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- [00:00]
A
What's going on, everyone?
- [00:01]
B
Welcome to Real Talk Real Estate. This is the David Green Show. I'm David Green and I'm here today with Arthur Kolker, the owner of Stay Fi, a short term rental supportive business, fascinating model, really cool person. He's here today to talk about what you can do to improve your business. A very difficult market, and I am thrilled to have him. Arthur, welcome to the show.
- [00:26]
A
Yeah, thanks for having me, David.
- [00:27]
B
No, thank you. I'm sure you're a very busy man running companies. I know exactly how that goes. Especially at a time when real estate in general is struggling, it is hard to make a dollar in today's market. So I appreciate you taking some time to be here. Can you just take a brief minute to introduce yourself, tell us about your company and why you started it?
- [00:47]
A
Yeah. So I started stay back in 2018, and my background was originally in marketing consulting. So I was being hired by large short term rental property managers to help them develop independent brands and break free from the big OTAs like Airbnb and VRBO. And so when I was working with these businesses, I realized one of the biggest gaps that they had is that they had no ability to access guest data. So, as I'm sure you know, Airbnb doesn't share things like emails with you of guests now. It doesn't even share phone numbers with you. So. So it's very hard to retarget the people that stay and love your properties to get them to come back and book directly for the next day. So that was the big challenge that I discovered in that experience. And so I developed stayi originally to address that. So we took a technology that I'm sure everyone's familiar with in hotels, in coffee shops and airports, where when you join the WI fi, we have this captive portal where you log in and have to provide your name, email, phone number, other information. We were the first company to take that and bring that into short term rentals.
- [01:54]
B
So.
- [01:54]
A
So that means when you have a group of adults or just a family or friends staying in your property, you can not only collect emails from the booker, but now you can collect data from the entire reservation. And then now in Stayfi, we also have the ability to remarket to all those guests. So over time, people that use StayFi, they collect more and more guest data of all the people that love and stay in their properties, and then they can educate all of them about why they should book direct for their next day and therefore, over time lower their dependency on OTAs like Airbnb. And build up their direct channel to be a robust part of their business, which is vital for any short term rental operator that wants to become more profitable over time.
- [02:35]
B
Do you mind sharing a little bit about what's going on with the online travel agencies, the OTAs that you mentioned, and why this is so important, particularly in today's climate?
- [02:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, obviously Airbnb is the increasingly dominant player in the short term rental booking space. So over the past few years we've seen vrbo, which is owned by Expedia, their share of the market has continued to decline. Direct booking as a share of the overall bookings continues to decline. And Airbnb is just becoming increasingly dominant. And as they become increasingly dominant, they have more market power to exert their rules and control over all of the operators that use the platform, which makes total sense because they are a publicly traded company and they are, number one goal is to benefit their shareholders. Right. So they are doing their job to extract the most money that they can out of of operators and to keep guest booking on their platform and not going anywhere else. So recently they change their fee commission rules, which was kind of a long time coming, which many people expected to now where they are doing a host only fee of 15 and a half percent, so guests no longer see any fees on their end. All the fees are eaten up by the operators, which means that if you want to maintain your same level of revenue on Airbnb, you have to upmark your rates by about 18% to take account for that 15 and a half percent they're taking from you. And then they've also instituted new rules which make it very hard or potentially against platform policies to collect guest data through Airbnb. So you cannot ask guests for their email, for their phone number through Airbnb messaging because they do not want you then circumventing Airbnb and asking those people to come to your website and book directly. So they really clamped down on the messaging within Airbnb and of course they're going to extract as much money they can as they can from their operators because their stock price has not been performing the best. And so they obviously need to juice growth as much as they can.
- [04:35]
B
All right, let's sum some of this stuff up, because that's really good information. The first thing is that Airbnb is the dominant online travel agency. So when we talk about OTAs, we're mainly talking about Airbnb. Do you happen to know a percentage of what they have in the market? I don't know.
- [04:49]
A
Depends on the market, but anywhere from like 60 to 80%. Yeah.
