Vee Venski’s insights provide a practical roadmap for building a successful short-term rental business. By starting small, building a strong team, focusing on quality, leveraging technology, driving direct bookings, and seeking mentorship, you can enhance your operational efficiency and deliver an exceptional guest experience.
For further details and a deeper dive into Vee’s strategies, don’t miss our full podcast episode
Summary and Highlights
Navigating the short-term rental market requires a blend of strategic planning and practical execution. In our recent podcast, Vee Venski shared his expertise and experiences, offering actionable advice for both newcomers and seasoned hosts in the short-term rental industry. Below, we delve into the core strategies Vee discussed, providing a comprehensive guide to help you enhance your short-term rental business.
1. Start Small to Gain Essential Experience
Vee’s journey began modestly with a single spare bedroom listed on Airbnb. This approach allowed him to learn the fundamental aspects of short-term rental management without the complexities of larger properties. Starting small offers several advantages:
- Risk Management: It helps mitigate risks by limiting exposure and financial commitment.
- Learning Curve: Provides hands-on experience in managing bookings, guest interactions, and property maintenance.
- Foundation Building: Allows you to refine your processes and identify best practices before scaling up.
Actionable Tip: Consider beginning with a single listing or a smaller property to master the basics before expanding your portfolio.
2. Build a Strong Team and Embrace Automation
As Vee’s business grew, he emphasized the importance of building a reliable team and incorporating automation into operations. This approach can significantly enhance efficiency and scalability:
- Team Dynamics: A well-rounded team can manage various aspects of the business, from guest communication to maintenance.
- Automation Benefits: Automating tasks such as guest messaging, booking confirmations, and revenue management reduces manual workload and minimizes errors.
Actionable Tip: Invest in automation tools and hire skilled professionals to handle key functions like guest services, property management, and marketing.
3. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
Vee shifted his focus from acquiring a high volume of properties to improving the quality of each listing. This shift had a notable impact on profitability and guest satisfaction:
- Higher Revenue: Premium, centrally located properties often command higher rates and attract more discerning guests.
- Enhanced Guest Experience: High-quality amenities and prime locations contribute to better reviews and repeat bookings.
Actionable Tip: Evaluate your current properties and consider upgrading or focusing on fewer, higher-end listings to maximize revenue and guest satisfaction.
4. Leverage Technology and Data
In the competitive landscape of short-term rentals, technology and data are vital tools for staying ahead:
- Dynamic Pricing: Tools that adjust pricing based on demand and market conditions can optimize revenue.
- Data Insights: Using analytics to track performance metrics helps in making informed decisions and identifying trends.
- Communication Platforms: Efficient communication tools streamline interactions with guests and automate responses.
Actionable Tip: Integrate technology solutions that offer dynamic pricing, performance tracking, and streamlined communication to enhance operational efficiency.
5. Drive Direct Bookings
Vee highlighted the importance of driving direct bookings through various strategies, which can reduce reliance on third-party platforms and enhance profitability:
- Website Optimization: A well-designed, user-friendly website can facilitate direct reservations and showcase your properties effectively.
- SEO and Marketing: Implementing SEO strategies and engaging in digital marketing can increase visibility and attract potential guests directly.
- Guest Relationships: Building strong relationships with guests can lead to repeat bookings and referrals.
Actionable Tip: Invest in your website, optimize it for search engines, and develop marketing strategies to boost direct bookings and reduce dependency on booking platforms.
6. Seek Out a Mentor
Reflecting on his own experiences, Vee stressed the value of mentorship in avoiding common pitfalls and accelerating growth:
- Guidance and Support: A mentor can offer invaluable insights, share experiences, and provide advice on overcoming challenges.
- Learning from Others: Mentorship allows you to learn from someone who has navigated similar challenges and achieved success in the industry.
Actionable Tip: Seek out a mentor who has experience in the short-term rental market to gain guidance and accelerate your learning curve.
Follow Vee Venski here
Transcription
Vee: What’s been interesting. One thing I came to realize, which was kind of fascinating for me is probably it’s not surprise to most of the people out there, but the person with the most data who can analyze this date in the most efficient timely manner will win. And as you add more properties. Or as you grow your average revenue, like a monthly revenue, you get access to better tools that you can make a better and a more well informed decisions.
Vee: So when we had two properties, we’ve had none of this software that we use it because right now we spend around 700 pounds just on a software loan every single month, which is roughly around a thousand dollars. And for a person who just starting out, they just simply can’t afford it or it will not be viable to them.
Vee: However, because of this, we will have a competitive edge over their listing.
