Shannon Hyde:                 00:00:00              Guestready have a pretty interesting strategy in that. What we did is we hired maybe one, maybe one person in each city and we launched in six different cities at once. The growth plans are always very ambitious from the beginning, so I mean to say 1600 yeah, it is still a surprise because you know it’s still pretty crazy to think in three years that’s kind of where we are at. That’s kind of been our strategy.

Julian Sage:                       00:00:22              This is episode number 50 of the short term rental success stories podcast. Are you an investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed? Go to cohostit.com for more information. Welcome back. The short term rental success stories. I’m your host Julian Sage. This is a show where I talk to hosts about their journeys and starting and growing the short term rental business. My goal is that you’ll be able to walk away with practical information that’ll help you become a better host and learn how to scale your business. Like any exceptional hosts. We all strive for five star reviews, so please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy because it really helps support the show. If you haven’t done so already. Going over to our Facebook group, the host nation to connect with the community.

Julian Sage:                       00:01:02              Hey, what is going on Host Nation! I am super excited to be back again with you this week. Firstly, I want to say thank you so much to the host nation family for allowing me to be able to share all of these success stories with you. This podcast has truly changed my life and if it wasn’t for everybody that is a part of the host nation and constantly supporting me, you know, we’re at over 70 reviews right now on iTunes, the host nation family. We have over 3000 people in our group. We’re getting tens of thousands of downloads and listens a month. I love seeing and welcoming everybody into our community. You guys have really just changed my life so much and because of the show and because of all your support, I want to just keep on moving forward and striving for more. Because of this, I met my business partner, mentor and friend Jon Bell.

Julian Sage:                       00:01:46              We started another podcast, vacation rental machine. I was able to get myself from struggling, just getting by, now being to almost financially free, all of this while still serving in the coast guard and now we have a management company together and we’re also coming out with our course, the vacation rental machine formula. We have a book that’s coming out really soon. We have an awesome super tight knit community of BNB empire builders, which is our private mastermind group. All these things in 50 weeks, I never would have imagined that my life would be where it is right now and it’s all thanks to you, the host nation family. So from the bottom of my heart, I thank you so much for the impact that you’ve had on my life and what you’ve allowed me to do, which is to help change other people’s lives. That’s really the biggest calling on my heart is helping other people be able to change their lives and claim that time freedom back.

Julian Sage:                       00:02:36              This business has truly changed my life and my goal is to help at least a hundred people. If I can help a hundred people claim their time freedom back so they don’t have to struggle the same way that I did when my dad was passing away from cancer and I just needed to be able to spend more time with him, but because I was stuck with the job and when you don’t have money you have to pay with time. I was in a situation that I did not want to be in, so now my mission is to help other people claim that time freedom back. These past 50 weeks has been me trying to claim my time freedom back, but we’re right there and now that I’m able to take care of myself and my family, I want to be able to help other people change their lives as well.

Julian Sage:                       00:03:10              So like I said, Jon and I had been working on a program called the VRM formula and what we want to do is give you guys a special training where we’re going to be peeling back the layers of the VRM formula and exactly what it is. When people come into the space, it can be overwhelming with how much information there is and all these different things that you need to learn and there wasn’t ever really a clear path, but in this training you’re going to be learning about rental arbitrage, co-hosting, John and I’s own stories, and then exactly how to go from start to finish for building your own vacation rental machine, Airbnb business. This program that we’ve been working on is really the culmination of months and months of hard work. I’ve been investing so much time and money into this program because I really believe, I truly believe that this is going to be a thing that will change your life.

Julian Sage:                       00:03:57              I don’t want people to just listen to content and then not take action. We’ve been designing this program so that it really is step-by-step. This isn’t general information. I mean we cover a lot of information on vacation rental machine podcast and the short term rental success stories podcast. But what’s more important than information is implementation. And that’s the goal of the VRM formula is that we can walk you along every single step so that by the time you are finished with the program, you’ll have your very first and profitable vacation rental machine that is able to run on autopilot. Being able to pick up a property is one thing, but being able to automate it so that you do truly have that time freedom is completely different. So if you’d like to join our live training, go to shorttermsage.com/earlybird. And when you subscribe to the email list, we will let you know when the next live training becomes available.

Julian Sage:                       00:04:46              And you’ll also get our special early bird price. And since this is episode 50, I wanted to do a very, very special episode. So in this episode we have the special honor of speaking with Shannon Hyde. Shannon is the head of global operations for the property management company guestready, which is one of the largest property management companies in Europe with over 1600 properties up to 2000 under management all around the globe. He was one of the first employees in their London market and helped grow the company from three properties to the over 1600 that they have. Now. This is a really special episode because I’ve never been able to talk to somebody that has over 1600 properties. That is crazy and Shannon is just such an awesome guy. He shares so much information in this episode and you can tell in this episode, I’m really trying to just dig and find out as much information as I can so I hope you all benefit.

Julian Sage:                       00:05:38              Shannon shares a lot of really good insights on building both a property management company and the PMs software to automate and run their business, which has fueled their growth and Shannon actually did something really special for us, which he allowed us to be able to look at his property management software behind the scenes. This is something that they have developed in house and how they managed their over 1600 properties. I’ve never seen anything quite like this to be able to see such a large player in the space. Just revealing so much information. So if you’d like to see a behind the scenes, look at the property management software that Shannon talks about in this episode. Then go to a shorttermsage.com/rentalready, so like guestready except rental ready. You can check out that bonus episode after the show. It’d be like my show notes for this episode.

Julian Sage:                       00:06:23              You go to shorttermsage.com/STR50 or if you’d like my show notes sent directly to your inbox every week. Then go to shorttermsage.com/ shownotes. With all that being said on to this week’s conversation, Hey, welcome back Host nation to another episode of short term rental success stories. In this episode, I have the special honor of speaking with Shannon Hyde. Shannon is working with guestready. He started at the foundation. I’m super, super excited. This is going to be such an awesome episode. I highly recommend you listen to this one once more. But Shannon, would you please introduce yourself to the host nation, let them know who you are and what inspired you to get into short term rentals.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:06:58              Yeah, sure. Thanks Julian. And to share my story and hopefully give you guys some interesting insights and to get us ready. So my background, I I’ve been working at guests ready for a bit of a three and a half years now. I joined when we had about five properties in London and over the last three and a half years with 1600 companies in title. So it’s been a pretty crazy ride. I’m pretty, you know, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of sleepless nights. Mmm. Before yesterday I was working for a company called one fine stay who do like luxury rentals in London and a few other cities, a footprint and they got acquired by ACOR in 2016. So they were kind of one of those first movers into like, you know, short term rental space. You know, they sort of launched around the time Uber luxury apartments in London.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:08:02              Mmm. So yeah, that’s, that’s kind of my story in terms of why, but into short term rentals. I mean, I think the rise of editing days has been really interesting in terms of monetizing an asset that otherwise would sit empty. How, you know, people are sort of moving towards like working remotely and being able to sort of travel and not be stuck in six locations. And I think because of that, it’s been nice that you can monetize your property when you’re away. You know, I’ve been able to travel you know, my time when, as to why you would do short term rentals.

