Episode 016 – Room by Room: The Living Room

We are going Room by Room to teach you just what you Should Have and what you Must Have inside each. This episode is the Living Room!  Michelle is on a buying spree and has taken this as a great opportunity to pick up more properties.  While she's putting them together, she's put together a list for you of what is really important and what items are critical to have inside your Short-Term Rental.  We would love to have to add your two cents, as well.  So, please find our facebook page and add to the conversation.

Plus, contest details are inside this episode!  Enter to win BIG!!  Go and Grow!

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, it's Michelle, the master of money mindset.

And you are listening to the BNB dash boss podcast. And in today's podcast, we're going to be talking all about living rooms. We've been going room by room telling you what we've put in the side, every single room. And today it's all about living rooms. Our show today is brought to you by. Audible is where you get your audio books online and get a 30 day trial into the audible membership for free.

By going to audible trial.com forward slash S T R revenue that's audible trial.com forward slash S T R revenue. You'll get your first audio book for free and 30 days into the audible membership just for trying us out. You'll love autumn. Right [email protected]. You can find our $7 courses available for you to try out, find out how to cohost, how to do rental arbitrage, or how to invest in real estate.

We're all three, by going to B and b-boss.com and clicking on our store. And you'll find our $7 courses right there. Try us out. You'll love it. You'll love those courses and they're only there for a limited time. So. Also, don't forget our contest. We've got our contest running right now in every week.

We're picking a. And everyone's names are going to be put into a drawing at the end for a final prize of an Amazon Dodd with a little clock on it. And your guests will love that. They'll be able to walk right in, ask Alexa to connect to their account, and there'll be able to play their favorite music, ask for the weather or whatever else they want to ask Alexa to do pretty darn awesome.

And I would really greatly appreciate you going to iTunes and leaving me a five star review. I appreciate. So please do take a picture of it. Send it over to me at Michelle at BNB dash boss. Let me know that you did and we'll enter you in those drawings. So going room by room and talking about living rooms, one of the first things that I thought we better mention our keys keys, because most of our entryway goes into the liver.

There should be no keys and your short-term rental. And I mean, no keys in your short-term rental. The only time we ever have any keys is if it's a pool key for homeowner's association or something like that when we just can't get away from it. But otherwise there are no keys. Keys can be copied. Copies of keys can be made.

Do you understand? It's beyond words, amazing to me that people even still have keys. I'm like, do you not realize what can happen? And the safety features around keys. You should not have keys. It's super cheap to get electronic locks nowadays. It's super, incredibly easy to get memberships and apps on your phone that you can change super easy.

There's absolutely no excuse for you to have keys and less, like you said, you absolutely can't get away from it because there's a homeowner's association, right. Or something. But even in our contracts, even in the contracts where we do rental arbitrage, we talk about either. And we make sure that the locks belong to us unless the owner wants to buy them.

But otherwise the locks belong to us and they're going to be changed and no keys will be given to a renter ever. So there was a post on one of the Facebook groups that I'm in of a young man and he said, Hey, so a guest calls me telling me the key doesn't open. It turns out they made a copy of the whole set of keys I gave.

Any advice. Yeah. Don't give them any freaking keys. Like, oh my God. And the comments on there were amazing because people were like, oh, use this lock or that lock or use these keys. No, no keys. You will have one set of keys for you. And one set of keys for your maintenance in case the batteries go out on your lock.

And that is. Those keys will never, ever, ever, ever be accessible to a guest ever, ever cut it ever. Not ever. Will they be accessible to guest? I know I'm like, oh my God. It's like when you're trying to teach a kid, you know, not to do something and they just keep doing it. You're like, no, never. And they go, but what if no, never, but I mean, no, never.

That's what I want you to know. No, never. Will you ever have a key given to a guest? The thing is you can copy any keys now, guys, any keys and even those smart keys with a smart locks, people can bump those. And if you don't know what that is, There's a smart key lock schlock makes them, there's a bunch of different lock companies that make them.

