What's New for Hospitable

[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. Welcome to short term rental management with Luke Carl, the multifamily madman. Although that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're talking about big nation rentals. And today we are going to catch up with one of my favorite softwares, hospitable. Fantastic property management software. And we look forward to hanging with them after a word from this week's sponsor. This episode is brought to you by the premier short term rental Facebook group, short term rental long term wealth. We have nearly 50,000 members and this is the biggest independently owned and operated STR Facebook group and it has been curated by yours truly, cash flow car. Join us on Facebook. Search the groups for short term rental long term wealth. That's short term rental long term wealth on Facebook. Welcome to the short term show short term rental management with Luke. And we've got Brian from hospitable on today. Very exciting stuff. Going to talk about property management softwares in general and all things hospitable. Brian, how are you doing, buddy? [00:01:25] Speaker B: I'm doing well. How are you doing today? [00:01:27] Speaker A: I am wonderful. And you're in Athens, Georgia? [00:01:31] Speaker B: Yes, Athens, Georgia. So it's a college football town. A lot of short term rentals here. And we manage 13 or 14 rentals. We used to own a rental house that my wife and I lived in. Did like the house hacking thing, started an Airbnb back in 2018 and then started managing properties for other people. We've got 14 rentals we manage here for other people. [00:01:55] Speaker A: Okay, cool. And how did you end up with the hospitable gig? [00:02:00] Speaker B: So I've been using hospitable as my PMS software since 2019. So kind of searching around, same thing everybody does when they kind of get to that point where they need a little help. And we found, kind of bounced around from a few different software options and landed on hospitable in 2019 and then was using the software. I was a financial advisor for a while. You wouldn't know it by looking at me with the beard and hair, but I was clean cut at one point in time and then just decided that wasn't really for me. Kind of switch careers and more remote work, a little more family time, things like that. So hospitable was hiring a couple of years ago, so I decided to jump on board and they were happy enough to have me, I guess, I hope. [00:02:44] Speaker A: How did you even hear that they were hiring? I mean, if somebody that's in the space looking to get deeper into the space, how did you know? [00:02:53] Speaker B: So we do a pretty good job of hiring or letting people know internally what's going on. So we'll put out emails to our hosts that use our product and let them know, hey, we're looking for an engineer. If you know anybody, let us know. And so there was an email that went out and they were looking for a sales rep and a support rep, and I think I applied for both. I don't know that I wanted the sales job at first. I thought that might be a little too stressful because I was a sales rep before for financial advising, but it's worked out really well. So that's what we'll always let our hosts know, that we're hiring first to kind of let some people throw their hat in the ring and see if that works. And it's worked out really well. I think I was the first host hire, and then we've gotten three or four others since then. So we've got a bunch of other hosts that use hospitable that also work for the company. [00:03:43] Speaker A: And where is the company based out of? Where do they start? [00:03:48] Speaker B: So Pierre is a frenchman who lives in Brussels. The company was founded in Estonia, and we all are remote. I think I live closest to another employee than anybody else. So they're in Atlanta. So we're about 45, 50 miles away from each other, but we're all scattered everywhere, uS, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Bali, kind of all over the place. [00:04:15] Speaker A: That's wonderful. That's really cool, man. And that's kind of the whole point. I think that's the reason a lot of folks get into this business to begin with is to kind of live a little bit more of a free wheeling kind of a life. And that's great that you guys are living by that culturally within the company. And just let me back up a little bit. And for anybody who maybe doesn't know, we're talking about property management software today. So software that you can integrate with your otas, your Airbnbs, Verbo, booking.com, et cetera, that will do most of the heavy lifting for you. And if not, if nothing else, at least keep you way more organized than you would be. And of course, I've been around in this business a long time, and we didn't have any of these softwares back in the day, and we are living in a much more efficient property management world today. Brian, give me a little bit of background there as far as at least your memory it sounds like you've been around for a while. Do you remember when the softwares came in and how much of an impact did that have on your life? [00:05:21] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot. We started in 2018. There was already a lot of software options on the market, and I think it was kind of, some were shifting from more of a traditional management software to more of what's available now where it's a little more streamlined, better user interfaces, more automation, things like that. Where back in the day, if you wanted a management