All Forum Posts by: Benjamin Vail

@Carlos H DeOliveira Yes if you have a listing making more than $2500/month, then pricelabs will be cheaper. We have 60 listings, and our cost to ad another listing on pricelabs is about $5/month. 

@Blake Lawrence - The key is dynamic minimum night rule sets. On most of my listings we have 7 night minimum for any booking more than a month in advance, then 2 - 4 night min as those dates get closer. Pricelabs also has "orphan night" settings, which is what you were referring to in your example of July 9-10. 

I have used all 3, and for me, the clear winner is Pricelabs. Most of the pros that have tried them all, stick with pricelabs. It is the cheapest, and the most powerful. None of them are “set it and forget it”.

If you are trying to target longer stays, pricelabs has dynamic min. Night stays, which has been the single most valuable tool my business had in 2019. If used correctly, it will keep all of the small crappy reservations from being able to book you spot, (they will book your competition instead). Then when that one 2 week long (big fish) come along, your Calendar will be the only one open. My average nights per reservation doubled in 2019. 

I think you mean "does anyone know what Stay Alfred "WAS"? 

I read an article yesterday that Stay Alfred filed for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy yesterday! I don't want to see anyone suffer, but I can't hide my excitement for this news... Let me start from the beginning. 

Stay Alfred is a short term rental company, (Like Sonder, Vacasa, Domio, Lyric, ect..). Their main business model was renting several apartments from new built apartment buildings, and filling them with furniture, and re-renting them back out on Airbnb and short term platforms like Vrbo. Stay Alfed is one of the companies that got VC backed funding. They raised $60 million, and were off to the races. In my hometown of Columbus Ohio, they came in and opened 60 units in a matter of a month. They signed 60 leases, and opened units in many of the new built buildings. 

I like business competition just as much as the next red-blooded American, but for me running a start-up STR management company that I started in my garage, and funded myself, I can not compete with a $60 million backed VC company. I just can't. They operated at a loss, in order to soak up market share.

I made it to the VRMA international conference this year in New Orleans, and I met some of the people who worked at Stay Alfred, they are nice people. I sat in a session on revenue managment, and It was really cool to sit in a room with the leaders of the biggest STR companies in the world, and what I learned was that they really don't know that much more about revenue management (dynamic pricing) than I do!

Fast forward to 3 weeks ago,... Stay Alfred announced that they were going to "put a hold on all rentals for 8 weeks, to pass the virus and open back up". I thought that was strange, because how much that would actually cost them to shut down with $0 revenue for 8 weeks and how would they pay rent on the thousands of leases they just singed nationwide? 

Then yesterday I could not help but be excited to learn that they are closing for good. I am already making a plan for how I will approach those landlords about taking over some of the Stay Alfred dumped units. 

I am so glad you asked.... Can someone explain what "Stay Alfred" is?... And like I said, you should change it to "What Stay Alfred Was?" ... :)

I will admit up front it is not the most efficient system, and we do have a lot of over-lap of features that we only use one tool for. However, after lots of research and searching, we still see the value for what we pay for these tools. 

For this stack of **4** software tools per property, we end up paying about $25/month per property for all 4 total. Some of them make us more money, and some of them just save us time. As long as each one makes or saves us about $6/month per property, then I see it as a net gain. 

Tokeet (PMS) = mostly valued for its channel management, direct booking capabilities, and direct booking website. We do not pay for any ad-ons, just their basic product. This is valuable because for every direct booking we can save about 10% from Airbnb guest fees. Also we can fill more nights and get slightly higher rates being on multiple platforms.

Smartbnb = Mostly valued for messaging. They have great auto messaging, and AI messaging features that do most all of the heavy lifting for our guest services department. As mentioned above, they also have a fantastic inbox tool, that integrates data from Airbnb and Vrbo, so that guest communication and vetting is a much faster and more robust data. Not to mention I still value their SEO boosting tools, I use their data analysis tools (metrics) several times a day, and I pull market reports to check up on each listings SEO often.

Breezeway = task management, scheduling, photo reports from each task stored in the cloud, keeping and tracking information and photos of listings to track things like theft of items, live communication with crews in the field, capturing and tracking expenses per task, or per property and then being able to bill those expenses to the owners. This provides value in transparency for our owner/clients, time saved in calls/texts/ect., and also increased revenue from tracking and billing tasks. 

(and I forgot the most valuable!) Pricelabs = Dynamic pricing and dynamic min. night stays. I have tried beyond pricing, and wheelhouse, but Pricelabs is by far the most valuable product on the market in pricing. If you spend time learning the data of your local market, you can set specific pricing rules in pricelabs that optimize revenue, and minimize headaches. I honestly believe that the implementation of Pricelabs (and proper rule sets) increased our overall gross revenue by 10% - 20%. When you consider the price they charge per property, it is a no-brainer. One of the highest ROI investments I have ever made.

I am happy to answer questions anyone else has about these tools, or similar tools needed to run STR properties.

Great thread guys! Let's keep it up, keep it positive, and keep sharing information that helps everyone out right now in the STR industry.

@Julie McCoy - keep us updated on Lodgix. We currently use Smartbnb for messaging, and Tokeet for PMS and channel distribution. There really is not one solution that does everything needed, that is why we use a few different products. There is some overlap, but different products excel at different things, like the auto-messaging from Smartbnb is the best in the industry. But they only integrate with Airbnb and VRBO. Tokeet pushes our products out to Booking.com and runs our direct booking website. Tokeet seems to have some other good features, but they charge extra for them. Like digital signatures on rental agreements, they charge an extra $100 per month for their @signatures add on. They have a pricing solution, but it is not as robust as pricelabs, and they charge more for it. We are currently working on making what we need with SignNow, for less than half that cost.

