[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is short term rental management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl.
Short term rental management. Today we are going to talk with Paul from owner Res man, it is probably the most sophisticated property management software in our space. It's got all the nuts and bolts, everything you could ever need or want, and a property management software or a channel manager, if you will. And very grateful to have Paul, the CEO and founder of Ownorez, coming to hang on today's episode of short term rental Management.
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[email protected] brokered by EXP short term rental management. We are here in the house with Paul from owner Rez, who I've just been made aware you were at the conference here in February. I didn't, I didn't see you there, but let's talk about that, Paul, I guess, to start, what'd you think of the, the SDR wealth con?
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it was crazy, wasn't it? I mean, it's, it's, it's, I'm, I'm really kind of disappointed I wasn't there. Previous years we sponsored and Bill Faith is a, is a big supporter of ours. And I just, I didn't realize it was that big. I didn't realize it was not just big in numbers, but big in passion and energy. And, I mean, every person you talk to, whether it's a session, like one of the great session you ran, or individual PM, so homeowners that are coming by the booth, I mean, they are all, you know, they're ready to go. They got their notebooks, they've got tons of information. If they're already a user of ours or somebody else, they're ready to tell us exactly what they dislike and what they want changed. So it's powerful event.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Wait a minute, so you're saying that clients come up to you and say, please change this?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Well, okay, so some of them, that's guts. Yeah, but we love it. I mean, one of the first things I ask people when, you know, we get a lot of, you know, hey, this is great. We love you. Long time user type thing. But one of the first things I always ask is, you know, what do you hate? Which kind of sets it back on their heels a little bit. But what do you hate? What do you dislike? We know a couple of the big areas, but it's interesting, it's interesting to hear how people. What. Not only what they hate, but how they articulate what they hate. Because in that it kind of, we had a lady. I mean, steam was coming out every year. So she. Dad, she was kind of passive aggressive, almost. Like at one hand, she's like, kind of rocking back and forth, waiting to meet us, waiting to meet us on the side.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Eventually we kind of go over there like, hey, what's going on? She's like, yeah, so I'm a user and I'm a co host, and I've got a couple of owners I'm working with. And then she, like, the steam just blew and she couldn't stop anymore. And she was like, all right, so here's the problem. And she just laid into, like, so this little area of property management, this setting, this, you know, right down the list. But I mean, she kind of went back and forth from, like, not wanting to say too much, but clearly she had a notebook of notes and she wanted to go through them and wanted to get them out there. So I think we probably spent about 40 minutes with her just talking laptop out. Some of it was, you know, things we could correct. Right? Oh, it was a website thing. There was a website thing, and, you know, some setting that hadn't, wasn't flipped. Uh, and it kind of adjusted a whole bunch of stuff for. But, um. Yeah, so I love it, though. I mean, right.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: I mean, I think to a certain extent, some of that is just like the conference crowd, you know, I don't know that, uh, your average Joe is going to have those same feelings, but these, uh, this conference type folks, and I don't, I'm not to pick on that one. That was a fantastic conference. But just conferences in general, these can maybe tend to be a little overzealous in certain areas, I suppose.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Very true. Yeah, for sure.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: But that's really cool that you took all that time and, and sat down with her and. Bravo. Bravo. Good on you. So let's, let's step back a little bit and talk about, you know, just the briefly, you know, it's been, been done before, but tell us the beginnings of the company, how you got involved in the space.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Yeah, so kind of the classic story of someone who was, you know, had a short term rental, a vacation rental cabin on the river. Type thing, and then realized that the property manager I was working with didn't like I could do a better job than them and didn't have kids, had more money than kids at the time, so wanted a second rental, third rental, and, you know, that was kind of my whole focus, my wife and I. And so we were also software engineers, me and the other guy that co founded. Eventually I co founded another guy. There was a first iteration of this, or first creation of it. Ownorez back in 2007, 2008. Started in this is, you know, before Airbnb existed. This is, you know, it doesn't sound like that long ago, but it really is. 15 years in the space is quite a while. So kind of treaded water for a while on my own five or six years, and then reached out to Chris, who had known for a long time we had worked on a lot of stuff for Washington Post, a lot of big systems, government systems, media systems, and talked to him about joining forces and starting over. And we had a vision for channel management and stuff that would eventually emerge in the industry. It wasn't really a thing then, at least not as a term, as an industry term. Airbnb was coming online around the same time. This was 2012, and then at the same time we were investing in more properties and stuff on the side, but we saw what channel management and property management and stuff needed to be, and particularly for the small homeowners. So that's where owner res was born. We saw that back then. I mean, you had, what, escapia, you had a couple of big products, but it was all PM focused, trust accounting focused, and we kind of had our chip on our shoulder that we couldn't. We couldn't break through as kind of a small player in the space. We couldn't get the same tools. We couldn't get Austin, Texas to return our calls talking about homeaway. So we kind of had a chip on our shoulder and spent from 2013 at that point. That's when the new owner res, was started, the new corporate structure that we have now from then till about 2017. So about four years just trying to break down doors and kind of do things for the small, scrappy homeowner market, what I call power users. Not that PM's aren't power users, but it's a little bit different space. And we really broke through in 2017. We had booking, and back then, TripAdvisor was more relevant than now. Homeaway was still a thing before they completely rebranded and sold to Expedia. And of course, Airbnb was emerging as a powerhouse 2017 2018. So that's the time period where we really figured out our pricing model and what the, whatever it is looks like now. That's where we broke through in that time period. So that's the brief overview, kind of the big milestones along the way.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: So you've been around since before there were 4000 softwares and what did that look like? I mean, because it seemed like at least my recollection being a manager in the space when the software first started coming out, they were, it seemed to me, at least from an outsider looking in, very, very difficult to communicate, especially with Verbo, home away. And so was that, was that a tough nut to crack? What did that look like from your end? The first one that I was at the time, I was using igms back, back then. But what did that look like to crack that? You know, like, was it a matter of like getting them to realize that this thing was going to be for real or how did that, how did that work?