software, it was going to send automated emails to guests, which isn't ideal, obviously, in this day and age. So we kind of bounced around for a few different software options and then landed on hospitable. But I think so many software options exist nowadays that it's kind of tough to figure out what's the best option for the host or for the manager. So kind of just searching around and seeing what specifically jumps out to you, what needs you have. And that's what I tell people all the time. With hospitable, obviously I have sales calls all day. I'm not a hard sales type person. I try to educate people and help them understand exactly what the software does. And if they're not a great fit because they have a need specific to their company, then obviously I'll let them know that. But there's a lot of software options available that really do a great job and help us as managers and hosts automate things and save time and create a better experience for the guests. At the end of the day, it's. [00:06:39] Speaker A: My impression that hospitable is certainly one of, if not the most simple software available in the short term space. I would go so far as to even say easiest, maybe even sexiest. And I like that. I'm a hospitable user. Full disclosure, I've used many softwares over the years, and of course, back when you were talking back, the early days with the email thing back, I think IGMs was the very first one that I was aware of. But do you guys consider yourselves and market yourselves as such, being the easy, simple software, or is that just something that I've made up? [00:07:20] Speaker B: No, I mean, I think the sexy option. I've never heard that before, but I'll take it. We're going to make new shirts now that say sexiest PMS system on the market. So I appreciate that one. But definitely the user interface is one thing we hear a lot. It's one of the best user interfaces for software. It's easy to follow, it's easy to understand. We tried to make things easy to set up. So that's a big one, onboarding new properties. Because I'm sure, you know, once you start with a software company, regardless of whether you hate it, at the end of the day, it's a nightmare to pull the plug and try to move to a new software. So we made it really easy for people to come on board, like if they're not happy with their current PMS provider. Onboarding with hospital is pretty quick and easy. We have free onboarding, which is really nice, but the software is pretty straightforward, easy to set up, easy to understand, and then we're available to help if somebody does have questions. We're human beings that have answers, so we try to make it easy. Low barrier of entry for people that need that help. [00:08:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't want to name names. I've used a handful of softwares over the years and you definitely are the sexiest, I think, because most of them are just ugly, man. I mean, it's just like one color, maybe two colors, and very difficult to figure out where things are. So, yeah, there you go. Hospitable, sexiest short term rental property management software that there is. I think that that is true. The company kind of started as messaging was the first and foremost the most important thing to you guys. And a lot of folks back in the day were stacking you on top of owner res. That was a very popular thing. I feel like a lot of the other softwares have kind of caught up in the messaging space. But you guys, again, still remain simple. Are you still targeting the messaging? Is that like your most important feature, you think? [00:09:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's probably the low hanging fruit that's really easy to create. More efficiency and more time for the I still to this day, I'll talk to people who aren't automating messaging, even though Airbnb offers, they call them scheduled messages through Airbnb or something like that. So Airbnb realized that this was a need that hosts have, so they started implementing that product. Verbo doesn't offer it. I think booking.com might offer it to a certain degree, but it might be more email based. So for mean, yeah, definitely. The automated messaging is one of the things that most people kind of come to us for, and then they realize we do other things. But like you mentioned, more software companies starting to automate messaging, especially native messaging on the platform. Like we said before, most people were doing automated emails to some degree. So we've all rented cabins and beach houses in the past and gotten some strange email from the management company that gave us all the do's and don'ts. But like two months before our. But. So now we can automate all that directly through Airbnb, Vrbo and booking.com. So it's a huge benefit to the guests because they're going to get that message on their phone, right? Like everybody's stuck to their smartphones, they're going to get that message on their phone, able to take it wherever they can, and then now kind of figuring out ways to make the messaging better. We've implemented some AI into the software, so we've got a Chat GPT integration to create some really nice guest messaging. We've got an AI system for detecting and automating responses for guest questions. So it's just kind of figuring out what's the next step in the guest messaging evolution and trying to stay in front of. [00:11:07] Speaker A: So it is actually Chat GPT direct integration into your dashboard. Personally, I don't know. I'm not there. I've even actually put in a couple of my headlines. No