Let Perseverance be Your Engine and Hope Your Fuel

From the Podcast: John An is a short-term rental industry expert with particular expertise in optimizing and customizing the technology stack, driving up revenue, and continually streamlining operations. Experienced in building and operating a short-term rental brand from the ground up, John has generated multi-million dollar annual revenue laser-focused on profit-first. He even leverages his own short-term rental company as a fertile testing ground to experiment with new systems and approaches, developing creative solutions to solve operators’ pain points.

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Transcript

0:04
welcome everyone thank you for being with us today at our August lunch and
0:09
learn we’re just going to give it a few more seconds here before we start
0:15
in order to give more people a chance to join us I’m able to lease and I’ll be your host today I serve as an at-large board
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member of the SD stra and this is our August Lynch and learn I also serve as
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the chair for our education and events committee
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um we have events of every month so would love to have everybody join whether it’s an in-person or with the
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lunch and learn so just stay tuned if you don’t
0:47
know about all of our events we can get those that information too you can always email us
0:54
so let’s just give it about 15 more seconds give people a chance to
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settle in and we’ll get started
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before we get started I just have a few housekeeping items to go over for those of you who haven’t been to one of our
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lunch and learns this event is a webinar attendees will not be able to turn on
1:25
your cameras or mics we will also not be using the raise your hand function but if you have any specific
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questions for our speakers please utilize the Q a at the bottom box and we’ll get those answered at the end
1:47
in a couple of days we’ll also send a recap email with recording of the event the slide deck and additional resources
1:54
when the event ends you’ll be redirected to a quick survey to tell us what you thought about the event
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thank you in advance for filling this out and helping make sure each event is better than the last
2:06
okay I think we can probably get started um as I mentioned my name is April Solis
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and I am on the board of the SD stra the short San Diego short term Runners
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Association as for SD straw as we like to say I am also a vacation rental owner for
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since 2011. um but let’s get started with an overview of what we’re
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going to be covering today first I’ll give a quick overview of the SD straw and tell you a little bit about the
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organization then we’ll go over um things with our guest speaker John Ann of tech tape before we wrap up
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today we’ll do a q a and try to get as many of your questions answered as possible so let’s get
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started um now let’s talk about the short-term rental Alliance of San Diego combining
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the efforts of the former share San Diego and short-terminal Alliance of San Diego the new San Diego short-term
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rental Alliance they’re a group of responsible short-term rental hosts and manager staff contractors local
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businesses real estate professionals and others who rely
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on the value of private accommodations bring to San Diego we believe in Fair regulations and balanced Solutions
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collaboration with all local stakeholders and continued learning and understanding for the betterment of all
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if you’re interested in volunteering or getting more involved with our organization please reach out to San
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Diego straw gmail.com and information will be provided in the
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q a in chat so um if you join today you can use our summer code 20 for 20 off your first
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year we’re doing a promotion right now and it’s going to be um exciting for all of our members
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because for those of you thinking about joining it’s a perfect time to help build our foundation or and uh we
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actually have a challenge with our Arizona team to help us compete in a membership drive just so you can bring
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in more members so let’s although we love Arizona Let’s beat them um so just remember when you join today
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put in that summer 20 to get 20 off now I’ll turn things over to our guest
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speaker John N John’s experience as a founder and president of ohana stay and founder and CEO of tech tape John has
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helped to generate millions of dollars in Revenue for his members and so I without further
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Ado I will turn it over to John all right thank you April let me um
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get over to my screen let’s start sharing can you see my screen
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yeah all right great um thank you April for having me on I’m
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excited for today’s conversation um today is more
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um I would say open conversation so while we do want to have most of the questions so at the end
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um April if there’s anything that comes up feel free to you know pop pop those questions uh at me
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um so as uh April mentioned my name is John
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on I’m the founder of tech tape uh I myself uh I have a short-term rental company and out of that we built Tech
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tape uh because of the challenges and using the technology and the short-term rental space and so today I’m going to
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talk about two areas where we provide services one is revenue management where
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you can make more money and one is um kind of back end work that we can do
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to streamline your Tech stack so making more money
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um the way we got started uh providing Revenue Management Services was actually
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because of the results that that I was deriving out of my own portfolio
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my properties are out in Honolulu Hawaii and my two bedroom two bath condos and
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if you can see on the screen these are not super luxury you know drop dead gorgeous properties it’s an old older
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building they’ve been consistently generating uh upwards Beyond two hundred
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thousand dollars of gross revenue per year for two bedroom two bath condo and
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this has been you know ongoing since about 2016 that uh that we we’ve you