Julian Sage:                       00:08:42              So, so you started with a guest ready when they had five properties. I mean, did you become a founder or was it, was it just like, Hey, they saw you working at one fine stay and they’re like, Hey, this guy is rocking with their operations. Let’s just pull them on over. How did that relationship turnout?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:08:59              Yeah, I mean, I’m, I, I didn’t know. Alex is our CEO. He’s reached out to me on LinkedIn and it was like, you know, I’m starting this new company, you know, I think you’d be a really good fit for it. And you know, at a time I was looking to so join another startup or something going a bit more early stage. Cause I mean once I stay was kind of pretty well matured at that point. No it’s just sort of about to get quiet. Mmm. So yeah I didn’t really know what I was sending out for and getting myself intimated as a bit of an IUT with that. But at the same time it was a pretty exciting prospect. So yeah, when he reached out to me it was like, you know, do you want to help me build this thing? And I was like yeah that sounds awesome. Let’s do it.

Julian Sage:                       00:09:37              You know, I’m, I’m looking at the, I remember seeing guests readies name before we talk to him cause I was actually looking online, you know, world’s top 20 vacation rental companies. There’s this blog article on medium and they have this really cool like infographic with like the map and then guest ready is actually on that. It says you guys are based out of Paris, but they say that you have a 2000 rentals.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:09:59              Yeah. Yeah. So it, it kinda fluctuates. I mean, you know, in Europe it’s high season in the summer and we sort of scale on scale down of the summer and we have a lot of hot time hosts that, you know, turn on and off like their properties when they’re away and that type of thing. So 2000 properties like, yeah, like site, you know, hosts can come back and that type of thing. But we do have a lot of sort of part time hosts.

Julian Sage:                       00:10:31              Okay. So you, you guys, you know, at the, at the moment you have around 1600 properties. The, these are a full service management or what, how do, how do you do your management?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:10:41              Yeah, so we we provide like a full management model for that, you know, yeah. I just sort of 10 case relation for an own away, like completely wild. I mean we have some investors that don’t live in the country upright and then we manage influence, everything to do with the rental sites. We provide our furnishing solutions in some cases. But we do, you know, like full cleaning, maintenance, check in, check out pricing optimization and guest services.

Julian Sage:                       00:11:13              [Inaudible] And how many, how many States or countries are you guys operating out of

Shannon Hyde:                 00:11:19              I think it’s six different countries. It could be more of, it’s either six or eight, a UAE, a Hong Kong, Malaysia. I think there might be one more that I’m missing. Yeah. France, I chose six different countries. I think we’re in about maybe 12 or 13 different cities. But we were in like, you know, mainly focused around London and Paris probably,

Julian Sage:                       00:11:50              You know, three, three years. You started in August two 16. You know, right now this, this interview it’s January of 2020. I mean that, that’s some fast growth. What, what did, what did it look like when you first joined the team? At five properties and someone’s reaching out to you on LinkedIn saying, Hey, you know, we’re starting this company you know, do you want to join our startup? Could you even have guests that you would have been over 1600 properties in this short amount of time and spanning, you know, across the globe at this point?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:12:19              Yeah, I mean when, when we first started yesterday, I had a pretty interesting strategy in that

Shannon Hyde:                 00:12:28              What we did is we, we hired maybe one or maybe one person in each city and we launched in six different cities at once. So we launched it in London, Paris Hong Kong, Singapore and Amsterdam as well. And we just basically tried to get traction in all those markets just to see if we could yeah. A bunch of properties together and sort of raised money out of that. And quite considerably we saw some really good growth. Some markets like London and Paris or is always really good for us. But then some of the other markets, we had to shut down after a few months or like six to 12 months after we launched. A speaker, I guess for various reasons, but mainly because to guests and hosts wasn’t as as high as maybe we expected initially. Mmm. So I mean like the growth plans are always very ambitious from the beginning. So I mean to say 1600. Yeah. It isn’t a surprise because, you know, it’s still pretty crazy. Mmm. But at the same time, yeah, you kind of need to move fast to break things, you know? And that’s kind of been our strategy.

Julian Sage:                       00:13:34              You guys had like a macaroni plate approach. You just threw everything out there, said Hey we’ll see which markets are gonna pick up. And that’s where you went from.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:13:42              Yeah, exactly.

Julian Sage:                       00:13:44              What, what does it take to be able to scale to that many properties? I mean, you guys, you guys are doing something right if you were able to, to do this. Is this, is this just like a different type of of, of, are you guys doing like a different model or a different type of business? Cause lots of people, they start property management companies, but you know, a lot of times they just, it’s just the smaller operations, you know, and if they do scale, maybe it’s like maybe a hundred hundred properties, maybe 200 properties, but you guys have just like blown up. How, how do you do that?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:14:12              Yeah, so I think we’ve always really focused on on service quality as being like a, I really came and part of our business, especially to our hosts because the, the owners or the at the end of the day you can keep them around. That’s what’s going to allow you to scale. If you turn your hose you don’t really have a business that’s sustainable. So we always try to focus on that to begin with. I guess what we were able to do, you know, by launching in sort of six different cities, we had this like really big mentality of like sharing knowledge between all the cities but also sort of finding best practices. And so we were able to really share knowledge across like different parts of the, to try and optimize. Like I’m mocking strategy or like I guest experience strategy in that was, that was pretty cool to be able to do that because it meant that like we had a lot of different ideas, especially like different cultures.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:15:04              Give us like a lot of different insights into the business. I mean in terms of the like the growth itself, like we, we, I guess we, we, we, we’ve done that through sort of two different channels. We’ve done it through like organic growth, which is like, you know, in terms of building a sustainable business but also like getting more hosts from like different marketing channels, but also promoting referrals and think that that channel would known itself like really good. And that you only really get that from, from providing a good service to, to your hosts. But also we have made a few acquisitions as part of our journey, which has allowed us to growing up, go farther in size, but also grow our team and knowledge and all that type of thing.

Julian Sage:                       00:15:48              So you said there’s two, there’s two aspects, there’s the operations and then there’s the, the marketing without good operations. Your marketing you know, it’s kind of pointless cause you can’t, you can’t grow if you’re not able to produce. As far as operations go, I mean, when you started at five properties and you’re the operations head of head of operations w what, what was, what were you doing that was so unique or that was able to stand out and compete against everybody else? Because, I mean, three years ago, I mean, Airbnb wasn’t, wasn’t new, short term. Renting wasn’t, wasn’t new. And I’m sure that there was a lot more, a lot of people in the space. But you guys have been able to, you know, make a, make a serious impact.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:16:28              Yeah, sure. I mean, we, we always like, as I said, that we focused really on like on our hosts and making sure that they’re always really happy. When we were a little smaller, I think we could really focus on providing like a really, really personalized service. You know, like when it comes to especially managing people’s sort of primary residences as we call them, which are like, you know, homes that people ordinarily live in them but they’re away. So let’s see times a year type thing. Those are the hosts that I really need special attention because they have an emotional connection to the asset. So we were, we were trying to differentiate ourselves from our competitors by doing that. And I think as we go a lot bigger, the sort of value proposition stayed the same. Like we’ve always had a, you know, personalized to top managers to each property and those like account managers go to the properties and they have good relationships with the owners. But as we got bigger, I think we were able to provide a different, a different suite of services that are more geared towards say, like yield or like, you know, revenue management as being a really strong point about business because we sort of had the scout start to no centralize those functions and dedicate all the time.

