Welcome to the dynamic world of real estate investing, where optimizing your rental occupancy is key to realizing your investment's full potential. Whether you're a seasoned landlord or new to the game, ensuring consistent occupancy requires strategic planning and effective tools. In this guide, we'll dive into actionable strategies to boost your rental occupancy rates, emphasizing leveraging the Furnished Finder calendar. Plus, we'll provide helpful links to Furnished Finder (opens in new tab) and our latest podcast episode for further insights and resources.
The importance of high occupancy rates
In real estate investing, maintaining high occupancy rates is essential. Empty properties represent lost income, so keeping your units filled should be a top priority. Whether you manage a single unit or a portfolio of monthly (midterm) rentals, thoughtful strategies can greatly impact your bottom line.
Regularly update and review your listings
Take time to see your listing from a tenant's perspective on Furnished Finder. Ensure your information is current, including amenities, utilities, and photos. A well-maintained property can significantly enhance your property's appeal.
Don’t miss out due to pets or fees
It's common for landlords to hesitate when it comes to accepting pets. However, embracing pet-friendly policies can significantly broaden your rental appeal. Around 30% of booking inquiries include a pet. Consider flexible pet deposits or finding creative ways to accommodate pets without compromising your property’s integrity.
Additionally, avoid pricing yourself out of the market with high fees. Consider what similar properties charge and adjust accordingly, ensuring potential tenants see your property as affordable yet valuable.
Enhance your tenant communication
Effective communication is crucial.
Respond promptly to inquiries.
Personalize your responses to show professionalism and genuine interest.
Clearly outline your booking processes and policies to manage expectations and build trust with potential tenants.
Utilize tools like the Furnished Finder message templates to streamline and standardize your communication, allowing you to maintain consistency while saving time.
Smart availability and flexibility
One of the most effective ways to ensure consistent occupancy rates is by maintaining smart availability on your calendar. Be open to various booking timelines and resist the temptation to overcommit far into the future unless there's a clear advantage. Remaining flexible with your leasing terms can help attract a wider range of renters, from travel professionals to digital nomads.
Furnished Finder calendar: your key to seamless management
Leveraging the Furnished Finder calendar can simplify how you manage bookings, block dates, and improve the visibility of your property in tenant searches. Keeping your calendar updated not only boosts your listing's search performance but also signals to potential tenants that you're an attentive and professional landlord.
Strategic use of short-term and midterm rentals
Balancing short-term and midterm rentals can maximize occupancy throughout the year. Use short-term rentals to fill gaps or during peak seasons, ensuring your property remains occupied as much as possible.
Linking with other platforms
Thanks to Furnished Finder's integration capabilities, linking your calendar with platforms like Airbnb and VRBO can help manage multiple listings effortlessly. Just remember, while these platforms import bookings to block dates in Furnished Finder, the reverse isn’t yet automated, so you’ll need to manage availability manually on those platforms.
Conclusion
Implement these strategies to consistently fill your rentals, optimize your occupancy rates, and reap the benefits of a lucrative real estate investment. To explore more resources and insights, tune into Furnished Finder’s podcast episode (opens in new tab) on this topic. For additional tools and support in managing your properties or to get started, visit FurnishedFinder.com (opens in new tab).
By applying these expert tips and leveraging the powerful tools available, you can elevate your rental business to new heights. Remember, the key to success lies in proactive management and strategic thinking. Happy investing!
Episode 138 Transcript
Welcome to The Landlord Diaries, where we talk about midterm rentals and the opportunities behind them. We'll share landlord stories, talk about maximizing investment potential, and discuss how to live the very best landlord life. This podcast is proudly brought to you by Furnished Finder, the leader and largest online marketplace for midterm rentals.
Remember to like and subscribe if you enjoy our content. Hey guys. Welcome back to The Landlord Diaries. Thank you so much for joining us. Again. We have one of those unique episodes where it's just Katie and I coaching you on one of our fantastic internal tools, which is our calendar. So we're gonna walk you through everything calendar.