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Yeah, getting them to realize that. Well, I think, I mean, homeaway was, was kind of the, the big player, more the big player in the space than Airbnb now, probably not from the consumer standpoint. So if you're a guest, you're just out there looking at your booking progress. Airbnb really started to be a threat even before that. But homeaway was the one all the PMS wanted to be with, right? They're the ones that you wanted connections with. That's where you wanted all your inventory, one click sign on and all that, or one click connection and all that. So, yeah, so the corporate structure at homeway at that point was very, not very willing to play ball. And I think, you know, from, from their standpoint, I think it kind of made sense because they didn't know who to invest in. You know, it takes a lot of money to invest in these big partnerships, lots of money, not just certification and testing, but to know, you know, what you need to do with your APIs and, you know, I mean, I could spend 2 hours talking about that and I actually have an email that kept it around and this is from a while ago, I think it's 2012, 2013, where I emailed a vp at Homeaway. He was, he's not there anymore. Didn't last of the VRBO and Expedia transition and I basically just like went off. Not really a good moment for me, but it may have cost us a year or two getting them to listen, but basically saying like, look, you know, it's the young people in the industry I think I used Airbnb actually at the time as an example. Like, we are the people who are going to continue working with power users, building what power users need and revolutionizing the space.
You can't see that you're with Xcapia and you're with the couple that they had at the time. They were pushing us to Reynolds United, which is an up and coming thing in the UK at the time, saying, oh, yeah, go use these other middle managers, these other third party managers. And we finally cracked it by integrating with channels that we didn't really want to integrate with at the time, like booking.com was one, just to show them what we could do. So in other words, we had another meeting with them and sent them some screenshots and videos and said, hey, can we come connect with you guys and see what it's like to get on the inside?
And we showed them our booking.com dashboard and when we showed the number of users that were connected to it, and we showed them a booking coming in and how it shows when content had changed and all this stuff, just to show them that from a technology standpoint, we had the chops and that's when we got the call and they approved us. But it was very tough at that time. Very, very tough.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: I'm going to give you an analogy. I've been in the rock and roll radio business for a really long time, and I still do it occasionally. And one time I was interviewing Def Leppard, their singer, Joe, and we're on a first name basis. And it was at the time when the Tom Cruise movie came out with Rock of ages. And of course, it was a Broadway play and that was one of their songs. And I asked him about it. I said, what do you feel about this whole movie? They were in the movie, et cetera. And he said, when it first came out, we heard about this play they were going to do on Broadway in New York called Rock of ages. And we didn't want anything to do with it. Uh, we just never dreamed that anything would ever come about or ever, it would ever make any money or ever, anything would ever happen there. So we just didn't even, he was like, we didn't even respond. Why would you respond? This is just some stupid play that's never going to become anything. And then the next thing you know, it's a major motion picture, $50 million, uh, Tom Cruise is in the movie. And, uh, and of course they got on board at that point. So maybe it was, uh, similar to that. You just had to make your, make waves, right? Like slap them in the face and say, hey, this thing's real.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm thankful.
It kind of changed their whole perspective because from that point forward we felt like not only we've broken down that door, but we wanted to, the success of that wanted us to kind of keep kicking down doors. An example of this is right after we announced, hey, we're a new partner, we got all these people in the door. Well, remember, our market is what it's the smaller homeowners. So people who have 1358, maybe what we call the starter PM space, people who are graduating out of just managing their own want to manage from others. Typically they're between five and twelve, five and 15. And VrBo at the time said, yeah, so your integration is solid. Everything looks good. You have to have 15 or more properties. I think. No, that was true. Advisors. Five or more properties for VRBO. And so there's like 2000 of our users, our customer accounts who were immediately ineligible. And so for the next like year after that, we were beaten on that door. Yeah, you know, go. We'd go to conferences and meet up with them, say, look, the net booking value of the small homeowner space and starter PM space is significantly higher than PM's. It's not that PM's don't care. It's that if you're managing a condo building in Myrtle beach of 50 units or 70 units, what do you think your net booking value is going to be compared to? A mom and pop who's got two beach houses? And that's all they do all the time. They dote on it. They're putting out soap and shampoo. Before that was a thing.