Julian Sage:                       00:17:41              What did your team look like when you first started out? I was this, was this a company that was just kind of a funded with, with venture capital right away or was it after you got to a certain point that you started really just skyrocketing when, when was the tipping point?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:17:56              Yeah, I mean like to begin with it was we didn’t have like venture backed, we weren’t venture backed for like maybe a a year and a year and a half until after we started. So we had the founders, like they did raise a bit of safe money to begin with. Those only very small amounts. So we were pretty much like pretty scrappy to begin with. Like, I mean, I’m like all the, all the founders and stuff, we’re getting involved that business quite heavily in terms of like, you know, the daily operations and that sort of stuff. I’m in London, like, you know, after about two months, like Alex, Suzanne was like, to me, I’m not going to do any more check-ins. You need to like solve this type thing. And I was like, Oh no. Like, what am I doing? Mmm. But yeah, like from, from the beginning it was like, it was too distracting.

Julian Sage:                       00:18:44              What did your team look like? If you were, if you were preparing to launch, what did the, what did that look like? Cause you were operations, but you also had a CEO what, what else did you have?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:18:55              Yeah, so I I launched like the London city with there’s one of my colleagues who’s our UK director now. He was basically a London city manager as such. So we sort of split the Judaism between maybe being focused on like the guests and everything, sort of like supplier related, like, you know, made sense cleaning and that type of thing. He would deal with the property owners and then sales. We you know, our role is like over time, like as the company group changed quite quickly, we sort of had to review things on like a, almost like a monthly basis just to make sure that life is, you know, the accountability for certain tasks was getting done. And as you grow people started to be spread more, have more structure in place. So we would we’d have to juggle with the resources and so, you know, just have like five weekly team meetings and just be like, Hey, you’re responsible for this.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:19:48              And that, that would change quite a lot. You know, when you sort of two people and then three people after that, you kind of start to get a bit more structure in place and have people more accountable to specific departments, kind of how it grew out from there. One thing that we did, which was interesting, we like those like functions were very much localized from the beginning. So like for example, you know, the guys in Paris, they would be dealing with all of their guests and the guys in London would be dealing with their, I guess Thompson. After a certain point we did start to centralize those functions so that we could have like, you know, I’d better like standards across all of our markets that also likes you know, specialized people more in those nice functions. So we set up like a big team in Malaysia, so we’re already operating in Qualimpor but we just sort of started to centralize a guest communications team there, which was covering all of the company or in terms of English speaking markets. And then that was quite good for us because then we’re able to sort of grow in different areas like different cities. And it wasn’t like impacting those, those, that team was like highly localized

Julian Sage:                       00:20:58              Being across the country. It just to start off, I mean that’s got to be, you know, a lot of people get overwhelmed when they have, you know, maybe different people, different cleaners in, you know, just like another, another state, another city. But you guys were across the world did where you were just repeating what you were doing at like one centralized location at different locations or did you have like what does that look like when you have multiple locations and different amounts of properties under management?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:21:27              Yeah, so I think one thing that we’ve always tried to localize is the host relationship. You know, we have local account managers in all of our cities. And that type of thing. I think property management is a very relationship driven business. And to try and have say like a central team for that I don’t really think works that well. I mean, you can do it, but I don’t think in terms of like creating a good experience, be a good brand, that’s not necessarily the best choice. For guests I think maybe it’s a bit different because like they have, you know, when you’re trying to standardized like a product that the guest is getting, you kind of want it to be the same. So having one actually works pretty well. So that’s kind of the way I would look at how we dealt with it internally.

Julian Sage:                       00:22:13              What did your team look like? Initially, like how many people did you have and what were their different roles? One when you just had like, let’s say five, five units in the Paris market.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:22:23              Yeah. So we sort of split it into anything sort of host related, anything guest related. So the guests for us was like operations and then host stuff was like account management sales. So it was sort of split. I mean, when we first started in some cities, like if we had sort of less than five or 10 units, we might have just one person sort of doing all of those functions. That in and of itself created a lot of challenges because, you know, you have, you’re effectively trying to provide so 24, seven guests or like good posts, but that person only works at a Monday to Friday. And so like pretty soon I think it’s pretty tricky to do that with just one person in the city. We sort of have to have to be able to say take a work weekends and like they wouldn’t go crazy just being by themselves trying to like, so yeah, that’s kinda how we separated things between guests. And then as the business grew, we started to centralize those functions. So things like finance, marketing and even silence and that type of thing.

Julian Sage:                       00:23:26              A lot of, a lot of hosts that are trying to start their own management companies. You know, growing and marketing is always a challenging, challenging issue. You know, marketing and finding reliable cleaners. I will get to the cleaners. But marketing, how w what were you guys doing? Were you guys like door knocking on every, you know, the 1600 properties or how did you, how did you start to scale?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:23:46              Yeah, we, I mean we started by just contacting landlords via this channel. What’s spare room in the UK. It’s kind of similar to like a Craigslist where landlords can post their properties on there who are doing all the outbound to there. We also do a lot of outbounds just contacting, you know, like posts that look like they either were getting bad reviews cause they might have like three, 300 sites, property or something like that. So you could contact them to say, Hey, you know, like [inaudible] help posting. Not that you’re getting bad news, but you know, like, you know, it’s, you want someone else to do this for you. And those were like, I’m not sure they’re the most like scalable type marketing initiatives that they did get us most in the beginning. But I think the majority of our hosts through like online marketing channels, so like our website and that type of thing. And then pretty much just the referrals after that when we were able to build up a big base of hosts.

Julian Sage:                       00:24:46              Can you kind of help us visualize what, what your guys’ growth was. It was from like five properties when you joined and then you said you were bootstrapped for about a year and a half. What, what was the progression of the units and at, you know, to where you are today at 1600.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:25:05              I mean, I remember we were just always busy, always just thinking of the next month, next month type thing. I mean, I don’t know, like in terms of numbers, like what it looked like it was, it wasn’t like this, it was pretty, pretty steady growth like each each month from what I remember. I mean, I, yeah, I guess, you know, certain points you just start to run into different problems. And I remember getting to like 50 or 60 units and things started to break in terms of that processes. So we always need to like just continually rethink things. Mmm. I don’t know. I guess, I’m not sure. I don’t remember like specifically like specific moments of like, Oh yeah, this was, this is how, how was it that point? But it just, it just kinda grew similar pace each month is what I felt like. And it was always, it’s always busy. You’re always sort of casting your tail

Julian Sage:                       00:26:00              That there wasn’t any like pivotal moment where you’re just like, you, you figured something out and it was just like, wow, all these new properties started coming in because, you know, really, you started out a little bit, a little bit different. You know, you started across the U S a but you’re, you know, this Paris, London area, you know, you started off with five and then you get to 50, and then like everybody else that is hosting, once you get to a certain number, things start to break the same processes that you didn’t have that you had before when you’re at five is not going to be the same when you have 50. But there was a point where you, you know, you really started probably taking off or something, maybe clicked. What do you remember when that was?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:26:37              I mean, I think we just, we’ve just consistently grown like steadily over time. Like it hasn’t been like this Blitzkrieg of like, you know, we doubled in one month or something like that. I mean like when we were, when you have small cities, yeah. You could double in size. Mmm. But I think like the main thing is minimizing churn. So like taking on the right owners, like I think, yeah, I mean, just thinking about it now, like, wait, we kind of figured out at some point we’ve got a better handle on which properties do we want to target, which owners like, are the best for us. And that could be say down to like the different areas of the city where, you know, like maybe longterm rental or but types of posts that you want. Do you want to target investors or do you want to talk about like, you know, primary residence owners and this type of thing.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:27:23              Mmm. And so we, we started to get a better handle on like what our unit economics in terms of like, okay, this property is located here, it’s going to generate this amount and that leads to X amount of profit or loss, right. The properties that look better for us and then, Mmm. And that I guess like helps seal said minimize churn because then you’re targeting the right properties that, you know, you’ll have to say like longer periods of time. Mmm. You know, you’re spending, you’re getting a more efficient spend on your marketing and your sales efforts. So yeah, that was probably the main thing.