But what we haven't done in a while is taken the opportunity to remind you of why Katie and I are the furnish funder podcast host, because we're. In the trenches with you guys. We are midterm rental operators ourselves. So quick reminder, Kelly Bailey here. I've been a host on Furnished Finder for four years and eight months now, and we have five midterm rentals that we own, that we've bought during that time period.
Four of them are three bedroom, two bath homes. One of them is a two bedroom, two bath home, and two of them are midterm rental ADUs in the backyard of w. Two of those homes. And then we have one that is a co-host listing. So just some fun facts. I went ahead and researched from 2024 how our midterm rental portfolio did.
We had over 95% occupancy for. All of our properties and five of them with a hundred percent occupancy. Four of my eight rentals had a hundred percent of their bookings from Furnished Finder in 2024, and the rest were around a 50 50 split between Furnished Finder and Airbnb. There's a ton of opportunity in this market and I just wanted to challenge you.
Think outside the box. Maybe you have a room that you want to add or an a DU in the backyard or an unused room that you wanna turn into a rental. We, our two ADUs, one of 'em is 300 square feet and it has no washer dryer, no dishwasher. It's a small space and it did fantastic in 2024. So that's my story.
Katie, let's hear your midterm rental furnished rental story. All right. I really got into the midterm furnished rentals. After starting working at Furnished Finder. It opened my eyes. I was interested in real estate. We had one long-term rental that was our old house that we lived in as a family, and then all of a sudden I was like, okay, I could do this.
Monthly furnish rental thing like this is a great balance between, the cash flow and the income we wanted and not having to do the short term rental thing with the turnovers all of the time. So we have currently, when I say we, me and my family, we have 13 midterm rentals. A mixture of purchased and arbitrage where we work with partners.
So it's been a really great little family business for us. I work, get to work with my mom and my brother, and my sister and my husband on it. It's something that we all hope can be something that turns generational. But yeah we've also had fantastic occupancy and a strong calendar is a really big part of that.
So that's why we are here today is to talk about calendar, because a calendar management and strategy is just. It's a really big component of your success with monthly furnished rentals. And at Furnished Finder we recognize that and we know that the number one request that we have heard from landlords over the past few years has been, can you please give me a more sophisticated calendar?
Can you please gimme a calendar that I can block dates, that I can mark future reservations? And we heard you and we are so excited to announce that we have a brand new calendar. It is here. So now on this episode, we're gonna talk about two things. First of all, how to use the calendar within Furnished Finder, why it matters, but then also what are some strategies that you can use as a midterm rental landlord to keep your occupancy full?
Because that's what we all want at the end of the day. So a couple things for keeping your calendar optimized. If your calendar isn't up to date, why does that matter? Because tenants can't find you. A guest move-in date is one of the primary search methods and sort features on the Furnished Finder map, and your property will appear in more search results.
If you wanna match with more tenants, make sure that you are, have a strong calendar management system. And guess what? It's not complicated. Furnished Finder makes it very easy. So let's get into the, how it works. What are the key features of the calendar and how simple it is. Katie. Yeah, guys, an accurate calendar is like turning on your porch light and telling potential renters that you are like open and ready to host them.
So it's just, it's huge. Let's talk about it like you said, Kelly. In the past our calendar was very simplistic. It was, tell us when you're available. Select the date that your property is available. But what we heard from you landlords is that you might have dates that are blocked in the future.
You might have future reservations coming up and we can't quite put it so simply as tell us your availability date. So we have reworked the calendar but I think it is still simplistic and manageable, but in a much more functional way. So there's two aspects of your calendar. First thing is you're gonna tell us your minimum.
Stay. We always recommend a 30 day or one month minimum stay, but sometimes you might have an HOA or regulations in your area or just your preference that makes it so you have a three month minimum stay or a six month minimum stay. So you're gonna enter that right on your calendar page. Then you're gonna enter in any bookings or dates that you have where your property is already spoken for.
Okay. Maybe that is actually a reservation that you have from a furnish find or traveler. Maybe that is when you have family in town. Maybe it's when you're doing schedule and maintenance that might be a little bit invasive, whatever it is, where your property is not available. You tell us those two things and we are gonna figure out when your property is available automatically and publish that on your listing.