And basically, would you take your old key? You know, the key that works now and you put it in there, you put this little reset key on the side of it, you pop it, you bump it and then put a new key in and it sets the lock with a new key. Right? And they're like, oh, this is so smart and so easy. Well, How's thieves.

They've figured that out. They can tell just by the lock, how to bump the locks. If it has a lock like that, and they'll bump it, put their new key in and they'll open your door. So, no, you don't want those smart ones. You want an electronic lock and every electronic lock has a set of keys just in case a battery fails and only you and your maintenance people should have those.

You shall never ever give them to a guest. Okay. This is one of the 10 commandments from God. This is the 11th commandment on the tablets. The stone tablets carved in stone with God's own hand, thou shall never give a set of real keys to a guest. Okay. That is the commandment. And so don't break that command.

They can make copies of it. Anyone can, and I don't care if you think, you know them or whatever, it happens all the time. So this guy had put on there, please, you know, tell me what to do. They made a copy of our whole entire set of keys. Well, guess what? Now that poor guy, he's got to go re key his entire house.

So whatever keys he gave them, if it was to a mailbox or if it was to a pool or a maintenance shed, the front door of the back. What ever keys he has. He has to go relaunch all of those. And that's going to cost him a lot of money because if you're using good lucks, it's a lot of money to re-key your house.

Anytime you buy a new house, that's the first expense you pay is re-keying the entire house. Every single door that goes to the outside is re keyed. It's a huge expense. You can never put any of your future guests in jeopardy by letting your old guests have a copy of your keys. Ever. I also wanted to say that one of the replies on here, one of the comments to this gentleman was, do not give them any more keys than absolutely necessary, which I totally disagree with because what is the 11th commandment thou shalt not give a guest keys.

Right? I had it. Who gave a whole set of keys to her local mechanic. A few days later, she met one of the shops, employees letting himself into the front door of her house. Do you see how that happens? Like literally things like that happen. It's a dangerous, dangerous thing. We never ever give keys away. Now there are keys.

That may be two other things. Like I said, like two. Or maybe to a community center or things like that where you can't make copies yourself or you can't use electronic locks yourself, right. Something like that. Well, stipulations have to be made in advance for things like that. So in our communities where we have community pools, we have spare keys ready to go.

We've already made our copies of spare key is because people lose them and they lose them all the time, but they're never into our property. Okay. They might be into a laundry room. They might be into a pool. They might even be a key into the subdivision itself. Right. But new way, is it into our property?

Our properties only have electronic logs and I can not, not state that more emphatically. Okay. So it's one of the things I wanted to cover in the living room, because most of the time the living room is the room that you're going to be entering first when it comes to keys. So, um, so glad that we covered that first, but let's get down to the nitty gritty.

When it comes to the couches and chairs, we buy comfort. Absolutely. But it's got to look good in a short-term rental. It's got to look good. And if you have comfortable furniture already in there, but it doesn't look good, then make sure you can buy some kind of slip covers. I love his slip covers because a lot of times they don't look like your grandma's slip covers.

Right? First of all, they're not plastic or anything and they're way more comfortable, but slip covers now can be white. And put on again. So things don't get stained. They don't look terrible. So slip covers are really great for furniture like that, but we make sure that the furniture we buy can be washed and mourn because it's going to get a lot of wear and tear from your guests.

And if you've got kids, it'll get a lot of wear and tear from the kids. Believe it or not. Parents will let their kids on vacation do just about anything. They will let them jump on beds where they won't let them do it at home. They'll let them jump on the couches where they won't let them do it at home.

They'll let them tear off the cushions and make forts where they won't let him do it at home. So your furniture's going to get a lot of wear and tear, and you've got to make sure that you. A good quality furniture when you possibly can. Now, if you're just starting out, you go to Goodwill or something, you get what you can, but make sure it looks good.