Vee: Hit me! Hit me!
Gil: Hey folks, welcome back to direct booking simplified where we break down the strategies and tactics to win in direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Vee. Hey Vee, welcome to the show.
Vee: Hi Gil. Hi everyone.
Gil: Yeah. Welcome back. Welcome back. You, uh, you took a little vacation there recently, um, to visit family.
Vee: Yeah. Yeah. It was lovely. Went to Turkey and need some sun in my life because in the UK we don’t get a lot of sun sadly.
Gil: When’s, uh, when’s the last time you took a vacation prior to that?
Vee: Oh, I mean last time I was in a warm sea where it’s not like three or five degrees, it was five years ago.
Gil: Okay. Okay. Okay. How, how’s your business set up right now? Were you able to completely disconnect or were you the. The digital nomad and running all your short term rentals from remotely. I was just set up now
Vee: I’m actually quite lucky. I do have a director now who oversees all the operations. So I was able to completely turn off my head for 23 days. Don’t think for a second about the work. Everything was working as it should. Of course, we’ve made a few mistakes, but nothing crazy that I could not fix upon my return.
Vee: But I’m just so happy I do have a good theme that actually helps me to run our properties.
Gil: that’s, that’s amazing for you, 23 days is a decent amount of time for you to, to, to walk away and have like minor, minor things that you have to address when you come back. That’s, I would say that’s a huge win.
Vee: I mean, it was just a little things. It was just some cleaning issues because we also offer cleaning services to our landlords here in the Northeast. We clean over 40 properties. And because when I left, uh, our business partner gave us another 20 properties. Without the proper introduction. So as you can imagine, it was a bit of a rocky start, but as I said, our team pulled this off
Gil: Awesome. Awesome. So kudos, kudos to your team. Um, what was, uh, Well, how did you get to the place where you build out your team? Actually, maybe rewind back just a little bit. Can you introduce folks to kind of who you are, um, and what you do and kind of like your portfolio?
Vee: Sure. And my name is V and I live in the Northeast of England. We manage service accommodation. We provide quality accommodation in the Northeast. We have now a little over 13 properties. Uh, we’ve started two years ago. In the service accommodation market. And I’ve been a landlord myself for the last eight years.
Vee: And we’ve decided to transition from a traditional investment and the long term tenancies into service accommodation for better margins. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
Gil: Nice. So, so we call them like short term rentals, long term rentals in the States. So you went from converting your longterm rentals into short term rentals. Is that right? And growing your portfolio from there.
Vee: uh, we’ve added more and converted them as well, but we’re not just doing short term rentals, also mid term rentals, which is like a month plus. I’m not sure if that’s the same term in US, but yeah, that’s something we’re exploring right now as well.
Gil: Nice. Nice. So how did you, so you, you mentioned you’ve been in the services accommodation and short term rental side for the last two years. What was that journey like in the very beginning? Like, how did you get into that first door?
Vee: The first one was a very interesting one. I was living in the student dorms in Manchester, had no money, didn’t know what to do. Uh, moved over to a very small town called South Shields and I rented out a completely unfurnished, uh, two bed property. So I just heard that Airbnb, it’s a great game changer.
Vee: And I thought, okay, uh, there was just a week before my birthday. I’ll spend a week and I’ll launch my first Airbnb as a spare bedroom. So I furnished everything, took the pictures myself, didn’t know what to do, how to stage everything. And for the first two, three months, I was sleeping on a yoga mat in the other bedroom.
Vee: And that’s how our first listing came live. And 18 months after we have 13 properties.
Gil: Wow. Wow. I bet you have no regrets sleeping on a yoga mat for four months. I
Vee: and it’s good for your back. So
Gil: bet. I bet. Um, so what, what was your second one like, and kind of thereafter then did you, are you, did you take the same approach to acquire your next few properties or did you take a different approach?
Vee: no, it was completely different. The first one, of course, it was just a spare bedroom and that’s how I learned. There is the money because I wanted to keep my risk to minimum. There is the money I’ve seen the bookings coming through. Obviously I worked out all the little things, the communication issues, how to optimize things.
Vee: I’ve played with the pictures layouts, been tracking all the numbers for the three months or so. And in the same time, I was. Uh, on a hunt for a property. And three months after I found a one bed property in the city center of Newcastle, that’s actually on the corporate let, which is great. That’s exactly what we want.