Julian Sage:                       00:27:56              So when you, when you first started off, it sounds like you were, you were really trying to just pick up any property that, that anybody had, but then what really started to work best for you is when you figured out what exactly your target customer is and how you can best serve them. And then once you knew how, you know, even down to the specific type of property that you were targeting that’s when you started like marketing towards those people.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:28:20              Yeah, exactly. And I think like all of those, it’s not to say that when we started we took on everything is just more like we didn’t have the awareness to say this was like a this property is going to be a loss leading property or like you know I was just not a good deal for aspects find Z reasons or like you know, so I mean I think that’s maybe something that’s important to define early on and like even if you had a small portfolio you would get a good sense for you so that maybe that, that that research can be done pretty easily and even like tools like air DNA and stuff to provide you with pretty good sort of revenue management talks to understand like, you know, this probably is going to generate this much per night so I can charge a commission of X or like you know, I’m going to pay this rent. I think it’s maybe easier to do that now and something that we could’ve done better.

Julian Sage:                       00:29:09              Going off of that, what did, what is, when you’re working with a property owner at this point now, what is, what does it look like? How are you able to still provide that same level of service to your clients? Are you, when you reach out to them, are you like helping them analyze their property or are you going for completely new people that don’t even know about the space? How do you, how do you take a person along that, that customer acquisition journey?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:29:32              Yeah. Like we have ’em on our website. We have a chocolate moment where you can input your address and it will tell you, you know, on a monthly basis what you should generate property per month. So that helps hosts like get a good sense of, you know, whether this is like a viable alternatives to, you know, the long term renting or, you know, whilst they’re way over when they do onboard with us, you know, like we, we as I mentioned, like we have a academic kind of account manager can help them see their own board, that property and help them to finish the property and that type of thing. And they’ll provide them advice as to like, what, what will sell the best, you know, like whether it’s like adding a, an extra like a sofa bed or like extra amenities.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:30:21              And then basically off to that, like, you know, we have like a team that’s available, you know, Monday to Friday is you know, in terms of account management, but then host like, you know, we have a 24, seven guest communication team. So, you know, even if there’s like a big emergency or something like that, generally there’s someone available for a host if they need. Like the account managers that we have, you know, they, they have a very good relationship with HR. It’s more of a like a partnership than it will be a sort of strict customer client relationship. So we worked with the property owners to also like try and prove their properties because for us it means that we can, we can make more money. They also make more money. So like the feedback loop for use and stuff like that is quite good in terms of owners like conceal, they were abused for their, so that listings on our, you know, on our system and that type of thing that helps make those changes.

Julian Sage:                       00:31:11              W when you first started, you had around five 50 figured out your processes, then you really started figuring out how you can best serve your clients at that point. What did, what did your, how did you start to scale? Was it where you were the properties that you knew that were performing well, where you just like targeting those specific locations and how, how were you, how were you getting more people that you knew that you wanted into, into your business?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:31:37              Yeah, I mean we, we are you guys defined in our STDs like where it is that we want to operate. And so like when we had interest from different areas, like we weren’t inside those, those locations reject a lot of leads. So I guess that’s one best one. Why did we did that? I mean I think that’s, we haven’t really gone down to like a model of like doing leases. You know, this master list model that some other companies like slumber do where they lease apartments or someplace or businesses, some of this commission revenue split model. So for that, like we haven’t like targeted like, you know, state agencies or specific properties to say like, we want to lease this for X dollars or X. It’s more been a case of like suturing the interest that we go through channels.

Julian Sage:                       00:32:33              The, what’s your, what’s your primary method of finding those ideal clients? Is that like a Google, are you doing ads or do you have like a blog? How are you acquiring these new people?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:32:44              Yeah, I think I’m not sure how much I can maybe go into that, but it’s like I would say we were quite successful through online campaigns

Julian Sage:                       00:32:55              On the online campaigns. And you are getting, getting very specific with the types of people that you were looking for.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:33:02              Yeah, I mean we are all stuck. We will take sort of, there’s two kind of types of posts. I guess there’s like the primary residence posts and then the investor hosts, like the investor hosts I think are great because

Shannon Hyde:                 00:33:17              Generally they yield focus but they’re not also like emotionally attached to each property. So if you provide a really good service to them and you get them the returns that they’re looking for, then you know, they’ll stay with you for a long time because they want a passive investment. So if you can handle that for them, then you can make them the money. I think that that’s like a really win-win situation. So, you know, we really like investors and you know, yeah, we really like to work with investors if we can find them. So that’s definitely something we target if we, if we are doing sort of like outreach and that type of thing,

Julian Sage:                       00:33:51              I’m going on your site you know, guest ready.com and I mean, it’s very, it’s very minimal, very simple. It’s just got a bunch of different, different cities that you guys are operating out of. But when you’re targeting people and you’re, you know, you said what I really love is you said you have your, your, your typical homeowner and then you have your investor clients are these two different types. Investors are typically, you know, more, more analytical. They’re more numbers driven. The homeowner maybe needs a little bit more handholding along with them. But when I go to your site, I don’t, I don’t see too, too much information. Do you, are you guys like creating a different type of resource or a different site that is like a landing page for people that you’re driving them to or, or what?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:34:30              Yeah, I mean I would say most of the most of the leads that comes through our website are like, I guess typically primary residence owners. We probably get, I mean like, I think that they invest in like the sort of big stage clients, you know, more [inaudible] generally able to get them not through like inbound leads through like networking and that type of thing. So it’s about, well our website’s pretty simple. Yeah. I guess like most strategies, strategies can work. It’s just, it’s just a case of lightweight, put your resources. I think that having a good website is pretty easy to do nowadays. I mean that for us. Oh, I really an easy way to reach a lot of people.

Julian Sage:                       00:35:17              You said networking for investor clients. Are you guys going out is everything online or are you doing like boots on the ground, going to events and stuff like that for networking? How are you expanding your, your investor client base?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:35:30              Yeah, yeah we do. We participate in a few events in different cities across the world. Try and create like partnerships with real estate companies as well. A lot of real estate companies are looking to get and to show that. So do you get to Maxon short that companies from shortlist, sorry, not companies but from like, you know, owners that wants to do short laps so we’re able to partner with them. That can be quite good like you know, to, to have that sort of win win relationship. But then in terms of maybe sharing the revenues with them and that type of thing. But yeah, otherwise, you know, like in, in big cities like London, Paris, Dubai and stuff like that, there are a lot of like developers I’m looking for yield and in most cases like short term rentals, provide that. I have good relationships with those types of people.