Chat GPT. I don't know, just to be clever, whether that's clever or not, but are you seeing people using that? I've tested it on your site a little bit and it does work very well. [00:11:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, they're discovering it for the first time because we did a launch of the product of the chat GBT integration, but I think a lot of people probably haven't really discovered that it is available. So we'll do demos and product walkthroughs and kind of show people that this is a feature they have and people are usually pretty excited about it because it's not an automated feature, but it is something that can help you set up some really nice guest messaging. So, for instance, a few weeks ago, you and I were talking before the show started about music venues in Athens. So a couple weeks ago, there was a guest that messaged me. They wanted some specific things to do during their visit in town. So instead of me writing out this bulleted list of all the restaurants and things they could do during that weekend, I just clicked that chat GBT button in the inbox and it created a list of all these restaurants. And the 40 watt club was one of the one of the ones listed. So it sent them some pretty cool recommendations for things to do. It wasn't anything I had to spend any time on. I just read the message and make sure it wasn't weird and then sent it out to the guest chat GBT is not to be trusted. I mean, it's AI. So you don't want to just plug and play and let chat GBT message your guests because they're going to mess something up at some point. So there needs to be some oversight, but it's at least saving me the time and the host the time and not creating these messages and trying to craft the perfect response to each guest. So I use it all the time, and I think the hosts that discover it use it as much as they can because it's a huge time saver. [00:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess I never thought about it in that capacity where I get to choose whether or not it's sending the message or not. In that scenario, it does make a lot of sense where, okay, yeah, this is a pretty good message send. It's just one less thing I didn't have to type out. Is there an additional charge for that? [00:13:17] Speaker B: No, it's included in the software. [00:13:19] Speaker A: No kidding. Because you're very inexpensive. [00:13:22] Speaker B: Right. [00:13:22] Speaker A: I mean, just give me a random price tag. For a user with five houses. [00:13:28] Speaker B: Five is $64 a month, so it's 40 for the first two, and then $8 per property after that. And then there's price breaks, like the more properties you have. So for larger managers, they pay less per property per month, but we don't lock you into a long term contract. So that's one thing that's pretty, again, pretty sexy to people. So they don't want to be locked in. There's no upfront cost like an onboarding fee. I mean, I can't remember what some software I was looking at today for our management company has a $2,500 onboarding fee. And that was an immediate deal breaker for me, because I'm not going to pay $2,500 for a company that I have no idea whether it's going to be beneficial to me or not. And there's some PMS systems out there that are charging hosts $500,000 to set up their listing, set up their account, so we don't charge for onboarding. Everything's pretty easy to get set up, which is pretty nice for people, but $40 is the entry point, and then it goes up from there. $8 per property per month. [00:14:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's something to take note of here. There are some softwares that are very difficult, and they are going so far as to. I actually didn't know that, Brian, that I didn't know they had in house setup fees, which is kind of smart, because you hear a lot of softwares out there. Again, I don't want to name names Onarez that are difficult to set up, and they had all these offshoots of people that you could hire to set up your software for you. So it's very interesting to hear that some of those softwares are bringing that in house. It is kind of smart of them, I suppose. But at the same time, I can see that as a turn off as well. Where, hey, if you want to set up this software, it's going to cost you $1,000 or $5,000 or something like that. That's crazy. But again, I think that if you're going to use hospitable, it's one that if you decide you wanted to go to something crazier or more robust a little later on, it's easy to get in and out of, like you said, whereas with a high tech, again, more sophisticated software without naming names, if you go through all that trouble to set one of those up, you're kind of stuck there. I mean, I wouldn't want to get out of that. It's almost like you guys are the gateway drug, and then if somebody found the need or maybe got to 150 properties or something like that, to go to something with more bells and whistles, that could be done, but to do it the other way around, I think, is rather difficult. [00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, that's where I typically meet with hosts who have 20 plus properties. And when you get to that level, you're still a small pm at the end of the day, but you have integrated systems into your company, you've integrated software, messaging, and pulling the plug completely on that and moving to something else can feel pretty daunting. I've been there and we're still there. I'm never leaving hospitable, but as far as other software options we use to kind of supplement