- [04:52]
B
That's massive. Right, so everyone else together is somewhere between 20 to 40%. And Airbnb is getting all the rest of it. They're a publicly traded company and so they have to be loyal to their stockholders or the shareholders. Now the market's down, people aren't traveling as often and they're not paying as much, which means Airbnb is making less money. It seems incredibly foolish to me. I don't understand it, other than just a massive arrogance that they feel like they can get away with this, but because their share prices are going lower, because their profits down, they've responded by saying, we're going to tax the host more. We are going to take more money from the host, not the guest, in an effort to try and get the guests to travel more often. This is my all by assumption. I haven't talked to Airbnb and they're thinking, well, if the guest doesn't pay as much, they'll travel more and so we can try to make up some of our revenue. The problem with this is the hosts themselves are also struggling. And we're not publicly traded companies that can raise money through stocks. So you've got these like, beat down hosts that are barely making ends meet. A lot of them are losing money every month. And if they went big in this, they're losing a lot of money. And now they're being told you're going to make even less money, which typically means the host has to increase their price. This is the brilliance of what, how terrible this is for hosts. So the host increases their price to make up for the 15 and a half percent, which means that the guest is paying more and the host is paying that money back to Airbnb. But it's a net equal for the guest. They're not actually getting a cheaper trip because the host has to respond. And then Airbnb just collects more money.
- [06:32]
A
Yes. And of course, Airbnb, if you can think about it, they are morphing into a more traditional Ota. So if you look at like, OTAs in general, in terms of like hotel booking, flight booking, internationally, the dominant one is booking.com and booking group owns like a lot of other brands that you've booked through. So Priceline and all these other websites too, are all booking.com. so if you think about it, booking.com charges hotels. They have this model of charging hotels between 15 and then boutique hotels can pay up to 20, 25% of the revenue because booking.com is so dominant and strong in that space. And I don't know if you saw the news, but Airbnb is going to start trickling some hotels into their platform. So I think they realize that they need to diversify their growth outside of short term rentals. So not only are they likely to continue to increase their fees, but they're also going to introduce more competition on the platform. Which is why it is so important that building your entire business dependent on one or two platforms is an existential risk. Because at any time Airbnb can change the rules, they can introduce more competition, they can introduce the fees that you are paying, they can become more, even more guest centric where if you get one complaint or one issue, they suspend or remove your properties from the platform. They dependency on Airbnb or other platforms is a big risk. And we as hosts and operators need to actively be hedging our bets for how can we diversify demand to as many channels as possible so that we're not dependent on any sole player that could hold our business's fate in their hand.
- [08:14]
B
That is a great point. Capitalism works best when there is competition. If you take away competition, you create a form of a monopoly where one player has all the power. They can do whatever they want. And when you add in the publicly traded component to this, not only can they do whatever they want, in a weird perverted way, they are obligated to do what is worse for the market and better for the shareholders. And so whenever you get one person that becomes this big, like Google, you could say they set the rules for how the whole market works and we can complain about it, but what can you really do? That's what today's show is about. This is about how you really fight back against the evil Republic. If we're going to use a Star wars analogy, the empire and you sort of yes, empire. And that's thank you for that. The evil empire. And you take the place of the Republic with a guerrilla warfare tactics. And one of them is what Stayi offers because you can collect guest information to direct market to them to get them to come back. Now in my experience, it's better for you because you will make more money avoiding the fees. It is better for the guest because you can offer them a discount that is still cheaper for them than if they use the online travel agency. And maybe the most important part that I don't hear get talked about enough is that guests have figured out how to complain as soon as they get to your property and hold this review over your head. To get refunds, they can just make things up. They can say whatever they want. And if you don't refund money or discount their stay, they'll hit you with a bad review. Less likely to happen when it's a direct guest and the guest already knows they're getting a good property because they've stayed there before and they like you as the host. You know you're getting a good guest because they've stayed there and they didn't trash your property. This is a win for everyone except for the the publicly traded company. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about how StateFi helps in this fight?
