-by-step press of how you check into the property and you have pictures now you could also make a video but i think pictures do the job most of the time because you know if you have these pictures and by the way we will use these pictures to make the guest manual later on then guests won't be constantly asking you well you know i can't find the lock box how do i check in how do i check out because you have the you know you have the picture of the building uh on the road you have the picture of well exactly where the lock boxes are you have the picture of the front door of the building so make sure you have all the pictures as if you were checking into the property for the first time and sort of you sort of just do step by step the next thing you need is close-ups so these are your amenities your toilet packs so now let's say your property you know has a dishwasher and it has you know like you provide fresh towels and fresh toilet packs or you know if you provide anything else then you want to make sure those things are photographed because when you want to put them onto your listing because you know that really sells your listing that sells your property compared to other properties so all these small details these uh extra touches these small things which sort of sets you apart you want to make sure you know the photographer takes pictures of those because you can use those for your marketing the next thing is a picture of the heating control the water control and the washing machine again the reason you need these is because if for example if you have a picture of the heating control and in the manual you can explain where the heating control is how the heating control works how to turn the heating on how to turn the hot water on if you have one of those in a manual you're not going to get the call from the guest saying oh i can't work out you know how to turn this on i can't work out how to turn that on and so if you have a picture of you know the heating control the water control the washing machine control all those sort of things then you're not going to get those questions again and again and again and it will just make your life much much easier the next thing you need a picture of is the communal bins so this only applies to apartments more so than houses but again even with houses you should take pictures of you know the bins outside and or show them exactly where the bins are the reason you want to show them where the bins are is because if it's a long guest and they're there for a few weeks most likely they will have to change bins here and there and they would you know it's important for them to know where to put out the trash and you know where to put other bins and again if you're if this is a house where you know the bins have to be put out every thursday or every wednesday then again you would sort of put that in the manual take a picture of where the bins need to go and you put this in your manual that every thursday please you know leave the bins on the main road or wherever the bins are supposed to be and uh so that people can come in you know empty out the trash so again if you have those pictures in place you're not gonna get the questions the next thing you need is a picture of the parking so again if you provide parking it's very very helpful to know exactly which bay how to enter the car park so maybe you know next to the building there's a gate in uh this you know there's a gate full of parking and that's how you enter the enter the car park so again if you have a picture of the gate and you have the picture of the bay uh you're not going to get the question you know which bay is it how do i enter or um you know all those sort of questions relating to parking finally you need a picture of the view from the window now this isn't for the manual this is more so for your marketing again this only really applies if you have a good view at the window so for example if you're in central london and you've got an amazing view of the london skyline or maybe a famous monument that might be really helpful or again even if you're in a not so popular area and you're in a you know a nice town or uh like a village or something and you have a really nice view or you know with cafes and so on and so on outside and again if you if you think that view is something which sells the property a bit more then that is something you would put into your uh into your marketing essentially so make sure you one you hire a professional photographer to take pictures and the second thing you need to do is make sure not only do they take pictures of your property but they also take pictures of all these things uh i've listed below purely because well you know you can use those to improve your marketing and also improve your guest manual which saves you a lot of time because people don't keep asking the same questions again and again so in this session we'll be going through the guest manual that you need to create in order to make sure your guests have a good experience and also to avoid any unnecessary questions which can be answered using the guest manual now the platform i use to make the guest manuals is called hostfully.com and essentially what hostfully does is it allows you to create an online manual which you can also print out so what that would mean is for example once you have this manual so you know this is on a phone this is on an ipad you can basically send your guest a link to your manual and you know before they even check into the property they already have the manual which is actually much much better than simply just having a manual which is in the property because you know there's a lot of information they need before they even get into the property and typically the problem with manuals printed manuals is that well you know you can only access that information once you're actually within the property inside the property but what about information like how do i check in and so on and so on you know what's the best way of getting there which train should i get you know where's the parking space all that has to be addressed before they actually check into the property and this is exactly what hostfully allows you to do it allows you to make a very very simple manual very very quickly so what i'm going to do now is essentially all you have to do is click sign up and it will take you through the process of making your manual but let me just show you exactly what you can do if you go to products and click guidebook examples this will show you give you some very very good tips and tricks on the sort of things you can do with your own manual using some of their really cool examples so you have this company here heart of cape cod i guess it's an apartment company or a accommodation company and then you click see guidebook and that opens up their guidebook and this will give you a lot of ideas when it comes to essentially making your own it's very very simple it's essentially a template you can use to make your own guidebook so now this is exactly how the guest will see your guidebook for example so you know let's uh you have all your details here so then you click on a right you know that they can click on arrival house manual attraction so they click on arrival all the arrival details are there so the check-in time you know gaining access the wi-fi details the property address the directions the parking the recommended ways of getting there you know from from the airport if you're driving so you have all the details then you click house manual and within the house manual you have you know all the details about how to use different things so for example it says swimming pool and uh it has all the details about the swimming pool what time the swimming pools open and i recommend it that you use your professional photographer to take pictures of the heating controls the washing machine controls so on and so on so you can essentially add them to your manual and like i said you can also add videos to the manual as well which is really helpful so for example this one says the dishwasher and um this is exactly what i meant and they've done a really really good job the dishwasher tablets are under the sink the recommended setting is cycle five and again you know it just helps the guests when they're there and if you have all this information they won't be asking you a lot of questions you have the emergency numbers you have parking secure parking for many vehicles on site for cars and for motorbikes so again you know if you have all those things again helps just a lot so i believe the apartment is probably here somewhere let's have a look you have all this see as you hover over the attractions on the right hand side you can see it's changing so it's highlighting which ones they are so again this is you know really helpful for guests you can have cafes here and so on and so on places to eat again really good shopping again very very helpful to have these things and then for uh departure well what time you have to check out anything additional you know where should they leave the key and any additional details um which you want them to carry out before they check out so again that was a very good example if i go to one more just so you can see so again another apartment company or accommodation company so we go here we go to arrival so again you know very similar they have all the wi-fi details and parking details and how to get there by bus and taxi they also have the color you know the current weather which is again something just a additional touch which was really helpful and very very similar so you know how to open the door how to lock the apartment essentially everything you need in order to you know have a good stay don't have any extra questions everything is already answered for them so this is what we used hopefully for which is to make the manuals see as many examples as you want just to get some ideas of how you can sort of you know create your own manual again it's very easy to use it's essentially a template and if you need some help you can even go to the demo and under the demo you can watch their 15-minute demo which will show you exactly how to use the manual or you can even you know click this button