and run parts of our business, it's tough to think about moving away when my wife is a real estate agent. She's having a baby, we'renovating a house. I have a full time job. We have 14 short term rentals. What time do we really have to think about doing all that? But that's where, like you said, for hospitable, it's easy onboarding, no onboarding fee, and then setting everything up. I think it's really simple. So it's definitely one of those things where you're just coming up with all the slogans, man, the gateway drug of the short term rental software industry. [00:17:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that's you. I'm the slogan maker, baby. [00:17:06] Speaker B: I love it. [00:17:07] Speaker A: But not to say that you guys could not be used for somebody with a larger portfolio or a larger property management company, I would imagine that. Again, I only have nine. But short terms, hundreds of the long terms. We're not here to talk about that, although we are going to get into that. I think the end user that has 100 properties could do very well with you. Yeah, I don't think that this is like a noob software in any way. [00:17:38] Speaker B: No, not at all. And I think it's what your needs are. Everybody's needs are totally different. I'll tell people all the time that have one or two properties, they might have some specific need that we can't meet and we're not a great fit for them, but we have at one point in time, I think he's still with us, but we had a guy who had 3000 Airbnb listings over hundreds of accounts and they were all connected to hospitable and they managed all the messaging and everything through our system and it worked great. To your point. Sometimes you get to a point where you need something specific and you can layer hospitable on top of another system that can work really well. We have a unique connection with Airbnb, so we're able to connect to Airbnb alongside another PMS system. So that's not really the case with most other systems. Most PMS systems have to connect to Airbnb alone, so they're not able to connect side by side with something else. So we can kind of piggyback off Airbnb alongside another product, which is really nice if you do get to that point where you need really robust property management software along with the automation that hospital provides. [00:18:44] Speaker A: Management Monday is proud to present this episode of the short term show. Management Monday is a weekly course that will teach you everything you need to know about managing a short term rental from a distance, how to get more bookings, hire ADR, how to hire and fire vendors. Even if you don't want to manage it yourself, you need this course so you know how to manage your manager. Over 10,000 super hosts started their career with management Monday and the best part is it's free for short term shop clients. Start your journey today at the shorttermshop.com. Theshorettermshop.com. Yeah, you're talking, you're referring in some capacity to API. Can you explain to me as if I'm a five year old? I have a five year old, so I associate because I'm hanging out with her more than anybody else. Really. Explain to me, like I'm five years old, what is API? And you guys do not do that, is that correct? [00:19:51] Speaker B: So in this instance, I am also a five year. At the end of the day, I'm more of a salesperson. The API is more of an engineering thing. It's over my head to many degrees. But we do have API connection with Airbnb, Vrbo and booking.com. So we are API connected to the channels at the very basic level. There's a couple different connections that you can have with a listing channel or an OTA, like an ical, which we're all familiar with. Icals, are they lag? They're not really fast. And so if you got a reservation on Airbnb and you've got an iCal connection to another platform, you might get a double booking because the iCAL is probably not going to push information really quickly to be able to block that off with an API connection, information flows a lot faster. So we are API connected to Airbnb, Vrbo and booking.com to where if you had a reservation on one of those channels, it's going to automatically block off on the other channels. We're sending that messaging directly to those channels via the API connection. We're able to pick up different things with the reservations, like check in, checkout times to be able to automate things for your cleaning staff, your team, anybody else who needs information to be relayed to them. So we are API connected. As far as getting into the nitty gritty on what it does, I am the wrong person to ask for that one. [00:21:11] Speaker A: I was under the impression you were not. Or maybe back in the day you were not. But so how come you guys, I can layer on top of other softwares, but other softwares I cannot. Do you know why? [00:21:23] Speaker B: So from what I understand, we have a specific API connection to Airbnb that other PMS systems do not have. It's not necessarily better or worse, it's just different. So like for instance, booking.com, you can only connect one provider to booking.com to be able to manage your listings. Vrbo, you can connect multiple softwares to Vrbo, but it's a terrible connection because things are going to get lost. You're not going to be able to manage everything as efficiently. But with Airbnb, we can connect to Airbnb alongside owner res like you mentioned to be able to. On one hand, you can have some property management functionality that you really need to manage your business. And on the other hand, you