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know started that and so folks um started you know
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asking me to run their revenue and eventually this became a full service
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um I’m gonna say something that’s slightly controversial and that is not to follow
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your Market not to follow your competitors when you’re doing Revenue management
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um it’s actually trying to find what the market will bear uh what people who are traveling are willing to pay for your
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property at any given time uh and so this is actually showing the graph of
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the clear line are booked nights of the condo that I just showed you pictures of
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um during the summer The Gray Line are unbooked tonight so
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um they went empty the dark blue dots are what the competitors in my market the 75
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competitors in my market uh were priced and actually got booked and there are a
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few Dots here there are some light dots like here and that’s where they were priced but they didn’t get booked
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so what does this show you a couple things by not necessarily following what my
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competitors are doing you know we I drew a red line that kind
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of shows the top end of what people are doing and so all that white space in between
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represents money that all my competitors left on the table essentially right because everyone saw that one you know
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their neighbor was priced at this this price so then they’re like okay maybe I could push it a little bit maybe not as
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much but you kind of you know average out to what everyone else is doing
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the other thing that this shows is this looks like someone about to have a heart attack right it’s like erratic up
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and down and it’s because we are responding to the demand curve and so you know one day we’re at almost 1200
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maybe 1750 right and then like the next day we’re down to 590 and we’re able to
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do that because we’re looking at what the market will bear as opposed to what the market is doing
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so for comparison uh sake if you look at this is another operator uh in the
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market who’s doing really well um but if you see this this is much more
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algorithmic right on the weekends it goes up on the weekday weekdays it goes down sometimes he pushes a little higher
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and then loses occupancy uh other times he pushes really high and gets occupancy but it’s very you know it’s it’s like a
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steady heartbeat right it’s not a heart attack right this is how this is a heart attack this is kind of a you know steady EK ECG
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EKG um I’m not a medical doctor um so this is and again this operator is
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killing it by all on all um standards but there’s still a lot of room left for
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um you know generating revenue and so what this is really getting at is I’m
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sure most of the listeners participants here today are using Dynamic pricing software like real house price Labs
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Beyond pricing and they are amazing tools but they’re just tools right so the analogy that I
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use is you know wheelhouse price lab is a sports car but if you don’t have a driver you’re not going to win the race
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right you’re just going to have a nice pretty sports car and so whether it’s yourself
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whether you hire someone internally to be your Revenue manager or you hire third party you need someone to actively
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manage that revenue for your business if you don’t want to leave money on the table
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the reason why we take the approach of not just following the competitors
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um it’s partly because the short-term rental industry is very fragmented right
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so everyone in your Market everyone’s kind of guessing what that pricing should be and I and it’s a very nascent industry
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at least with the technology and so there’s a lot of data in our industry but
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the data and the approach are not similar to hotels and a lot of people think if we just copy whatever the
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hotels do you know it’s it’s accommodation it should be the same thing
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um just kind of high level structure rentals every property is a
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unique property even if it’s a apartment within the same you know Condo building
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because you have a separate listing separate descriptions separate photos separate reviews so every property is
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unique where hotels you know one one instance of a hotel
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image hotel room image represents hundreds or thousands of rooms uh so those are identical inventory
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in the short-term rental uh space there are lots of variables I just mentioned
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the reviews can make a difference uh your amenity can make a difference your
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view can make a difference even if you’re in the same building where again the hotel there are very few uh
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variables at least as as far as the room rate goes the nightly rate uh goes
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um short-term rental industry is very fragmented right but everyone kind of does they built their own business their
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own way everyone has their own way of doing Revenue they have their own way of managing cleaning
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um and then the hotel industry you actually go to school to learn how to do the various things that that um you’re
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supposed to do so the data points um is just kind of an average of a lot
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of people guessing where in hotel the data points because everyone went to the same school and got trained is very
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precise so I use a lot of analogies so the analogy is a short-term rental is like
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playing darts at a bar and there are going to be some guys who are really good at darts but the vast majority are
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going to be drunk you know people who are just playing for fun and even though you can average out where all the
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previous starts landed and say on average you know this is where the Talk’s gonna land that average has
