Episode 085 – STRR – You Can’t Fix Noise & Other Things to Avoid

We received some not-so-great reviews because of a neighbor’s dog and it was a nightmare. How can you avoid this situation?  What other types of situations can you completely avoid when shopping for a new property, whether you're buying or renting?  Michelle gives you her list of things to look for and things to absolutely avoid when looking at properties for you Short-Term Rentals. 

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss podcast.

And in today's podcast, it is Friday is December. Can you believe this thing? God, this year is almost unlike. Let it go. Let it go. We thought 2020 was bad. Actually we would have relived 2020 had we known 20, 21 would have been like this, but 2021 is almost over. We're getting ready for the last few weeks.

What do we got? Five more Fridays. New years. Thank goodness. So our replay this week is about not being able to fix noise. It's actually a couple different episodes that we're blending together for you. So it might be a little bit longer, but it's really good. If I do pop in here, it's going to be at the end of this episode because it's two episodes put together and it's very, very long.

I want you to be able to enjoy it, but take a listen and enjoy. And in today's podcast, we're going to talk about. They can be a real pain in the, you know what, depending on where you live for this week's podcast, we had had a bunch of bad reviews because one of our properties in a college town down in Tucson, Arizona had a lady next door who had four.

For little Yorkies. And I don't know if you guys have ever had to hunt for neighbors, but it was not fun. They had gotten a new dog and whenever they went to class, they would put the dogs outside. Now the three dogs, the other three dogs were used to it and they didn't bark hardly at all, but the new little puppy was like going crazy.

It was just so upset. Ping led outside. It just barked embarked on. I don't know if you know this, but afterwards, we, like, we had looked this up after we had had so many bad reviews about dogs. Do you know dogs? Can't lose their voice from barking. If you go to a rock concert and you just scream and scream and you get done all weekend, you were someplace, my throat hurts so bad.

I've been, you know, screaming and yelling, not dogs. They can't get sore throats. We really wish we were like, when is this going to stop? Is this dog finally going to get us? Apparently not, it's not the same as a human, so they can just bark and bark and bark and bark and never end. And that's what this little guy did and what he did to our reviews for that place were just incredible.

I mean, it was maddening. Now what we found out was the city of Tucson. Arizona has a city ordinance. Just for dogs barking because apparently it was a real problem. And there were a lot of people who had neighbors who had just let the dogs bark and bark, but just because there's a city ordinance does not mean that the process was an easy process.

First with these little dogs we noticed, because one of, obviously one of the guests said, Hey, I'm trying to study for the, because it's right next to ASU. There's a lot of people who. Just to take certain tests or certain testing, that's done. People will come in for their continuing education and stay and then take a series of tests.

And a lot of times they'll stay for a few days and, you know, just want to get a lot of rest up so that they can study by themselves and then take these tests. So you need to have a quiet place. Well, we had a woman come in and she was not happy. She could. Any studying done. She was just like, this dog is making me crazy.

So we had found out because she had sent us a message through platform, which was nice that she was having trouble with his dog. That was next door. So we sent someone over to talk to the owner of the dog and no such luck. They pretty much didn't care. It was kind of told to us that was basically none of our business.

Where they left their dog and the porch for their outside. There wasn't a lot of outdoor room in the backyard of the house next door, but where the little porch was that they had this dog was literally right next to the window and the, of the bedroom window for the little house that we had. So it was a nightmare happening.

If you were to stand there and you took the gate down, It would be probably less than six feet or eight feet from the window to where the dog was barking. So, I mean, you can literally throw something there if it weren't for this big six foot seven foot fence. Right. So yeah, it wasn't a pleasant thing. It was actually kind of a nightmare.

So the guests that we had had an idea of giving this dog, some chilled treats, she said, do you have a nearby vet? And we're like, oh, what an amazing idea. Because we have an Aussie, she's an Australian shepherd. And she had literally jumped out of the car once when my son was riding with her, it's a long story, but she jumped out of the car, rolled in traffic and broke her little hip.

And she was on the mend for a long time. What is crazy about Australian shepherds is they have so much boundless energy. You've got to take them for a walk at least twice a day. I mean, they just go, go, go. This dog just wants to run. So we had to keep her chillaxed the whole time she was healing, you know, for like, what was it?

Four or six weeks, whatever it was. Right. And how did we do that? Well, obviously drugs, like, well, obviously drugs. She had chill pills. The vet had given us these, I think they were made out of hemp or maybe they had some kind of CBD oil, but they basically. They gave her pot and it helped her relax her enough where she was just like, yeah man, whatever.

Right. The doctor was just like the whole time she was healing. She was just walking around totally high as a Chi and going whatever happens. I'm so super happy right now. So where I thought, oh my gosh, this will be so great for this little puppy. Well, there's a big difference because my dog, what is she's, she's like 40 some pounds as a full grown Aussie.

We have, uh, we have larger dogs too, because we have golden retrievers, which are like 80 pounds. And we also have our daughter St. Bernard, which is like 120 pounds. Big difference. You can't just assume that the same amount of whatever's in those are going to be good. So we just said, Hey. Here doc, we've got this problem.

Here's this little terrier it's about this big. Yay. Big. So we just took a picture of it over the wall while it was barking. Nana's cause we had lots of videos of it barking anyway, just of the wall. And you could hear the dog, you could see it's a little cuteness on the other side, it was an adorable puppy.