Julian Sage:                       00:36:21              W what are some of the biggest differences from when you first started operating to where you’re operating now? I’m sure that, you know, lots of things have changed, but are there like things that are really completely, completely different from when you first started off?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:36:34              I would say probably on like the on the operation side we are just like a lot, which is much better, much, much more efficient and much more on the tech side as well. You know, like we, we have put a lot of time and effort into building our own CMS software and that type of thing. That’s really helped us to scale on the operation side in terms of keeping costs low, just providing a good service, having really good visibility on what’s going on in the properties and that type of thing. So. Mmm. Yeah. I mean, when we first started, we didn’t really have any, any sort of tech tools to help us to, to grow. It was very like, you know, Google sheets and stuff. Like just doesn’t, it doesn’t really scale that well. I can’t link things together that well and that type of thing. So probably like the tech side is, is the big one in terms of operations. And even, I guess on the account management side, I think it’s really helped

Julian Sage:                       00:37:31              From, you know, where, where you guys are right now, 1600 units. You know, obviously you, you know, you have to be able to cut costs in different ways. So there’s a lot of tools out in the market right now that, you know, probably weren’t around. They’re still in development when, when you first started you know, we have tools like, you know, properly turnover BNB for cleaning. You know, there’s like guests, the, and your Porter hopefully all these different tools for PMs. But when it comes to, when you get to a certain point, you, you know, being able to implement your own systems and create your own processes and your own like PMs or your own task management software it seems like that’s the logical way to go. Is that what everybody else is doing though? All these other companies that are, you know, these heavy hitters in the property management space, are they all utilizing other people’s software or do they all start creating their own inhouse suite of tools?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:38:22              I mean, I think it depends on the, on the company. Like I know,

Shannon Hyde:                 00:38:25              I know some big companies, at least in Europe that are still, they still use third party tools and other big companies that have their own software. We, we mean like, we were always like a tech enabled property manager. So we were always looking for ways in which we can use technology to help us be more efficient and scale. So we started off by using a lot of third party tools and there are a lot of really good ones on the market. What we found is like a lot of those tools are really good at sort of like niche, like seems like, you know, properly is really good for the task management.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:39:01              W w we really wanted to have our own system because like there was a lot of things that we still couldn’t do. So we started to build our own system over time and you know, you can link a lot of these apps together and this type of thing. But in some cases you sort of able to automate the workflow, maybe 70 to 80%. So we really looked at like, you know, each process like you know, step by step and how we can automate that process. I think that when you sort of do things over and over and over again, especially when you start to get a lot of puppies, you start to notice like, whether you we, we built our own TMS software that links in with a channel manager and now we sort of have like a pretty full suite of functionality that kind of really most of the rentals, like in terms of like what we need to do to manage them. It’s not really any sort of ADI tools that we use for like on the property management side that we haven’t got in house now.

Julian Sage:                       00:40:03              So you don’t, is, is there like a certain point when it’s, it’s best suited because I imagine when you’re working with third party, you know, things might break when you’re, when you’re managing 1600 units and you’re using someone else’s software, if something breaks, that’s gonna cost a lot of money. And it’s also going to be troublesome because now you have to deal with another company, their tools. Are they integrating with other tools? You know, and when you’re scaling to 1600 units, you know, your whole business revolves around how you’re able to handle your operations or were there ever, ever any instances where like just something broke and then just like all hell went loose. Cause you know, even as a smaller, even a smaller managers like if you know, let’s say, you know Airbnb has an issue. Like everybody, the whole, the whole world freaks out. You can’t, you can’t log into your portal. Is it, does that happen when you’re at 1600 units?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:40:56              I mean, I think, I mean, I’m not going to name I’m not going to name names. We were using another software, like when we first started, we didn’t have our own software, so using a TMS software that I remember one day like they were using Airbnb’s unofficial API. So I’m not really sure the reason why, but there’s two different types of API you can get with Airbnb. You use the unofficial one because there’s some functionality access to the official API. And because of that, the unofficial one is much more unstable sometimes. And I remember, I think this was like may, maybe we were at 500 or so but I remember that it was like coming into the weekend and basically we realized that like we had about, I don’t know, a couple of hundred every day constant. We weren’t receiving any messages. So it was just kinda like, it’s coming up to 3:00 PM checking time and we’re like, Oh God, we know guests are going to be contacting us saying, you know, I’m outside or I’m, I’m locked out and we just have no visibility on it whatsoever. And that went on for about two days and it was really, yeah, it was really, really painful to manage. So I think like the key takeaways, it’s really important when you get to that size and need to have really reliable otherwise like, yeah, the issues get compounded really, really fast and it’s a, it’s really hard to have like a consistent level of service.

Julian Sage:                       00:42:22              Like you were saying, I mean two, two days, two days of not being able to send messages. And because you were using a tool that was using this unofficial API, how do you manage all of the, the hosts that and the people that you’re helping them make money? Because if you’re, you know, this is somebody’s property that you’re working on and you’re trying to, you know help them maximize their return and because, you know, maybe you scaled a little bit too much now, you know, things are kind of breaking a, how do you handle that with your investor clients?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:42:54              Yeah, I mean, I guess it just comes down to having, having good risk management procedures in place. Like, I mean, if we’re using ’em [inaudible] if we’re, if we’re using any tools that need to be good, they need to be robust. And they make soapy, reliable I guess. And you know, we don’t use that software any more. I mean, it works really, really well. Mmm. I guess like, yeah, that, that’s sort of just comes into the, into the, you know, the forefront of our minds. When you get to a certain point, it’s like, okay, sweet. If things do go down for one day, one hour, like what impact that’s going to have on the business

Julian Sage:                       00:43:33              For people that are, let’s say at that 50, 50 unit Mark. How, how do you start to scale operations? Like what are the, what are the people that you need in place or what are the things that you need to be able to do to be able to get up to, you know, that hundred, 200, 500 unit count?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:43:49              Yeah. I think like what we, what we did initially was we partnered with a lot of third party providers that like, you know, things like cleaning companies and maintenance companies. I think if you can get some really good partnerships, they’re really good connections, good quality companies that do a really good job, then you can then you can scale. And I would say, you know, when you are, even when you’re small, when you’re big, like don’t rely on just one partner to be able to, to to do that job, you need to have backup plans in place. Like I know in some markets like in Paris, like when, when we were growing, there was a lot of companies using the same cleaning company and that same company went out of business. And so for lot of companies, they’re like, they’re trying to cover 50 to a hundred jobs on Monday trying to deal with that.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:44:39              Mmm. Because I think as a short term rental manager, like you kind of six or seven businesses in one, you’d be like any company or like a guest, you know, concierge company, you’re a revenue manager. So to outsource those functions if you can do it well I think like saves you a lot of time and hassle. I would say, you know, like the, on the guest communication side of things, I see a lot of companies that outsource virtual assistants in the world. I think that’s a pretty good strategy too. You can get it right. Does like there are some companies you can go through to do that and there’s other companies you can outsource that to. But if you can find, you know, people in the Philippines and that type of thing, I think that’s a really low cost way of providing, you know, long level of support. And when I mean long level, I mean like covering more hours of the day. You know, if you’re in Europe and you have someone in the Philippines, you know, they can cover the nights when you, when you’re asleep means that you don’t have to have people on call and this sort of thing. Mmm. That’s probably something that I would think about if it’s your, especially in a city where like, you know, the margins are pretty tight. [inaudible]