Who do you think is going to have higher net booking value? We'd show them this and we talk about it from their standpoint because they don't have one click connect like Airbnb did, the newer OAuth model.
It was a technology and business operations problems. They didn't want to have to call each person and wire up the XML feeds and all this, but eventually they did. And now they tell us every six months, I think it's actually every four months, every quarter, when we have like partner meetings that show high level numbers and, you know, the big volumes going through over and over again. It's. Man, net booking value is so good. Net book value, I think back like five, six years, like, yeah, because perspective was changed on all this. You know, a door was kicked out. So, you know, I think sometimes these big companies, they just don't understand what they don't understand until, you know, someone is persistent enough or someone cleans their clock like Airbnb, and then they're, they're forced to kind of sit up and listen.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, no, absolutely. That was a big game change. And you guys, correct me if I'm wrong, you started out as more of a trying to get people to do off platform, right? Isn't that where the name came from originally?
[00:13:41] Speaker B: We didn't have a choice because for the first, like four or five years. Five years, every bit of five, because 2018 really was the breakthrough.
We had to have something where our customers could book, book their properties and go somewhere. We didn't have these channel connections except for smaller side act, Tripadvisor type websites. So we created all these toolkits for doing just that. We have the thing Bill Faith talked about on stage, our book now widget that you can drop in anywhere that he thought was so game changing, which actually kind of made me chuckle because that's kind of a small thing that we haven't really changed in a lot of years. But things like that. Our channel bridge tool, the direct booking, the oneclick hosted website inquiry parsing was a big thing. So we'd go out and we would hustle for, you know, pick a market like the Disney market in kissing me. You know, Windsor Hills homes or island, you know, island plant, what was it? Plantation home. You know, these communities are right outside of Disney and there's a ton of them. I mean, it's, there's like 4000 homes in like a mile of Disney that are vacation rentals. And we'd go to these hoas and say, so you set up a website, you know, windsorhillvacationhomes.com and your member, all the houses in your subdivision automatically get an email inquiry. And you have this old email parsing thing. Let's work with you. We'll do all the work, but give us that information in a parcel way so that when those emails come in we can automatically grab them and turn them into inquiries for our users so that you can automatically quote them and you can automatically book them. So we were doing that back in 20 1415 as kind of the answer for how we get around the fact that the big otas, the big channels weren't directly sending us information. And then we did a bunch of stuff that kind of poked a finger in their eye too. Like when your booking came in via ical, we had a tool that still exists, actually called channel bridge. That's a chrome extension and it runs in your browser and it will download and screen scrape all the information out of VRBO or Airbnb as to what it costs. Your guest counts email address. It'll kind of grab all that and backfill our system so that you had all those details. So we were scrappy back then and doing all kinds of stuff like that.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Was there, was there a small aspect to this that you knew there was something to this space and you were just completely drawn to it, but you, it took a minute to figure out where your niche was.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, now here in 2024, we have eight verticals. Eight verticals being, you know, channel management, accounting website, so on. For a long time, I feel like our vertical was, you know, how do we create tools for power users so they'll keep paying us every month? I mean, for the first, like four years, five years of business, that was our vertical. And so we get on long calls with users who, hey, I have a problem with onboarding. How do I do this? Someone said it was really good for them, but it's really complicated for me. Still get that a lot. So Chris and I would get on hour long phone call. We do three or four a day where we get on, and these conversations would go all over the place. I mean, we'd be fixing their email, doing stuff that had nothing to do with owner's, nothing to do with vacation rentals, just to show them that, hey, you know, we're, we're the, we're the guys to call, so. Yeah.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Was there a Wolf of Wall street moment there in 2018 when you finally got, you know, breakthrough with the big OTA?
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Hookers and blow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was. For sure there was a. Oh, my God, we've arrived. We're. Well, I think that. I think probably the most surreal thing for me was we went from a nobody to integrated partner to an elite partner, which. There's like five elite partners in Verb. They have more than 100 integrated partners. There's like five every year that are. That they bring out the Vegas and award and they're on the elite list. There may be more than five now, but there was. Originally we went from nobody to integrated to elite in like, 18 months. They measure elite based on volume and how fast your APIs are, how good your net booking volume, all that stuff. So I remember we got Elite. There was a moment where I went back and dug out the email to the VP in Austin from like 20, whatever, eleven, and just kind of looked at that and it kind of thought about my past self, the Paul who's writing this email, not sure if the business is ever going to continue.
