“You have to ask. You have to read.” Jeff Iloulian spent five years building a 150 property portfolio in Los Angeles, and set up close to 300 units along the way. He also once checked out of IKEA with 48 shopping carts and a $40,000 bill, then watched most of it break, chip and peel inside a year. In this episode of the Booked Solid Show, Gil sits down with Jeff, cofounder and CEO of HostGPO, to talk about what that portfolio actually taught him. Not just about furniture, but about where bookings really come from. Jeff’s direct booking strategy had nothing to do with paid ads or email funnels. It came from reading guest messages closely enough to notice who kept showing up, then walking across town and building the relationship himself. That instinct led to Netflix, Warner Brothers, UCLA faculty housing, Lakers players, and one film shoot that covered nine months of annual revenue. If you have ever wondered why the same guests keep booking your place, this conversation gives you a way to turn that pattern into a channel. Summary and Highlights 🎙️ Direct Booking Channels Hiding in Your Guest Messages with Jeff Iloulian “You have to ask. You have to read.” Most operators go looking for direct booking channels in the same three places: ads, social, and an email list. Jeff Iloulian found his somewhere far less glamorous. He found them buried in guest inquiries he almost did not read. This episode is part cautionary furnishing story, part masterclass in noticing what your own inbox is already telling you. 👤 Meet Jeff Iloulian Jeff Iloulian is the cofounder and CEO of HostGPO, a community buying group built for the short term rental industry. Before that, he was an operator. He started with a single Los Angeles property in 2015 and grew to roughly 150 doors over five years through lease arbitrage, property management, and a mix of creative deal structures. His background is unusual for the space. Jeff studied Economics and Philosophy at Columbia, earned a JD from UCLA School of Law, and practiced business and intellectual property litigation for three years before the entrepreneurial itch took over. He describes himself as a person who refuses to accept that something has to work a certain way until he has tested it himself. He also loves music, tacos, and travel. 🛒 The 48 Cart IKEA Run Jeff’s origin story starts across the street from his own home. A developer bought a great property and planned to demolish it, but Los Angeles permitting takes 12 to 18 months. The house sat empty for weeks. Jeff had just read a New York Times DealBook piece about lease arbitrage, so he knocked on the door and proposed a deal: pay a small amount, furnish it, run it, and hand it back with 30 days notice. They said yes. He set his booking window to 30 days out and started welcoming guests personally. Then came the scaling problem. Four adjacent units to furnish at once. Jeff brought his entire 12 person team to IKEA, rented a U Haul, and checked out with 48 shopping carts. The line wrapped back into the store. Checkout alone took two and a half hours, long enough that the cashier’s shift changed mid scan. The bill landed around $40,000. He asked for a discount and they laughed. 🛏️ Why Cheap Furniture Is the Most Expensive Thing You Can Buy The units were terrible. Everything broke, chipped, or peeled. But Jeff’s point is not about IKEA specifically. It is about the real math of a broken bed frame in a live rental. You block the calendar. You order a replacement. You lose a day or two of revenue. You pay for junk removal. You build the new bed. Then you refund the guest it broke on. Do that a few times and the “savings” evaporate. Linens compound the same way. Buy sheets from one store, restock at another when the line gets discontinued, then patch in something from a third. Now a bed has a cream pillowcase, a bright white flat sheet, and a duvet that matches neither. Guests notice immediately. So do your cleaners, who are now sorting mismatched inventory on every turn. This is the same logic behind data driven design decisions and why designers like Courtney Petrovich treat furnishing as a revenue decision rather than a taste decision. 🧵 The Hotel Standard Nobody Told You About Jeff has been in the industry 11 years and says he is still learning. His example: a 60/40 cotton polyester sheet behaves completely differently depending on how it is woven. If the synthetic yarn sits inside and cotton wraps the outside, dirt binds to the cotton and releases in the wash. That is what stain release actually means. Other details he had never considered until vendors walked him through them. Fitted sheets without hem lines, so they go on in either direction. Color coded thread inside the seam so cleaners can tell kings from queens from twins at a glance. Case packs, so you order 72 pillowcases directly instead of breaking apart 20 full sets to find the pieces that actually wear out. The best operators Jeff sees do one thing consistently: they set standards, then plan replacement cycles 16 to 18 months ahead and phase inventory in. Boring, and it works. It is the same operational discipline Ishita Lalan and Lisa Roads have both described from different angles. 🎬 The Direct Booking Channel That Started With One Email Here is where the conversation turns. Jeff’s property management company was never brand forward. Luxury homes, cabins, apartments, studios, all under one roof with no single consumer facing identity. Paid ads made no sense, because there was no unified brand to send traffic to. So he asked a different question. Not “how do we market our brand,” but “where do the people who want these specific homes already live?” The answer arrived as inbound. A trickle of emails