Shannon Hyde:                 00:45:47              Considering,

Julian Sage:                       00:45:48              So, you know, in the space, like you said, there’s like six different businesses that you could essentially have a, that you’re managing as a short term rental property manager for a business at scale, does it not make more sense to keep things in house? Like you said, the the, the technology, you’re, you’re building that in house and we’ll, we’ll talk a little bit more about what you’re building and what you’re offering as well a little bit, but for, let’s say like cleaning, I mean, you have 1600 units and you said that you’re outsourcing it to other companies. Does it not make more sense to keep it in house and have your own full time cleaning staff or, or what’s, what’s your perspective?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:46:26              Yeah, so I mean, for our business now [inaudible] pretty much most of our cities are in house. It really depends. It’s very, it’s very case by case basis. Like, I think you know, there are some locations we working, we were able to find really good partners and it just, it’s easier for us to outsource that. I mean now we’re at a stage where, you know, like we have some really good knowledge of how to, you know, train, manage and retain cleaners. So like, no, in terms of bringing that in house, I think that’s like something that we can do well now. But you know, when we were smaller it was a lot, it’s a big learning curve. So we just you know, we look at it on a case by case basis. Like if it’s getting really expensive we can look at it and say, okay, is it going to be cheaper in house?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:47:14              How are we going to do that? And just sort of chocolate tastes. Okay. But I don’t think it’s a one size fits all sort of a solution, you know? Mmm. The probably the biggest cities we’re in, we have got it in house and that’s, Mmm. Yeah. I think it’s probably just because like we have worked with partners and then you know, we realized we could do it either cheaper internally we want to strive for high quality or different things. I think housekeeping is something that’s really, it’s really tricky because like those cleaners are like the backbone of your business. So to Alice samosa that you need to do it well, you need to make sure you find good partners. Mmm. Otherwise, yeah, it’s just if you can find a really good clean out, I think you can make a world of difference. The headaches,

Julian Sage:                       00:48:00              How do you guys manage that? Because you know, cleaner cleaners are such an essential part of the business and being able to have the same standard across the board at every property making sure that every property is checked. Do you have someone that’s going and actually viewing the units after every cleaning or do you just like, do, is there like a separate, like onboarding process for these cleaners whenever you take them under your guys’ company? How, how does that whole process work?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:48:27              Yeah, we, we operate in a few different ways. Like we in in markets where we are doing in person check-in the person who’s doing the check in time quality control, the cleaning, Mmm. In like when I’m playing these are in the property they can, so in my checklist of items like quality assurance, like manager that can check, I mean you’re not going to see things like dos and that type of thing. And that’s why we kind of have that two step process in place. If we’re doing say self-check and we do like do a certain amount of spot checking of those cleaners we are also through our software able to tear up their ratings that cleanness got from Airbnb. And so you can see for each cleaner like what score they’re getting from the guests. So it’s quite easy to identify which cleaners are doing a really good job in which one, so maybe I’m not following. And then in some cases we also do video calls with that cleaners. Like when maybe they’re first starting out just to make sure that they get everything right in terms of staging the property in terms of like inventory and also like seeing, you know, like small details in the or making sure that they have a really good understanding of what they need to do. I think like having a few of those sort of processes and places really net we can consistently do a good job.

Julian Sage:                       00:49:43              Do you have a dedicated person that is interviewing cleaners and you know, verifying cleaners when they do the first cleaning or are you just finding like agencies that already are operating that you can trust?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:49:56              Yeah, we, we have like a housekeeping manager that’s like a central housekeeping with recruiting and that type of stuff. I mean in the big cities it’s been pretty easy to find good cleaners like this. Like kind of, it’s kind of credited a little ecosystem of suppliers that sort of Mmm. It hasn’t been like crazy hard to find like good please. It’s just that retaining them I think is like the challenge. I’d probably stay for that side of things like don’t like do you kind of get what you for when it comes to cleaning and you need to treat those cleaners as if they’re like the backbone of your business. Like, I mean they are as important as your revenue managers or your account managers and stuff like that. So we, we try and make those the, those, those staff like, you know, super, super, yeah. Valued in our business in terms of like the recognition that they get from guests and hosts and that type of thing. Yeah. If she could get good clinics and retain them, it’s like the core of your business almost.

Julian Sage:                       00:50:57              Do, do you do the linen for 1600 units or are you outsourcing that?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:51:03              Again, it is kind of case by case basis. We have a, you know, some cities where we operate, where it is, it is, you know, in house and then somewhere it’s outsource. So, Mmm. It just depends on like, you know, the local partners that are available in the cities. You know, the [inaudible] and then the cost and the economics of each property

Julian Sage:                       00:51:26              And for let’s say amenities. Are you as part of your full service, are you replenishing amenities and how, what does that look like when you have different amenities and different units you know, across the world even. I mean are you using like Amazon to like, you know, basically reorder stuff for these different places? Or do you have like different lists for different properties about what they need?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:51:50              Yeah. I mean like we do, it’s, it’s, it kind of works on a city by city level. Again, just depending on light. Whether we sort of run things like remotely where I would say we have like companies that can deliver that sort of stuff with linen, then they might do the reflection of that. Or if we have like our own central storage, which is a lot easier. Mmm. Generally I would try and provide the same sort of amenities across the board for guests across like different markets so that they experiences is largely the same. But there are some cases where we provide different things I can do by, we provide bottles of water for guests because they drink water. So it’s more things are that, and also in Dubai it’s like 45 degrees outside, I guess easily appreciate some water where it’s like, you know, in London that’s not as needed.

Julian Sage:                       00:52:41              What’s been the most challenging part of scaling this business?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:52:45              I think at different points like the processes break. Mmm. It’s usually when you get some three X, like every time you go up three, three times, it starts to get a tricky again. Like, I mean when we, when we, another thing that we sort of, yeah, it was like when we started, we knew that we were going to try it and scale this like pretty fast. Every time we sort of review processes, we try and implement something that’s relatively scalable. Mmm. But yeah, I mean that’s, the doing the continuum is definitely like, you know, a challenge. It’s something you need to get right, especially when you expand it to new markets. It is like a people management business like this, you know? And it’s relationship driven. So like having really good people is really critical. Yeah, that’s, I like the operations side of things. It’s definitely, you know, as you get bigger it becomes a much biggest challenge of, of getting it right.

Julian Sage:                       00:53:42              Is there anything different from I mean is there anything really different from a person that’s managing a portfolio of five or 50 properties versus 1600? Is it, is it like a totally different beast or is it essentially the same thing? Just a little bit more complex?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:53:59              I would say like on the host facing side, it’s probably pretty similar in terms of like the day to day challenges that owner’s tabs and dealing with those [inaudible]. I’d say on the operations side it becomes like a big base of different challenges. Like just, you know, when you, when you get to a certain size, you need to start to have really robust like quality control processes in place cause you, you kind of lack visibility on the local level when you’re not able to know your property portfolio just by being like going to every property come a bit scary in terms of you know, what, what can happen in like, you know, kind of losing that control. So that’s something that we focused a lot on. I also just like building in like scalable processes in terms of like documenting your processes and standardizing them across like all of your Olivia properties is really, really important.

Julian Sage:                       00:54:57              Is the, the way that you document processes and implement processes the same as if you are a smaller manager versus you know, 1600 properties.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:55:08              Well I mean like if we were to change any process now it becomes like a big project, right? I mean, even something as simple as like adding a, I think a bottle of water to every guest day becomes like a big project that has 10 different stakeholders and you know, so I say when you’re small, you know, most of the stuff’s just in your heads and you can coordinate really easily between internal people and say, Hey, now we’re going to offer a bottle of water. And everyone’s like, cool, great. But you know, when you get bigger you need to have like a lot more structure in place. Otherwise, like it’s yeah, thanks.

Julian Sage:                       00:55:47              I imagine that it’d be very, very challenging because you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re so focused on trying to grow the business, but at the same time you have to have that same level of care that you had when you had five units. How, how do you, how do you manage that, that relationship between being able to still have an awesome, awesome service and be able to help your investors and your clients and the guests as well as, you know, scale exponentially or scale, you know, very, very rapidly to a large amount at the same time.