Let me just say, but it just barked nonstop. So he took it and he said, well, this is probably, you know, what you want to get. But you need to ask permission. We're like, wait, why, what we've got to ask. And they're like, yeah, you can't just give your neighbor's dog some pot. And we're like, well, gee, why not? I mean, then we thought about it.

We're like, yeah, that's kind of true. You can't just give the neighbor's dog pot. There was just no talking to this neighbor. There was just no talking to the neighbor. The neighbor wasn't happy about us inquiring. We knew it was around. And we were going through this whole process of just fine, you know, doing all the things, going through all the steps with the city to make sure that we had gone through.

And anytime we needed to we're calling the police. We were logging it with the guests. We were making sure guests knew about it. We had these little treats just in case it got in a like crazy. We didn't know what to do with the treats. We just kept them in the drawer. We got dog barking boxes. Have you guys ever heard of those?

Yes. They have them. You put the. Batteries or you can plug them in there's certain kinds. We tried a couple of them. They don't work very well at all. And that dog was super close to a wooden fence. You would have thought that it worked it didn't, it didn't work. We put the boxes everywhere, no matter what the dog didn't care about, any sound was going on.

I don't know. Maybe the Doug, we were like, maybe this is like a deaf dog. Maybe it doesn't have any hearing because do you hear that the other dogs would be going through. Not the puppy. The puppy could have cared less or like, great. We get the only nonstop barking, deaf dog in the whole city of Tucson.

We've got it right here, living next door. So anyways, we just went through this whole entire process, but in the meantime, we were letting people know beforehand because we didn't want them to get. And have to study for tests. We knew about the times of day that she let the dog out, but because the dog was in the house with her during the night, but here's the deal guys.

There are a lot of people out there, even in the state of Arizona. What is it today? It's about 104 outside or 106. It's hot here. Okay. I know you people in the Midwest. Yeah, we've got a real feel of 102, even though it's 90 some degrees outside and we've got humidity. Let me just tell you when it's 106 in the desert, it feels like hell, it just feels hot.

It's just hot. It's like, I'll give you a real feel. Here's a real feel. And just a picture of Satan with a Pitchfork. That's what it feels like. And people will leave their dogs out all year long. Living in dog houses with, you know, sometimes you worry because if there is no water outside, even if you put a bowl of water outside, anything you put outside is going to get hot.

You can't touch your door knobs in Arizona or your steering wheels without oven mitts, sometimes depending on the color of it. And if it's metal, heck no, it's like hot to the touch. You can literally burn yourself and people will leave their. So before you rent a space before you buy a house, before you do anything, look at the neighbors, look at their yard, look at what's going on.

If you hear a dog, stop, drop, and roll away from the house, because honestly it is going to be a nightmare. They don't care if they're the kind of people who leave a dog outside in the Arizona sun all day long. They don't care about you. They don't care about your feelings and they certainly don't care about your little Airbnb business.

They don't care. They don't care about an animal, a live animal being stuck outside in the Arizona sun. Now, this lady was a little different, like I said, because that puppy was probably the new guy on the block. It was probably dropping little wee bombs all over the house. And whenever she went to work or whenever she went to class, wherever she was.

She just didn't want the dog to chew on something or make a mass because it was a puppy and she didn't probably feel that it was, you know, if I just stick this one, dog outside is going to be lonely. I'm going to just stick the other dogs out with it. And they will at least have some company or something, but she didn't leave him out all the time.

So she at least loved her pets enough to keep them inside the house most of the time or whenever she was there, there was hardly ever any bargain. And so I have to say kudos. Because there are so many people in this state that leave their dogs outside. I happen to really love my dogs. Not that I'm one of those people who get my Christmas card made with my dog, but I really love my dog.

And I know that I'm the human and I have to take care of them. I'm not going to leave them outside. It drives me crazy when I see people leave their pets outside in the Arizona sun. It's just so nuts. I take my dog everywhere with me. If I know I have to run in some place, unless it's in to Starbucks, Chino grabbed my drink that I pre-ordered or something, but most of the time, if I know I'm going in somewhere, I won't take my dog in the car.

I can't leave a pet in the car for even 10 minutes in the Arizona sun. It gets incredibly hot here, really fast now in the wintertime, no problem is like 60 degrees outside or whatever. They're not going to be in the car for five minutes. I can run into sprouts and grab some whatever, and they're going to be okay for five minutes, but I'm very aware at time.

And I'm very aware at the heat levels for my pets, because I know I'm responsible for them. You can't forget your animals and your kids, man. I always look at these stories and I think to myself in a car, in a car, how can you, I can't even imagine leaving. A baby or an animal in a car I'm super aware that I'm responsible and that the heat of Arizona can kill any living thing inside left inside a car.

But what I want to reiterate here is the fact that you really need to know and understand what's going on in an entire neighborhood. Before you jump in with both feet, look around. Look around what's going on. Right. And remember what I said too, before you buy property or rent a property, look and see what's on the books for the city ordinances.

Are they going to have short term rental rules? If you're not doing your due diligence in all these specific areas, there's no one to blame, but yourself there really isn't. If you buy a property and you knew that there was a junkyard next door with the big old junkyard. And then you start having challenges and then you're like, well, shoot, that doesn't seem fair.

Honestly, you're just like those people who buy a house right under the airport and they go, wow. I mean, I can't believe they just land these planes any time of night, all night and day. And you're like, you bought a house right next to an airport really. And now you're going to sit and complain. That's pretty much what you do when you have a dog, like.