- [10:05]
A
Yeah, for sure. So number one is obviously guest data collection in short term rentals. Thankfully, we have a lot of behavior of repeat stays. Repeat travel families like to come to the Smoky Mountains, the Gulf Coast, Hawaii, ski travel. There's so many destinations that we service where repeat travel is big. And so that's really where statefi comes into play. Because every guest that comes to the property, if they are an Airbnb guest, right? It's very common in English, in our American vernacular, they're saying, I'm staying in an Airbnb. So already you're losing this battle because the great experience the guest is having, they are attributing to a brand that has nothing to do with the experience. Right? They don't, they don't manage the home, they don't communicate with the guests, they have nothing to do with why the guest is having a great stay. But yet Airbnb is getting that brand value, which is why it's really important. Even when I talk about short term rentals, I never say Airbnbs because, like, why should they get that brand benefit, right? So first of all, we have to educate all the guests on that. You're not Airbnb. And we have to collect their data. So immediately when they get to the home and they join the WI fi, they'll get presented with that splash page. But of course it'll be presented with your branding. So we'll say David's Cabins. And then it will have whatever photo you'd like and language you'd like. And then we will collect their name, email, phone number. You can even say things like, hey, give us your information and we'll send you a code off your next day. So you're always giving that, you know, give, get. So if we're going to give you our email, I should get something valuable in return. Or it could be a guidebook, area guide, whatever it is, then we've captured the data and started that process of education of not just the booker but the other people standing there, which is again a group of people that should not be neglected. Then once we collect that data, we have a ton of automations for marketing in Stayfi as well. So we'll trigger a wi fi welcome email so everybody who logged in will immediately get an email where we have a bunch of custom kind of pre built templates for you that will say hey, welcome to Dave's Cabins. Here's the story of our business, here's why I host whatever it is, educate them about your brand while you do this, we can share valuable links to a guidebook, area guide tours and activities, upsells whatever you want. And then again that key messaging of if you want to come back you can book to book again here for less. And then we have another automation for after they leave to get them to come back again. And then you can trigger another email and then you can enroll them into a monthly newsletter. So it's going to take 5, 6, 8 touch points for that message to be ingrained in the mind of the guest that you're a not Airbnb and that be coming back next time will be better for you and them. And price is usually how you're going to drive that message. And that's what we see most commonly. And that process of education and marketing to the guests and providing value is what's going to turn them in as they arrive from an Airbnb booker into a your brand guest. And then you have them for all of their future stays. And also referring you your business to other people that want to come and stay in your market is another key piece as well.
- [13:11]
B
One of the biggest misconceptions that I noticed when I first started hearing about direct bookings is I think most people started off where I did, where they assumed this is about having someone find you on a Google search and book your place direct, which would be wonderful if they do. But it's not practical. Airbnb is investing bazillions of dollars into getting in front of people and appearing at the top and buying up any competition that could come along, just like every big publicly traded company is going to do. It's more about if they find you through these places, Airbnb, any of the other OTAs that we mentioned, they don't go back to those to book it again. They come to you directly now they're interacting with your brand and it's on you. Depending on how good of a host you want to be to earn that. If you give them an amazing experience, if your property's in great condition, if you do your job of communicating wonderfully and they recognize that, they're more likely to say, hey, I want to come back to your property, or what other properties do you have? You've essentially moved them out of the sphere of the empire and into the small world of the Republic, where they can see, like me, I'm a property manager, so I manage other people's properties. I can sell them on those. We make it a point when they're like, you're so great, you respond so fast. We really appreciated that recommendation. Well, if you're ever visiting Hawaii or South Florida or Georgia, let us know. We'd love to give you a discount. I think you mentioned something about price is one of the main things that everyone looks for. I say that over and over and over, because the amazing thing is I can give you a discount and still make more money and avoid what I call the hostage takers that come into your property and immediately try to hold you hostage to get a discounted stay by having the direct booking. It doesn't have to be Airbnb or direct booking. It's sort of Airbnb then direct booking. Is that similar to how you see this playing out?