Desperate, just bleeding all over the page in a way that's just sad to even, it's sad to read. Like, I'm clearly like, come on, man, you know, banging on the fence, I'm banging on the outside of the glass door to now it's elite. And now their team is asking us, hey, how would you prototype these new features and how would, you know, what would you do in this situation coming to us?
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Yeah, Wolf of Wall street. Yeah, yeah. But with that came massive competition, right? Or was it already there and were they already waiting? Or was it like, oh God, here goes, here goes the floodgates?
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't, I feel like I've been in software a long time. I feel like software because of the nature of its so cheap and easy to scale and anyone can do it from their basement, that every industry everywhere has massive competition and everyone's trying to build the next best thing because why wouldn't you if you're smart enough to know how to do it or you've just been trained in how to do it, even the training has really, the barrier to entry there on training has just dropped enormously with all the tool sets and all the clouds and stuff. So I look at it, yeah, there's a huge influx of competition. There's no doubt. I mean, you look at like Capterra or whatever, I mean, it's gone from, you know, half a dozen of us or a dozen of us to like 100. But I think that's kind of everywhere. And I don't think that's bad necessarily. I think that just raises the exposure of, you know, you have to be on software now. I mean, believe it or not, 2024, we still run into people who are like, yeah, I'm still doing excel and I'm still doing it manually and I got my little files, my email, and they still don't, you know, could be managing 1520 properties and still doing it by hand. So I think all the software and all the conferences and the, just the saturation, if it is saturated, I think that to some extent that's just made people scrutinize software more and go, okay, now who is the best of the software? So it keeps you on your feet?
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel the same way. People say the same thing and, oh, it's saturated and there's too many people that are doing this now and this that the other, and I'm still here just plugging away, teaching people how to do it better. You know, I'm not worried about my competition. They can't compete with me. They just can't. I mean I'm, first of all, I've been, I've been doing it longer than everybody. I've been on every me since 2011, which is like the day it started and I've got more reviews and I work harder and I show up and I walk my own properties and you know, and you just can't compete with a guy like me. And it's great to hear. Great to hear you have that same attitude. Do you think that a lot of these, it's probably already happening, some of these smaller software, the management softwares are going to get absorbed, I guess, by larger ones or how's that going to work? Because we can't continue with this. There's something like 1100 of these things out there. It's ridiculous.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: 1100 software.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: That's what I heard.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: I heard that it may be if you count all the third party apps and cleaning and price management and everything. So yeah, I mean there's certainly been a, there's certainly been a push for acquisition. There's some, there's some players in the industry and there's some camps that have kind of developed. We have more than 100 certified partners, 50 not just integrated partners and, but ones that we've tested and we've announced, hey, they work with our API and we've partnered with them and yeah, we've signed off on the fact and here's a support doc about how it works. And there's definitely, like I said, been camps developed among some of these ones where you obviously have the ones I can have it that have picked up a lot. I think there's a couple that have tried to create it all themselves as well or create their own camp in and of themselves like a PM's that's wanted to become more of a conglomerate. I think guesty kind of falls in that space. I think Streamline would have, except of course it joined inhabit. So there's some m and a that's been going on a lot. I know we get hit up a lot. I mean all the time. In fact, for a while there was a line that some of our competitors were using where they were saying, oh look, on arrays can be bought up soon. Don't whatever they're doing now would be different in a year or two. So there's lines that are used about us all the time. But that was one that was happening pretty consistently by a couple of competitors for a while. So I think M and A's will continue. I think some people also kind of just collapse a little bit, go out of business, seen a little bit of that, where some people have actually come to us and say, hey, we have like 75, 80 customers. We never really gotten off the ground. We don't want to do this anymore. Are you guys interested in like an affiliate deal? We'll just pass people over to you. We've had some, actually some big competitors also, like the escapias that, who have kind of narrowed their focus and realized all we want are 50 and larger. So, you know, if you've got 20 listings, we don't really want to focus on that anymore. And they've come to us and said, hey, let's set up kind of a partnership. Even though this is a direct competitor, we feel like you guys are good in the industry and we hear a lot, we see what you do. So will you trade us, so to speak? Will you send some hundred pluses to us and we'll see you a whole bunch of 15 and twenties or five s. So there are those conversations as well.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: This episode of the short term management show is brought to you by short term rental, long term wealth. This is the book in the STR space written by my lovely wife, Avery Carl. It has hundreds of reviews on Amazon, and it will teach you literally everything you need to know about STR, short term rental, long term wealth. The book wherever books are sold.
When you say 100 partners, what does that mean exactly?
