[00:00:02] This is Short Term Rental Management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Karl.
[00:00:16] All right, here we go. Short Term Rental Management. Greatest place on earth. And I love you and I'm glad that you are here. Today we are going to talk about brand names and specifically Zillow and Airbnb.
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[email protected] that's stsplus.com yeah. Long hair. Lou. Karl. I'm here to talk about Airbnb vrbo. These are all brand names. Band Aid, Kleenex, Zillow, Trulia, and there's a term for this, it's called genericized. Kleenex has genericized a brand name, made it generic, which is brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. And especially in the, in the case of Airbnb, which I love Airbnb. And by the off chance that somebody from the old Airbnb might happen to be listening, listening to the world's greatest rental real estate podcast, Short Term Rental Management, second greatest behind Short Term Show.
[00:01:57] I love you. I do. I love you, Airbnb. You're great. You've done wonderful things for America and the world and given us a great way to travel and have fun and, and live our lives and create stories. I think it's a wonderful thing.
[00:02:12] But I do want to talk about the fact that nobody ever says, I'm go, I rented a vrbo. I'm going to stay in a vrbo. Everybody says, I rented an Airbnb. I'm going to in air in an Airbnb. And it's funny because it has possibly gone so far that even if you rented it on Verbo, you may even still say, I rented an Airbnb.
[00:02:36] I'm going back to my Airbnb.
[00:02:40] I got to get to my Airbnb.
[00:02:43] And it's brilliant. I don't know if they did this on purpose. I don't know if it ever came up in meetings and frankly, it's none of my business. I think that they do a great job running their company. I do Chesky, if You're listening. I think you do a great job and I'm proud of you and I'm a fan. You got a lot of fans out there and it's a wonderful thing. I just don't know why we call it an Airbnb. Nobody ever says, I gotta get back to my verbo and I want to take it one step further. Nobody ever says, I, I just ran into Zillow.
[00:03:21] That's what blows my mind because again, I'm so deep into the long term rental world. I love long term rentals. If you want to know anything about long term rentals, feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to tell you everything. I know most people in this world, in the short term world, don't care, are not interested in long terms. And I get that they're not as cool, they're not as hip, they don't move as fast, etc.
[00:03:41] But in the long term space, you're renting a house generally from Zillow or Facebook Marketplace, and if it's not Zillow or Facebook Marketplace, it's Trulia or Hot Pads, etcetera, Which connect directly to Zillow.
[00:03:57] But nobody ever says, I just rented a new Zillow for my family. Can't wait to wait to move my kids in. It's in a great. My new Zillow is in a great school district.
[00:04:08] I just rented my family a new Zillow.
[00:04:11] Nobody says that, you know, so why are we saying I just rented an Airbnb? It's brilliant. How do you get to the point. That's my question.
[00:04:21] It's got to be a book on this subject. How do you get to the point that your name, your brand name is genericized, But I think as hosts, we need to understand that all this is a single family overnight rental. And of course, Airbnb was created for individual rooms back in the day. The guy, the founders of the company, as a matter of fact, the other guy, not Brian Chesky, but Joe Gebbia, the other guy was on How I built this recently. It's the second or third time on how I built this, which is a great podcast that I listened to and wonderful guy, and he talked, they talked very openly about the fact that they were more interested in really just renting the room, the extra room in their house to save a couple of bucks, make a few extra bucks.
[00:05:02] Brilliant concept. And then eventually they, in at least in our world here at Short Term Rental Management, they became verbo competition. I don't think that that was Their I don't think they felt they were competing with Verbo. I think that they felt they were creating something new. And in a lot of ways they were.
[00:05:18] So. But anyway, regardless what we're doing, what we're talking about here is short term rental management, where we're talking about the property management of a single family. Overnight rental is really all it is. It's just a, it's a house, it's not a commercial property, it's not a single room. It's generally a home.
[00:05:34] Single family home that we rent overnight. Preach about this all the time here on strm. And for that reason, in our world, it is a little bit weird to call it an Airbnb because I think traditionally an airbnb would be like, you know, a space in somebody's house or an adu or a mother in law suite or just a bedroom.
[00:05:57] I mean, there was a period of time when Airbnb first came around that it was almost like, hey, let's put a hammock in our closet and rent it out. Now I'm joking of course, as being ridiculous, but that was more so the concept than what VRBO technically does, which is again, and VRBO is actually pushing that these days, renting the whole house. If you watch a vrbo Advertisement In 2025, you will see that they are pushing the entire house aspect because technically you're not even allowed to put a room on vrbo. It has to be an entire house and again, a single family home.
[00:06:34] And I could be wrong, but I'm not wrong very often in this space. You cannot put a space within a space on vrbo. It needs to be the whole house. Could you put an apartment unit? I don't know. I have apartments. I rent them out long term so they are Zillows.
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[email protected] that's str.listingadvice.com so along those same lines, I do want to talk about Zillow. We want you. I've mentioned this before and I'm mentioning it again. Why can I not rent my overnight single single family home on Zillow? I can rent it long term on Zillow.
[00:07:38] Why does Zillow not put a vacation rentals button on their website?