And then you look over the fence. You're like, man, their dogs are outside all the time. You didn't know that you didn't ever notice or hear that dog before just now. That's when you started, like, what were you doing? You always do your due diligence. Always. One of the first things I notice is noise and sound of every property I walk into and you can ask me.

That dog barking is among the same thing. I mean, it's among the houses that you do not buy. So it's going to be among the rules that you do not rent. So what I wanted to do is give to you those same rules because they apply with your short-term rental. You do not rent a house with dogs outside. And you will know, you will know because you're going to go there at night and during the day, that's another thing that people do.

They will go to look at a property at, you know, one in the afternoon and they'll say, well, it was really nice. It was super quiet. There wasn't a lot of cars around in this area, blah, blah, blah. And it was super quiet. We didn't hear a lot of noise or a lot of traffic, and you're like, you're there at one o'clock.

Try in the morning, you know, rush hour trying the evening rush hour, try later in the evening and see what you get, because there are certain areas of Phoenix, especially when you are driving around. And you're not going to hear a lot of traffic during the day, but holy cow in the morning and in the evening during rush hour, it's crazy.

And I'm talking roads with one lane on each side. So it's just single lanes on each. And the noise can be incredibly maddening. And the traffic starts early in the morning, like 5:00 AM, five 30 and that's all the people here is traffic, traffic, traffic, but you can ask my husband, he'll say, oh, Michelle's not even going to look at this as backed up to a main street.

And you bet your sweet ass. I will not even look at it. I don't want to see it. I don't care what the price is. Why. Because I know that if I'm renting it out, it's going to be noisy and nobody's going to want to stay there more than a year for a whole year. Right. And if I'm renting it out as a short-term rental, same thing, even worse scenario, because now I'm going to get shitty reviews because of it.

And I don't want the bad reviews. My properties are inside properties. They are never on a main street ever. They are never backed up to parking lots. Even in the buildings that we buy in Florida, we make sure that the properties don't face parking lots. The thing is you have got to think about these things ahead of time.

You've got to think about it because if you don't, you're making a huge mistake. You can't fix noise. So we make sure that when we buy in certain buildings and certain units, I always say. My unit has to be facing the lagoon. My unit, you know, has to be away. And when I have agents looking for properties for me, one of the first things I say to them is I will not look at this property.

If it's backed up to a main street, you cannot do that. You don't want to compete for last place. You never ever compete for last place. You don't want to be the wall. Because here's the deal. You will just play catch up all the time. You will be working hard, answering questions and answer. I mean, you'll be back and forth with these people all the time.

And if you're not, then the people you hire your virtual assistants. Well, and that is costing you time and money because they can be doing something else. If it was a quiet unit, it wouldn't be having any sort of trouble. It wouldn't be causing you any problems. Correct. So if you have a dog barking problem and your city doesn't have an ordinance, what are you to do?

It's a constant calling the police and you know, going in and what can you do? There's not a lot. You can do, you can ask them, you can write them letters. You can talk to them. You can bribe. But if you do have a city ordinance, just know, just because you have a city ordinance, it's not going to be a walk in the park.

It's still going to be a lot of work. And man, I can't tell you how many discounted rooms we gave away. How many discounted nights? We even got to a point where we sent people letters beforehand and we said, look, we have lowered our rates because of this. So please don't come in and then tell us it was a challenge.

And then expect us to give you your money back. It's not going to happen, but we got so many lousy reviews. It took us down. It dropped us way below and even with the bark box and everything else. The only thing that saved us was one renter who came in and offered to stay for an entire two months because it was a snowbird.

And when he was there, he helped us monitor and call the police when he was happy to. And literally that's what saved us because by the time we got done with the whole thing, they've just moved out and left because they had gotten so many calls and the police had come over and the owner got to a point where with the city of Tucson, they were getting fined.

I think it was $50 a day. For every violation against a certain time, but there were court appearances. There was all kinds of stuff that was required before all this happened. And so it was a nightmare just because there's a city ordinance does not mean it's not going to be a nightmare. It's a nightmare.

It's a nightmare. So it's best left, avoided. So that's going to bring me to something the houses not to buy. This goes for houses, not to rent. And I've already mentioned one, and that is houses with noise, noise of traffic. They are awful. What else is out there that drives you? Absolutely baddie. And so we have to think of ourselves as being a good neighbor to our future guests.

Right? We have to take those precautions for them. So noise is a big, huge thing. If I see people with cars up on. You know, bricks or blocks? Nope. Nope. Nope. Doesn't look good. And people don't want to be in that type of area. I am very persnickety about the locations I choose. If it looks bad, when I drive through the neighborhood, I'm not buying it.

I'm not renting it. Why would I, if I was staying there, I wouldn't want to stay in neighborhood like that. It would be too iffy. And we rent to a lot of single women and I want my daughters to be. And if it doesn't look safe, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna rent it out. I'm not going to buy that property either.

So look around, take notice of everything in the area. What does it look like? So let's talk about some of the properties that we had purchased in Texas in the Midwest. And in Gilbert, there are a lot of agricultural places. What does it smell like? And a lot of times it doesn't smell bad during the day, but at night when the sun goes down, something happens and you can smell the agriculture in the area.

You have to be really careful when you're buying in certain parts of places where it's going to be next. Like there was a dairy two miles down the road, tons of flies, things like that. You have to know and be aware of them. A really good thing to do is talk to neighbors. You're going to tell a lot by the neighbor, when you knock on the.