can have all the automation that hospital provides, be able to be efficient, provide a good guest experience, save everybody. [00:22:14] Speaker A: Cool, cool. So let me ask you about, I mentioned long term rental earlier. In the long term rental space, there are two to three big softwares that you hear all the time. You got bildium, you got Appfolio, and you got parmis.com, which used to be cozy, but they bought cozy. And you don't really hear about too many others. There are many others. I used one for a long time called tenant cloud, and there's a bunch of them out there, but there's really like three, at least to my knowledge, in my experience and my years in long term, that kind of corner the space. So how the hell did we get to a situation where there's literally, I heard a figure recently, like 1100 short term management softwares. [00:23:00] Speaker B: Wow, okay. Yeah, I hadn't heard that. That statistic is not surprising. But I think they're easy to create and they're easy to figure out what's the need in the marketplace. And that's where Pierre, our founder, why he created what was called smart BNB. Back in the day, there was a messaging need because nobody was doing automated messaging. It didn't exist on the OTA platform. So he wanted to be able to create automated messaging for his guests. So he created Smartbnb, which is now hospitable. And I think there's other software providers that are seeing a need for that. At VRMA. A couple of weeks ago, I talked to a guy who, they are a software provider to be able to do trash pickup specific to short term rentals. So they will take your trash to the curb, pick it up every week if it needs to be picked up. There's mesh Wi Fi, gateway software like Safei and other providers. So I think it's just figuring know what's the need in the market and then being able to provide that. But there's know a handful of the PMS softwares that are kind of the most well known, the big, the big guns in the industry like we've talked about. Know igms is still kind of there to a certain degree, although I don't really hear igms's name too. Guestsy hostaway hostfully are the other three big ones that we hear from most often, or people move from their software to hospitable most often. So I think the five of us, the owner's hospitable hostfully hostaway guesty logify. You can kind of throw in there. So there's a bunch of them that are kind of cornered the market and are still doing a pretty good. I mean, if I was tech savvy, I'd start my own short term rental management software company and just sell the crap out of it. [00:24:42] Speaker A: Hard to compete though, right? At this point, with all those other. [00:24:45] Speaker B: Softwares, it probably is, but just figuring out what you could do differently, how you could set yourself apart. I mean, talking about AI earlier, I think that's a big one. There are some companies who are really going to leverage that over the next few years and kind of set themselves apart, and we're already seeing that to a certain degree. I can't remember what their names are, but there's a couple AI driven messaging platforms and management platforms that I saw at VRMA that they're small. It's probably just a small team, a few people, but they're kind of figuring out a little niche for themselves and trying to drive users toward that because those people have a need for automation. They really want a fully automated short term rental business, which you and I both know, a passive income short term rental business doesn't exist. So people are always going to have a need for something specific and somebody has the know how to figure out how to make a software to fill that need, then good on them, right? [00:25:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. Where do you see the future of the space in general? I'm kind of thinking that a lot of these smaller softwares are just going to kind of disappear. And I think that those big names that you named, not naming names over here, but we name know they're going to prevail, much like in the long term rental space. That's kind of how I feel that it's going in that direction. But what do you think? [00:26:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right. I don't necessarily know about go away, like the small PMS softwares and the small software providers, I think they'll probably get gobbled up by some of the big ones. So big companies are going to buy small companies. That's kind of always the way it is. They're going to leverage somebody else's work to be able to add to their own software stack. I'm sure that's going to continue to happen. As far as the future. I think I've seen more otas kind of coming around niche specific otas, so I think that's going to continue to go. And I think Google Vacation rentals is probably a big one. It's kind of been around for a little while and hasn't really done a whole lot. They don't really provide online booking or payment processing or anything like that on the host to have their own website or to have some sort of provider to be able to take the payment. But I think Google is probably going to put some money behind being able to compete a little bit with the online booking agencies like Airbnb, Vrbo and booking.com to be able to drive some traffic to their specific listings instead of to Airbnb and Vrbo. I think that's probably a big one over the next few years and we kind of saw a need for that. So we integrated Google vacation rentals with our direct booking system. So every direct booking site that's created and hospitable, it