here and ask them more and more questions but hostfully is the platform i would recommend for manuals and uh what we're going to be doing with these manuals once you've made it is very similar to all these companies we'll be you know taking this link and we'll be sending this to our guests every time they simply make a booking so every time someone makes a booking they're about to check in or maybe you know a few days before check-in we send them these details so they know how to check in where to get the key where the lock box is or where the key nest is and all those details so they have a much much better stay and avoid any unnecessary questions for you so hostfully.com is what you need in order to create your manuals in this session we'll be covering how to start automating your service combination business now the stage we're at we have a property up and running and we really need to start automating purely because well if there isn't any automation it will end up burning a lot of your time so now the best tool for automation in my opinion is guessing.com now gusty is what is known as a channel manager or you can call a property management tool you know whatever you want to call it but essentially it is a channel manager what that means is that as you can see on this diagram the reason is in different colors is because these are essentially maybe different platforms so you have airbnb you have expedia booking.com home away tripadvisor and you have one central tool for all your reservations because you know what you don't want to be doing is logging into all these different websites and seeing well how much money you made from booking.com how much you made from airbnb and then you know automating it becomes a huge huge challenge so on and so on so what guest it does it basically keeps everything in one place and it just makes the automation process a lot easier using some of their tools so if i go to features here and then click automation tools okay maybe i missed it let me just scroll down they offer a lot they offer analytics you can even have websites through them but we'll ignore that for the time being the channel manager is essentially what i'm referring to when i say that you know all your bookings are essentially controlled in one place so this is the most important thing which is the automation tools and the automation tools allows you to do things like this it allows you to send automatic messages so for example in this screenshot here if you see it says schedule to two days before check-in and maybe before two days before checking you have your confirmation message you have your check-in message which says you know thank you for booking here are the check-in details here's your manual so on and so on and equally two days you know before checkout you can have your checkout message so it could say something like your checkout is coming up in two days this is what you need to do about the checkout this is where you need to leave your keys so and so on so and that will do that automatically for you without you having to do anything and this will actually message the guest through sms through email or through the booking platform so airbnb and booking.com so you can basically set up all your messages so you never have to you know send them the messages yourself it will also you know will automatically be done auto responses this is this is a really cool feature this is i believe guest is the only software which actually does this in the whole of the service accommodation industry which is you can set this up so every time your guest has a question so for example they might say well you know um for example what is a wi-fi password or so on and so on guesty will actually answer those messages for you and uh which is really cool because you know you don't have time to be replying to the same messages again and again about wi-fi or where the towels are or what the check-in time your checkout time is you essentially store all your responses on guesty and guest it will answer those for you now you might be thinking well sure it's not going to be that good because it's a computer doing it rather than a human the way gusty actually works is they actually have their own staff who reply to the messages for you so it's not like a computer is replying it's actually people replying on your behalf which makes it really cool because this is very very accurate well it's 100 accurate because there's people replying and it means you don't have to answer all the questions you just have to you know pre-program them and they will it will answer for you you have stuff like auto pricing now this is not something i particularly use but if you wanted to set up some pricing rules you can absolutely do that for you and this could be things like um increase the price of you know my accommodation by 10 for any booking which is more than one month in the future now some people might do that because they might want to say but they might say well you know if it's more than one month in month one month in advance then well maybe i i want a higher price i'm not really too fast about you know offering um getting those bookings at the same rate maybe i want a bit more money so i'll increase my rate again not something we're going to dive into too much it's not something i believe is needed because we're going to do this using other techniques which will which is going to be covered so you can ignore this one and then you have stuff like auto reviews which is again really good so every time a guest leaves your review on airbnb they will actually you know review the guest for you without you having to review guests every single time they they check out your property so again you can automate the review so it's not something you have to do automatic payments so rather than you taking payments yourself you know going into stripe and taking payments this can do that for you it can be completely automated so and these are just some of the features they have so many more features so this is just a quick overview of gusty but essentially what you need to do and by the way gusty has one of the best onboarding trainings they're almost you know kind of not known for their onboarding training but they they have very very good onboarding training so they're going to take you step by step and help you set this up entirely so you are essentially up and running all your properties are connected they're automated and everything is in one place so in order to sign up for guestie what you need to do is you need to email one of my account managers the reason for that is that gusty actually doesn't allow people to sign up to guestie if they only have one property so the minimum requirement for guesting is five properties if you're under five you can't actually sign up to gusty however i have you know an understanding with one of my account managers and she's very happy that if i refer someone then they can sign up with only one unit so in the task guidance section i'll be including her email and exactly what you need to email her in order to get listed with gusty and what you need to do is you need to email her and she will book you in for a demo and once you sign up there is an onboarding fee and on boarding fees around 500 pounds or 600 pounds and they also take a percentage of bookings going forward but again they only take commission going forward and there's a one-off fee and i personally think that's really really good because they're not charging you a fixed fee every single month so you're not really tied in you only make money for example they only make money if you're actually getting bookings and making money yourself which is i you know really really helpful so that's what you need to do there you need to email my account manager her name is shelly i'll include her details request a demon you know a demo once you've had a demo you need to sign up for guest you need to pay the on-boarding fee and then they will take you through the onboarding training where they will help you set this up entirely and this is going to be the best way to start automating your service accommodation business by far once you set up guestie you need to change your booking.com payments so you're able to take the payments yourself rather than booking.com taking the payments for you so in order to do that click onto property go into policies and once you're on that page if you scroll down there is a section which says guest payment options now if you're using payments by booking which you would have done when you made the account then that's essentially what the settings will be but you can click edit and you can select the type of property so it says can you charge credit cards at the property click yes and then select the ones that you want to charge and you can select essentially all of these except for this last one here and then just click save now what that will do that will automatically change your payments so going forward you will be taking the payments yourself rather than booking.com taking the payments for you now what is the reason we're doing this well there's a couple of main reasons the first one is that even though booking.com takes payment they don't take the security deposit now we want to make sure we take the payment and the security deposit and if you're taking both at the same time it just makes it slightly easier whereas if booking.com is taking the payment and you're taking the security deposit you know sometimes the guests end up having a bit of a bad experience because they don't realize why you know why you're taking another payment when booking.com is already taking the payment it becomes very confusing the second thing is payments by booking booking.com they normally pay you about 30 days after the booking or there is a bit of a delay whereas if you take payment yourself you can take payment before they check in so you always have you never have any cash flow issues from that point of view because you don't have to wait until you get the money and you also have a lot more control over your bookings because well essentially you know you've taken the payment yourself you know who's paying who's staying so on and so on so essentially you just