- [14:59]
A
Yeah, of course. So you can imagine this developing a robust direct booking business is not going to happen overnight because like you said, it's very hard to get new net new guests to trust and book you that have never stayed with you before. That's what Airbnb has done so well is they've allowed an ecosystem where the guests and the bookers have some level of trust with each other. They're going to get what they paid for. And of course, you see there's all this other hostage taking activity there and people taking advantage of that trust network. So it's very hard to convince somebody to come and stay with you that's never experienced you before. Once they do, they are the most likely people that want to come back and stay with you again. And I think sometimes when I talk to especially newer property managers or newer hosts that grew up post Airbnb's existence, they have a very different mentality that I'll call like more legacy property managers that have been doing this since the 80s and the 90s, usually more in traditional vacation rental markets. For those people, they added Airbnb later and their business started as almost 100% direct bookings. And for them, they use Airbnb just to supplement the unbooked nights that they're not getting direct. So really large property managers that I've operated for a long time because they have such a robust network of repeat guests, they are often 70, 80, 90% direct booking because they've been doing this for 20, 30 years. And now the OTAs just sprinkle in for those unbooked gap weekends or those few nights they're not getting. And they typically charge really high price differentials between direct and OTAs, where the OTA bookings are actually much, much more profitable. So they're only willing to sell their OTA nights at even more inflated prices to cover all those other issues. So I think sometimes people are like, oh, how am I ever going to escape this trap of being in the OTAs? It's not going to be overnight, but if you work on this for a year, two years, three years, you can get your business to be 20, 30, 40% direct and be on the path to be like these legacy operators that are 80, 90% direct, because sometimes people don't believe that's possible. But I tell people there are people that have been doing that for years and continue to do it today.
- [17:17]
B
I love that. That's one of the philosophies that we talk about at coast to coast getaways, that we will use OTAs as the front of the funnel. That's probably where you're going to find us. It's very difficult. We get direct bookings occasionally on my site. It's actually surprising to me when it happens. But the majority are going to come from some ota, because the people listening to you and I talk right now are the hosts that own the properties. They are not the guests that don't know anything about real estate. I want to take a vacation. They don't. They're not in our world. They don't understand this. They just hear everyone else talk about Airbnb. They get hammered by the marketing of this multimillion dollar budget they have. And so they go. You kind of have to accept that. You don't have to keep it that way, though. You screen out the bad ones, you bring the good ones in, you create a CRM. You market to them like a real business owner should, similar to what you see Airbnb doing. And over a period of time, like you said, you can build up. The majority of your bookings are direct bookings. You're only filling in the gaps with the ones that are coming from the OTAs. And your overall experience as a host is not driving you crazy, and it's making you still love real estate and love business and want to stay in the industry, which I think we need, is a massive amount of burnout. People jump in, they're so excited, they pour their heart and soul into decorating a place and they get all emotionally attached and then they slowly learn to hate it as they just get beat up by the guests that are coming in. So I know stayi well, first off, let's just ask this, how is it you guys are collecting the information in the first place?
- [18:44]
A
Yeah. So we use that WI fi captive portal. So in your property there'll be a new WI fi network that we helped you set up. And then when a guest joins that, they will see the splash page where they have to enter their information to gain access to the Internet. And that way we collect somewhere between 80 and 90% of the data we also offer and integrate with other ways to collect data. So if you're using a property management software like a guesty owner as Lodgify Hospital, which you really should be, we also will look in there and we'll see if you have any real guest data and we will use that as well. And then we also let you collect data on your website. You can upload forms. So we really want to centralize as much guest data into one place as possible. Then you can market to as many people as you can. And that's just what's really important. And I would say the other thing there is once you collect data, don't a lot of we see a lot of our hosts are 10 times scared to start marketing, think it's not going to be good enough or not professional looking enough. I'd say any progress, anything that looks authentic and real will be appreciated by guests that you are reaching out to them. Again, it doesn't need to be like the most perfectly designed email. It can be a little rough and actually that can make guests feel like this is a more authentic hospitality experience run by an individual, run by a family. It's not, I'm not dealing with Avant Stay or Costco or some giant property management conglomerate. So I think for a lot of hosts that have one or two properties that actually they can lean into their brand as a person that's running these properties. And a lot of guests will identify with that and will find that very appealing to book with as opposed to maybe a booking with more of a corporate feeling, short term rental operator. So just leading to whatever your strength is when it comes to positioning your.