automatically gets indexed in Google. And I think a lot of people are seeing some good search coming from that already, which is pretty neat. [00:27:28] Speaker A: Okay, explain to me like I'm five years old, Google vacation rentals, even though you already did, but a lot of folks don't even know it exists. And like you said, it has know kind of been floating around for a little over a year now, but they haven't done a whole lot with it. What's your take on the whole thing? [00:27:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's crazy. They have so much money and infrastructure at their fingertips that they could put a little bit of that towards the Google vacation rentals, like part of Google, and it could be really special. I think it's tough to figure out how to find a vacation rental through mean you can just search your city vacation rentals, which most people probably just search their city and Airbnb because Airbnb is now a verb. So I think people are just doing that instead. And I don't think vacation rules on Google will pop up at that point. So you kind of have to figure out how to find them first. And then if Google wants to provide some sort of infrastructure for building sites and doing payment processing, then I think that's probably the next step for them, be able to capture extra fees or capture listing site fees from the host or the guests or whatever that might look like. And I don't know if they really want to do that, but I think that there's a big kind of void in their system where they could make it better and make it more optimized for hosts to be able to get more reservations from it. And they're just not really doing that right now. I have no idea if they're going to. I don't have anybody from Google in my contact list. I'd probably call them all the time and try to figure out how to get my listings more optimized on Google. But I think that there's opportunity for them to do a better job with it and hopefully they will. And that'll help everybody because we all want to have a direct booking website and drive traffic away from the otas and that could just help it in the future. [00:29:13] Speaker A: I'm happy to pay the otas. They spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on marketing so I don't have to, but I see the benefit in doing it off platform as but now with Google, with you guys. Explain that to me. Let's say I sign up for hospitable today. You guys do have that Google vacation rentals capability. How does that work? [00:29:37] Speaker B: It's directly tied to our direct booking system. So you create a direct booking website inhospitable. We have a feature that you can toggle on the Google vacation rental listing. So if you wanted to add your listings to Google vacation rentals, you can choose which ones you want to add. Some people don't want to add all of really. I'm sure there's certain use cases for it, but I don't really know why they wouldn't want to just list all of them in Google. So you turn that feature on or that integration on and then we'll push your listings into Google vacation. So if a guest goes to, in your case, smoky mountains and they're looking for a cabin for a couple people for a couple nights, your listing will show up on the Google main page on the Google vacation rental search. So they can see, I think you can see a couple of pictures, the pricing, a little bit of a description. You can click on the link for the website and then it opens up your hospitable direct booking website which has all the nice pictures, text, all the description, amenities, all that kind of stuff on there, and then they book direct through you. So they put in their credit card payment details and then our system will charge them and then they can get all the automation and hospitable, all the good stuff that hospitable provides, but they're going to go directly through you instead of paying whatever 12% to Airbnb and you pay the 3% to Airbnb. So it saves everybody a little bit of money, which I think is the big draw. You mentioned you're happy to pay the OTA, which I agree with you like 3% to Airbnb for marketing and payment processing is dropping the hat like that's nothing. I'm totally okay with paying that, but it's thinking from the guest side. The guest is more inclined to pay less if they don't have to pay the 12% fee to Airbnb. I think they would love to do that as long as you can provide the trust factor for them. [00:31:17] Speaker A: So I literally just click a button and it goes to google vacation rentals. Now what if I want to have my own website? Can I use my own website or maybe a boostly website? Can I use a wix or a WordPress website through you guys to be pushed to Google? [00:31:36] Speaker B: That's the next step. So we're working on. So for my management company, for instance, I have my own custom website that has our booking widgets through hospitable listed on it. So guests can show up to my website, which my wife does an amazing job of doing social media for, and email marketing for, to try to get bookings. But that website is not going to show up in Google search right now. It's the hospitable direct booking website that will show up in Google. So our websites in hospitable are designed to get bookings. They're not designed for you to have a contact page, blog, know anything specific about your company. It's just designed to get people to book direct through you. So that's the site that's going to show up in Google. [00:32:17] Speaker A: So for right now I'm better off just using creating the hospitable website, which