Vee: It’s on a three year lease and we furnished everything. It was very minimal investment into that property. It was around 2000 us dollars. And when life,
Gil: Wow. Wow. I didn’t. So we, in the States, we call that our arbitrage there, um, where you’re like, you’re renting away and then you’re really renting that out as a short term rental. Is that now how you’ve grown your portfolio to the 13 that you have? Or are you doing other styles of like co hosting or purchasing the property outright?
Vee: yes, we do a mixture of everything right now. So a first six, seven properties, it was rent to rent or as you call arbitrage. And not all properties worked out, unfortunately. And some of them, I’m still surprised why they didn’t work out because they had all the luxury of having a hot tub, nice backyard, but it just didn’t work.
Vee: We don’t know why. And once we’ve got under the seven and above, we decided because it’s been too risky. As in our area where we operate seasonality, it’s a big thing. So January and February, that’s when your normal 70 percent occupancy drops to 15 percent occupancy,
Gil: Yeah. Yep.
Vee: still have all the rent you need to pay.
Vee: So either you’ve made a big surplus during the hot season and you have money to withstand it, or you need to adjust your business model. And that’s what we’ve done. And we do co hosting and management where we just collect a management fee. From the landlords and also these properties are in a much better condition that what we manage because of course, at the beginning, you try to get any properties to get under your belt, grow the numbers, grow the revenue so you can grow, but then you realize it’s quality over quantity.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. So what do you, what do you mean by that? Like talk to me a little bit about like some of the learnings there with specifically like the quality over quantity side of
Vee: Sure. So right now we do have 13 properties and on average we generate around 25, 000 pounds. So if we multiply it by 1. 3, uh, for us listeners, it would be around 30 uh, us dollars every single month. And this is from a 13 properties. However, In London, I do have a colleagues that have only two properties and their revenue.
Vee: It’s as much just from two properties alone, just because it’s London, it’s a three bed in the Lux segment. So it’s really important to pick your niche right at the beginning. Not every area is suitable for Lux stays. However, they just have two properties. They get as much revenue as we have yet. They don’t, don’t have as much overheads and also their profit margin is a normal, they get around seven to 8, 000 pounds per property in net profit, but they don’t need to admin assistance, three cleaning teams.
Vee: They don’t need to get all this fancy softwares to work with it. So right now I’m more focused on getting very good properties that can generate not 2000 pounds, but four or five, six, seven. And what we’ve came to discover it’s around one property. In London equals five or six in the Northeast. So that’s why that’s the ratio.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. Does that change kind of like your, your marketing as well too, because now. Uh, you can see it on your shirt if you’re watching this on video, but like you’ve actually grown a brand over time. Um, do you see that brand kind of evolving, um, to being kind of more of the luxurious, like the luxury end kind of more in the city, uh, rather than kind of in kind of the outskirts.
Vee: Yes. I would say our longterm strategy for the next five, 10 years is to get into the higher end market. And as of today, we’ve secured two penthouses in Newcastle city center, and it’s all on a managed basis. But I do know that it will take us probably another two or so years to get more properties because this sector has a different, how would you say it?
Vee: Like a hidden rocks, if you like. It’s a different kind of guests that you’re attracting yet. They’re demanded different things and it required different kind of capital to start up. So for our studios, it may need us only 2000 pounds to invest in, but with the Lux property, it’s very normal to start between 25 and 30, 000 pounds.
Vee: So the entry point is. It’s very big.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Do you see yourself growing into two separate brands from your HFC or do you kind of plan to roll it under the same brand when you do that?
Vee: It would be under the same brand. It just probably would be a laxed segment because right now we provide quality accommodation and only quality accommodation in the Northeast. It’s not the high end. However, we now in a comfortable position where landlords come to us and say, yeah, I have some properties, please manage it for me.
Vee: And we say, sorry, we can’t take it. It’s not, uh, to our standard, unless you invest that amount of money and we can help you with it. We just no longer take these properties that guests on Airbnb or booking. com will leave two or three stars because not all properties are Airbnb suitable.
Gil: Talk to me, talk to me a little bit about that when you’re looking at closing clients. You kind of alluded to this in the very beginning, but, um, in the very beginning, you’re there really just to grow your co hosting business and you would take on, not in every property, but you’re much more lax. It sounds like now you’re much more rigorous on the types of properties that you look for.
Gil: What’s some of the criterias that you specifically look for when you’re vetting, not just the property, but probably even the host themselves or the, the owner.
Vee: Yeah, um, so there’s a few things that will look so as of today, we are known to be a central Accommodation provider in our area and all our properties are central. So if anyone want a central accommodation in Newcastle, they come to HNFC stays. And because of this, we try to find the central properties that in the good, uh, well, cosmetic state or something that we can improve on with fairly minimal.