[00:23:06] Speaker B: So, obviously, ownerize doesn't do everything. We don't want to do everything. I feel like we probably do too much already. So take something like revenue management or pricing. Dynamic pricing. Price labs is an example of this. Beyond wheelhouse, we don't do that internally. We do have good pricing tools, you know, selecting on the calendar and pricing and discounts and seasons. But if you want a dynamic pricing engine, meaning, you know, every night at midnight, a pricing engine calculates for all your listings what the next year should look like based on demand, based on holidays, based on the fact there's a rock concert going on somewhere that just got scheduled. And, I mean, some are that good that actually watch event calendars in different cities. Then you need to integrate or hook up one of those pricing engines to Oneorez. And so integrated pricing or dynamic pricing is one of those partnership categories. So you can go to a price lab, for instance, and you can hook it up so that it connects to Oneorez and automatically updates your rates and owner as, which then powers all your downstream stuff, all your channels, direct bookings, reporting, all that stuff. So there have been, we're right around 100. I think we're past 100 where they've reached out, integrated with our APIs. Some cases we've done the same in reverse. We've reached out and said, hey, you're a great partner. We'd like to communicate with your system. And done that. There's been a handshake there, technical handshake. And then we've kind of made a joint announcement and told the world, they told their users, we've told our users that, hey, we now work with each other.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: One thing that you guys do that, to my knowledge, nobody else does is rental agreement signatures. Can you briefly describe to me how that process works within your dashboard without, you know, showing any pictures or anything? Yeah. And also, why the hell is anybody else doing that to me? That's the most valuable thing out there. It saves me a big pain in the ass. So go ahead on the rental agreement thing.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it's difficult, I think, is why people don't do it. So you want renter agreements that are dynamic to each booking. So like, email messaging is another thing that's dynamic, meaning when you reach out with a message, you don't want to say, hi, guest, thanks for booking.
We got it. Or some generic copy and paste, you want to say, hi, susie, thanks for booking on Airbnb. You'll be coming out to on these dates. Here's some information you need. And get highly, highly personalized. Renter agreements really need to be too. I mean, the renter agreement needs to be your property name, your guest name. It's legal. It's a legal structure. The date you're going to be staying, what you're agreeing to, what you don't agree to. The channels have their terms and conditions, the so called disclosures on the checkout screen when you're, when you're, I hate the term checkout because it's, it's ambiguous in our industry. Right. But the shopping cart screen, when you're going through and you're selecting your booking, they have the, yes, I agree to terms and service. Terms of service. I agree to house rules, but that's not really a very good renter agreement. It's not legal in nature. It doesn't have a signature on it. It's not, you know, something that's more purposeful to, you know, like a waiver or something that recognizes that I'm agreeing to certain rules and then you have the whole direct booking side where, you know, you have to craft that as well. So whether it's a guest is coming through a channel or they're booking directly or you sent them a quote, there needs to be a way as part of that process that you show them this docusign type structure a long time ago.
And it's funny because people talk about this as well. This is an area that we're overhauling right now. We haven't touched it in a long time. We created this dynamic agreement structure where you can put field codes in there to personalize it and say what the states of stay are and the guest name and all of that. And then you can add electronic signature to it as well. That's part of the direct booking flow or the quote acceptance flow. So if you send someone a quote or you're using our direct website or WordPress site, that booking process will walk you right through taking payment. And oh, here's your renter agreement screen. You agree, you move on to confirmation. So it's right in that flow. But then there's a process also where if you're coming through channel like Vrbo, you can reach out with a link automatically and say, hey, thanks for booking on VRBo. We need to finish a couple of things. You know, I need your point of contact information, members of your group, and here's that same renter agreement to sign.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: Yeah, brilliant. Love it. To me that's, that's, that's a big reason why to go with you guys and also you have to some capacity. Third party insurance and screening processes involved. That to my knowledge, again, nobody else has. So can you walk me through that just briefly?