Make sure you clean it. Make sure you put some kind of scotch guard on it. So it doesn't get really dirty. You want something that's super comfortable, but really good looking when it comes to guests. And we add a lot of color with pillows and textures, you know, like a little throat blanket and stuff, lots of texture and color there that you can add and people can cozy up, but those kinds of things make your place feel more homey and people love it.

We also try to make the end tables, coffee tables, and TV stands. Anything we can, if we can make it whole go together, if it can be a set, that's a bonus for us. I don't like a hodgepodge of things. And most people don't, unless it looks aesthetically pleasing, unless it looks like it's somehow went to get.

If it looks like you went to three different garage sales from three different people and you threw whatever the heck you could. That's literally the amount of money you're going to make out of that place because people will pay for things of better quality that look better aesthetically. So if you've got a property that looks like it was thought about and put together by a designer, then you're going to get a lot more money per night.

For that place then you would, if it looks like it was all the leftovers of all the yard sales, garage, sales and Goodwills and the area. So making sure you do the absolute best you can. And if you can't do it right now, as you go along, keep improving your place. I mean, we add to our places all the time.

Very few of our places, eh, well, not very few, probably probably about half of our places. We don't add to anything anymore because they've been running for so many years. So we might replace things. We don't add a lot of things, but we do add some things sometimes. And especially our new places. Like what else can we put in there?

And our top end places constantly. So we just added an echo.in one of our older places. It's a nice little addition. I mean, it's a nice one that got the clock in it and a stereo speaker systems. So they can play music and hook up to their own echo and their own Alexa if they've got an Amazon app of their own.

But what's really cool is when we add something, it improves the quality of our guests stay each. And every thing that we add, so we want you to be able to do that as well. We make sure that we buy smart TVs a long with having fast internet service in our units. Now, a lot of our older properties might still have cable, but any of our new properties that we buy, we do not get cable anymore.

We just make sure that we have a really fast internet and that our TVs are all smart TVs so that when you turn them off, Right away. You'll get a menu to go to Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or the regular TV. And instead of using cable, what we do is we get just an antenna for local channels and there are antennas on Amazon.

You can get seriously guys for like eight bucks and they go like 50 miles or more. So there's no reason why you can't have local channels just with an antenna. And have a smart TV. It saves you a lot of money per night. And if it got to a place where there were a lot of people with cable, like in Orlando, then we tend to keep the cable because we're competing with other places that use cable.

And when your competition has it, you've got to have it as well. So this is one of those times again, where you really need to know your competition, but for the most part, anywhere in United States, the majority of places everybody's doing Netflix and Amazon right now. So that's what we do. We just make sure we're using those smart TVs.

And I love the smart TVs. For another reason because they're mountable, you can put them on the wall and for like 50 bucks, 40 bucks, you can get a wall Mount that goes in and out and moves all around. So we usually use wall mounts where we possibly can. And the reason why also is TVs are light enough that they pull off easy when kids are playing with them, but they're heavy enough that they can harm a child.

So now that TVs are so darn light, but they're still big. It's nice have them mounted because then kids can't pull them down on themselves. So we're really careful about kids. That just reminds me that we have a great article about safety on our website. So go to short-term rental revenue.com. And inside the articles, just plugin safety.

And you'll see, we've got an article that talks about anchoring your furniture, like the bedroom dressers. Oh my gosh. That was a huge thing. When I Kia dressers were tipping over left and right. And little kids were being killed. I mean, Ikea had some major lawsuits come against them. They would just, we're not being careful when it came to building their dressers.

And so all these little kids were killed because they would open up one drawer, open up another. And then when they did the whole dresser would come down on them and crush their poor little bodies. So when it comes to safety safety, when it comes to furniture, I think that's an article you should definitely read because it's going to talk about the corners of coffee tables.