We knock on doors all the time. I don't know why people don't do this, but if you're buying properties, when you are a real estate professional and a real estate investor, you're going to have to knock on doors and you're going to have to get used to, and very comfortable with knocking on doors and talking to other owners of property.

When somebody answers the door, you're going to be able to know a lot about them. Is this somebody that you want to be neighbors with? And you'll be able to tell there are also neighbors that will drive you crazy nosy neighbors. Oh, the Herald sun's just left. You know, they were there for 15 years. Their daughter had this problem and this and this one on, and you know, he was up at 5:00 AM and if they know way too much.

It's like, yeah, that's TMI. They knew way too much. They're going to be in my people's business all the time. And that could be challenging for you because nosy neighbors sometimes are worse than neighbors with, with the dogs that they just locked outside and they just don't want anybody around them.

These guys will be constantly, you know, do you know that your guests didn't get home until this time? And then they did this and then they. You don't want that. So talk to the neighbors when you're going around places, because you want to know what type of neighbor you get and the type of neighbor that you have, and if they're selling the property and why and why the other people sold the property, do you know why they sold?

Oh yeah. They'll tell you. They, if they know, they'll tell you it's kind of wild, but you know, maybe if their friends will say, well, those are friends of ours, they have the property up for sale, but they'll tell you their friends. Great. This is what we were thinking. And we were thinking of using it for this, let them know.

And they'll tell you right away to how they feel about that, unless you're afraid they're going to buy it. I mean, if you got, if you're afraid they're going to buy it themselves and don't do it. And if you're in that kind of neighborhood, but otherwise just, just put it out there and let people know and let people give you their feedback, because they'll tell you this actually isn't a good area for that.

Or I wouldn't think it was, or they will be really interested in it. And they'll tell you a lot about. The thing is you need to, there's some things you're not going to know, and you're going to know too late, but then that's why you do a short lease. First be leery of signing long leases, because I like shortly says, I literally love six month leases to start off with, because you're going to hit the majority of your problems within that first six months to see what is going.

Ben, if you've got to, you can get out of there in a six month lease. I just want to try it out. So almost always I give somebody the deal where I'm going to pay six months upfront and we'll just try it out for six months and see how it works. If it's in some place, an area that I don't know very well.

Now, if it's an area I know then I don't have to do that. But if it's not a place I know real well or a neighborhood, I know. That is a double benefit for me. So do a trial period. Trial periods are really great. Also watch the stairs. If the stairs are too narrow or don't have a long enough landing. So that means you want to make sure that your foot fits across the whole part of the floor.

You don't want people having used their tippy toes to go upstairs because the stairs are short. They'll fall easier when they're coming down. They need to be able to plant their feet correctly as they're coming down the steps with their bags and stuff, and that's going to be your fault. You've got to make sure that your stairs are wide enough and that the landings and risers are a good size so that it, it has the perfect, wonderful flow of correct stairs.

There's nothing worse than having little short, tiny steps where people can just trip over each other fall and hurt themselves on your property. Not good. Another thing I look for is low ceilings. I don't look for them. I actually avoid them. So I should have said that in a different way. Another thing I avoid, like the plague besides the loudness is low ceilings.

Can't stand low ceilings. Now, remember whenever you buy a property, especially. You may have to someday flip that property and sell it. So hopefully you're going to be able to hold it for a long time, but people are going to want to be there. And if you buy correctly in the beginning, you're going to avoid all these challenges.

And if you rent correctly in the beginning, again, you're avoiding a lot of challenges. And so I'm very, very picky. If I can't stand the ceiling hype myself, then I don't go. It's like, Nope, Nope. Not going there. If there's weirdness about it. If I think something's weird, somebody else is definitely going to think it's weird and I want things to sell quickly.

I like the flow to be right. I liked the ceiling height to be right. I like when I walk in for everything to feel good about the house and if it doesn't right away, I just. I say no about a lot more houses than I say yes to. And that's okay. When you start investing in real estate and you start to buy these properties, be picky, you will go through more properties and say no to them than you will say, yes, you will get more nos to the offers that you make.

Then you will get yeses. If you get yeses to all your offers, your offers are way too high. Yes. Because you should initially always get a no, that means you came in low enough, ask Maria. She'll tell you. We had Maria Giordano on before and she knows if I think my price is low, I go in and offer a little bit lower.

It's like, I'm like, that's a low offer until I'm almost embarrassed to give it. That's when I know my offer is low enough. It's like my, my cash offer anyways. It's like, here's how I know it's low enough. It's pretty embarrassing. Oh, it'd be almost embarrassed to do it, but that's why, that's why we can do that.

We have actually a bunch of other offers that we do and we'll teach you that later, but make sure you're looking for these things and make sure that you're not th here's the feeling you want to avoid when you're purchasing and renting properties. This is the only one. If I don't get this, ah, that's you don't want that feeling guys because there are a million properties out there.

And you've got the chances and the opportunities to pick the right ones, pick the right ones. Not every property is for you. And if you lose out on a property, there will be more always know that you will get the right properties, that the right properties will come to. You make that one of your affirmations.

I only rent the properties that are right for me. I only buy the properties that are right for me and my guests. That's a great affirmation to have. So I hope that helped you with the dogs. I mean, you can get those bark boxes. You can do all those things too, but just know that nip that in the bud just don't do it.