- [20:31]
B
Brand, that's yeah, absolutely. I know, like me personally, I don't know if everyone's the same way, but I'm not a huge fan of interacting with AI. It's kind of a pet peeve when. When I get an auto reply that is obviously AI, it feels kind of like someone slapped me and so I would skew towards. If a human being is talking to me, their grammar's not perfect. Maybe they spell a word the way it sounds when you say it. I know it's a person. I'm more likely to say I want to do business with a human. That's just how my values are wired. I'm sure there's people that are staying in our properties that don't love the system of being shoved into this funnel, milked of everything. They can get forced to communicate with auto replies and a person that they don't know. They don't know if they're getting a good host. They don't know if they're getting a crummy one. Most people listening to this would consider themselves a good host, but you got to remember that a lot of the time the guests are getting screwed over by a W2 employee or someone that outsourced to some third world country that isn't paying attention to the messages coming through. It's not an owner operator. And so they're kind of stuck. They don't know if I book on Airbnb. It's a grab bag. I don't know what I'm getting. We tend to look at it from our own perspective, but this system is so much better for everybody. I just can't highlight that enough. So what you're mentioning is your software collects the information and then you recommend that people funnel that into a pms. We use hospitable, where it would be collected, function as like a CRM and then you send out emails about discounts or improvements to the property or check ins, that type of a thing.
- [21:59]
A
Yeah. So in Stay Fi we have the. We have a CRM as well. So we can do email marketing, text marketing. We have very like. We have email templates that are built for vacation rentals because a lot of people are using tools like mailchimp or Constant and Contact, which are great, but they're just generic for like any business you could imagine under the sun. Oh. Or our templates will. We have like availability templates. So we actually will look at your hospitable calendar and we can pull in properties that are available for whatever dates you want to feature and pull in their images and pull in the prices. So it's just a Lot easier to build emails when we have an integration with a property management software, because we can pull in all the content that you'd want to put in your email, which will make building them a lot faster. And then the great thing, obviously, about Hospitable and then really any modern property management software is it makes accepting direct bookings so easy. So that used to be like, the other big barrier to starting your own direct booking process is that it wasn't easy to build a website, it wasn't easy to do payment processing, it wasn't easy to put put together either, like a damage waiver or some type of house insurance process. But now all of the PMS have all of that functionality. The things that people were going to Airbnb first because they were like, oh, I have air cover, so I'm like, safe. Even though tbd, how often that will work out for you? Which is a whole other subject. But now the PMS has all of these services wrapped in typically, so that you can not only accept direct bookings, you can accept them as confidently or more confidently than a booking from an OTA because it has all of those safety things around it. So that's. That's the other thing that's happened a few years is anybody can do direct bookings now, whereas it used to be only larger property managers had the real ability to set that up and actually do that effectively.
- [23:49]
B
Yeah. And now you just made it easier. So not only are they able to collect the information, but you're providing the dissemination of this to stay in touch with the guests.
- [23:57]
A
Totally.
- [23:59]
B
Yeah, that. I mean, most people, like you said, they know how to buy a property. Maybe they know how to run numbers, they know how to decorate it, they can talk to a host, but they don't know technology. It's very intimidating when you're thinking about, I don't even know what I don't know. I can listen to every podcast in the world. I'm still missing something, so I don't want to take action. But when you get that support of, like, well, here's how you can do it. We'll make it easier. Here's what everybody else is doing, and here are communities of people that can, like, help you do it. You find that this is way less intimidating and than you thought. We have yet to have a bad experience with a guest that was a repeat guest that came back to us. In fact, they're usually, like, trying to get to know you personally, which I like. I want. That I want.