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nothing to do with what that next start throwing is where that’s going to land on the flip side with the hotel industry
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because everyone’s playing by the same set of rules it’s like archery at the Olympics right
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everyone is highly trained you have you know only professionals uh
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operating it and so you can kind of take the average of all the arrows that were shot uh previously and when you average
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that all out you’re gonna be pretty close to where that next uh next hour is
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going to land and so that’s why the approach that we’re taking of finding what the market will bear versus
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what the market is doing is applicable at least at this stage in the short-term
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rental industry um just couple things people you know we’re
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data driven data driven there’s a lot of data everywhere and the data is very important but the data task performance does not
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indicate future results right you’ve heard that in many you know investment circles
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looking at past data you know last year’s uh performance to predict next
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month’s performance is like looking into the rear view mirror in order to drive forward right like yes you’ve passed
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there and you navigated that curve but that doesn’t mean by looking at what what you just passed is where you’re
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gonna you know where you’re going to be going and so we advocate for data informed get
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the trends that the data sets are telling you and then make informed decisions
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um around your pricing I want to make sure that I’m moving fast because I want to make sure we stay on
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time um so what’s the most important part is let me
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um flip this around the most important indicator as far as we’re concerned is occupancy
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that’s not to say you shoot for the maximum occupancy all the time but the occupancy is the result
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of your pricing strategy the result of your amenities the result of your
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description your pictures right and so if you if you have over time
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what occupancy you want to achieve at whatever given time in the future and
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and then you moderate your pricing strategy and your marketing strategy around it
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the occupancy is what will tell you whether things are working or not I hope that makes sense if not if there are
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questions I’m happy to answer it um and so we we heavily focus on looking
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at occupancy and pacing how quickly uh
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different time points are being booked up uh to see when there’s demand and
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when we want bookings and when we don’t want bookings so that is the quick piece on Revenue
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management and just to close this part out is um again I’ll use the driving analogy
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Revenue management is like driving and that you have to have your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel consistently so it’s not a once a month
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or every periodically you know randomly you go in and you check and see what’s
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going on and so when you’re driving you make micro micro adjustments and that’s how you stay straight and within the
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lines that’s what Revenue management uh requires so you know we go in three
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times a week minimum to make sure that all the properties that we’re uh we’re
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providing Management Services for are staying on track and uh headed where they need to go
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so kind of Shifting gear
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um the other service that we provide stems from the fact and it’s to optimize
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your Tech stack stems from the fact that there are a lot of moving Parts in a
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short-term rental Hospitality business and there are a lot of technologies that have been created to address a lot of
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those pieces right so you have a channel manager so that you can you know connect to all the channels
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um you have Revenue management you have data for demand um there’s a lot that goes on and in
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fact there have been multiple um studies or a compilation of the tech
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space in our in our industry these boxes this is like how many pms’s there are
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they’re actually over a thousand pms’s in around the world right now not only are there lots of categories right so
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this is um what is the connectivity uh this is
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um Channel management Revenue management or Revenue software not only are there a
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lot of categories within there there are lots of different solutions and they have overlapping feature sets and they
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work differently and so essentially our Tech space is um
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it’s kind of chaotic right people are always like what PMS do you use and then you try this and then it doesn’t work
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for you and then you ask another person what they use I am the idiot that changed pms’s 15
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different times one five and that’s kind of how I got to all the technology aspect of my business
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um so what we do what we provide is this is
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this slide that you’re seeing is an example of um
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kind of the software that uh property manager would use right so you have the
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channels OTAs you might have price labs for dynamic pricing you might have QuickBooks stripe guesty as the PMS
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right and some of them talk together right so these black lines are products
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that are directly integrated between the providers so that you can get the benefit of other services the
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Integrations essentially right then there are white label solution so
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if you’re using Enzo connect there’s actually a lot of things that Enzo connect provides that auto hosts seam
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and Yale and other third-party are providing but it’s it’s invisible to you because
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Enzo has white labeled it so you get that full service but then there are a lot of other links