have a lot more control so you need to make this change and going forward what that will do is that will mean you have to take the payment yourself now the way you take the payment to yourself is by connecting us your stripe account to guestie so what will then happen is that essentially gusty will be connected to stripe and i will add this link into the task guardian section and then once you do that you go on to guesty and you go into for example you know any of your listings and once you go into a property you can go into auto payment so for example if i was to you know click on a property and if i was to go into automation and go into auto payments as you can see what i've done here is i've set up this rule here so if i if i just click back onto these rules as you can see what is happening is that the payment is being scheduled to collect 30 days before checking 100 using the guest card so what this will do and guest it will help you set this up this will essentially take the payment for you so essentially what is happening here is 30 days before check-in guest is taking the payment now the reason this is 30 days before because my cancellation policy is 30 days so as soon as you're within the cancellation policy you want to be taking that payment if your cancellation policy was 14 days you will simply change that to 14 days the reason is you don't want to take money before the cancellation period because if they were to then cancel you then have to go and refund them so i only take payment once i'm within the cancellation period so reach out to guestie and they can help you set up the autumn payments feature for your property but that is essentially all you need to do which is you need to change your payment settings within booking.com then connect your stripe account to gusty so you have a payment processor which is able to take the payment and then reach out to gusty so they can help you set up auto payments for your property and make sure you take the payment only within your cancellation period so if your cancellations five days you take it five days before checking if it is 30 days you take it 30 days before check-in and that is all you need to do in order to set up your own payments for booking.com in this video we'll be covering security checks and essentially preventing any type of fraud parties or any bad related events when it comes to service accommodation so we have there's two main reasons for having security checks the first one is to preventing parties or any other related events and the second one is to preventing charge banks chargebacks basically mean that imagine someone stays in your service recommendation unit and a month later they say well you know you get an email from the bank company the credit card company they say well this accommodation was booked using a stolen credit card so you need to provide proof that this person actually did stay now if someone booked with a stolen car it's unlikely you'll be able to provide proof that that exact person states since well the person who stayed was actually not that person since he used a stolen credit card so what ends up happening is you have to give all the money back so the last thing you want is you know you get a thousand pound booking a month later they take the thousand pounds away from you purely because well you can't prove that that person stayed since it was a stolen card now so what we want to do is we want to make sure we don't get those bookings in the first place and we can detect any sort of credit card fraud so in this session we'll be essentially going through two main objectives one how to prevent any bad events like parties and then in the second half we'll be going through how to prevent any sort of chargebacks and that is the reason we have the guest verification process so in this video we'll be going through some policies you can set for airbnb in order to make sure you don't get any parties or any bad guests so you need to go into your guesti account and then click once you're in a listing click communication service then you scroll down and you have a thing which says this listings checklist and this is the checklist guest it will follow for every single booking on airbnb now the first thing says verification offline id what that means is if someone is inquiring to book your apartment and they do not have an id for example their id is not verified on airbnb guest will say please verify your id here's a link how to verify your id and you have to verify your id before you can book the apartment so that is a very good way of making sure that anyone who books through instant booking or through inquiry has an online id because you want to have you know you want to make sure they have government issued ids on their profiles the next we have no pets if someone was to ask well can i bring my pets the answer is no unfortunately because well we do not want i don't necessarily want a lot of pets in my property because well they might damage the furniture and so on and so on if they if anyone was to ask about parties and events they would also get a no because well we do not want these types of properties the next one if someone was to ask about events again that is a no similar to this the next one you need to know importantly is this one here which is guest from same city as listing ask what that means is let's say you are operating in peterborough and you get an inquiry from someone who lives in peterborough in that case gesture will highlight this to you and flag this up and they will send you a text message or an email saying someone from peterborough is looking to book your listing in peterborough the reason i flag this up is because i'm always cautious of people who are picking accommodation down the road or a few minutes from where they live because to me that is a sign of maybe someone looking to have a party now a lot of the times you get someone it's an elderly couple and they might have some relatives coming or something and that's fine but you know you do have to be a bit careful about when people are booking from the same location so this is a role you need to have for airbnb so this is highlighted reviews if bad reviews ask so again when someone sends an inquiry on airbnb guest you will check their reviews if they have any bad reviews they will highlight this for you and they will ask you what should they do should they let them stay should they not let them stay again very very helpful because if they had bad reviews in the past you want to see what the bad reviews are for how many bad reviews they have because if they have a lot of bad reviews then you don't necessarily want them in your property the last one here is filming and photoshoot if someone asks us about hosting filming and photo shoots within the property then we decline we don't really want a lot of equipment going back and forth or a lot of people in the apartments going back and forth you know it it it's not exactly the ideal so in that case we also decline so these are the settings you can simply copy them you can speak to your gueste account manager and they can you can reach out to the sport team and get them to set this up for you i believe you can't actually set this up yourself there might be some new options but essentially in order to do this you have to reach out to guestie and they can do that for you in order to avoid any bad bookings on booking.com the first thing you need to do is go on to property and then click policies now when you do that you essentially end up on a page like this which has all your policies in place and what you can do there is you can simply scroll right to the bottom and you have a section which says guest information now what you need to do here is where it says guest address details you can leave these ones you don't necessarily need these because we'll get these from the guests using our terms and conditions form but i would turn on that they must provide a phone number since you need this to contact them and i would importantly set the minimum age to 22 because what i don't want is i don't want 18 year olds 19 year olds who are still maybe students in universities i don't really want those people booking so i have a minimum age of 22. so if anyone does book who is below that age i can simply cancel that booking because it does not meet my terms and conditions very very simple to do very easy to do but it's a great way of preventing bookings by people who are pretty young and who might not necessarily be up to a lot of good so that is what you need to do within booking.com change your policies and insert a minimum age so in order to prevent chargebacks from stolen cars from people you know booking with cars that do not belong to them this is what you need to do and what you need to follow the first thing you need to do is you need to create a form now i've created this form using called formsite.com you can simply make an account it's very very cheap very very easy to do and i have a form here which basically asks people for the type of booking whether it's personal or business and their arrival date their departure date the details of the people booking so for example who who is you know the guest name who is booked by the reason i have this distinction here is because sometimes people book for other people i want to know who's making the booking and who's paying for the booking because when it comes to preventing chargebacks and stolen cards you want to make sure that you have the person who's making the payment you need their details it doesn't really matter as much who stays it's very very important you have the details of the person making the payment since you know a lot of people look for their children or maybe they book for in a company they book for a colleague but you need the details of the person who is actually making the payment because if if you do not have those details and you know someone down the line says well i never stated this property you can't challenge them so this is why it's very very important to have these extra details now if you select business then essentially you have some extra details here and it just says company details and you want their company name and company