Just don't rent a place with dogs next door. And if you mess that up, that's your fault. No one else's fault. You should have checked it out. And if somebody moves in later and brings a dog, then you make sure you nip that shit in the bud as fast as you can. Because as soon as that dog starts barking, just knock on the door, say, Hey, I don't know if you realize this, but you had your dog out yesterday.

I know you guys just moved in. You're probably getting settled. You didn't want to leave him in to chew things up, but here in this neighborhood, we do have a noise ordinance. And, you know, we wouldn't want to have to do anything about that. We, we use this property for whatever, and you just want them to know nip that shit in the bud fast, let them know you're going to have problems with this neighbor.

If you don't fix it because the longer you let something go, the more of a problem it become. And you've got to be proactive with a lot of stuff. So, so I'm going to give you my list of things that I look for when I'm buying a short-term rental property or I'm buying a property to use for a rental, or I'm buying a property to fix and flip and sell.

Okay. Renters, when you are buying a property to rent as a short-term rental. You need to look at location. We've mentioned this before. It's the number one thing to look for? It's critical guys that you know, that you're not backed up to noisy neighbors or a busy street. It's just pretty much common sense.

I don't know how somebody can not realize that, but maybe you did too late. Write it down. Have it be one of your prerequisites don't even go look at a property. If it's backed up toy busy. Don't even look at it. Don't even contemplate it. Let somebody else pick up the noisy property. You have the perfect properties.

All your properties are perfect properties. You want it in a good neighborhood? Not just that it's in a good neighborhood, but that it looks good. It's aesthetically pleasing. When you go through it feels like a good neighborhood and you're going to check out the neighbors. You're going to walk around.

You're going to talk to neighbors. You're going to make sure you've got good neighbors. Not to know. Not too distant, no drug dealers and no Gladys. You want to make sure it feels good to that. It feels like a nice neighborhood. And you want to make sure that you check it not just day, because almost everybody goes and looks at properties mid day.

You've got to check it every single part of the day. So you want to make sure that yes, during the morning rush hour, it's nice in the evening rush hour home. It's. And later at night, it doesn't turn into, you know, a drug dealers paradise because some properties do a lot of properties do. As a matter of fact, especially when you get into larger cities, you go in there at night and it's completely different than during the day, especially in warm places like Arizona in the middle of the day.

No, one's outside. No one's outside. Nobody even cares. It's 107. Nobody wants to hang out, but everybody comes out at night when it starts to. So you want to make sure that the property you check it and that location is good. Every single time of the day. Remember to look for parking. Parking is critical.

Your guests are going to have to have somewhere to park and they don't want to have to park down the street or try to find a space. There's nothing worse than not having parking. Now I know that Savio, you live in big cities. I don't care. I want to know that there's parking. And if I have a car, I want to know there's a place close by that I could have my car.

And if I have my little kids, I don't want to be lugging luggage and baby stuff and kids and holding their hands down a busy street way away from parking parking is critical and it means that you can sometimes charge. So look for parking, look for garages. That's actually on my buyers list. If I am going to buy a property, I never buy a property without a garage.

I just don't. It has to have a grudge. If I'm going to buy it, it has a garage, even in Arizona where they have carports, it's got to have a garage. If I have a property that doesn't have a garage, it's not my property. I'm renting. Because my properties have garages. They have to have a garage if I'm buying it, or it has ample parking and we're not overlooking the parking lot ever.

So let's say I'm in a condo situation out in Florida where they don't have any garages in those properties. I make sure the location of. Always overlooks a lagoon that it never backs up to a parking lot. Why? Because when people are getting back from amusement parks, especially at different times of the year, think about this guys when Halloween horror nights is going on, that thing goes till two in the morning, the park is literally open till 2:00 AM and the people get out at 2:00 AM.

Do they go right to their room? No, they do. Now they're hungry. They've been walking around the park. So where do they go? Jimmy John's is open till 3:00 AM. Wawa is like a little gas station that they have while it was open 24 7. You can get sandwiches. Everybody goes out, they eat, they get a little more to drink.

They come back, they're loud in the parking lot, getting all their crap out of their car, you know, whatever they had with them, making sure that they've got their new mugs and their t-shirts. Hey, did you grab that? T-shirt and they're yelling across the parking lot to each other. And if your units are right next to the.

Chances are there's going to be a family who are not going to Halloween horror nights and nights. They're there to go to the amusement parks. And they're one of those families like we're going to be up at the crack of Dawn kids. And as soon as the national Anthem comes on and the gates are open, we're going to be going in.

And that's going to be the guest who gets to hear those people screaming and shouting at 3:00 AM because they're getting up in another three hours. And Wiki and a bunch of kids up and having breakfast and getting them ready so that they can be there by the time the gates open. The thing is, you have got to think about these things ahead of time.

You've got to think about it because if you don't, you're making a huge mistake. You can't fix noise. You're not responsible for it. Yes. But you kind of, are you kind of. When you purchase that property, or you rented that property, you were responsible at that time for making sure it was in a location that was going to be quieter.

So you want to make sure no busy streets, no busy parking lots, no motorcycles, you know, in the yards getting started. No dogs barking. Right? We were already gone over that. The first part of this, but you want no noise. Noise is one of the things, so good neighbor. Parking noise. What about the parking at night?

If you don't have a house with a garage or some type of designated parking, what does the parking situation look like at night? Make sure you test that out because I've been to a lot of places and they look great during the day and you've checked it out and you come back at night. There's no place to park.