is quick and easy, right? [00:32:23] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, it's pretty fast. We create the listings based on your Airbnb account. So you don't create listings, we create them for you based on your Airbnb list. [00:32:30] Speaker A: You don't create websites, you create it for us. Is that what you meant? Yeah. And then, so create the website, which is basically just click a button and then click another button. It'll send that website to Google. Would there be any benefit? Let's say I had a fancy WordPress website with a bunch of blogs, et cetera. Would I still maybe want to create the hospitable website and push that to Google? Or wait until you guys have the capability to push my current website. [00:32:59] Speaker B: I think you can always switch in the. So I've got both set up. So currently I have a hospitable website that is indexed in Google so guests can see that on Google vacation rentals they can book direct through my site. We also have a fancy WordPress website or in your words, a sexy WordPress website. People can see all the content we've added different things, our blog, all that kind of stuff about our management company. And then that does have the hospitable booking widgets associated with it. So guests can still book direct, put their credit card in, they're going to pay the same amount on that site that they would through Google vacation, and it's all tied to hospitable. So once they book, all the automation in our system starts, which is really neat. But from my perspective, the benefit to doing both or to having a hospitable website is it's easy and fast to create. It is indexed in Google for now. And then having a custom website is where we drive our own traffic to that site. So through social media, email marketing, that's where we can kind of create a little bit more value for ourselves. Where people are finding us on Instagram and going to our website, people are finding us, their previous guests, that we collect their emails through hospitable and through stayfi, and we do email marketing through Mailchimp to those people to try to push them to our direct booking website. So that's where you can tie it all together. [00:34:19] Speaker A: Okay, wonderful. Well, what else is coming on in the future for hospitable? I guess for me, the big question is the financials. I hate to tell you, your financials stink and it's difficult for me to figure out what the hell I'm making. It's almost kind of a waste of my time. I'm being brutally honest because I love you, but are financials going to get better? [00:34:38] Speaker B: Yeah, they are. So we've got a team that's working on that right now. So, metrics, we call it metrics, but it essentially is financial. So we're pulling the financial data from the otas to try to make it obviously accurate a little bit more a more digestible format. So in the future, I've seen screenshots of what it's going to look like. We'll get better data from the otas, and then in the metrics section, which I'm sure you're familiar with in hospitable, you'll be able to always download the data. So that's what we've been able to do for years. We'll have the actual dashboard where you can see your financials, so you can see revenue RevPar, occupancy, average daily rate, all those metrics that are key to managers and owners. Filter it by property, platform date, current versus a year ago, things like that. So you'll be able to see all of that visually on the screen and you'll still have access to the data. So that's something we've got a team working on right now. So that's a big one. The next big feature that's coming out is going to be parent child. So being able to have multiple listings that are tied together in a few different ways, like if somebody wants to book a room or the whole house, we can kind of manage that block. Up until this point, we don't have the ability to do that. You can set up an Airbnb with a linked calendars feature, but outside of that, Vrbo is pretty messy. Booking.com doesn't really work very well, so we're working on that feature that should be live pretty soon and then launching direct. So right now, direct premium is only available in the US. So that's where payment processing, guest screening, damage protection, we're going to be launching that more worldwide coming in 2024. So I think we're starting at Canada UK and then trying to push that out as many places as we possibly can. I think part of the direct premium value proposition for hosts is going to be doing tax remittance. So that's one thing we're working on being able to do is like, Airbnb and Verbo, collect your taxes and remit it for you, or they do if you work with hospitable. So that's a huge time saver. But if you start taking direct bookings, you have to think about how do you manage the taxes? Do you want to have to do that monthly to your county and city and state? So we're going to be able to have the ability to be able to collect the taxes for all direct bookings and send them out directly for you through an integration we're working on. So that'll be a really neat one and a big time saver for a lot of hosts. [00:37:01] Speaker A: Very cool. Yeah, that's very cool. One more thing I'm going to throw at you. Please make it so that I can change the order of my properties on the calendar page, because in the wintertime, my beach properties are completely empties. But it's alphabetical. I think you can do it maybe by tags, I'm not sure, but you. [00:37:21] Speaker B: Can have tags, and the tags is great for filtering, but I get