email address and company you know so on and so on but if we just select personal it's pretty much the same except for those other things you can sort of play around with this i'll leave a link to my form so you can simply copy and paste my form if you want to so once they've added their details very important to note here it says the billing address of the payment card you the home address doesn't really matter as much because you will get this from their id sometimes anyway but it's what's important is a billing address the reason is that let's say you steal someone's card even if you have their card you won't know what the registered billing address is and that is one way and i'll show you this slightly later on of how you do this but that is one way of detecting credit card fraud because if someone's stolen a card they might have the card in their cvc number which is the three digit number on the back but they won't necessarily know well where this person lives and therefore this you know they won't be able to answer these questions and if they make this up we'll be able to detect this later on and this will fail our checks and therefore will prevent any sort of credit card fraud so what you then do is you ask for the billing address you then also ask them for a picture of their government issued id you want their id and you also want them to upload a picture of their bank card so now very important to note here it says please block out the first 12 digits of the card number you don't necessarily want the full card number because of security reasons you just want the last four digits most credit cards and debit cards have 16 digits you just want to see the last four and i'll show you why slightly later on when we do uh when we run all the checks it then has some more information about you know why we require id why we require the picture of the bank card and then it also says if you would like a receipt then they can just simply click yes or no and you can send them a receipt most people simply just select no if they have any additional comments they can you know they can put this in here then there is a box to essentially sign and they can simply you know sign their um yeah they can sign that they agree to the terms and conditions it says plain sign here if you accept the terms and conditions shown below do you have then all the terms and conditions and right at the bottom you have a button which says submit and they will simply submit this form now once they submit this form it even says scroll to the bottom of this form and hit submit because you want them to see the terms and conditions now once they fill out this form you essentially get the form here from the person now i have blurred out a lot of the details again for security reasons and uh data protection and so on and so on but you essentially get their name their email address their phone you know phone number and so on and so on you get a picture of their id again this is blurred for security reasons and a picture of their card and what you have is you have their last four digits the first 12 he has hidden with a piece of paper i can see you know the name on the card i can see all those details he's he's signed the card and essentially so on and so on so once i have all these details on the form i also have his details on my stripe page the reason i the way i have these is purely because well if the when the booking is made either from booking.com or a direct booking i'll make i'll make an account for them i'll make i'll add them as a customer on stripe if you have connected booking.com to guestie and you have connected stripe to guestie this will automatically be done for you and you can simply go on to stripe and you'll see all the customers you'll see where they came from in all their details so in this case if i if i scroll down here and again a lot of this is blurred for security reasons and because there's a lot of personal details about this person about this client but what we what is important to note here is this segment here which is the payment method now the payment method has their card and what happens is again this is slightly blurred but what stripe shows you is only the last four digits of the card so again it says visa dot dot dot and then the last four digits and again the same here which is the number and the last four digits it shows you the expiry it shows you the origin of the card and it's it says if the cvc is passed and failed ignore the zip check for a second and i'll show you why this is important so the cvc is basically the last three digits of the card and if they input the wrong details for example within within booking.com when they're making the payment this will fail automatically and if it fails it will actually not even show you the card it will automatically detect there well this is a stolen card and therefore it won't even show it to you so this has to cbc has to pass otherwise you do not get these details so now this is where the whole credit card stolen card prevention comes in the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure the name on their id matches a name on the bank card so if i go back onto the form and again you can't see this exactly because it's blurred but i'm looking for the name here which is the name on their id and i'm looking at the name on their bank card and in this case the names do match the name on the id is exactly the same as the name on the bank card so that is absolutely fine so i know that the person whose id it is the card is also theirs the card also belongs to them so the first check is absolutely fine sorry the second check is the last four digits on the card has to match the last four digits on stripe so if i look at the picture on the card it shows me the last four digits now i want to make sure these last four digits are exactly the same as these last four digits here on stripe because what that means is that this person does actually have the physical card so it might be stolen but he does have the he or she does have the physical card so you know it's not a picture of the card or anything along those lines that he does actually this person does have the physical card therefore you know it's less likely to be stolen but at this stage it could still be stolen because someone could have just stolen the card but at least they have the card so that's fine the cards are exactly the same what you don't want is that they send you you know their lloyd's card which has a different last four digits number and you know here is something else you want to make sure they have the physical present with them the one they have used to make the booking so that's fine we then move on to the next thing which is the card origin has to match the id so if i go up here the id you can probably see even though it's blurred that this is a uk driving license they've submitted a uk driving license so that means this person is uk based okay so therefore when i go on to stripe their card origin really should be from the uk and in this case it is but if their id is uk based and the card is from france to me that would be a red flag that why does someone who is based in the uk have a card from another country and i normally would not accept those and i would highlight that you know we need a card which is registered in the same country or so on and so on so that is that is one massive red flag when the card is from a different country and that is a big sign that the card might be stolen because a lot of these cards get stolen from different places you know they move countries and so on and so on so this is check number three you want to make sure that the card origin is the same as the id origin if this person has submitted their passport you know and it was a uk password then i want to make sure that the card is also uk based or if it was a german passport i want to make sure that the card is has a german origin the next thing is the signatures also have to match again this is not a big check but this is anyone can replicate this but it's just helpful to know for example again it's blood so you can't see but there is a signature hero on their driving license and that is the same as the signature which is posted here again this is also blur so you can't see but the signatures do match again a small check anyone can replicate this but it is just it is just helpful to see very very quickly now the final thing which is the big thing here in order to make sure the cards are not stolen is if you go back on the form and you look at their zip code zip code postcode whatever you want to call this you this is their billing address so when you ask them for their address remember it was a billing address if i go back to this the billing address of the payment card if someone has stolen someone's card it's very unlikely they will know that where the card is registered so if you take their billing postcode and go back to stripe and if you click this button here which says edit and then click more options there is a thing which says zip and postcode again it is blurred but when i input that person's postcode in there and then click update what will happen is that stripe will check so i just have to put in my password very quickly and then click update and then let it load up so again this is slightly blur so you can't see but you can see this which says that zip check is passed that means that this billing address is correct so that would mean that it's very very unlikely this card is stolen because well in this case they have provided the correct building address now this person in summary has provided a picture of their id the card has you know the card they they provide provided their id their the the name on the id and the bank card are exactly the same so that means the person who's booking whose id and they present their id the card also belongs to them the the card they're using to make the payment on stripe is exactly the same was the one they submitted the picture off because the last four digits match the card is from the same country as their id it's not from a different country they have the same signatures and they also have the correct billing address now one final check on this is if the booking