A couple quick tips here guys. If, first of all, if you have a tenant in your property right now, go ahead, hop in your calendar and add their stay, right? Just add it as of today and then mark their move out date. You can always change their move out date later if they extend or they change as midterm rental tenants often do.
The other thing is don't worry about putting things on there that aren't. Gonna make your property unavailable. You only wanna add things to your Furnished Finder calendar if they're gonna make your property unavailable to a tenant, because we're gonna adjust your availability based off of that. So just a reminder, it's so simple.
All you need to do is put on your minimum stay and what dates are not available. So I've got an example personally from my rentals. We had a guy that said he was a contractor and was just gonna be with us for a couple months, but didn't know how long the project was going to be. He ended up staying with us for over a year.
So what I do is I just take that block date as he gives me the new move out date. I update that block date. Then I just ask for a 30 day notice. Now I have that final date that I'm ready to start taking reservations. And if someone inquired during the process, it's okay. I can circle back to him and ask, Hey, how's your stay going?
I've got an interested party. Are you planning to extend? And that helps solidify your extensions earlier sometimes. We really wanna keep the flexibility open for landlords because we know that you run your businesses in different ways. Some tenants extend, they often do. Some tenants like month to month, some more have a set stay.
So we wanna keep this flexible. The most important thing is really to ensure that whatever you have on your calendar is as accurate and up to date as possible. That is going to help us match you with the. Best leads possible and ensure that these travelers that reach out to you via direct message on Furnished Finder or booking request or phone are the best fits for you.
So that's just, it's the first thing, right? Are you available for my dates? We wanna make sure that we're getting everybody accurate information to start off on the right foot. Yep. The last thing that we have implemented with the. New calendar is a linking system with Airbnb and VRBO. We know a lot of people post their properties on multiple sites.
I think that's fantastic, right? No harm in that. Just, wherever you can get your travelers is great. Just one thing to know is when you go through this process, it is a linking process. So what it's gonna do on your Furnished Finder calendar is, let's say you get a short-term rental booking on Airbnb over the July 4th weekend, right?
And you do maybe some short-term rentals and some mid-term rentals. If you get a booking on your Airbnb calendar and you have linked the two, it's gonna automatically block those dates on your furnished finder calendar to try to remove that step from your workflow for you. Now, what it won't do. If you insert a booking or a blocked date on your Furnished Finder calendar, it's not gonna push it to your Airbnb calendar.
We wanna make sure that we're not creating any issues, we're not creating any redundancies. So this is something that we are looking to explore in the future. However, right now it truly is an import. Of those bookings from Airbnb and VRBO via an IAL link. Now in the future we might be able to integrate with other systems and property management platforms as well, but right now we just wanna focus on making sure everything is working fantastically.
So we have tested those two platforms. And feel really good about you guys linking your listings there, if that is something that fits your business. Today's episode is proudly sponsored by Furnished Finder, the ultimate platform for hassle-free midterm rentals. Whether you're a seasoned landlord.
Or just getting started. Furnished Finder has everything you need to find your next tenant. With Furnished Finder, you can say goodbye to booking fees, markups, and commissions, and hello to Direct bookings. If you are ready to experience all the benefits renting your property for 30 days or more, head over to furnished finder.com (opens in new tab) where you can list your property for one low annual price.
We make it easy to get started.
The nice thing about Furnished Finder is you typically have four bookings a year. 'cause we've got a 93 day average stay, so it's super easy to add your. Property manually to a property management system. So don't let that slow you down. So next conversation, that's a big one. Common scheduling mistakes that you, that can affect your bookings and occupancy.
Now that you know how to work the calendar, let's make sure you know what not to do. So forgetting to add or update a block date, that's an important one. So add it to your routine. Whatever your practices are. What I do is. After I collect the have the lease signed, we collect all the move-in fees. Now it's time for me to go to Furnished Finder and update my calendar.