- [24:40]
A
When they're like, your personality but yeah.
- [24:43]
B
Well, that could be true. Yeah.
- [24:44]
A
Yeah.
- [24:44]
B
But when they're asking questions like, do you guys have kids? Is that why you put these cool video games in here? Or we were, where's the best place to go get firewood? We left some extra stuff for you guys that we didn't use. It just kind of takes the edge off of hating. Just the constant beratement of, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong. I found a spider web, there was dust under a couch. There's a problem with whatever. And you're just constantly feeling like you're getting complained to. I know a lot of people can relate to this. It doesn't happen as often with the repeat guests. You make more money, they have a better experience and you don't hate your life quite as much. Now, the experience for the guests, when they come in and you're collecting their information, what's that like for them?
- [25:26]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's going to be the same that the guest has experienced in many other hospitality environments and also will give a professional look and feel because the moment they join the WI fi, they'll see who they're actually staying with. Not anonymous Airbnb company run by who knows what people and where they are. Right. So it can instantly give a brand and face to the whole experience and then it makes it very easy. I think the other key thing is prior to the stay, through Hospitable or your software, you have just been communicating with the booker. So you've sent the booker maybe a guidebook, maybe you sent them the instructions for how to get in, but there's no way to communicate with the non booking guests. Once we capture their data in StayFi, then you can trigger information to them. So you can send a text message with a link to your guidebook for this home, you can send an email with that information as well. So because now we can disseminate all the other information that will make someone stay fantastic. And all your recommendations to the non booking guests, because we can't trust that the booker has necessarily clued them in on all these important things and information that you want them to know. So I think that's the other thing is when you use a tool like Hospitable or other pms, it's very booker oriented, which makes a lot of sense because we got to get these people to book and pay and, you know, come and get into the property safely and all those things. But once we have the entire group there, we should open up communication with the entire guest reservation group because there's definitely things you want to market to them as well.
- [26:58]
B
Now, one thing that I was impressed by when we talked to you guys before the show to kind of get a feel for your company is if you're collecting emails via the OTAs, you're typically getting the email of the person booking, not all the guests that are staying with them. But my understanding was that StayFi allows you to collect emails from everybody else too. Is that correct?
- [27:19]
A
Yep. So anyone that joins the WI fi, you'll get their information, which is usually most everybody staying in the property. And the reason we chose the WI fi as the point of collection is it's the something that everyone will naturally do during the stay. So we're not asking them to fill out like a random extra form or scan some QR code or do some extra thing that they're not normally going to do. We want the collection point to be part of the process that everyone will naturally go through. In a vacation rental, that's wise.
- [27:52]
B
If you give people homework, they won't do it. At least that's my philosophy. I got enough to do. If you try to make me do something, I'm probably just going to not do it. But if I'm putting this in to get WI FI access, A, it sort of incentivizes hosts to provide a better experience by making sure their property has WI fi, and B, it makes it easier for the guests because rather than having to say, who's got the WI FI code, where's it written down, who's got the check in instructions, where do I go to find this? Everybody gets access to it pretty similarly. One thing that we've done to help take the edge off of just someone feeling irritated if they get an email or a message after they stayed in the property is we brand each property with the company logo in ways that they sort of get used to seeing it. So it's not like, who's this? Or where's this coming from? They're used to it. So we have coast to coast getaway branded teddy bears and we have the information in the kitchen and we put signs on the wall. And like, you see it and when you first walk in, you see our logo and the welcome sign. So they're sort of exposed to this is not just some random person's cabin. I don't know, there's some face or logo to put to the experience. And like you said, if they have a good one when they get the email or the text, they're not going to be as upset about it. They may be like, oh, this is interesting, if I come back at these times, I can get 20% off or whatever. And I'm going to say my opinion is if you're a host and you offer discounts on direct stays, you probably overall save money. You're just reducing so much of the risk of somebody throwing a party, somebody coming in there and trashing the property, somebody giving you a bad review because they didn't get what they wanted. And oh my word, I don't know how much you follow this, Arthur, but like one four star review can just destroy where you rank in the algorithms and it can be months of time to fight your way back in there, I'm sure. Do you have any stories you're willing to share of people that you've heard that just were doing great on Airbnb and like one bad guest ruined their entire business?