was made by a business now if this was made by a business what can happen sometimes is that when they submit a picture of their card their bank card sometimes it has the company name on the bank card and if someone has stolen a company card is very very easy for them to you know forge fake ids and even find out what the billing address is because you just have to go in companies house and you know find which company it is and where they're registered so if it is through a company if it is a company card i would do one final check which is i would make i would get them to email me from their company email address and if we go back to here on the form and select business then as you can see one of the positions is they have to have their company email address filled out as well and i would get them to email me from the company email so just to verify that you know this person does work at the company as opposed to someone who's just stolen the card from someone within that company so that is the final check you would do if it's company which is get them to email you from their business email to make sure that that person actually does work at that company and you know they're the ones who actually have that card so that is essentially everything you need in order to make sure that you do not get a charge back beyond this if if someone ever does give you a charge back and if you know for example if a company does say well this is a stolen card then you can submit all this proof you can submit any communication you can submit that they've some they've you know signed your terms and conditions they've submitted a picture of your bank card of their id that you have all the details and you have proof that this person did stay at your property now this list is actually created using stripes own instructions when it comes to charge banks and if you want to read more information on this tribe actually has a whole segment on disputes and frauds how disputes works how you know the best practice when it comes to responding so for example if i go into this you know it tells me it tells you exactly how to respond to them how to submit evidence to have the best chance of winning these disputes so if anyone you know does say the card is stolen you have all the proof that you need so for example here it says you know including proof of customer authorization and by the way this is actually exactly how i created this form i created this form using stripes own documents so look as you can see it says you need the avs the abs is essentially their billing address so the address verification and if i go into stripe the ziptech is essentially avs you also need the cvc again we we we've done the cvc check it says it's passed so sign receipts and contracts and again we have the sign received so contracts because that is why we have the form with you know the signed terms and conditions and it also helps if you have the ip address which matches the billing address the ip address is essentially you know where they were when they essentially completed your form now this might be hard to do with service accommodation purely because it's travel based and people are moving around you know when they book accommodation they might live in one city but they might be you know in a different town for work and they are essentially booking the travel when they're already in a different place so this one can be a bit hard with service accommodation but essentially if you read these documents and i will put a link to this below in the task guidance section this will give you a lot more information about how disputes work and this is pretty much everything sure one you do not get bad guess in the first place and you can root out you know as as much as you can when it comes to fraud and prevention and making sure you know you do not have people who end up booking with stolen cards other than just taking payments one of the things we also need to do is make sure we take security deposits for our guests from our guests so if you go on to again this is only for booking.com rather than airbnb because on airbnb airbnb takes the deposits themselves so for booking.com you need to go on to your listing on guestie under automation you need to click auto payments once you're within auto payments you need to focus on the number three here the first two are related to uh their normal payments not the security deposit the last one says authorization hold capture 150 of the payment five days before check-in so what happens is that essentially five days before the check-in 150 pound is held from their card so it's not necessarily charged and i believe there is an option if you want to charge it you can but what happens is you essentially put a hold of 150 pounds on their card so it is almost frozen let's just say and if you want to take that 150 you can do so now there is one problem with authorization hold which is the authorization hold is automatically released after seven days so if you take authorization hold and you know this is five days before check-in two days into their stay that authorization hold no longer applies and therefore you can't automatically deduct those 150 pounds from their account but there isn't really an amazing amazing solution other than this other than if you were to take 150 pounds and refund the guest every single time now the reason i personally don't necessarily do that is because from almost four years of running service accommodation there's only been two or three instances where i've actually had to charge the security deposits it rarely ever happens once you've had you know good screening and make sure you don't get any uh people who are likely to cause any problems and again at the end of the day you do have their credit card details so if you did need to charge the security deposit you can just do so after the checkout now you could argue they might not have any funds in their account and so on and so on but this is one of those things where because it rarely ever happens i don't necessarily want to go through the hassle of charging every single guest and refunding every single guest so what i tend to do is i tend to use the authorization hold to make sure they do have sufficient funds on their account you could and then once you once you have done this what will happen is that after seven days it gets released and if you do need to charge this then essentially you will charge it at that stage now if you look down here it says currently these rules will apply to all sources except for airbnb because on airbnb they will take the payment themselves and you do not necessarily have to take the payment because that will be automatically done for you now as you can see on this what is happening here is that five days before the check-in the amount to hold 150 pounds if you want to then charge it you can do so and you essentially just charge that amount at check-in and then all that would mean is you simply go in and you refund it once they have checked out so again you can do both things both very very easy to do if you at the start when you're starting out with service accommodation if you want to charge every 150 just to sort of get the hang of it and while you're still you know working out all the processes and procedures you can do so and again you will have to reach out to gusty in order to set this up to make sure you have all the correct settings in place or you can simply just copy the same settings i have one thing to note here is that we have a security deposit of 150 pounds across all our listings so if you want to set this within booking.com you simply go into property and then go into the policy segment go all the way to the bottom and it says damage deposit where you can simply add that you have a deposit of 150 pounds and that is how you set up deposits for booking.com on airbnb you don't need to do this since it is already set up for you monthly cash flow template so this is the monthly cash flow template that i wanted to take you through and this is a template that we use at the end of the month to have a look to see how our each of our apartments have performed so for simplicity i've taken out all the apartments that we've got and i've just put in apartment one two three so it's profit and loss slash cash flow here you will insert the month that you're looking at um so for example some of these numbers direct bookings um and channel manager information has relates to the month of december and so for example here i would type in december so i know that i'm looking at the previous month's cash flow um it's really important to do the cash flow um on a monthly basis for the prior month that so that you can see how the apartments have done um it's really important to make sure that you're monitoring this so that you can make adjustments for the months ahead um it's really important as well from say a pricing perspective so if you look at the revenue side um you want to make sure that the price your pricing is correct and it's generating you sufficient income and then from the costs side the expenses some of these expenses will be fixed and so will be difficult to try and reduce them but other expenses uh you might be able to such as for example if you have um lots of repairs happening in the month um just trying to find out you know why do you end up repairing or replacing or calling a handyman in for the same things over and over again this information this is assuming you've got three apartments and so this information is coming from that channel manager report so you will have a channel manager that will manage all your properties on the various portals and your challenge channel manager should have the functionality to be able to print out all the checkouts for the month so what we do from our channel manager we run a report that shows all checkouts uh in the last 30 days so we want to see in the month of december in the last 30 days how many checkouts have there been and this tab here channel manager report this is exactly what it looks like so the and this this report is emailed to us from my channel manager and it will show check-in so when they checked in and when they checked out so this is a report that's based