Vee: investment. So we no longer take properties where it would take maybe 5, 000 to renovate, take a new bathroom and a new kitchen, especially bathroom. That’s probably number one. If the bathroom is not squeaky clean and modern, we probably would not take it unless It’s, uh, getting a subsided brand that will not damage our main brand.
Vee: That’s, we’ve started taking a few properties like that and mainly it’s targeted to contractors.
Gil: Got it. Got it. It sounds like you, when you take on these properties, are you doing the furnishing? Are you paying for the furnishings or are you, um, asking the owners to, to cover that bill?
Vee: It varies, it varies from every landlord. At the beginning, we did everything. We only ask for a budget from a landlord. Not with every landlord we can agree on a budget and we see what we can do. Luckily, most of the properties already in a good sense, in a decent state. So we just buy some small decoration items like a nice cushions, artificial plants, coffee machines, something very minor, and we do it in our own expense.
Vee: However, landlords also provide money for that. Now we’re working with the bigger landlords who has five, 10, 20, 30 properties, and we breaking down by the numbers and saying, if you would invest that much money, we can charge such a nightly rate because of the competition is charging this, this, and this, and that’s what kind of facilities they provide.
Vee: Therefore, if you want to make more money, 5, 000 of investment is required, or we can stick with lower rates because you will not be able to compete with the fierce competition in our area.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. What’s been kind of the response from your, your owners when they’re, when you go to them and say that you want to upgrade the property to ask for, to get better, better, uh, ADR, what’s the response usually, or it kind of varies.
Vee: It varies, it varies, it all depends on the landlord. So if the landlord has multiple properties, 5, 10, and it’s their bread and butter, then most likely they have money and they see it as an investment. However, when it’s a small landlord who has a full time job as a pharmacist or in any other worker, and they just have it as a side hustle, they are less likely to invest the money.
Vee: Because they’re just not how they operate, um, in their property. It’s more like a hobby to them. Therefore, this is not our main target audience and we tend to stay away from these kinds of landlords.
Gil: Yep. Yeah. So it sounds like you’re also like, you’re not only vetting the property, but the type of landlords that you want to work with, you want to work with landlords that. Are interested in reinvesting back into the property to have higher quality tenants coming in guests coming in, um, to stay with you.
Vee: Yeah. Also, the chemistry plays a very big part. You may not think that, especially in the beginning when you’re desperate for property to say, Oh yeah, it’s a great property, they’ll invest money. But then you feel like this person is being abusive because it’s their property and they tend to think you work for them as an employee.
Vee: So you need to be very careful how to still maintain a good relationship with them, but in the same time let them know you’re not the employee, you’re offering them a service, hand, well in our case it’s a hands off service when we do everything, and I’m not the employee to respond to them when they need to, it’s, we still need to make an arrangement.
Vee: Uh, that came to me the hard way to realize and set the boundaries with the landlords.
Gil: What have you found? What have you found to be an effective way to communicate some of those boundaries or expectations?
Vee: It’s when a landlord say, I need the report by 4 p. m. the latest. And there’s like no, hi, no anything. And you say, hello, Jason. Yes, this will be done as agreed by that date. I’ll try my best to do it at that time. But sometimes you just have to say, I’m not working for you. If you want this to be done, you can hire a property manager, pay them 50, 000 pounds in yearly salary, and they will do it on your own terms.
Vee: But this is how we do it because we want you to focus on what you’re good at. And with landlords, normally what they’re good at is raising finance, find the good properties and repeat and we do operational side because no one really wants to stay awake at 3 a. m. at 4 a. m. when the guests got locked out or communicate with them or provide some sort of, you know, help.
Vee: amenities that’s been forgotten or left elsewhere. But we do that because it’s our job.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You definitely, it sounds like you do it when they’re coming back to you and they’re asking for things. Do you do anything on the front side when you’re going into the relationship for the first time in that first few calls negotiating, like, do you set any expectations there as well?
Vee: Um, no, really, no, really, uh, what’s been good. Um, actually it’s a little story how we’ve made 100 pounds investment that turned out to be 10, 000 pounds back, which was like 1000 X, 100 X. And in one of our properties, we’ve received similar leaflet. I’m not sure if you can see, it basically says, Yeah, pass the keys.
Vee: It’s actually one of the biggest, uh, property managers in the UK. I believe probably the biggest. And we’ve received the same leaflet in one of our properties. And I thought, why are we not doing it? Because it seems great. You just go to the right neighborhoods with good, in a good areas where you want to attract property.