Is there designated. I want my people to have a designated parking space. This space is reserved specifically for them. It's critical. It's crucial. It's part of my rituals when I'm looking for things parking. So we make sure that when we buy in certain buildings and certain units, I always say, look, my unit has to be facing the lagoon.

My unit, you know, has to be away. And when I have agents looking for properties, One of the first things I say to them is I will not look at this property. If it's backed up to a main street, I won't even look at it. And so when I get sent the little listings from my agents, one of the first things I do is pull up a map and I pinpoint it and I do a lot, you know, there's, if you go on Zillow, you can pull up the lots and it'll show you the outline of the lot.

And so I look at it, where is it? Where's the closest means? Are there headlights that go right into it, because if there's a bedroom in the front and it's at the end of a street that dead ends into it, then you've got headlights and there's, there's a million different things I look for when I'm looking for properties.

But I can tell you right now, bunch of them, I can tell just by looking at a map. Nope. Not going to look at it. I don't care what the price is. People are like, well, yeah, but you can do this, you can. Sure, sure. But you know, when you lower the price, When you lower the nightly rate for your short term rental, you lower the quality of the people you get.

I've said that on the show a bunch of times. Why? Because it's true guys. It's really, really true. You cannot do that. You don't want to compete for last place. You never ever compete for last place. You don't want to be the Walmart. Because here's the deal. You will just play catch up all the time. You will be working hard.

You'll be writing constant, you know, reviews and answering questions and answer. I mean, you'll be back and forth with these people all the time. And if you're not, then the people you hire, your virtual assistants will, and that is costing you time and money because they can be doing something else. If it was a quiet unit, it wouldn't be having any sort of.

It wouldn't be causing you any problems, correct? Bathrooms. I look for properties with at least one bathroom for every bedroom. Now you can't always get that. That's my ideal. That's what I prefer. Sometimes you're going to have to get a house. That's a three, two, right? So it's got a master bedroom with its own bath.

And then. Uh, bathroom from a hallway and then two other bedrooms that share that bath and that's okay. But here's the deal. Ideally, I want a bathroom for every bedroom, unless I know there's going to be a lot of kids then I don't mind Jack and Joel's and things like that, but for the most part, a bathroom for every bedroom, but here's the deal never, ever, ever buy a property where people are going to have to go through a bedroom to get to a bath.

If they're going to have to share a bathroom, you don't want those bathrooms through something else. When you're buying a property, you're looking for things with strange floor plan that falls into the strange floor plan. I don't buy houses or even rent houses with strange floor plans. It's not good. It never ends up being good.

You want the floor plans to flow? You want the bathrooms to be from a hallway. And you want as many of those bedrooms to be just like their own unique little suites on sweets. So then it's a bathroom and a bedroom altogether, and you never have to worry about the other guests sharing those bathrooms. So just make sure that when you walk in that the flow of the house is nice because people notice that it's not, and you might think, oh, it's kind of quirky, but it will work.

No. You're not looking for something that works. You are legitimately looking for something that people will enjoy. This is their vacation. This is where they are going to spend their time. It can't just work. It has to really work. So it can't just function. You don't want functionality, the hell with functionality.

You don't want those properties, those properties of the properties that the people are. Clearing maybe $500 and they're busting their ass for that $500 to a thousand dollars a month. You want that, or properties than that. That means you want your properties to all have a certain flow to them, have a certain look to them.

And that reminds me of something cleaning. Here's the deal. When you are buying a property, it's easy to go in and fix it. But I am a nut for cleanliness. It helps because when you get your stars, you know, people are rating your property. If your place is in clean, you're going to get low ratings. Your place has to be clean, but not just clean.

It has to be clean elbow. Let's say you go into an older property. How cleanable is this place you look around and the tile and stuff, you can clean it up and you like, I can get rid of this and this and this, but how clean at its cleanest will it. When you buy it, you can go in there and tear up the gross tile and put nice new tile up when you own it, you can fix those crappy baseboards and put newer ones in.

And you're like, oh, that's only a couple hundred dollars upgrade. I can easily do that and put some fresh paint on the walls. That's okay. You can do that when you own it, but when you don't own it and you're renting it, how cleanable is it? If you were to go in there and clean it, would it look clean? Or would it just look okay?

How cleanable is the property? That's actually really, really critical. It's a good question. And it's something you should always think through with the odd floor plans. It's going to be the same thing, those little nooks and crannies. They creep people out, man. They really do. It's like, where the hell does this closet go?

It's like the Winchester house, no Winchester mansion. It's like a staircase to nowhere. You're like, what the hell is this? It's creepy people. Don't like it. If you can't clean it, people don't like it. So make sure that there's no odd floor plans and that it's a nice clean area. People love good common areas too.

And high ceilings, good common areas, high ceilings. I am a nut for high ceilings. If I walk into a house and it's got low ceilings and popcorn ceilings and I don't own it. Oh, I hate. If I own it super easy fix, they just spray it with water, go in there and five minutes later and they can just smooth it all out.

For me. It's a very easy fix when I own the property, but when I don't, nobody likes those ceilings and nobody likes low ceilings. If I get some tall guys in there and they can just stand there with their hand up in the air and touch the ceiling, it is too low. I don't buy properties with low. I don't like old houses with low ceilings.