on checkout so everyone that checked out on the 12th so i've had to take out a lot of the information because it is confidential things like um you know where the apartments are but more so things like the guest name guest's email address and the guest's phone number so i you know we can't really share that information but these headings and some of the other information is straight from our channel manager it shows you the total payout the source whether it's booking.com airbnb um so these are your otas so anything that you plug in it will tell you which source accommodation um cleaning fare or cleaning fee so if we add these up 385 385 same here um this is the booking.coms commission and we could ignore these two we have a column that we built in into our channel manager so that if there's any of uh if there's any refunds discounts or anything extra like someone wants to stay for an additional 10 nights we we add in for example any comments that will influence anything to do with any uh additional revenue generating revenue items or costs we'll put into that particular booking so that when we pull this report we can see from one place whether there's been any additional revenue or any additional costs um these three fields here these are additional fields that we add in so this is stripe so stripe is our payment merchant and all we're doing here is any bookings that are that we take via booking.com we use stripe as our payment merchant and uh for all the booking.com bookings we just double check that if um the channel manager is saying that um this was the payout then we'll check on stripe just to make sure the two are the same um the reason we do that is because on stripe you can't actually break down per apartment um the the payments that have been made what stripe does is if you've got you know 30 apartments for example it just takes payments um and then it sends you those payments at periodic times so it's very difficult just to run a report from stripe that says show me the payments for the month of uh december so that's why as a check we just want to double check that any payments from booking.com that we're taking via stripe that they are there and then in terms of the stripe fees we'll add these here as well so these are this this is stripes um credit card fee for processing our transactions so that's a cost of of business that we need to take into account um so this is an example of a report from our channel manager um so if you use a channel manager you will definitely get some sort of report that you can set up and you can tailor it so for example you don't have to have a lot of this information in there if you don't want it so you'll be able to tailor it depending on upon the information that you want but we find you know this is the basic information that you'll definitely need is check in check out confirmation code you don't necessarily need a listing title listing address nickname so these we have just so we can identify the apartment obviously um you could argue don't read the guest details in this in this report but we just have it for completeness and then total payout we always want to find out you know what's the total payout and that's made up of the accommodation plus the cleaning fee so again we just want to make sure that the cleaning fee is set according to what we think it is uh sometimes you think it's one thing but actually when you check it's another so it's always good to have it split out and then you want to see what your channel manages um what booking.com for example the the channel manager the ota sorry that you use what their commission is and so for airbnb for example if they said source airbnb there would be uh here it would be 0.000 because airbnb pays directly into your bank account um you don't have to you don't take payment using a third-party payment merchant so again this is a channel manager report and you can customize that report to include whatever fields you like but generally these are the type of this is the type of information that you're going to need in order to do the monthly cash flow forecast just going to look at the direct booking so these these are direct bookings so this is maybe you're on one of their corporate websites such as situ icab silver door and they so the way in which those bookings work is they'll call you to say look we've got an inquiry can you help we need a two bedroom apartment for 30 nights can you help and uh if you can help you provide them with the breakdown of what the cost is and what services you provide how many bedrooms and if they're happy to go through with your booking uh once the client gives the confirmation then they'll send you a summary of the booking and they tend to pay you um it depends so for example situ tend to provide a credit card um which you can take payment from and same with icab actually but there are some some of the other corporate providers they prefer to make a bank transfer um so with these companies sometimes there is a delay in terms of payment with the otas they normally pay before they arrive however with the direct bookings with the corporate agencies payment um can be on check-in but it can also be you know two weeks 30 days or even 60 days credit terms so just just make sure you're clear you know which one you've opted um opted for um so these are some bookings that we had in december but these apartments this was a situ icab situ these were the number of nights 28 36 31. um this this was the 19th rate that we quoted this was the total payout commission 15 that's how much they take so for example um when we invoice them we'll invoice them for 2520 and they'll send us a remittance back saying yup we owe you 2520 less our commission which is 378 unless the vat on that as well so they'll send us a net payout of 2066 spot for so then we'll work out a net payout per night um um to give 73 pounds and 80 pence and that will and so this column here the cash flow month so here we're looking for because this cash flow represents um cash flow for the month of december here we're going to enter the month of january because what we want to do for these type of bookings so for the long term bookings that you get with situ with icap so with icab generally they tend to book for say you know two three four weeks in advance and they tend to extend so you know rather than waiting until someone checks out to do the cash flow we pro rata any long bookings so long bookings generally anything over say 15 nights you want to kind of pro rota so that you're having a look at the costs and the revenues in that particular month so in terms of these we'll proras the bookings so that this revenue relates to the 25 nights in december so let's go back to month so this is total from the otas so if we look at apartment one three eight five three eight five apartment two four seven six four seven six then we'll look at the direct total direct bookings so for this one it's 1845 1845. two two three eight and three zero five zero so we're just picking up these numbers from all ota bookings and uh the total direct bookings this is a total column repairs so as i mentioned earlier in our channel manager we have a column that says refunds refunds discounts or extra costs so if there's any repairs that you need to make that you would have made in the month so for example imagine a chair breaks you need to send the handyman or the blind comes down you need to send the handyman or there's another issue anything that costs you you'll put it against that particular booking so that it will appear here and you can enter it here so repairs any any repairs you can enter here so this column is stripe fees so um again this is coming straight from the stripe fees that we would have pulled out and looked at six pound seventy five and eight pounds thirty booking channel commission so for example this is the ota's commission so if you use booking.com or you use airbnb for example this is their commission so if we have a look at channel manager reports for apartment one 69 pounds and a 34 pence 64 pounds a night and 34 pence so that's the commission so channel manager commission so this is for example our channel manager so our channel manager is gusty they charge um you know five percent um of the ota amount so this is just a calculation so it depends on the cost of the it depends on the channel manager that you use and what their pricing is like and you can add in a cost here for the cost of their services cleaning so we charge around 30 to 35 pounds per clean um and we add another 10 pounds or so for for linen um so we round it up to about 50 pounds and then we'll enter the number of cleans that i've taken um that taken that have that happened in the month so here for example we've had four cleans four cleans and five cleans that's all those costs um so these costs will vary month on month the revenue will vary month or month these costs will tend to stay the same so these are kind of like your fixed costs so the rent for your apartment the gas and electricity bill the council tax any water bill for these particular apartments on water bill is included within the rent so there is none the wi-fi and the tv license so these once you've done it in the first month they should remain a relatively constant so fixed costs on a monthly basis and you can kind of see that these are the variable costs so what that gives us is total income which is made up which is coming from the otas and any direct bookings to give us the total income and this column gives us the total expenses so the total profit or cash flow is your total income less your total expenses so what this monthly summary does here it just summarizes the above for each apartment and gives an average as well so total income total expenses and total property profit so this apartment made uh 969 pounds in december this one made 1300 pounds and this one made 14 uh 1500 pounds so this is this apartment actually is a studio so did pretty well this one is a one bed did pretty well and this one is a two bed so did pretty well so on average across the three apartments um the apartments made one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds or so so that's that's um that's in terms of the