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so we talked about partners a second ago. So there's different partners in the space that sell insurance. They're safely and proper and rental guardian and so we have partnerships with a bunch of them, but we wanted to create a kind of one click turn on way where this is just included. I talked about that quote, acceptance process or booking process flow a second ago with the renter agreement. Well, the same thing is true of things like trip and travel insurance. But if you, if you go rent, if you go book a flight or you go book a cruise ship, you know, it's, it's ubiquitous. Now you come to that part of the process where it says, hey, ensure your trip, accidents happen. Do you want to be covered? So some of its bullshit, some of it's pretty good, some of it's pretty important. I mean, you know, if your trip, your bags are lost as a medical emergency, a few bucks could, could help in that situation. So so we look for a good package and we're using the rental guardian package. So it's in our support docs and stuff. You can see all the terms and what's offered, but we built that into the system so that, again, with the renter agreement, with the rest of it, there's a flow that kind of walks you through that and walks your guests through, hey, I'm accepting the risk or I'm going to add these levels of insurance. And what it does is it makes the cancellation conversation also easier because if you've pushed that, then when it's time to cancel and they have canceled for any reason or they have travel insurance, trip interruption insurance, you know, it makes that conversation easier if it's, if it's last minute and they're not going to, they're not going to get a refund.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: From you and rental guardian handles all that stuff for, as me, as the property manager, I don't have to deal with anything. I just say, go deal with them.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: Yeah. For the travel insurance side. Yeah, it's, it's very, that's been a great partnership over the years. Brady and that team are just, they're good people. They care a lot about the guests and the experience and they don't, you know, they don't nickel and dime and they don't worry about little things. And if it's travel insurance that's purchased directly between the guest and rental guardian, so it's handled directly by rental guardian. If there's a claim to be made, you know, there's a claim form and claim process that they do with, with rental guardian. There's a damage protection side that's different, that's coverage for the PM or homeowner on the property. And that one's pretty good, too. We crafted one with their team that doesn't involve the guest at all. So there's no, you know, the Airbnb and Vrbo policies that are out there, you know, I need to be careful what I say here, but they're not ideal there, you know, there's a lot that's left to be desired. So one of the problems is, you know, if you say on, on Airbnb, hey there, I need a resolution payout here, I'm asking for money because they broke, you know, broke a window. Someone threw somebody else through a window. You know, they're going to come back to the guest, hey, do you have pictures? Do you agree that this happened and there's this whole back and forth process? The damage protection package that we put together doesn't involve that. They never contact the guest at all. It's between you and the insurance carrier.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: And who pays for that? I pay for that. As a host, the guest doesn't know anything about it.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Guest doesn't know anything about it. So it's called a spread risk model. So all properties and bookings are covered equally, but for a low cost. So the way classically that you've seen it done on Verbo and Airbnb. Airbnb, it's free. But on Vrbo there's kind of a selection process which is the guest is presented at the time of booking with, do you want to buy damage protection? Accidents happen. Do this instead of having to pay a security deposit. And there's problems with that. When you present the guest with the option, it tends to be a self selecting process where the frat guys know, yeah, maybe I should add that onto my booking where careful family does not. And so your risk tends to follow accordingly. So a spread risk, it's also more expensive. A lot more expensive. It's like $7,500 per booking. The spread risk model is it applies to all bookings and all guests evenly. There's no picking and choosing. Guests are not selecting it, but it's a lot cheaper. It's $20, $25 per booking.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Interesting.
Where are we going with this? The whole industry completely changed in three years and now it seems to be, I don't know, dusts may be settling here. I've got a lot of thoughts on where I think we're headed. But in your opinion, as are you still a host? I guess. Let's, let's ask. Let me ask you that. Do you still have properties?
[00:31:51] Speaker B: I do, yeah. My wife took over that company from years ago and her team managed it. But yeah.
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Okay, great. So where do you see this thing going for 24 and 25 as far as all these, I mean, just people just came out of the woodwork. We really got lucky, honestly, in this business in a lot of ways. But where do you see that going?
[00:32:12] Speaker B: I think there's going to be a market correction. I think there's definitely saturation in certain markets. It depends. There's other markets that are still emerging. There's some local markets out there that didn't even realize it's a little country town on a river or mountain somewhere, and no one realized that this was a thing. And now they're starting to emerge. The big Gatlinburgs and Kissimmees are, I think, going to correct. We're seeing that already. There are places where people were throwing up purpose built vacation rental cabins or beach houses and put a lot of money in. And then you started having an arms race to the bottom in terms of pricing. And so now some of those areas are fighting over the same demand, maybe even more demand, but there's more supply. And so you're seeing some of those people start to, their occupancy rates going down, or at least it rebound a little bit from the 2021 era. We're seeing that in our data for sure. I think the people that, I think what's going to happen is you're going to see a correction. And then the people who had good reputation and were around for years, people like yourself who you talked about, you've been doing this forever. And the reviews and everything you've been doing. Same with us. That's where you're really going to stand out. And I think that in 24, 25, there'll be an opportunity, even for people like you and me, who are solid. We have a good business model. We've worked a lot on our reputation over the years, a lot of our processes as some of that, as some of the pressure is relieved from the balloon and some of those other cabins, houses start to drop off or start to look to.
I need to sell now, I maybe did this wrong, but I think there's an opportunity there to pick up good properties cheaper than, than what they may have been.
[00:33:48] Speaker A: I agree. Also, again, from the toilet and shower head perspective that I have, you know, there's just, this isn't for everybody. You know, landlording is not for everybody. And so I think there's a lot of people that just kind of didn't realize what they were getting themselves into. And there's nothing wrong with that except for when the market, the real estate market comes to a complete standstill like it is right now. And now it's like, well, crap, I can't, you know, it's, if I want to get out, I got to lose a little money. I'm actually dealing with that right now on an apartment building that I may have overpaid a little bit, and now I gotta either eat it every month or, you know, sell it at a little bit of a loss because the interest rates are three times what they were. Anyway. I agree with you, too, you know, for the most part on all that. But I do think a lot of it has to do with, I mean, I read a statistic, a statistic one time, 50% of all real estate is sold in the first year. And, you know, so there there was a massive amount of people that got in and you got to understand like globally, half of those people statistically are probably going to get out.