It's just one of my things, especially when I'm buying now, you might go it's good enough. Or in this area, well, then you deal with it, but I'm just telling you, and these are the things that I do. I want my standards to be better than everyone else's I want, when people walk in, I want there to be a wow factor where they go, wow.

This place is. Wow. This is airy. Oh, feel how openness is. That's what I want. I want people to walk in and have a wow factor and that's if I'm renting it or if I'm buying it, so I don't do it, I just don't do it. It's something I don't do. I don't buy or rent places with low ceilings, so you can make up these rules as you go.

They're just my roles. Another thing I look for, guess what everybody made. It's got to have a good maid's closet area. I know there's a lot of places that are really fun to look at, especially little Casita's when you're renting a one bedroom place. And they'll say, this is great, but it has one closet that is not good.

You have to come up with something else. Now we've been able to do that because we've been able to buy these drawers and put locks on them and use them for the maids to lock up. But whenever you have keys, that's hard. I don't like having keys for hardly anything. I like digital everything because keys tend to get lost.

Keys are just, I mean, they're just a problem waiting to happen. So maids closets, I love those little digital locks. They're like $35 for the indoor ones, so, so easy. And they keep everything locked in there for your maids and they separate them. When you go into a property, look for our. Ah, this closet would be a great maid's closet.

If it's only got one closet, be careful because where are you going to put your stuff? And you want your maids to have their stuff in a place where you can lock it away. Because if it's not locked away, people think is theirs and they just take it and you can't blame them because people are just, that's just how they were raised.

Their mama didn't raise them. Right. That's where my mom would have said their mama didn't raise him. Right. Like he has you're right. They didn't raise them. Right. If it's not yours, you just don't take it, but lock it away because whatever's not locked up. They're going to think they can take, it's absolutely crazy.

People have taken hairdryers and you're like, really like, good. Didn't think that maybe that should stay. I mean, that's why I love those hairdryers that actually screw into the wall. If it's screwed into the wall, there's no denying that it wasn't meant for them to take. You're like, dude, it was screwed into the wall.

Why would you even think that you could have taken that? And the last thing. I do is make sure that I have a grudge. If I'm buying the property, I want a garage, but I like garages in single family homes. Anyway, the reason why is like in Florida, I'm sure you guys have seen a lot of places in Florida.

They'll take and they'll do the floor up really nice and then make it into a game room or they have air hockey or a pool table or Foos ball or something for the kids to play and people. But people also love that when you buy the property. So if you're buying a property, people love having garages. They want to have a place to store their shit.

Americans got a lot of shit. I mean, they've got a lot of stuff that they have. I've got to put my Christmas stuff away and I've got to put this away. So attic storage, I am a storage freak. I love closets. I look for a lot of storage areas, but if I'm buying it, long-term. I might think about the income, but I never use the income from short-term rentals to buy a place.

Anything I buy, I base on a long-term lease. So if the place runs out for 2000 a month for a long-term lease month to month, those are the numbers I'm going to run. I don't care if I can pull 6,000 a month or 7,500 a month. As a short-term rental, that's not what I'm going to buy it because things change.

And I never want to be stuck with a property that I can't afford because something changed. Right. So I want to make sure that I buy the property based on my rentals, based on the rentals in the area, they have it on a bunch of stuff. So actually you'll be able to look up and find out what the rental prices are.

Pretty easy. You can go onto rental.com. You can go on to Zillow and find out what the rent. Everything has a rental price. You you've got to know your areas, but that's what you're going to base a purchase on. If you are buying the property and if you are renting the property, you'll be renting it for that much a month that you don't want to pay more.

You're going to do everything you can to not pay more. You can pay all six months up in advance, right? To get the test, the water. But the thing is you want to make sure that when you're buying a property, that it's got all the things that you want. If you were to have to sell it quickly, let's say the earth shook no more short term rentals are allowed there and everything's up in arms.

You want to make sure that you can cashflow that property easily and that if you have to dump it, it has everything, a great property needs in order to sell quirky properties, don't sell fast guys. They don't. They sit on the market forever and ever. Well, every house in this area has a garage in this one.

Doesn't why did you rent that or buy that house? One of my rules is I never buy a house without a garage. If I'm buying it, it has to have a garage. If it's an, a condo situation where no one has a garage, where is it? It's not backed up to the parking lot. Right. So I make sure that these are rules that I have because my unit's going to sell.

If there's another unit in that condo and one's overlooking the parking lot and mine is overlooking the lagoon whose place is going to sell first, definitely mine. And I can probably sell it at a premium price because it doesn't overlook the parking lot. So just know those things. There are reasons because if you ever have to get out of something and you have to get out of it fast, you want to make sure you can sell that yours is going to be picked for.

Your location is better. If you're backed up to a major street, you're going to be, you know, ding, ding, ding down, power lines, awful. Never, ever be backed up to power lines. Power lines are a big, no, no. Okay. Those are the things I'm going to go over them really quickly again for you. So it's a good neighborhood.

Looks good. Feels good, right? Not just good during the mid day, but location, location, you want to check out the neighbors? The parking. What about at night? Want to make sure it's got ample parking noise, dogs, motorcycles parked in the parking lot busy streets behind them. You want to make sure that you are very aware of the noise bathrooms, optimally one bathroom for each bedroom.

Right. But if you can't do. Just know that that's what you want. And you never want to have a bathroom that somebody has to go through a bedroom to get to. And speaking of that, remember no odd floor plans. Quirky is fun for somebody else. It's not fun. When you have rental properties or real estate, you don't want anything quirky.