[00:07:43] Charge me a monthly or annual fee to put my website on Zillow and have another way for people to find my my rental. It's no different than Google Vacation rentals. Now I understand why Zillow didn't do it in the past. And when I say Zillow again I mean hot pads, Trulia, etc these, these single family home, well they're really an MLS feed, but you can rent on there as well.
[00:08:15] And I understand why they didn't do it in the past and it's because they needed a payment processor and they weren't going to get involved with the payment processing. But now we're living in an age where most of us owner operators on single families have our own payment processor on our own website to rent to friends, to rent to acquaintances, to rent to our to our soi. Our sphere of influence.
[00:08:40] So are we living in a day and age where Zillow could put a vacation rental button on their website and charge me a monthly fee or an annual fee to post my website that has its own payment processor?
[00:08:53] Is it any different than me trying to go on Zillow and rent a home to live in?
[00:09:01] The difference historically has been that with long term rental you didn't necessarily need a payment processor and or there were a million other third party payment processors like Apartments.com or Cozy were the two most popular. TenantCloud etc. There's a million of them out there. Buildium, Appfolio. Those are the large ones usually for larger organizations. If you're not familiar with those. Appfolio and Buildium are the owner res of long term rental.
[00:09:31] Owner as hostaway of long term rental.
[00:09:39] If you, if you understand that analogy and if you're listening to my show, you probably do. And if you don't, you will get to know it.
[00:09:47] Because if you're hanging with the cream of the crop, you will rise to the top. All right, Zillow, I want you. Zillow seems to like to stick their hands in everybody's business anyway. So why don't you stick your hands in the vacation rental business and charge me a monthly fee to post my website on Zillow?
[00:10:09] Obviously it would cost them some marketing dollars. They'd have to do a little bit of a shift there and start advertising and get people used to the fact that they can rent a house part time instead of full time on Zillow. But to me it makes perfect sense. Why is Zillow not getting involved with overnight rental? And I think that they will. Their former CEO has started a company called Picasso where they do fractional vacation rentals, has Nothing to do with what we do here. It's really the Picasso business model. Seems to me a little bit more like timeshare. It's a lot like timeshare. You. You. You're buying a fraction of the home and you can use it for a fraction of the year.
[00:10:54] And they've been around a long time. But again, he has nothing to do with Zillow anymore, to my knowledge. And I could be way off on some of this stuff, but I do my best to try and keep up with the trades. So, Zillow, we're after you. Let's get a vacation rental button on Zillow. I mean, come on, let's go. What are we waiting for?
[00:11:11] Are you trying to say that we're too small potatoes?
[00:11:16] That the money's in the long term rentals, or can I pay you Zillow? I'd like to pay you a monthly fee to advertise my overnight rental website because it's very difficult for me to get SEO on my overnight rental website. In other words, Joe Blows Rentals.com is not nearly as big of a machine as Zillow.com. that is a household name. So let me pay you to put JoeBlo.com on Zillow.com.
[00:11:43] makes sense to me. Will it work? I don't know. I don't run Zillow. I'm not that smart.
[00:11:50] But kudos to Airbnb for being able to genericize their name.
[00:11:57] Is that a fun word? Try saying that one 16 times fast. Also, I love you, Airbnb. I do.
[00:12:05] I am eternally grateful for everything you've done for me and my family. I think you are the best in the business, and I love the fact that you're genericized. I don't know if you did it on purpose. I don't know if you even realize it's a thing. I would assume you realize it's a thing. But nobody. Like I said, I just. I wanted to do this whole podcast. It's 20 minutes. To tell you a joke that nobody ever says. I just rented a Zillow for my family.
[00:12:29] And really, at the end of the day, it's the same thing. It's just slightly different. But they got that brand name in there, man. It's pretty cool.
[00:12:39] So it is cool. But don't get so wrapped up into it that you're renting your Airbnb. And I get it. It's an. It's a whole culture and I'm part of it and I love it. But at the end of the day we got to do whatever we get, we got to do to get that damn thing rented. You know, that's our job as property managers because to me, I think of myself more as a property manager than anything. Yes, I happen to own my homes, which is not common.
[00:13:02] It's not common for somebody managing. In other words, it's not common for somebody that owns rental real estate to manage their own rental real estate. Especially as much as I've got. That's it's not for everybody. Most people that can afford as much rental real estate as I own are going to turn it over to a professional. I just happen to have over the years become a professional and I enjoy it. And I built a team and I built my own property management company. And I use Airbnb to advertise and I use VRBO to advertise and booking.com and I would like to start using Zillow to advertise now. If you're listening to this podcast and you're saying, well, what's the difference between Airbnb and vrbo? Why can't I get any vrbo? That's a conversation for another day. And it's a conversation that I have very often have it in Management Monday. As a matter of fact, have that conversation every week in Management Monday, which is a world famous how to rent your vacation rental course that I do every Monday for the short term shop. We would love to have
[email protected] Enough with the plug. Ola. I love you. Go rent yourself an Airbnb.
[00:14:03] Springtime is here, the summer is here. And you need to go spend some time with your family on the road. And that's what it's all about.
[00:14:13] Don't overthink it.
[00:14:22] Sat.