And now we're dealing with the situation where there may be a deal or two coming up in the near future.
[00:35:03] Speaker B: So yeah, I think that's, that's right. I think there's an old phrase about long term rentals, which is you make all your money up front or when you're flipping or whatever, it's you make all your money upfront, meaning what you bought it for is going to determine in the end what you're going to sell it for. The long term equity game.
Don't count on that. It doesn't withstand market fluctuations. Doesn't withstand market fluctuations. And I think my advice for people who want to be STR owners is think about that long and hard when you're buying something saying no. I think bill mentioned that at the conference or one of the sessions where we were talking about being careful, being patient, watching your sheets, knowing your numbers. I think theres an urge to just want to own stuff. Something came up that looks like its interesting, but weve all been subject to it. I had at 1.12 properties, im down to three. So I learned over the years also and had to get out of some stuff. But thats the number one advice I come back to is feel like you made your money upfront when you bought it because it was such a good deal and because it really ticked off all the boxes and it's not something that you're going to figure out later on.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. I love it, man. Anything else you want to tell us about maybe the future of owner is any changes coming up? Do we even need any changes? Seems like you guys have already thought.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: Of everything, but we actually want to change a lot of stuff. We have over 300 items on our roadmap and we're not going to do 300 items. But we have key focus areas that we're working on and key focus areas are really around messaging and accounting and cleaning up and driving those forward. We have some of the most powerful trigger messaging capability of anyone in the industry. But there are people who layer software on top of ours because they go, well, this software's just easy and yours isn't. And they're right. And so we're hard at work at a bunch of messaging, cleanup things, inbox related trigger things. So lot coming out there is actually just looking at a change log. We have a change log every week and it's got probably 1520 items on it every single week. I mean, half of those are bug fixes and small tweaks, but it's just our team really, our team really loves what we do. I think that's, you know, until, until that ends, until someone, you know, kind of pin pricks the balloon. That kind of internal happiness and enjoyment about what we do here, I think, is just going to keep us, you know, building and changing and fixing stuff long into the future. So a lot of stuff going on.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: I don't want to make it sound like you're selling yourself to me here, but just let's say I've never heard of any of this. In my first time hearing anything about, basically I randomly stumbled on a YouTube or something. What makes your software management software? You know, give me a, give me like a, without it sound like a pitch. A pitch, I guess.
[00:37:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I've been thinking about that a lot over the years and I, you know, it used to be the feed that, the tit for tat feature comparison. Well, we have this and they don't. But the problem is, you know, a, a lot of people have everything now or have enough of everything where they have messaging or websites or channels or whatever, or some people just, their marketing says they do, but they really don't and that kind of thing. And I thought about, like, what's the difference why owner is and what I, what I've come to in the last six months, maybe longer, nine months now, is we talk about how we're the foundation, right? We, we are very foundational. In your stack of tools, you might have channels you might not use, our website might use a different one, but you need a foundation that's really, really solid and really good.
I liken us to why Google beat Yahoo 25 years ago in a search engine war. You remember 2000, 2000, 199 even where Yahoo was everything. And Google was like this search bar. And even on Yahoo site, it was search powered by Google. And then everyone was like, oh, what's Google? And they went over there, nothing but a white page and a bar.
And Yahoo kept rebranding. Then they went and did their own and they went back to Google in terms of search, you know, search technology. And the reason everybody kept going to Google with the man on street interviews and in articles was that Google just worked. It worked really well. The results you got were just better. They were more relevant. Everything was clean. Everything was fast, really, really fast. There wasn't a bunch of crud on the page, a bunch of other things they were doing and over and over again when people leave Oneorez and they come back or they compare us to other systems. They're out there telling their friend, hey, yeah, you should be on it. Yeah, I'll help you get started and you'll get a jumpstart call or whatever, but let's just push past that. The thing that they talk about is it just works. It's fast, it's up all the time. There's no spinning when you hit a menu. If there is spinning on a menu, we're going to notice it because we do a lot of internal logging and it'll be fast.