So that's how I do it. Katie, what's the next step in common? Scheduling mistakes. We wanna make sure that everybody knows to really resist the temptation to hide your listing. I have talked to so many landlords who say I have a six month booking right now, so I've hidden my listing. And you can do this from the calendar page.
However, I want everybody to just not touch that button unless you really have to. Okay. Because you don't know who is going to reach out to you and say, Hey, I'm looking for somewhere six months from now. Or a parent who's saying, my, my son or daughter is gonna be a grad student, or is gonna be doing an internship, and I'm trying to get a handle on the housing before it gets competitive.
Or maybe someone reaches out to you and says, Hey, I'm a corporate housing provider and I love your property. I see it's unavailable, but can I keep you on my list? Furnished Finder is about these relationships, and it's about leads and it's about communication. So when you hide your listing, you are taking yourself off the table.
So update your calendar, keep your property visible. Please. I'm like, I'm, I see so many people do it, and I just, it just it's taking yourself out of the running for even those relationships to start or for someone to, maybe they can't stay at your property now, but it's a travel nurse and they favorited your property and they meet another travel nurse in six months.
And they're looking in the same spot because they're coming into the hospital or facility and they say, oh, you know what? I couldn't stay this place, but I really liked this listing. Pass it on. Keep yourself out there. That's a fantastic example. I love that. So the last one for common scheduling mistakes is going to be letting your listing expire when you have a longer booking.
We already know Furnished Finder is a great value. It's so minimal what you pay compared to your potential income on Furnished Finder. It actually we've figured out is 55. Times your investment is the potential you have on your return with Furnished Finder. So why do you want to go ahead and take a six month booking and then keep your listing active versus letting it expire?
Is your tenure on Furnished Finder is tied to that? Your professionalism when someone is looking at your properties and they see some are available. Some aren't available. It gets a little confusing. So if they see, oh, Kelly has eight midterm rentals, she's got five star reviews, she does, this is who I wanna stay with.
It shows that professionalism by keeping your listing live and then access to those landlord tools for people searching for the future that want to book with you. Yep. And even if you only have the one property, right? Even if you only have one property and you're thinking if my property's.
Full for the next, since six months, and my listing expires in two weeks, why would I keep paying for the next six months? There's so many reasons. There's so many reasons. Let's say Kelly and I are in the same market, and I get a lead and I say, ah, actually, you know what? I'm full for a while, but I know Kelly is a great landlord, has a comparable property.
Let me send you. To them, right? And then Kelly is bound to return the favor. It's those relationships. Midterm rentals are a relationship process. You might get a housing specialist that reaches out to you, and same thing you say, my property is not available right now, but I would love it if you kept me on your list.
You have the opportunity to keep developing those things and keep developing your business. And even if you have one rental, you have a business. So it just, it. It keeps you moving yourself forward and advancing yourself. Guys that's huge. That's huge. I see so many landlords just reduce their potential by hiding their listing or letting their listing lapse.
Okay, now we get it. We get to get into the strategy part. We've spent this first half talking about really like the tactics of how do you, man, how do you manage this? Brand new calendar functionality that we've made, right? What are the best practices? What do you need to make sure you do and don't do?
And now we get to talk a little bit more high level about let's talk about how you're just gonna keep your calendar full, right? Because as landlords, we want a full calendar. If we have vacant properties, we are not doing what we want to be doing. So let's talk about this. We've got some quick strategies we're gonna roll through.
And guys, if you have a notebook or you wanna open the notes app on your phone, this is the time. 'cause this is where you're gonna get some really good actionable steps on this strategy. So let's pivot here. First thing is to have smart availability. Tell me what you think about this. Yeah, smarter avail.
Availability is super important. Try to keep your calendar as open as possible, so that's easy. Just don't block it unless there is a booking or something that you have to shut down the property for. Think carefully when considering future reservations. I just had a friend ask me, she said, Hey, I, I don't have my, I have my next availability, but I have someone inquiring about a potential stay in December of next year. It's ooh, you could say yes because you know it is a booking for three months or so, but. If you say, Hey, let's touch base let's stay in touch and touch base as it gets closer to those dates now you have the opportunity to book now, see how long that current guest is going to stay for, and then circle back to that person that is interested in December of next year.