numbers so again you just want to make sure that the information coming from your channel channel manager is complete you want to know the accommodation the cleaning and the commission and then any direct bookings that you've got um if they're long term for example you know we you just want to pro rata them so that you can have a look at what's the revenue generated in the month rather than waiting until someone's checked out after say six weeks so make sure you prorate the prior to the revenue again it is shown on this sheet how to do that you just put in your checking date to check out dates the number of nights is automatically calculated you add in your nightly rate um commission that net payout and what this does is so we're looking at december month so this is a january checkout so the pro rata is just looking at so they checked in on the 7th of december they would have checked out for example on the 1st of january and that gives us 25 nights in december of cash flow which is 1845 pounds so if we go back here these are some of the checks that you want to want to do also on a monthly basis so please check booking.com your booking.com extranet to ensure that the commission matches the commission charged so what do i mean by that so if we go on the channel manager report so here we've got two apartments two bookings apartment one apartment two and our channel manager is saying that um booking.com for the month charged for that booking charged us 69 pounds of 34 pence and this one 85 pounds and 69 pence so we just want to double check to see um that is correct so booking.com will generate you a monthly invoice based on checkouts in the in the month so you just want to double check that that's correct and that matches what booking.com is going to invoice you for um check airbnb airbnb payments are being received into your company bank account because again you don't take payment for those they'll pay into the account details that you've provided here we'll have a look at um occupancy the number of empty nights so you'll just type in um five six or zero here for example long term bookings proactor ota so for example now the reason for this is that we if we've got any long um ota booking so for example if we've got an airbnb booking imagine someone booked for two months for the month of november and december the channel manager report if you're showing all checkouts for december it's going to show that all that revenue was generated in the month of december because that's when they checked out so what you want to do is pro rata that booking so you put in the total payout from airbnb or booking.com the number of nights so it would have been 60 in that case nights in the current month that would have been 30 because we're looking at december to give um and then you um you look at the price per night from airbnb or booking.com and then this one will be the total for the current month which will be the nights in the current month multiplied by the price per night and what that will do here it will um revise your cash flow so if you look here it will take this and add it onto your um cash flow up here so again it's really important to make sure that any long-term ota bookings you are pro-rotaring so that you're getting a view of what of how much money you generated in the month so and then we have a commentary section so again the whole purpose of this is to have a look at you know how much money are your apartments generating what's the revenue and can you increase that revenue and what are the costs and can you reduce those costs if our repairs seem to be really high we want to try and understand why is it a reoccurring cost that seems to be happening is it a cost we are responsible for for example that's another thing cleaning costs is there anything that you can do in terms of the cleaning costs a lot of these other costs are quite small so the big ones you want to look at is your pricing are you charging enough um and in terms of if you want to try and reduce your fees is can you try and get some more direct bookings can you try and get on with situ icab silver door and the apartment network prestige to get you know the bookings where the nightly rate tends to be a lot more higher and also the length of stay tends to be a lot longer as well so that's the reason for the commentary so for example this particular month december has been pretty good um you know on average 1 250 one pounds per apartment has been generated which is good the only check i would do here is to see you know in terms of the other apartment providers on booking.com maybe airbnb are we being competitive in terms of price because i don't want to be under charging for this particular month for this for these three apartments we had these long bookings and these generally are the nightly rates in this area so for example what you could do is you can go on to situ's website type in the area that you're interested in or looking at so for example um i know bracknell and it will show you all of the apartments they've got listed in bracknell and what the nightly rate is so if you've said to them i don't know 110 pounds but on the website every every other apartment provider is listed at 150 then you might want to increase your nightly rate especially if you seem to be getting lots of these types of bookings so that's one thing to look at so in terms of the commentary again so for example here it will be things like so the average cash flow generated was x this was above or below our set expectation the main reason for this was due to a long-term booking which we received at a good rate from a corporate agency or we had lots of short stays with a big gap in between one of the bookings which resulted in low occupancy overall so then you want to have you know going forward what are you going to do for the month ahead so going forward for the next month we will try and contact the corporate agencies we work with and icap to see if we can help them with any inquiries review our adverts on airbnb and booking.com and check our prices are competitive um to our competitors so that's the whole um point of this cash flow is the numbers aspect but also um analyzing as well okay what's happened in the month just gone and what do we want to happen in the month that's ahead um so that you can have a look at kind of adjusting um pricing possibly so for example if your mt knight was really high like 15 20 you know and even you know 25 then you know your apartment wouldn't have generated um you know would have generated very little revenue so then you want to try and understand well you know why does that mean that the prices that we are showing on airbnb and booker.com are too high so that's one of the reasons that we need to do we want to make sure one but the apartments are making the amount of money that they should but also we want to make sure that um they're being competitive in line with other apartment providers so on booking.com for example make sure you're looking at other apartment providers and not hotel rooms so i think a lot of people make the mistake of trying to compete with say a hotel room but um you know you're kind of doing yourself a disservice there because you know a hotel room someone like ibis that has i don't know 100 rooms can afford for a lot of them to go empty and charge 60 pounds a night whereas you know if you gave your apartment away for 60 pounds a night you make very little money even if it was booked you know for the full 30 nights so even when you're on booking.com just make sure that you click where it says apartments and then make sure that you're checking to see um that you're competitive and your availability is there as well sometimes that can happen you know for example if you're blocking out your calendar in your channel channel manager then um that can affect you know where you appear in terms of the rankings on booking.com and airbnb but a lot of people do that because they don't want to let people book six months in advance so for example they don't want someone booking for the summer now because the rate is the rate in the summer is the same as it is now so that's why a lot of people tend to block out their calendars and maybe only leave them open for say um you know three months instead of say six but um your channel manager should allow you uh to change how much you're charging um you know going forward so that's the profit and loss cash flow it's a relatively straightforward you just need to make sure that um you set it up once um make sure you have that tailor report tailored report from your channel manager um and then you can update the cash flow on a monthly basis um again try and target the direct bookings as they're more profitable and as you can see the number of nights tends to be high as well um and just make sure you capture any extras refunds discounts extra costs um you know per apartment these can get quite easily lost so you want to incorporate all costs into your analysis the property redress scheme um or property ombudsman so in essence all the property agents and professionals that carry out estate lettings and property management work in the property industry have a legal responsibility to join an authorized redress scheme the property redress scheme otherwise known as the prs is authorized by the ministry of housing communities and local government and the national trading standards estate and letting agent team to provide redress for estate lettings and property management agents so the property risk scheme is also authorized by authorized by the chartered trading standards institute to resolve disputes so under the property redress scheme they offer a service to property professionals such as company landlords inventory clerks tenant relocation experts property finders and removal companies the advantage of these kinds of professionals is that membership offers an open and transparent resolution service which can increase their reputation and offer their customers um confidence so really by joining the prs property agents and professionals agree to resolve complaints using their resolution process and agree to abide with their final decision when they are legally required to do so so in essence it's