Task management is available on Smartbnb and Tokeet, but Breezeway is a much better product. When you are running 50+ units, you need to have great team manage. Now Breezeway is building an SMS messaging product that may become more useful to us in the future. Imagine if your guest gets auto texts that the maintenance tech is delayed 30 min in dropping off those extra towels requested! Breezeway also automatically created a COVID-19 cleaning checklist, and made it very easy to implement on all cleaning tasks assigned. 

What is certain is that these companies will continue to innovate, and maybe someday there will be one that is the clear best choice. Until then, we all need to keep exploring new products, and pushing developers to improve faster! 

Tokeet + SmartBnb + breezeway = Zen 

I am a loyal SmartBNB customer (4 years now). It saves SOOO much time on messaging guests. It also does a lot for SEO within Airbnb. I am not sure if it does the photo switch, but I do know that it has a "heartbeat" feature that goes in and updates your calendar every 5 minutes in the background, and I am pretty sure it does a small edit to your listing description. So it does do things to trick the Airbnb algorithm to boost your search results. I consistently get 20%+ more page views than the other average competitive listings in each market (as confirmed by Airbnb performance stats). I have decent photos, but they are not THAT good!

Smartbnb also will provide you with a free market report any time you ask it to. This shows you what ranking your listing is being displayed in search results on each open date you have. It also shows you links to the top 3 comp. listings in your market for that date, so you can actually see who you are competing with for that specific available date! 

Not to mention they have a feature called metrics, which collects and displays all of your reservation data in a very digestible format (easy to read and share charts and graphs that help you take action steps to improve). I use metric daily. 

The Smartbnb inbox is likely the MOST useful tool they currently offer. It is hard to explain how helpful it is, but test it out, and you will see what I mean. For each conversation with a guest, it quickly displays the guests hometown, reviews, reservation dates, total price, ect. It is very helpful for vetting guests on the fly without switching different screens. Also it displays what the total cost to the guest will be (after platform guest fees are added) which is very helpful because Airbnb will not show you that amount. 

There are lots more features that Smartbnb offers that we still don't even use. The other thing I love about Smartbnb is that they are constantly approving, adapting, and they do care as a company on the service side. 4 years ago, I learned about Smartbnb on a podcast called Get Paid for you Pad. I signed up for Smartbnb, and 2 days later I was doing a skype call with the founder of Smartbnb Pierre! They have grown a lot since then, (and I don't think they offer personal skype calls with the CEO anymore), but every step of the way they have listened to our requests and feedback, and made lots of improvements (such as Vrbo integrations, pricelabs integrations, ect.). As If I have not nerded out enough already, I had the opportunity to meet the whole Smartbnb team at the VRMA conference in 2019, and they gave me a pair of Smartbnb socks! 

Great post @Luke Carl ! This is nearly exactly what I do for my PM company every time any owner calls us to inquire about us managing their property. We typically run a 4 page report that has all data from 3 of the closes comps (ENEMIES), and also larger market data for the neighborhood and then the city as a whole. 

The problem we run into is that Airbnb only lets you see so much information when you are looking at another owners listing as a guest. 

What would you say about a property that lists on multiple platforms, or takes direct bookings? Do you also search and scrape data from their Vrbo listing, Booking.com listing, and info from their own direct booking site? Or how do you account for all blocked off dates as assuming they are "booked at the same Airbnb rate"?

What do you do to account for dates that the owners have blocked of the calendar for themselves or for their friends to use it? What do you do to your revenue predictions to account for that? 

What do you do to revenue predictions to account for the fact that some owners don't set prices high enough to the market rate, or set them to high and don't get booked as much? (do you see that their rates are to low or high, and move on to find another ENEMY?, or do you just make a percentage adjustment to your predictions?

Some Airbnb listings have a setting where the house is blocked off a night or 2 before or after each booking (some hosts do this to help properly prepare the house for the next guests). How do you see if they are using this setting? And how do you account for this possibility? When trying to predict the number of sold nights? this could really throw off your predictions if you counted those as all sold nights when they were not). 

Do you make any adjustments up or down if you really bad or really good reviews? Like if a property has a long string of 3 or 4 star reviews mention bad cleaning, do you make any adjustments to assume that they house would make more if it had a better cleaning crew? (or do you move on to find a better ENEMY?). 

Thank you for sharing!

What is easier to walk away from and loose:

1. A security deposit on a lease?

 or 

2. A down payment and equity on an STR property that you are now trying to rent long term in a market where 1000 other STR's are now looking to rent long term?

Who will loose more when the real estate market takes a 20% dive? Or long term rent rates go back down 20% because of the market being flooded with STR converting back?

Just asking for a friend..

We have used 2 locks that auto set a new code and email it to new guests automatically. RemoteLock, and August locks. I had so many issues with August, that I have committed to never buy any of their products ever again. RemoteLock works pretty well, but has a monthly fee. Honestly the biggest issues are when the wifi goes out, and you tried to update the lock with a new code, but it didn't take because the wifi is out. 

We just gave up on wifi locks, and have manual keypad locks that we change the code every guest. We have a spreadsheet we keep track of it on. Don't over think/over complicate door codes.