- [29:47]
A
Well, it's. Oh God, there's, there's actually a lot of stories because a lot of times people have come and asked us for data about what happened. Like people throwing parties in properties that should not have and they wanted the emails of all the people that were there. And they like, weirdly, people were that broke into properties were still looking into the WI fi with other information.
- [30:10]
There's also, like, this is a very nefarious1 that StateFi actually can help prevent, which has gotten people banned permanently is guests placing cameras or listening devices and properties, which is a really creepy one that a lot of people don't want to acknowledge or deal with. But if somebody finds that in your property, you will be like banned for life. And so actually with our WI FI system, you cannot add devices with cameras or listening devices to the Internet in the property. And we like actively forbid any of those types of devices joining. So there are these kind of edge cases outside of reviews that can be super detrimental to your business that you have very little control over and are very hard to monitor and find. That definitely have happened in the past and you've heard stories about.
- [30:59]
Yeah, for sure.
- [30:59]
B
So yeah, just do any stand out though, where you were like, oh my God, like this poor person? I mean, I'm sure you hear it all the time. I'm just curious because some people listening aren't STR hosts and so they can't understand how the world works. But I know those of us that do have them live with a constant, constant cloud of anxiety hanging over our heads that if you miss one message or one thing goes wrong, it can literally destroy a six figure investment that you made in this Property?
- [31:27]
A
Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of people come up to at conferences saying, like, oh, I didn't. I didn't think I needed stay fi. But then this expat thing happened to me. Like someone threw a party, someone complained and got a full refund for some BS reason. So all of those things are super common. And I think a lot of people just don't realize the risk with Airbnb that, you know, they. They don't know. They know about the 15 and a half percent, but they don't perceive all these other potential costs that could happen when you're dependent on one platform.
- [31:57]
B
Oh, man, that's absolutely true. We have a property we manage for somebody, and Airbnb took the listing down, won't tell us why they took it down. They're saying that there was some form of violation. We don't see it anywhere. I'm looking in my account and it's not there. I'm pushed to somebody in the Philippines to talk to about why this happened. They bounced me around from person to person to person. Every single person politely says, you were taken down for violation. What were the violations? We don't see anything. We weren't notified of any violations. What I think happened is there was maintenance being done on the balcony of the property, and the guests arrived and they didn't know that the maintenance was being done because the owner didn't tell us that it was being done. The guests were fine with it, but they mentioned it to Airbnb before they talked to us. That triggered some auto thing that an employee said. This is a violation. Like someone could fall off of the property because the balcony wasn't put in place. But they won't tell us why. It's maddening. I. I've been on the phone, my assistant's been on the phone with them for about 25 hours cumulative waiting, talking to people, trying to like, look, guys, tell us what we have to do to get the listing showing again. I'm sure the CEO of the company would be face palming right now if he knew what this experience is like for a normal person that wants to list on his platform. But all of their staff is the ones that we're dealing with that have all the control that are destroying this, who don't understand it and probably don't care because they're probably paid $4 an hour. So even when you do everything right, these things do occur completely outside of your control. They can ruin your business if you're a property manager. They can ruin your investment if you're an owner, there is so much risk you're taking putting your hand, your investment in the hands of the company with no backup plan. So if somebody does use stay fight, do you guys have like an onboarding process where they can get acclimated to how to take advantage of all the features? Like what do you recommend if someone's like, hey, I want to look into this?