Shannon Hyde:                 00:56:21              I mean, I think as you get big on it maybe becomes easier to provide like a more consistent good service. Maybe what you lose or it’s harder to achieve is that really personal connection with guests? Because I’m, you know, they’re not texting like, you know, database of the Airbnb hosts who like, you know, lives in New York, whatever it is they’re speaking to like multiple people. We try and internally like promote like this idea of having like continuity in the guest communication when there’s like people calling in. So like we actually, we built some kind of smart automations that sort of help with that. We have like a virtual call center that routes calls based on whether you’ve spoken to someone before, so that same person. So if there’s issues that can pull up pretty easily in our inbox, we have like a way of like, login every single interaction. So it’s really easy to sort of see like what’s happened in the past. Mmm. So we’ve tried to use technology a little bit to, to facilitate that. But it’s definitely a challenge as you get bigger that you need to sort of address

Julian Sage:                       00:57:29              And talking about that technology because you’re, you’re actually doing something pretty interesting is you’re actually taking the things that you’re using internally and you’re planning on releasing that to the public as well. What’s, what, what, what, what is that, did you, how did you, how did that even come about? Like, did you identify something that was lacking in the market that you decided to fill? Why, why are you releasing something that was internal that allowed you to be able to, you know scale and manage effectively to, to the public?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:57:59              Yeah, I mean, like as a cross that guy journey, it was lost three years. You know, we’ve been doing this, this software that it’s mainly for internal use. And we were able to solve some really like big time points that we had as a business that we weren’t really getting with the external tools that are available in the market. So it kind of came out of a and identification of that, that, you know, look like what we have is really, really good. It’s an all in one software and we’ve been able to bring in like, you know like all of the sort of tools that you need to run this business in one place. And so we thought, you know, let’s let’s see what demand there is on the market. I mean, there are companies that have raised money by, by providing these types of software. And I think that, no, like, you know, at the moment we, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve only just sort of started releasing that to the, to the public. We have, we are working with other property managers now that use the software and it’s been, it’s been a really good state back. So we’re like looking to really to grow that this year. So yeah, it’s going to be pretty exciting to see what comes with that.

Julian Sage:                       00:59:04              Who is this for? Is this for the, the 1600 plus property managers or is this for the people that just have one or two units? What, what’s the, what’s the target for this?

Shannon Hyde:                 00:59:13              I mean, I would say probably

Shannon Hyde:                 00:59:16              It works really at any sort of size. We’ve, we’ve got some really good tools to monitor quality in terms of likes the, the tone of a cleaning, check-in, review management, miss type of thing. So I think it works best property managers may be sort of 60 units plus. But in saying that, you know, it even if you have five units and you use our software, you’ll get a lot of value out of it because it provides, you know, like all of the sort of talk to you need to run this business stuff in one place. Mmm. It means it’s what you don’t need to sort of patch a lot of different tools together. So if you’re not like super tech savvy and don’t have like a good understanding of how to link everything together, then I think it can provide a really good solution.

Julian Sage:                       00:59:57              So, so this is, this is a PMs as well as a channel manager, or is it just the PMs?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:00:02              So it’s a PMs and channel manager. Yeah.

Julian Sage:                       01:00:05              And, but you also said that it has other features. Are you kind of going for like the guestie feel where you have the, the the automated messaging? Are you including like dynamic pricing in there and all these different tools?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:00:17              Yeah, yeah. So we have we have quite a lot of automation tools, like things like the auto messages, the auto reviews. We have some payment processing automations that also like split the money to each owner. So like, you can receive the money from, say like the OTA, since we’re virtual wallet, and then it splits the money based on the commission structure owners. Mmm. So you’d have a need to pay your owners at the end of the month. It’s like, yeah, we have like, you know, automated pricing tools, like things like the revenue management tools. Like you can build an algorithm based on your market, have it like fluctuate based on seasonality and try and target like specific bookings with certain ways of doing it. Those are developed a way of sort of hacking everyday SEO by like changing your calendar availability each day. Just in terms of like the price update updated sort of one Euro one pound each day.

Shannon Hyde:                 01:01:11              Mmm. Yeah. We have like a really good like toss management system that’s like an iOS and Android app that know cleaners and, and readers can use to, to do with their tasks and they can upload like feedback and that type of thing. And then like on the owner side of things, we have like a really good owners close date, a change, that process if you want to see all the reviews from guests. So it’s pretty sort of comprehensive tool. I’d say probably, yeah, it’s similar to like, you know, one of the sort of other in one PMs is just your volunteer.

Julian Sage:                       01:01:44              Is this for people that are looking to simplify their operations or people that are looking to save money or is it for you know, the extra little suite of tools that maybe are for optimizing the business. What are the benefits of, of using this, this internal a tech that you guys are now going to be releasing to the public?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:02:07              Yeah, I think it kind of covers a few different bases. Like there’s like on the revenue generation side of things, like our pricing algorithm will help you talk to my surprises so that you can get better bookings for your homes. We also have ways on that side to upsell services to guests, which you can do really easily through like affiliate marketing links that you can add into our software that I’m just generate you extra money. I mean, we, we built it more as a case of like, you know, efficiency in terms of like simplifying things. And so I think on that side of things, that’s probably where we’re strongest, that that’s where we built like the most automation and that type of thing. Mmm. So it’s really like, I guess like our, a product market fit is probably like these tech enabled property managers that want to grow that portfolio in like a really lean way.

Julian Sage:                       01:02:58              How much have you guys been able to save by, by turning things internally versus having to outsource using all these different services?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:03:06              Yeah, I mean that’s pretty high. It’s hard to say like because there’s so many different things we’ve done to sort of save costs, but like, I mean we have been able to, to grow up portfolio sort of with like a really similar head count for Mmm. For a certain amount, like a certain amount of time I should say. So they would have noticed like, you know, in, in terms of staff costs that it has made a big difference on that side. Well, we, what we sort of did was like an hour each process in terms of how many clicks need to get to a certain thing. To do something and then try to reduce that down and a little bit of time, we have everything sort of on one page that you need to take that decision in front of you. Mmm. But again, it’s, it’s pretty hard to quantify, you know, when it comes to like the staff time.

Julian Sage:                       01:03:52              Well I mean like even just talking about like for you know, smaller hosts when they’re just starting off, maybe a dynamic pricing tool is going to charge them 1%. Once they take up some more units they maybe be drops down to like seven point a points, point 75. W when they’re using your tool though, cause everything’s included. Should this be saving a property managers a lot of, a lot of fees that they would have to pay towards all these other tools?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:04:17              Yeah, exactly. I mean, like what I find just from speaking to other property managers is they use probably five or six different tools to manage their business. And like when you add up sort of all the, all the costs of that it starts to get pretty expensive on a per property basis. You know, some cases are paying 30 to euros per property per month easily. So I think from that side of things we’re able to save them money. But also I think because we have everything in one place, it really starts to become a lot easier to manage. Like those tools, they have API APIs and things that are getting pushed and pulled to them, but in a lot of cases it’s not perfect.

Julian Sage:                       01:04:57              Yeah. And like, like w like you were talking about earlier, when you, when you have all these different tools that your business depends on, and then one of the API is just doesn’t work, or one of the, one of the tools just isn’t working right. You know, let’s say the dynamic pricing just all of a sudden it changes and now all your places are a dollar. So, you know, maybe maybe that wouldn’t happen, but if it does, I, your whole business is, is, you know, dependent on these other services.