Very soon, in the next day or so, we'll notice it, we'll make an adjustment. And I think that's really the fundamental difference, that you can rely on our speed and our love of the engineering and our tracking of, you know, all the stuff going on across our eight verticals and know that, you know, no, one of the things that we do, no one is really doing them better.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: Beautiful. Bravo. In the world of web crawler is the one I used back in the day.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: And Paul, every now and then you might hear somebody say that ownorez is, you know, difficult or, you know, it's, for me, I would just say it's, you know, very well engineered and, and has all the options you're looking for. But we do hear it difficult every now and then, and it sounds like you guys have found a solution for that.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So we've heard that for a long time. And there's things that we've wanted to rebuild, but we realized last year that instead of just pushing people to, hey, pay for setup or work with this person, we need to embrace the phone a lot more and just kind of push past working behind email and casework. And so we created a new jumpstart program as part of our onboarding team. And the Jumpstart program, there are six or seven people full time who do this all week long work at Oneorez, and they are free jumpstart calls for anyone coming in the door, and don't be shy asking about them. We actually reach out now in our welcome call and try and get people scheduled for the jumpstart call. So we're very aggressive about pushing it. But the jumpstart calls an hour, most of them go past an hour, 75 minutes, some even an hour and a half, and they are one on one. They're totally free. It's a screen share where you're working with an ownerized person side by side, and we meet you where you're at in the process. So if you are setting up your account, we walk through that as far as we can go in the hour and a half. If you've already been. If you've already had the initiative to get in and do a bunch, then we'll take you from that point forward. There are some people who are hooking up channels at that point and putting out messaging content because they've already done a lot of work themselves. So the jumpstart just drives them that much further. And then if you need another jumpstart call, we're not stingy with them. So it's been great. But it's a fairly new thing, so a lot of people haven't heard about it.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Okay, that's great. Wonderful.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: Because there are a lot.
[00:41:47] Speaker A: I mean, there's Facebook groups and all these people that you can call to pay and do this, and it sounds like maybe you, which some of them have a very good reputation. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but it sounds like maybe you just kind of decided to bring that in house.
[00:42:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, we did. We have an engagement team, too, that does a lot of calling. They do probably 150 calls a week, but those are more like 1520 minutes, like support work. You know, it could be a veteran user calling after a couple of years and how do I do this? And that's a scheduled thing. So we really wanted to embrace the front end of the jumpstart and onboarding because it's just, you know, if there's any one, I actually turn at conferences or after conferences, ask our team that's traveling to the conference, what's the number one similar, most similar thing you heard from everyone coming up to the booth, other than it's difficult because a lot of people say, well, it's difficult. And we go, yeah, we know. Have you, you know, have you done x, Y and z and looked at support centers and videos and. But we know it's difficult. So that's something for us to, from an engineering standpoint, a challenge for us to fix up front. But also, we really wanted to just work with people one on one and see what we could do and kind of just embrace that straightforward, cool jump start.
[00:42:57] Speaker A: Jump start. And difficult is probably not the right word, you know, but. And at the end of the day, I think that's what your clients are looking for. They want all the bells and whistles, you know, so it seems to be working for you.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. For a long time, we had kind of a who cares attitude about not doing more of the handholding upfront in our setup interview. So not taking that through kind of like the Airbnb process and have a picture of your listing and answer all these easy questions about, do you allow pets? And just kind of walking you through this really simple setup interview because partially because we were lazy, but partially also because we noticed that the people that came out the other end were really good, really passionate power users. They were like, oh, yeah, I really like this. And so, okay, let's just work for them. Let's just build what they need and listen to them and not worry about people who go, well, it's not easy, and I can't click a button on my phone and have it all set up. So that's where it was born out of. I, too, do not think that it's that difficult or that complicated, but in this day and age, you really need to kind of work with people on meeting them where they're at and what their level of difficulty or what their level of complexity is, you know, kind of bringing that solution to them.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Cool. So in other words, you guys will help people get their own res. Rocking and rolling?
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: Cool, man. Well, anything else we need to know on the way out, or I'll be happy to say goodbye. Oh, one thing I want to say is, by the way, the short. I don't know if you know, this short term shop sells houses. We want you to send people our way if they're looking to buy another house, you know? So sometimes Avery's not as forward with that aspect of our business, but that's what we do for a living.
[00:44:29] Speaker B: I didn't know that. That's great to know.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: Yeah, we sell houses. We're a team of real estate agents. I'm not an agent, but that's what we do, real estate agents. And we sell vacation houses all over the nation and. And send our clients to you at the end of the process.
[00:44:42] Speaker B: So that is interesting and very, very important to know. I did not know that.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: So, yeah, it blows my mind that you didn't know that. But I'm like, I bet he doesn't even know that. That's what this.
[00:44:51] Speaker B: I know you guys have a lot going on. I see you all the time.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: That's what we do. We sell houses. We have one thing that we do, period. And we sell houses. So good to know, and we're really good at it. And then I teach folks how to be better with their toilets at the end, and then they get hooked up on owner res, man. And we're very grateful to have you on the show, and if there's anything I can do to make your life easier, I'm absolutely available to do that.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: No, I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me on. And let's chat again soon. I know we're going to run across each other and 100 different conferences.
[00:45:25] Speaker A: Absolutely. All right, man. Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Paul from Ownorez short term rental management. We love you.
[00:45:32] Speaker B: Thanks. Appreciate it.