- [33:57]
A
Yeah, we do have an onboarding process. The entire software is meant to be self service, so we don't have any contracts. You don't need to have a call with us before you use the product. So everything you can do on your own. But of course then we offer support if you want help with certain aspects of the tool. I'd say like kind of the most basic things to get in place is one, data collection and then two, marketing automation. So we have, I mentioned before, we have all these pre built automations, things like an email that goes out when they join the WI Fi and email after they leave. We have a state anniversary email. The thing I find especially for hosts that are smaller when they're starting out, they may not have the time yet to invest in a monthly newsletter. But when you set up email automations, you basically make sure that everybody is getting these emails, no matter what else is going on in your life or what is busy or what you have going on. Because once you set up 3, 4, 5 automations, then everyone will get those emails automatically. You set it, forget it, it will just happen and you will see people respond to those and then book through those links. So that's definitely the most important thing is just to build that foundation of collection automation. And then as your list grows, it may now be worth your time to start sending a monthly newsletter to let people know about certain events that are coming up in your marketing area that they might be interested. And I think the other big strategy we see people having success with is once your list gets large enough, you're right, you want to preference repeat bookers over OTA bookers because they're more trustworthy and you've worked with them before. So a lot of people, let's say July 4th is like a big weekend for your listings. They open up their calendars, always on direct before they open the calendars and on an Airbnb. So they will email their guest list and say, hey, we just opened July, but only for our loyal guests. And they send that email to their audience where obviously they will also be getting a better price than an OTAs. So everyone can think very thoughtfully about how can I make sure that we are advertising our listings first to our loyal audience, get those repeat bookings, and then get the rest of the bookings we need from OTAs, and that will lower your risk and exposure to those dangerous types of guests.
- [36:16]
B
Yeah, and my thought, like I shared before, is it happens over time. This is not something you do and immediately you're 80% direct bookings. This is something that if you are committed to this, if you're going to be owning this property for a while, which frankly, many people are, because there's no one to buy it from you. So you are committed to this thing. You're married to that property, and the market's tough. You got to figure out what to do here. If the people that are responsible for feeding you are poisoning your food, in a sense, or taking bigger portions of it, you can sit there and starve, or you can figure out different ways to eat. So if your guests are already coming, if you're one of the good ones, if you're one of the people that really stay committed to providing your guests a great experience, you should be getting direct bookings and be rewarded for that behavior. And 15% is not something small. When you look at your Overall profit margins, 15% might turn into like 60% more profit because all the other expenses you have are so significant. So thank you, Arthur, for creating something like this and for helping fight the good fight to help the hosts of the properties as opposed to the publicly traded companies that kind of own all of the control. If people want to reach out to the company, they want to learn more, they want to speak to somebody. Where do you recommend people go?
- [37:29]
A
So you go to stayfi.com, you can go to our demo page, where you can book a one on one demo with us. Or on stayfi.com you can also go ahead and create an account and just get started. Take a look around the product. As I said before, there's no commitment to buy anything. So you can create account, look through all the tools and see if it's something that will work for your business.
- [37:49]
B
There you go. And we actually have account executive that's working with us. So if you guys want to get put in touch with someone directly, maybe you're shy, maybe you don't have service. Wherever you are, whatever it is, go to davidgreen24.com and use the chat feature on my website. You can get in touch with me directly, tell me that you're interested in this. After listening to the show, I'll put you in touch with one of them. They can explain to you if you like that human connection. Or maybe go check out their website first and then message me and I'll get you connected with somebody. Arthur, thank you so much for being here today. Any last words of wisdom for people that are short term rental hosts that realize that they have to make the best of the situation that they're in?
- [38:23]
A
I would just really emphasize progress over perfection. Don't be afraid of putting yourself out there, putting your brand out there, asking people to book you again directly, sending them simple messages, letting them know that direct booking is an option. It doesn't need to be complicated for it to work very well. So I would just get started because you will get better at marketing over time if you're not comfortable doing it. It's just a process that everyone will go through if they are serious about leveling up their business.
- [38:51]
B
That's great advice actually. Thank you for leaving that. Wonderful. All right, well, hope to have you on again and hear about updates that StayFi is doing. You have a good one.
- [38:58]
A
Thanks, David.