really really important that you join the prs scheme it's costs it's 125 pounds plus that for the entry based model which will apply to most people and it's just one of these uh schemes that's you know people you know guests customers you know anyone that's in the property industry for example will just ask if they've got a complaint or they're not happy about something they'll just ask just to kind of scare you which property reject redress scheme are you part of so it's well worth you know for the sake of 125 pounds plus that to be part of this particular scheme um so also in england a letting agent or property management agent that does not join an approved scheme can be fined up to five thousand pounds by the local authority and ultimately close down if they continue to operate illegally so you need to be part of one of these schemes and the prs is you know relatively straightforward easy and uh cost effective so one of the other schemes that you'll need to look at is um if you're handling personal information personal data so for example you might be sending out a registration form for guests to fill in that has their name address you might be asking for driving license passports that shows you know um their date of birth where they live um so this is all personal information um so for this you need to um join uh something called the information commissioner's office it's ico the cost is about 40 pounds and what that says is that um the data protection act basically requires every data controller who is processing personal information to register with the ico unless they are exempt you know most organizations that handle personal information must register with the ico again it's a relatively straightforward process it costs about 40 pounds but you need to register with them especially if you are taking direct bookings you know you're asking people for their personal information those are the two key games to be aware of the prs property redress scheme and the information a commissioner's office scheme so the first one is 125 pounds plus that and the second one is about 40 pounds insurances so public liability insurance cover so public liability insurance cover can cover legal costs and compensation payments if your business is held responsible for injury or property damage to a client contractor or another member of the public so in this instance imagine if an employee in your cleaning company leaves a wet floor after cleaning a floor and then someone slips maybe one of your guests and breaks a bone or is hurt or injured ultimately your business could be sued so your public liability insurance could then cover the legal fees and compensation costs up to the limit of your policy so for service accommodation it's really important that you take out public liability insurance so whether or not you need to take it out it's not a legal requirement but it's kind of helpful to know that it's usually taken out by businesses that interact with the general public this means you know public liability insurance it's kind of bought by tradesmen hairdressers shop owners restaurant owners for example but since most businesses coming into contact with the public at some point it's a good idea for many businesses to have it so in terms of how much public liability insurance do i need it's up to you to decide how much um it's sensible to check with your broker to see what he recommends is the industry normal industry standard the cover can range from 1 million to 10 million of public liability insurance so again this is also more more important when when dealing with the corporate agencies so when you're dealing with sichu seiko prestige silvador icab the insurance accommodation a bureau they will actually sometimes on an annual basis ask just to see your certificate showing that you've got public liability and professional indemnity insurance in place so if you if you want those type of kind of corporate bookings it's really important to have public liability professional identity insurance in place and it has to be to the group to the required amount so yeah definitely get it and we can we recommend keen insurance that's who we use so if you go onto keeninsurance.co.uk they can help or if you get in contact with us we can put you in contact with the broker that we use so another question we get all the time is does public liability insurance cover employees it is not designed to cover employees it's designed to protect you from third-party claims made by a customer a client or any other member of the public if your business has one or more employees you'll usually legally required to take out an employer's liability insurance policy so this can cover you for compensation claims made by an employee because they suffer an injury illness or property damage as a result of their work so for example if you hire your own cleaners um they're your own employees then you will need employers you will need this type of employer's liability insurance but um if you use uh third-party contractors so you use a cleaning company um you're just you'll want to check with them that they've got their own insurances so they've got their own public liability professional identity insurance so that's employers liability insurance again that only really applies if you've got your own staff professional indemnity insurance it's it's really for businesses that give advice or provide a professional service to clients they can uh cover compensation claims if a business is sued by a client for making a mistake that leads to a financial loss so one of the reasons that um so in this instance you might think well i don't actually need professional identity insurance i'm not actually giving out advice but the reason that we do tend to need it is because we handle client data so it's it's client data so for example if you [Music] request one of your guests to fill in a registration form you take their name address maybe a copy of their passport driving license birth ticket for example um you know you need to store that information so that's that's handling client data and again some of the professional agencies will want to see that you've got professional indemnity insurance in place before they'll allow you to you know kind of register with them so again professional identity insurance it isn't mandatory but again some of the corporate agency providers they want to see that you have it and so i would definitely recommend getting that as well um so contents insurance just want to talk about landlords insurance so again the type of insurance will depend so if you're if you have a flat that you're managing as a say rent to rent for example then the and it's a flat then the building's insurance is covered as part of the service charge paid by the landlord so you don't need anything in terms of the building insurance and you might choose to ensure your contents and contents normally is if you think of a flat and if you turn it upside down anything that falls out and furniture um anything that isn't nailed to the wall that's that's what we're talking about when we're talking about contents so um if it's your own flat for example again you'll be paying um the building's insurance as part of your service charge costs but you might consider taking out content insurance it's completely up to you depends on you know the type of apartment the location how much money you've spent on the furniture and how worried you are about you know kind of damages again it's not mandatory but we'll cover the cost of existing furniture that's the type of insurances that you'll need within um service accommodation public liability professional condemning insurance and if you have your own employees you will need employers liability insurance but if you don't you just want to check your cleaning company that they have the relevant insurances in place if you're running apartments you won't need buildings insurance because that's covered as part of the service charge but you might opt to choose um contents insurance if you're running freehold property so if you're running a house as a service department for example if you're managing it on behalf of someone else then again it's that person's responsibility to do the buildings insurance but if it's your own property that you're running as a service to as serviced accommodation then you need to pay for the building's insurance and potentially the contents insurance so once you have a bank account the next thing you need to do you need to set up a payment processor a payment processor is essentially something which allows you to take payment into your bank account now this might be for a direct booking it might be for you know future bookings through booking.com it might be for security deposits it might be for you know extra services like early check-ins late checkouts and so on and so on but you need a mechanism which allows you to take payments and the platform we use the payment processor we use is called stripe so essentially you have to go to stripe.com and once you're on the website there will be a button saying start now this is currently down here it might be up there by the time you go on the website but essentially you click start now this will take you to the create an account page now once you're on that page you simply fill in your email your name your password and once you've made an account you then link your company bank account to this account and as soon as that is set up it's very very easy very straightforward and as soon as that is up and running you can essentially start taking payments into your bank account

Channel: Ahmed Khan

Views: 111,666

Keywords: buy to let, buy to let london, buy to let mortgage, buy to let mortgages uk, buy to let tips, buy to let uk, property development uk, property investing, property investment, property investment for beginners, property investment uk, uk property development, airbnb, how to run airbnb business, how to run airbnb remotely, airbnb business, airbnb hosting for beginners, airbnb without owning property, real estate, airbnb course free, airbnb automated course, ahmed khan

Id: jTF80Q09zpw

Length: 411min 7sec (24667 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022