Ground Ops 101: Building Your Dream Team for your Short-Term Rental
Why Every Short-Term Rental Owner Needs a Dream Team
Managing a short-term rental involves so many moving parts and variables, it can sometimes be difficult to keep up with everything you need to be on top of when you’re doing it all on your own.
But one essential part of short-term rental management is your ground operations team. These are the people that you trust to get the job done when your property needs it. Building your dream operations team isn’t an easy task, but we’re here to provide a little bit of insider knowledge to help you achieve your short-term rental goals.
The Essentials of a Stellar Ground Operations Team
Operations are not just about providing top-notch cleaning services or repairing damages when your property begins to show a little wear and tear. Instead, your team on the ground should be your first point of contact when it comes to anything happening with your property, and that means that you need people that you can rely upon when the time comes.
For LocalVR, our ground operations teams are the cornerstone of the property management services we provide to our clients. From guest vetting to post-checkout inspections to fast owner communication, here are a few of the things we find important when it comes to establishing the best operations team in our industry today.
The Importance of Guest Vetting
We’ve touched upon this before in one of our other blogs specifically about the subject, but the importance of guest vetting cannot be overstated. Prioritizing the long-term value of your property by allowing the best of guests to enter is one essential service that your ground operations team should provide you.
When you’re building your dream operations team, try to keep in mind the people that will best look after your property and get to know its specific needs. With a stellar team at your disposal, you won’t have to lift a finger to ensure that only high-quality guests are able to book stays.
That’s why LocalVR has a three-tiered screening process for guests, always with an eye towards preserving the value of your real estate investment by preventing bad guests from ever setting foot onto our properties.
Your Teams Should Provide Services from Cleaning to Thorough Inspections
Another thing to keep in mind when building your dream operations team is that they should provide you with a full variety of services to cover your bases. This should always include cleaning services as well as routine property inspections to prevent damages and wear and tear from bringing down your property’s value.
In LocalVR’s case, we built an app that helps our inspectors do quality checks. It is photo- based and most inspections occur after each and every guest checkout to ensure that the property is kept in its most ideal pre-rental condition. Not only does this prevent damages from going unnoticed, but it also helps to keep guests accountable for any damages that they cause.
Our team members are able to become familiar with the properties that they oversee. They can then give back to owners by mentioning any oversights or quickly communicating any issues that might arise.
Communication with Owners and your Team
Another aspect to consider when you’re looking to build your dream operations team is the vital importance of constant communication between you, your owners, and your team. No team works well without every member working together.
Having a team on the ground that is local to your area allows you to take care of things (like a burnt light bulb or a leaking kitchen sink) without ever having to set foot on the property.
With LocalVR, you’ll find our guest services team boasts a response time of less than thirty minutes. We also provide incentives to our ground ops team when they have to venture out in bad weather, allowing them to pass on better services to the guests that stay at our properties.
LocalVR’s Ground Operations Dream Team
Dealing with the constantly changing variables of maintenance, cleaning, and damage repair and prevention can get in the way of your passive income dreams, which is why it is so important to outsource these jobs to people that you can rely upon.
When it comes to ground operations, LocalVR’s own dream team works relentlessly to ensure that both our guests and owners are always happy with the state of the properties that they are staying in. We want to do more than just provide property management services–we want every guest to feel at home when they are spending a night at one of our short-term rentals and every owner to feel their property is in good hands.