The house doesn't have any fungus way or walk through it. And you're going, where the hell are we going? Where is that other room? This is like a big puzzle piece. It's like they added onto the house here and added on there and added. And just because it's got five bedrooms in an area where you need more bedrooms, you're like, oh, this is great.

It has five bedrooms. And then you get in there and you're like, look, this house has no flow to it. I need a house that was specifically built to have five bedrooms so that everything flows easy. That is not a big, giant puzzle when people get in there because people don't like that. They liked their common areas.

They like their rooms to flow. They like everybody to go to their. And then come back and join together. And if it doesn't have a flow to it, it just doesn't. Now there are weird ecentric little places, and sometimes those are quite nice and you can do eccentric, but watch the floor plans also watch the stairs.

If the stairs are too narrow or don't have a long enough. So that means you want to make sure that your foot fits across the whole part of the floor. You don't want people having to use their tippy toes to go upstairs because stairs are short, they'll fall easier. When they're coming down, they need to be able to plant their feet correctly.

As they're coming down the steps with their bags and stuff, you've got to make sure that your stairs are widening. And that the landings and risers are a good size so that it has the perfect, wonderful flow of a staircase, but there's nothing worse than having little short, tiny steps where people can just trip over each other fall and hurt themselves on your property.

Not good. You want good common space. You want no low ceilings. So you want nice high ceilings, no popcorn. Unless you own it. If you own it, you can fix popcorn ceilings, rather inexpensively. Some things are pretty easy to fix. Now, remember whenever you buy a property, especially you may have to someday flip that property and sell it.

So hopefully you're going to be able to hold it for a long time. And if you buy correctly in the beginning, you're going to avoid all these challenges. And if you rent correctly in the beginning, again, you're avoiding a lot of. Low ceilings suck. And so I'm very, very picky. If I can't stand the ceiling hype myself, then I don't go there.

It's like, Nope, Nope. Not going there. If there's weirdness about it. If I think something's weird, somebody else is definitely going to think it's weird. And I want things to sell quickly. I like the flow to be right. I liked the ceiling height to be right. I like when I walk in for everything to feel good about that.

And if it doesn't right away, I just say, no, I say no about a lot more houses than I say yes to. And that's okay. When you start investing in real estate and you start to buy these properties, be picky, you will go through more properties and say no to them than you will say, yes, you will get more nos to the offers that you make.

Then you will get yeses. If you get yeses to all your offers, your offers are way too. Because you should initially always get a no, that means you came in low enough, ask Maria. She'll tell you. We had Maria Giordano on before and she knows if I think my price is low, I go in and offer a little bit lower.

It's like, I'm like, that's a low offer until I'm almost embarrassed to give it. That's when I know my offer is low enough. It's like my, my cash offer anyways. It's like, here's how I know it's low enough. It's pretty embarrassing. Oh, it'd be almost embarrassed to do it, but that's why, that's why we can do that.

We have actually a bunch of other offers that we do and we'll teach you that later, but make sure you're looking for these things and make sure that you're not, here's the feeling you want to avoid when you're purchasing and renting properties. This is the only one. If I don't get this, ah, you don't want that feeling guys because there are a million properties out there.

And you've got the chances and the opportunities to pick the right ones, pick the right ones. Not every property is for you. And if you lose out on a property, there will be more always know that you will get the right properties, that the right properties will come to. You make that one of your affirmations.

I only rent the properties that are right for me. I only buy the properties that are right for me and my guests. That's a great affirmation to have. Because you don't want anything else to happen. You want to maid's closet and you want it clean or easy to clean when it is cleaned. You wanted to look.

Easy to do if you own it, because you can do a lot of rehab and a lot of repainting and moving things and changing things out, not so easy to do when you're renting an old place that just looks dirty, even when it's clean. Not good. You want it to look clean when it is clean? Okay. I know that sounds weird.

Just make sure it looks clean and if you're buying it, you need a garage. You have to have a garage. If it's a house, if it's condo, it's a good location. Meaning it overlooks something nice to look at and not a major freeway or a parking lot. Remember we don't buy, backed up to any kind of noise ever. We don't rent backed up to any kind of noise.

Thanks so much for everybody who came and joined the membership group, we're going to shut it down again until next year, probably the end of spring, beginning of summer, we're going to be working on the members that we have. If you're on our mailing list. When we go through our first few weeks, things are jolted around a lot of times, people, I don't know how it happens, but they'll buy twice.

So we kind of wiggle those around. So a lot of times, if you're on our mailing list, we might have a shotgun. Where we just open it up for an hour or two or a day or two, and allow you into the membership, but only for people on our mailing list, not saying that it's going to happen just in case it does just so you know, being on the mailing list does.

And there's some new stuff on our website, two new freebies that we gave away. We had the old ones up there for a while, and I guess everybody has your, another house rolls and they're cleaning stuff. But a lot of people are asking us about questions that we ask the cleaning companies. So we put that in there as a nice little giveaway.

There's some questions that you can ask when you're hiring a cleaning. That we've put on there and a couple of new things are coming out. So just keep your eye on the website. Remember that we always have a lot of great articles that come out. Thanks so much for listening next week on our replays, we're going to talk about family friendly stays.

And I think you'll like that one December is my favorite month. So I wanted to have a lot of positive, positive. I remember that on Monday, we've got our newest episodes plain live, so make sure you're ready for them to drop at midnight on Monday. We'll talk to you soon.