Anywhere a kid can find a cord and pull on it. They're going to pull on it. So we, more and more often have our items secured to the table is in one way, shape or form, right? Because they need to be now, little kids will pull on those cords and you don't want them getting hurt. It's the same. Cords for blinds.

We don't have any looped cords anymore. And a lot of times we've replaced the blinds with the blinds that you lift and pull with your hand instead of using chords. So there are less and less cords for little kids to get hurt with. So read that safety article, if you possibly can, is going to save you a lot of headaches.

So go along with our smart TV. That we have mounted if we possibly can. I'd like to remind you about remotes and batteries. You want to make sure that you have remotes and extra batteries for people, but what's really crazy is those remotes will kill loss. And so we have an extra remote for each and every television inside the closet somewhere.

And they're pretty inexpensive, but it's good to have because when. You have smart TVs. If you don't have a remote, there's no way to use that TV. So you would have to get a whole new TV in there. If somebody lost the remote and you didn't have an extra one. So as soon as we ordered TVs, we order extra remotes with everything just in case, we make sure we have nice big lamps in the living room because we want them to look nice.

We want them to look like we thought about that and it goes with the decor. But we want it to fit in the room. And so we have these nice big lamps that we don't fuss on the price when it comes to some lamps and decor. So lamps are important. And in the entryway, we like to have hooks for coats, a place to place your shoes, right.

And an entry rug, so they can wipe their feet regardless of what the weather is outside. So our entryway is really pretty important to us. You know, a place for everybody to get in and dump their stuff. Now, most of our places are in nice warm places, but I hate to tell you, it gets pretty cold. I know you guys are laughing as versus if you're up in Toronto or something like it gets pretty cold in Arizona and Florida in the winter time.

I mean, there's times where we have had to wear mittens and hats and stuff. And so, you know, you want someplace, you can dump your coats and dump your shoes. And if it's raining, take off anything that's wet. So I like to make sure my entryways are ready for the mud, you know, ready for the wetness, ready for the cold.

That's pretty important to me, also something we haven't talked about, but we share the have, I should have added it into those rooms, but I'll put it. Is rugs an art. We put a lot of rugs into our properties. We've got a lot of tile flooring tile that looks like wood, especially in Arizona. We don't have wood in Arizona.

It just doesn't hold up to the heat. So we have a lot of fake wood tile. So the tile looks like planks of wood. But when you have toggle everywhere, the floors are really hard, hard. And so that's hard on people's back and hard on their feet. So we like to put rugs down and people like when they get up, they like to put their feet down and have a rug underneath them.

So we'd like to have rugs under our beds. We like to have rugs under our couches, but not far away enough where they can just take him push off on the rugs. You want the rug somehow secured under there so that when somebody goes to get up, they don't just constantly wrinkle. So, I don't know if you know what I mean, but imagine sitting in a chair and taking your feet and putting them together and then pushing your feet forward, if you had a rug, the rug would go right through that, you know, with it.

So we don't like that to happen. So we make sure that we secure our rugs under something. We like a different kind of rug at the entryways of the house. So people keep the mud and the dirt right there by the end. And artwork is super important in any place. The more artwork you can have, the more cool stuff you can have on the walls, the better your place looks.

I mean, obviously it can get to a point where it's overcrowded, but most of the time. Most people don't put enough in there and it just looks too bland. It doesn't look like home. You want people to walk into it and go, oh, I love this place. They really took their time with it. And I like to stick with themes too.

So a lot of my properties have a beach theme. A lot of them have a desert thing. It just depends on what's going on. And I had so much fun with the last desert theme. We did everything in that house was cactus and we had CAC dye everywhere. I mean, it was just everywhere and it was so much fun to do, but we've gotten a lot of great feedback on that place and artificial plants.

Now, one of the best places to get artificial plants is Ikea. I know it sounds. But they literally have like 79 cent artificial plants that look pretty good. And you can put them in these little tin cans. And last time we went into Ikea last week, there were 79 cents for these little tins. And I think the plants themselves were like a dollar 49.