Because reminder, my properties from 20 24, 5 of them are rented for over a year. So you get long bookings. Midterm rentals have a very short crystal ball period, right? And you want to apply that to your calendars. If you accept a booking for two months from now you have to find a tenant who's only looking for a two month.
Stay. So just be careful what you lock yourself into and make sure that whatever strategy you land on there fits well with you. My travelers tend to stay a little bit less or a little bit shorter time, at least not a year like Kelly. But it's still important that you go, oh, let's weigh the pros and conser and just communicate with the say, hey, I don't usually book that far out.
Are you comfortable waiting and let them know? Usually people are looking for properties about a month in advance. So I know you might be thinking you need to plan for six months from now, but if you're comfortable waiting, like there's, we should be able to find you a place to be. Okay.
And also remember obviously that lease extensions are common. Okay. Flexibility. I wanna talk about making sure that you're not. You're not missing out on bookings that could be very good for your property. The first thing here is pets. I see. I know a lot of landlords who, the second that I mentioned do you are you open to pets?
Do you allow pets? I can literally see their blood pressure rise. I get it. Pets have a bad reputation in rentals for being destructive. However, we let you take a pet fee or a pet deposit or you could ask questions about the pet, right? What are your pet's habits? Does it go outside? I actually had a tenant re reach out to me very recently, and she was like, I want my husband to come visit me probably about half the time, but when we're all together, we have four dogs.
And my gut was like, that's too many dogs. But then I'm like wait a minute. Tell me more what your dog's lives look like. Do you have four one-year-old border colies, or do we have some seniors who just nap all day? Tell me a little bit more. But we allow you to make those decisions.
So I just want everybody to feel really empowered. And feel like you don't have to exclude yourself right away. Another thing here is out feeing yourself, right? The average non-refundable deposit on furnished finder is $500. For non-refundable, the average de refundable is a thousand dollars. You guys, that is a lot.
That is a lot. Make sure you are not out, out feeing yourself. Fees are very expensive for midterm travelers. And yes, you want yourself covered. You have a business to run, but make sure that you are not taking yourself out of the running as soon as someone looks at your deposits and fees. Hey landlords.
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Visit Key http://check.com to unlock the power of stress-free property management and take your rental business to new heights. So another tip of how to maximize your bookings and your occupancy is to make sure and preview your listing through the eyes of a traveler. That's one of the first things I do when I add a listing.
It's also one of the first things I do when I'm coming up within 30 to 60 days of my next availability. So why is this so important? There's over 4 million housing searches and 20 million site visits per month. So you wanna keep your listing in tip top shape, and that is taken care of in a couple ways.
You wanna make sure that all the details are filled out on your listing. Walk through it, make sure your main photo and all of your photos are there. Make sure you're capturing the full idea of what your property has to offer. Complete your landlord profile to build rapport with those tenants that wanna I like the property, but who's my landlord?
Can I, am I gonna have a good stay? Complete that landlord profile and help them out? Utilities and wifi, it's expected that they're included in a midterm rental. So if that's not what you're offering, you need to make sure and communicate that well in your description. Any amenities. That need to be highlighted better, such as a washer dryer, internet speed parking.
Make sure all of that is in your listing. Anything you wanna add, Katie? This is like looking in a mirror after you get dressed to me, and it always surprises me how many landlords don't. Look at their listing where, I'll meet them at a conference or a meetup and they'll ask me a question and I'm like, okay, cool.
Let's pull up your listing. And they're like, oh no, I didn't know that was my cover photo. Or, oh wait, I do have wifi and it's not showing I have wifi. This is literally like. You get dressed and then you know you're getting ready for a date or the night out, whatever it is, take a look in the mirror and make sure that your listing looks like what you want it to look like.
And I think this is particularly important to look at your listing through the eyes of the traveler type that you are trying to accommodate. There are certain properties, I know Kelly has a lot of properties that could suit anyone from a travel medical professional. All the way through a digital nomad or corporate traveler or a snowbird, hers are very versatile.