“Pay your peers, not the platforms.” That one line explains most of what Na’ím Anís Paymán has built. He scaled a UK portfolio past 500 units across serviced apartments, guesthouses, and hotels. When the software could not keep up, he gave two developers six months and a hard deadline, then migrated 150 units onto a system he owned. Today he has made that PMS free and launched a host to host direct bookings network where operators refer guests to each other and keep the commission inside the community. This conversation covers why a free PMS makes commercial sense, how smaller hosts can market a portfolio they do not own, and why Na’ím believes the biggest gap in direct bookings is mindset rather than tooling. Gil and Na’ím also get into paid ads discipline, guest data, voucher tracking, and the quiet risks hiding inside a vibe coded booking website. 🎧 Summary and Highlights 👤 About Na’ím Anís Paymán Na’ím Anís Paymán is the Founder and CEO of Zeevou and the Chief Nucleator at Communitise. He studied Natural Sciences at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and started providing short term accommodation in Cambridge and Oxford while still a student. That business grew across multiple UK cities and eventually into guesthouses and hotels, reaching a £25M property portfolio built the hard way through spreadsheets, 2am guest messages, and OTA commissions that climbed every year. Unable to find software that matched the reality of running multi location serviced apartments, he built his own. Zeevou launched in 2020 and went on to win Most Innovative New Hospitality Technology at the Innovation and Excellence Awards, Best Channel Manager at the Shortyz Awards, and VRMB’s Keystone Award for Best Small to Mid Sized RPMS. He is based between the UK and Albania, and still spends a large part of each year meeting operators in their properties and at meetups. 🔧 The Six Month Deadline That Produced a PMS Na’ím did not build his platform gradually alongside the old one. He handed in notice on his existing PMS, told two developers they had six months, and moved everything on the day the contract ended. Roughly 150 units migrated at once. Then came two weeks he describes as manic. The developers had not fully grasped that availability has to decrease every time a booking lands. Double bookings flooded in. It is a useful reminder for anyone assuming booking logic is simple, and part of why we usually advise hosts to launch a direct booking site with a PMS already in place. 🤝 Why He Made the PMS Free and Built ZeeLink Zeevou is now free. That decision came from a specific frustration. Na’ím watched margins compress across the industry while platform costs climbed. He points to Airbnb moving from roughly 3 percent to 15.5 percent under its host pays model, alongside years of other increases. His conclusion was blunt: the OTAs appear to be the only ones making serious money, and everyone else is scrambling. So he asked a different question. Instead of paying OTAs, why not pay each other? ZeeLink is the answer. Hosts share inventory with one another, advertise each other’s properties, and earn commission when they pass a booking along. The bigger the network, the more valuable it becomes for everyone in it, which is exactly why the PMS underneath it costs nothing. 📈 The Portfolio Problem That Holds Small Hosts Back Here is the part that will land for newer operators. Na’ím names portfolio size as the rate limiting factor in direct bookings. If you have two units, the effort of building a brand rarely pays back fast enough to feel worth it. Pooled inventory changes that math. A host with three properties can market thirty. Someone pitching for management contracts can show owners a credible portfolio under their brand. Larger operators with existing traffic can monetize the inquiries they cannot fill themselves rather than losing them. He also sketched out uses beyond hosts. Travel influencers currently trade a stay for a post, when they could earn ongoing commission instead. Marketing consultants can prove they drive bookings before asking for a retainer. Management companies can use it as a lead source. If you are still mapping your channels, the Direct Booking Quadrant is a good companion read. 🧠 The Real Difference Is Mindset, Not Tooling Gil asked the question every operator wants answered. What separates the clients who get consistent direct bookings from the ones who stall? Na’ím’s answer was immediate. “Dare I say it’s probably not the tools, but it’s a mindset.” The hosts who win set the site up properly, then keep going. Initial SEO structure, ongoing blogging, rich snippets, structured data, optimization for both traditional search and AI answers. Letting a beautiful site sit untouched produces very little, no matter what is integrated behind it. Our guides on optimizing for Google and ChatGPT and the GEO framework for vacation rentals cover the mechanics of that work. They also promote relentlessly. Book direct prompts in every email footer and invoice. Peak dates blocked on OTAs when the calendar will sell out anyway. 📞 Website Bookings Are the Smaller Half This was one of the more grounding moments in the episode. Even with everything dialed in, Na’ím says website bookings are a small proportion of total direct bookings. The larger share comes from repeat guests who email, WhatsApp, or call. Contractors and traveling nurses rarely go back through a booking engine. So his team built for that reality. One click extensions with the price and payment link ready to send. Deposits, rental agreements, and data capture handled in the same flow. The lesson for hosts is to stop treating the website as the whole of direct bookings and start treating it as one entry point among several. That is the same argument behind building an email list from your direct booking website and running a proper repeat bookings email strategy. ☎️ Call Every Guest, Then Use What They Tell You At