So for two bucks, you've got this cute little artificial plant and you can put three of them together, you know, for less than 10 bucks. It looks so nice. I mean, it looks so nice. So I love artificial plants. I love artificial trees. As long as they look good. I don't like cheap looking ones, but if they look good, I've got them everywhere because they add so much color.

And they make the place feel alive. So I'm all for art for plants and some knick-knacks that match your theme. So in our cactus plays, I picked up a ton of route 66 thug, anything that said Arizona on it, any little swore throws anywhere. I mean, whatever that had a cactus on it, I picked it up and it looked amazing when we got done with it.

You can to just make sure that you stick with your thing. And you make sure you don't over clutter and that you lock things down. We use a double-sided tape and I'll have a link to that for you because it's not like really sticky. It's more like gooey and it peels off super easy without taking the surface with it.

But at the same time, it's strong enough to kind of hold it. So it doesn't let a lamp fall or get knocked over easily. So it's good for those things. I'm also going to add inside here, an office area, any place we possibly can. We love to add an office space, so it can be in a living room. If you've got a little extra space.

I think the picture that we're using for this episode is one of the properties that we have in Arizona. And it has a desk right there in the living room and that desk makes it so that we can actually. Accommodate business people. So we hit all the check marks to be able to host business. And that's just because we give them a designated workspace, like a nice big area for their computer, not just a short, tiny, thin space.

Somebody says this is big enough to put a computer, but a workspace where they can actually sit Heather computer on one side, have a book opened on the other where they're doing their notes or they're doing their work. And they've got a drink. So we make sure that our desks have a lot of space on them.

They're not just an afterthought, they're literally there for them. They also have a desk light. So you've got your desk with a really big space, your lamp that they can turn on in the middle of the night. And a nice comfy office chair, office chairs are hard to come by that space right there in the picture.

I'm sure when we first got it done, this chair hadn't come in yet. So we used one of the kitchen chairs, but as soon as we were able, we switched that over to a real comfy office chair. So we've got the lamp, the desk, the office chair, and a place to easily plug in your computers and all your accessories.

So we make sure that on the wall there next to the desk, that we've got a nice big Barb. So it's got a few outlets that somebody can plug in their computer. Maybe they've got to plug in their phone. Maybe they've got to plug in something else. So all of those little plug areas are right there and very accessible for people.

We make sure that that's one of the things that we do. And like I said, we provide them with fast wifi and the desk is a perfect place just right above the desk. We have these cool little signs that we get and I'll show links to those too, but we have the password and the name to the wifi right there.

And it's just right there where they can look at. When they sit down to do their work, they're like, oh shoot. What's the why, if I password here it is right in front of you is a really great space to have that little picture right in front of them so that they don't have to go searching for anything. So this episode is probably a little bit shorter only because there isn't nearly as much and the living room and the office area as the other rooms.

But they're very, very important. Like I said, it's very important to keep it clean. It's very important for it to be welcoming and homey. So you want to have all those things inside of it. And if I were you, I would go inside air DNA and I would make sure that I am comparing my property to the top properties in my area.

So by your local area for air DNA, Take it and make sure that you go into your properties and you run a report on your property and you compare it to the other same properties in that area. So it's kind of nice to look at the top properties and then make sure that you have the same number of bedrooms go in there and click, you know, if you've got a one bedroom, one bath.

That you can get up to two or three people, whatever, and you click those things and then look at those top properties because these are who you are comparing yourself to. How do you compare to them? So that's all for today. I wanted to thank you for listening. If you have any questions, make sure that you send them to us.

We'd love to hear from. I also wanted to thank you for your five star reviews that you guys are leaving me on iTunes. I really appreciate it. We're going to get to read those in the very near future. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Stay safe up. Bless you. Go and grow.