Mine are a little bit more niche where some of them are studios right by the hospital where I'm really going after those medical professionals or things like that. Then I wanna look at it not as Katie, but I wanna look at it as a traveling medical provider. Do you have the things that I'm looking for?
And if not is that reflected in the price or whatnot, right? So just take the, take them a minute and look at that through your eyes and make sure you are really, your listing is reflecting what you want it to reflect. I don't know about you, Katie, but I actually changed mine pretty frequently.
I was like, oh wow. It still says that I need to update it. So it's always good to review your listing throughout the year, especially when you have an availability coming up. Yeah, it's an art, not a science. And the listing performance panel, if you guys have not discovered the Listing Performance panel, it is also brand new.
It's right on your landlord dashboard and it's gonna give you so much amazing data. It's it's a business owner's dream, right? Because you can see how many views you've gotten, how many favorites, how many booking requests, how many contacts. It's gonna show you so much so you can play with things.
You can try a different photo and see if your numbers go up. Try a different headline, move your price around and just see how your numbers fluctuate. That was a really exciting update we made earlier this year. So we have two more to cover in how to maximize your bookings and occupancy with your calendar strategies and communication habits is one of those.
So when you have someone that says, Hey, I'm interested, how quickly are you responding to them? Do they have the opportunity to call you or did you decide not to provide your phone number? Did you say, yeah, it's available, or did you say. I'm a five star host on Furnished Finder. I have eight midterm rentals.
I would love the opportunity to host you. What questions do you have about the property? Make it more personalized so that they have that connection and say, oh, this is a professional landlord. I wanna connect with Katie, anything you wanna add to this section? Make sure you're utilizing the Furnished Finder message templates, if that's something that's helpful for you.
You can spend some time crafting how you really want your reply to be, and then you can save it as a template and then also communicate what your booking process looks like so you're being transparent. And let them know, Hey, do you have any questions? If not, I'd love to get started securing the property for you.
I go through a tenant screening and then we do a digital lease, and I have you, pay the security deposit online or whatever your process is. Reminder that we have all these furnished finder landlord tools and key check to help you with that. But communicate that, right? Let everybody know what's gonna happen here if they move forward.
And lastly for this section a lot of midterm rental, monthly furnished rental operators choose to only do midterm rental because short term can be stressful, but there are also many of us that choose to embrace both midterm and short term. But it doesn't work great to just. See which strategy works out because you'll get a lot of shortterm rental bookings in random spots that prevent you from getting a midterm rental.
So the two strategies we recommend, if you wanna try it, is to fill the gaps with short-term rentals, or turn on the short-term rentals in prime season and turn them off so that you can have midterm rentals the rest of the year. I think that's perfect, right? You guys, you can't do short-term rental and midterm rental just willy-nilly and see how your calendar fills up.
You'll just have short-term rentals, right? Because you'll have a three month gap, and then you'll have a two day booking that'll take up that space for a midterm rental. So just be really thoughtful about this. It's a wonderful, great strategy, especially for those people in seasonal markets. But just make sure you put some thought into that and have a strategy that goes towards it.
All right. I think this was fantastic. I really wanted to spend some time and make sure that everybody not only understands, what's changed in our Furnished Finder calendar and why it is so important and how to use it, but also just some strategies if you feel like you wanna raise your occupancy or you're looking for, okay, how else can I get people in the door?
Or how can I up my game? We've given some really good tactics here and things that you can implement right away. There's nothing holding you back from starting these things, so I would just encourage everybody to get started. Pick one or two things that you wanna implement in your business today and see what you can do to get going with them.
Because the best course of action to increase your occupancy is to take. That action. So reminder, we have a ton of content out there for you to improve your midterm rental business. So make sure you're tuned into The Landlord Diaries Channel on YouTube the Furnished Finder channel. Instagram, Facebook we have our Facebook group of over 140,000 members that you can ask any question you'd like on there and get a ton of responses.
So stay tuned to all of our channels, and especially email. We put a lot of important features and new product of updates in our emails. So thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe and comment. Share this episode with a friend and we'll catch you again next. Time. Bye everybody.