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that are not made here right now no lines so these are the dotted lines where we
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need guesty to somehow speak with a business Analytics tool if you want a
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dashboard we need slack and guesty to somehow communicate
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with each other so that your team knows what’s going on and those things don’t necess aren’t necessarily
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um integrated right now and that’s what tech tape helps create
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create that solution that doesn’t exist and it’s tailored to what your business
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needs right so it’s like buying off the rack suit and then tailoring it to meet your
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business needs we’re not creating new software we’re leveraging other other people’s software as you can see I do
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like to use a lot of analogy so um so this is something that a lot of people
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have some difficulty putting their head around so um I’ll give you an example of a
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solution so the pain point that we had was one our cleaners were sitting around
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waiting to you know enter units to start cleaning uh after a checkout
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um you know sometimes they could have gone in earlier but they’re just sitting around waiting and two we wanted to
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really optimize our review management right so what tech tip has created of course
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this was for my own management company but this is something that we’re providing for other other managers as
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well we have created a workflow where guests
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are presented with a checkout form and you know they’re strongly encouraged to
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check out to fill out this form when they uh when they check out and this you
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can send out through Airbnb or VRBO and it’s a very simple form your reservation ID so we can identify
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who the guest was and rate your stay those are the two questions so it’s very quick simple they’re willing to do that
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as soon as they check out then our cleaners get notified that
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um that the guest has checked out uh and so if it’s before the you know start time then they’re free to go and you
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know start the cleaning our internal admin team gets a notification that says the guess is
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checked out and has left us a five star review right just because we asked how would you rate your stay they’re highly
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likely to leave a five-star review if they left left a five-star review then we actually text them and this is
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again automatic and say you know thank you and we’re we’re in the process of building up Google reviews right now and
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so only to guests who have you know indicated that they’re likely to leave a
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five-star review we’re sending this message out so that we can start uh capturing Google reviews
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that was a pain point for us that we wanted to solve and so now rather than someone one of our team members having
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to manually text I guess and everything this all works within within our
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business this is just an example of what tech take can do but we’re kind of making
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things work together that aren’t right now made to work and integrate
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so with that um we have a few minutes left so I’ll field any questions or um you know April
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if you have anything you want to say should I stop sharing my screen or what’s what’s the protocol um no you can keep it on there that way
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um we just want to mention too that um John is giving a 10 off
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um for all of our members so make sure that you do use that discount code and uh on the screen right now it’s how to
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contact John regarding his services but we did have some questions come in prior
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to the call so um I’m going to read those off first and the first one is regarding yield
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management can you explain what book pace is and how would you implement it
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yes so booking pace is the rate at which bookings are coming in
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um at at any given point in time so it’s not just right now it’s
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um you know let’s say you’re interested in three months out um you know it’s like
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how how booked is your property um being booked so for example here
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this is a a pacing graph of uh one of uh one of our properties and what it’s
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showing is we’re at um I don’t know like 90 occupancy right
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now at this point and there aren’t any bookings coming in because we’re pretty much booked right
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right now what we’re seeing very interestingly the purple line is um is your pickup right so how much how
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much activity is there so what’s very interesting that we’re seeing is you know in October we’re not
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very booked up right now we’re at about maybe 20 right and for me that’s by Design I don’t want to be booked up far
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in advance I am moderating when I get bookings so we’re at about 20 booked but
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this is showing me that recently we’ve had within the last seven days we’ve had
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our occupancy increase uh in other words we had bookings coming in what does that
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mean there’s more demand people are booking that time
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um for whatever reason right so that’s pacing you can paste occupancy you can Pace Revenue right that’s pacing is just
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a general concept but it’s a rate at which um you know bookings or revenue or whatnot
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is coming in and the relevance to that is by understanding pacing
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then you cannot say okay like three months out I only really want to be booked at 40 let’s say right and if
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you’re behind then you can make the adjustment maybe reduce the rate or whatnot to get yourself to that level
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that you’re comfortable within your business um so that’s where those two things interact
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coordinate man just games across multiple platforms I.E like BRBO Airbnb Etc
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well first there are multiple ways this you