what you're saying, like being able to reorder them whenever you want, and that's something we've heard from other people as well. [00:37:32] Speaker A: I'm sure you hear a million things. I don't want to be that guy. Don't make me be that guy. [00:37:39] Speaker B: But no, we love feedback. [00:37:40] Speaker A: It's because it's happening right now. This time of year, my beach houses are empty all of a sudden, and when I look at my calendars, I would love to move those to the bottom so that I don't get a panic attack every time I look at my calendar. Oh, my God. Look at all the spaces I got to fill. If they're at the bottom, I can kind of. Anyway, just. But great. [00:37:56] Speaker B: Wonderful. Yeah, it's definitely good feedback, and I'll tell anybody who's listening, take. We take host feedback pretty seriously. Luke, I don't know if you've sat in on any of the town halls, but those are available every two weeks for hosts to join. They can give us their good feedback, then give us their terrible feedback, tell us that we suck, tell us that we're great. We'll take it in stride and try to build a better product. [00:38:19] Speaker A: And how does that work? Is it on Zoom? How do I join one of those? [00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it's on Zoom. We usually will list it on social media. We do email blasts about the webinar or about the town hall, and then any current hospital hosts will get it in their dashboard to see that it's out there. But I'm sure if this is going to be on YouTube, we can probably include a link for everybody. Yeah. [00:38:45] Speaker A: So if you're just logged. Oh, one more thing, man. The cool thing about hospitable is it tells you when Verbo's acting up at the top of the screen, which doesn't. That's been happening less and less. I remember when I first switched to hospitable, it seemed like fairly common. Hey, we're having problems with verbo. Is the connection getting better? Are things getting better in general? [00:39:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the connection with Verbo is always kind of up in the air, and Verbo is what it is. They're a giant. I don't know that they're really all that quick to work with smaller PMS systems, which hospital is not small, but we are not one of the giants as far as some of these other companies are concerned. That said, our team is working on making the connection more stable, and I think they've done a lot in the last couple of months to do that. So you shouldn't, like, I don't see any Vrbo disconnections at all. We don't hear it hardly at all. If you ever notice that, definitely reach out and our support team can look into that for you because there are specific things that I think make it more unstable and it's more like geared toward the security on your account. Like two factor authentication and things like that. [00:39:58] Speaker A: Love it. Okay, cool. Any idea when I can expect the financials to be updated? [00:40:06] Speaker B: Ma'am, we're not huge on giving like a timeline on something, so I'll just say we're working on it. It's a priority. [00:40:13] Speaker A: Got it. [00:40:13] Speaker B: So it's something we've got a few people on our team working on every day. [00:40:18] Speaker A: Make my life and my bookkeeper's life so much easier. But you guys have done that. Anyway, though. I'm a huge fan. I've been with you guys, I think going three years now and not going anywhere. Appreciate everything you guys do. Anything we missed? [00:40:34] Speaker B: No. There will be a know. We're going to keep doing updates to the direct booking system, so doing promo codes that are going to know percentage based. The google vacation rentals link is a new big one. Continuing to update how the sites look, the functionality of the website. So that's a big feature we're going to continue to work on over the next few months, six months. So definitely stay tuned to everything. And we do free trials for everybody. So it's not a hard fast. You got to sign up and give us your credit card on day one. So anybody's interested, let us know and be happy to help you out. [00:41:05] Speaker A: Promo code, meaning use this code for 10% off your next vacation with us. [00:41:11] Speaker B: Yes. Correct. One way I'm using this currently is airbnb. Guests come through our site. So they come in, they come through airbnb, they book through us, and then in the property we give them a promo code that know you're going to get this much off your next day if you use this QR code to book direct. So they scan the Qr code, it takes them directly to my website and they can put in their dates, they can put in the promo code, in the flow when they're putting in their credit card information and get a discount on that first day. [00:41:43] Speaker A: Cool. All right, man. Got a book you've read recently that you want to throw at us? [00:41:50] Speaker B: A book recommendation, man, I think I mentioned at the beginning we're having a baby, we'renovating a house. Reading is very low on my agenda at this point. Not to plug it. I did buy avery's book a while back and it's been sitting on my nightstand unopened. So it's there. It just hasn't been. Yep. [00:42:13] Speaker A: Well, you've got bigger and better things to do right now, man. It's exciting times. I look forward to hearing about that. I've got two little ones myself, and it is just unbelievable. So proud of you. Cool, man. Well, thanks for coming. And if there's anything we can do to help, you, just let us know. Thanks for hanging on. Short term rental management.