Shannon Hyde:                 01:05:21              Yeah, yeah, exactly. You also don’t have as much influence on like the, on the roadmaps and what those companies are going to do in future. So. Mmm. And we work pretty closely with our property managers to help them, you know either grow their business in a few different ways, but we also like if they need things wherever they’re also able to influence our roadmap. And a lot of the time things that they say they need are things that we need or that other property managers.

Julian Sage:                       01:05:52              Awesome. And do you guys have a timeframe on when, when this should be out?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:05:57              Yeah, I mean I think w we, I mean we are we are sort of like in a release at the moment. Like, you know, we are working with other property managers on this, on this software. I think like in terms of a full release, probably like the middle of February, they’re ready.

Julian Sage:                       01:06:13              Okay. So by the time this episode is out it should be out. I’ll include a link down in the description for those that are interested in, in finding out some more information about that. Yeah, th th this, this has just been so, so awesome, Shannon. I you know, it’s very unique to be able to talk to one of the people. Like I’m, I’m looking at this list of some of the other competitors in the space and, and you guys are like right up there where, you know, all these other heavy, heavy, heavy hitters are like Saunder Sonder lyric bungalow, some, some of these other management companies. So it’s, it’s really, really cool and really special to be able to talk to you. We’ll love to get you on another show at some point to talk more about your, your process and, and, and definitely talk with you some more. You’re just a wealth of knowledge. And I just think it’s, it’s, it’s so cool for you to be able to share this information with the community. Is there any, anything else that you’d like to share, Shannon? Before we head off? Oh, the question that I forgot to ask that is so important that I love asking people is what would you do? What would guest ready do if you had to start from scratch?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:07:14              I mean we definitely like launched in a few markets where like it was unfavorable for like regulation or like the market opportunity and this type of thing. So probably having a better understanding of the unit economics of the market in terms of what our staff’s cost would have been. Well it’s the market would have generated what you know and that type of thing. Yeah. Like a who was a, there was a few markets a week did close down after a certain amount of time that sort of weren’t viable for us for a variety of reasons. But that was, yeah. I think like knowing him,

Julian Sage:                       01:07:47              Knowing your market and, and what does that look like when regulations do change? If you’re managing, you know, all these properties in the Paris, London area, and then let’s say, you know, regulations do change and your, you know, how, how does that impact the business at scale like this?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:08:01              Yeah, I mean, I think regulation is good. Like there needs to be a responsible level of hosting. Mmm. So we are happy to work with, you know like government agencies or like, you know, boards that are sort of looking to enforce good standards across the industry to make it a more sustainable, a model for, for everyone in the, in the business. Like I think, you know, the, in big cities like London and Paris, there are areas that are like, you know, very overpopulated issues. So it’s like important as a, as a property manager to be responsible for that. So I think like, ultimately, yeah, like we, we, we have a model that’s like, you know, sustainable within the realm of, of you know, of the legislation in terms of how it’s enforced and that type of thing. So yeah, I’m, I’m really, yeah. Happy to say that there is regulation

Julian Sage:                       01:08:56              When, when you are at, at such a large scale is, are you just completely dependent on the regulations changing, like let’s say things change is your whole business kind of like, you know, Sol at this point or do you wan, you have scaled to a certain level. Are you working a little bit closer with a local legislation and how your business operates or is it just completely up to their win?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:09:21              No, I mean, we do you know, like we do participate in, yeah. You know, helping to professionalize the industry and working with regulators and that type of thing to enforce good standards. I think you know, it’s, it’s good to have a finger on the pulse in terms of what’s going on just for your own your own sake. And I think like as well to have, you know, there’s some good like alliances in India, Oh, membership boards that sort of helped to lobby and, Oh, not so much lobby, but it’s more case of like, you know, Mmm. Educating, you know, people that are in the, in, in city hall and that sort of thing as to like, you know, what’s, what stance is like is a good sustainable model for the city and not sort of goats on one way to space on some issues that like, you know, neighbors might happen, that type of thing. So yeah, like it’s definitely something that we wish to say.

Julian Sage:                       01:10:16              And what, what’s I’m curious as to what you, what you would say I always ask hosts, what’s the, what’s the question that you would ask the next professional or another professional host, maybe someone that as at a similar level than you or maybe the next level, what, what would you ask them? Like if you, if you could pick the brain of any of the other companies that are maybe a few steps ahead of you or doing something different, what would you ask them?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:10:41              I mean like a, a company has been very much focused on growth. So I guess it would be like a growth hack question of like, you know what, one of the things you’re doing differently to us. Like I do network with a lot of other companies in our space. It’s always really interesting to hear how other people are running their businesses and like the challenges that face them in. They usually the same sort of stuff that we’re dealing with. Yeah, probably on the growth side would be the most interesting.

Julian Sage:                       01:11:08              Is that when you get to that, when you get to where your level is, is, is, are all the challenges all the other managers basically the same? Is it customer acquisition and expanding your portfolios or is everybody kind of have different challenges?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:11:21              I think there’s always different challenges. Like, you know, this is, you know, when a company starts to get bigger, I like the challenges. Scott’s gay, they become different, you know, like, it’s for us, you know, it’s not just about acquisition of customers, it’s about, you know, like having a really, really good team and and that sort of thing. It depends on what your strategy is, right? Like, if you’re, if you’re a company that’s just looking to grow, grow, grow, like growth is going to be a number one thing. If you want to be like super profitable, then you know, like your objectives are gonna be different. So. Mmm. Yeah. Maybe for, for us, like, you know, we’re still looking to grow quite a lot. So,

Julian Sage:                       01:12:01              And, and, and last real quick question is from, from where, where do you see short term renting vacation rentals and this, this whole property management business going in the future? Is this a pretty, pretty fresh space? Is it too late for people to get in? What’s your thoughts?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:12:17              I mean, I don’t think it’s too late to get in because, you know, it’s a very hyper localized model in terms of working with owners or real estate agents and that type of thing. I do see a trend, at least in Europe and I guess also in the States, it’s like a market consolidation of like some big players coming together over the last couple of years. I don’t really see why that won’t continue. And you’ve got like companies like, Oh yo, so under that of raising like, you know, big, big rounds that I sort of moving into Europe, maybe not so much. I think that will continue and there probably will be like kind of big, really big professional players operating in like the chemo guys like in Europe and dos. But still, you know, like there’s a lot of opportunities. You’re a small property manager still. Yeah. Make really good business out of, out of posting and

Julian Sage:                       01:13:09              Well, thank, thank you so much Shannon for taking, I know we’ve gone a little bit past their time, but you provided such a wealth of information. I’ll include all the ways that they can reach out to you, how they can find out about this tech that you are going to be releasing by the time this episode goes out. And the website and everything. Do you guys have already have a name for it? What, what do you guys call on this? This tech?

Shannon Hyde:                 01:13:28              Yeah, it’s called Rental Ready.

Julian Sage:                       01:13:30              Rental ready? Okay, so rental ready. I’ll include that in the show notes. And thank you so much again, Shannon. And until next time, host nation, keep on hosting. Hope you hosts benefited from the show. If you found value, please go on over to iTunes, leave us a review and let us know what you enjoy about the show. If you’d like to talk to hosts that have been featured in these episodes as well as the community, go on over to our Facebook group, but the host nation.