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know if you don’t want to bring on a property management software or channel manager then
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just in terms of the calendar you can um Import and Export icals from each
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each of the um each of the platforms so that’s like the very lightweight and free way to do
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it if you know for whatever reason you don’t want to bring in a property management software
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the downside to that is sometimes it could take hours sometimes it’s even taken you know days uh for icals to
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update so it’s not instantaneous so you may end up with um you know double bookings and whatnot
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so that’s kind of the downfall to just using iCal
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um if you’re going with like the major OTA platforms like Airbnb vrbobooking.com almost any PMS that’s
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worth anything today will have direct Integrations with those uh those
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top channels so select a PMS that you’re comfortable
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with and then through the PMS that’s where it’s using API to make sure that
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everything is coordinated and typically through that it’s very close to
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real-time updates so your risk of double bookings is
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um is lower and then if you really want to distribute amongst lots of lots of
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different channels and I do not recommend that unless you have a very specific goal to doing it but if that’s
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what you want to do there are separate companies that are called Channel managers or rentals United is one uh
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there are multiple companies that provide that and they are connected to lots of different channels
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and then you connect that to your PMs and by doing that your your coordinating
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your calendar amongst lots of different uh channels that are out there
28:19
thank you um what pricing apps are most accurate in Beach areas in San Diego what are the
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top three apps that we should be using so
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that’s the best answer of all it all depends um there are no top there are no bottom
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uh I think the best way to again the pricing apps I think that you
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know top three in our industry are in no particular order price Labs real house
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Beyond right like those are the main standards uh that people use for Revenue
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management and all of those tools actually have a lot of data behind it so
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um you can actually pull reports and pasting reports and everything from those tools
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the important part is again it’s not just data and software that’s taking care of everything it’s you knowing your
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market with the data and implementing it together um so I mean you’re in the San Diego
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Market you should know you know when your peak season is when it’s going to
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be slowing down and you should be actually managing your software
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in conjunction with that of course the software will moderate the prices down and everything but you can get out ahead
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of it or you know play Last Man Standing that’s what you have to do and then the third thing that I’ll say
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is it’s always good to triangulate amongst multiple data sources and when
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things align that means that it’s probably a trend that’s happening and
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when things don’t align it doesn’t mean one tool is better than the other it just means you need to look and dig in a
30:02
little bit more to figure out what may be going on okay thank you
30:09
that’s a good question this is what I’m interested into how do I optimize my listings so I reach more International
30:15
guests the first and foremost answer is
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actually booking.com is really good for international guests I know in the US
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there’s um a lot of people have had issues with booking.com and so people say that you
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know there’s a lot of Fraud and whatever I’m booking.com but it’s actually if you’re able to get
30:39
the settings correctly so that your property is attractive to
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a certain you know certain type of guest uh booking.com is really good for international travel booking.com is
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probably more popular than Airbnb in Europe
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um and you know other International destinations and so if you really want to start targeting International guests
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I would say you should really start to figure out how to how to navigate
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through some of the difficulties that booking.com may present um
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and then in terms of your listing you know have it multilingual a lot of uh pms’s
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actually allow you to um have multiple languages uh
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booking.com you can’t write exactly what you want for your property description it’s kind
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of a generic description but then they translate it into I don’t know how many languages so that anyone looking
31:39
actually gets the information right so you definitely you don’t want to be you
31:45
know the English speaker who just assumes everyone understands English you want your listing to make you know
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whatever country you’re targeting make sure it’s written and it’s not the just Google translate that it’s actually you
31:57
know real grammatically correct uh you know description in your life in that
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language that you’re trying to um communicate in great advice thank you well that looks
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like our top questions if anybody has additional questions make sure that you email us and we’ll get those answered
32:17
for you as well as we’ll get a copy of this presentation out to everybody and I want to thank you John you know for
32:23
participating today really good information um and for giving us a promo and for
32:29
those who are members are looking to be members if you have suggestions on topics
32:34
um or guest speakers that can value our organization and our community please
32:40
let us know please send those in to us we’re here for you we’re here to provide information like John did today that’s
32:46
valuable to the success of all of us so with that being said thank you so much
32:51
for joining and a big thank you again to John remember um
32:57
to join SD stra if you want more webinars like this and a brief survey
33:02
will pop up at the end please take a moment to answer that survey and we do
33:08
have a in-person um meeting on September 12th so take a
33:13
look for information on that and thank you all for participating today
33:18
have a good day thank you April thank you