Vee: So it’s very targeted and that’s how you get in the front of them because you say you don’t have time. You, you, you’re shooting all the bullet points and in the next five hours, I’ve designed this myself. And as a result from this, we’ve received two central penthouses. in Newcastle that we still have a landlord and they have 10 more properties.
Vee: So of course, if we believe them and everything that we’ve promised and estimated, we’ll get way more properties under the belt. But a hundred, a hundred pounds investment turned out a 10, 000 pounds in net revenue, which is amazing.
Gil: That’s awesome. That’s, that’s, that’s a good marketing. That’s, that’s good marketing in the old traditional way as well, too.
Vee: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s not easy. It’s not easy, especially for me was when you had to go around, knock through some doors, get to some letter boxes. It feels. So much out of comfort zone, at least, at least for me, it feels like you’re not, you should not be doing this, but because, you know, you need to grow and you need to get in front of the right people, uh, that’s something we do.
Vee: And as I said, the landlords do call us and there it’s, you put yourself in the position of a strength because they reaching out to you. And now you can actually play this around when you’re calling them first. It’s so much harder to promote your terms, if you know what I mean.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’re selling to you rather than you selling to them.
Vee: yeah, exactly.
Gil: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Um, kind of in, in kind of rewinding back a little bit into your early days before you got into the more of the coasting side of things, uh, what were some of the biggest learnings in your early days?
Vee: The biggest learning in the, at the beginning, I would say build the team right at the beginning. So it’s a team automation, excellent communication will lead to quick growth. It’s a three principles that we focus on. I wish I would done it much sooner than I have because of the, my team. Now we can optimize most of our. and automate them. So we don’t have to spend that much time. And of course, don’t have to pay as much money to our stuff and through additional services. So right now we do have two admin assistants, one property assistant who basically looks after the supplies. As we call them, it’s a pair of legs.
Vee: It’s a physical presence of a person who need to be in the property and need to ensure that all the supplies are being provided. Soap, tea, coffee, and they keep active list of all the amenities because in our area, quite often, there’s a lot of theft that’s been happening. We also reported it to our cleaning team, making sure they check the inventory list every time.
Vee: However, even with this two double checks, Still, quite often the item’s gone missing and it’s hard to attribute to which guest. And the theft happened, therefore you can’t even reclaim it because you wouldn’t know, uh, from what guest, uh, the accident took place.
Gil: Got it. So you mentioned team automations, communications. There are things that you wish you had known or focused on in those early days to help you scale up. You mentioned communications there. Is that internal communications within your teams? Is that communications to your guest?
Vee: And when I speak of communication for us, we do have a five minute SLA. So if you check our profile, we have now over five hundred and twenty reviews on, uh, Airbnb or probably. Over 600 and all other platforms, we get 4. 9 out of five for our communication. So communication is paramount, especially when people don’t have patients anymore.
Vee: They want everything the next second. So we’re trying to deliver on this, um, important attribute. So when the guests. Send us a message or inquire. We try to get back to them within five minutes. Normally it’s much quicker than that. And I train all my staff and including myself to get within this timeframe, but it only works if you have a right notifications.
Vee: If you have multiple people who cover. 24 hours. So for us, you can get in touch with us 24 7. If you can’t hire your own assistant, you can hire virtual assistant like on Philippines or elsewhere, depending on their time zone. And it’s a very cost efficient route to still provide the communication your guest desires.
Vee: say, is the automated emails and messages so you don’t have to type it every single time. Most of the channel managers do provide this as a basic feature. You obviously don’t want to overwhelm your guest when you have five or 10 different messages with all the information. Also, what we do, we provide video check in instructions.
Vee: It’s not something very common in our area. We’ve received a ton of favorable feedback saying how great and easy to follow, because you probably know this, it’s better to see once than to read ten times. So, For that, we do provide 35 second check in video where you know exactly where you are, where to collect keys, where the everything we’ve also using technology of NFC on our amenities, when you go to the property and a lot of people ask how to turn the shower on, how to use a microwave, how to turn on the hop, a very basic questions that still takes a lot of your time.
Vee: So we’ve pre recorded videos and you can buy a very cheap NFC sticks on Amazon, like for 1 or 50 cents. You can put it on the microwave. They literally swipe their phone next to it and auto video on YouTube plays out. You also greet them so they can learn about your brand and they want, they had the questions answered without disrupting.
Vee: And disturbing your team, which is
Gil: That’s, that’s interesting. I’ve seen people use QR codes. I haven’t seen. Anyone use NFCs and I come from many years back, maybe like a decade ago, I was in IOT in smart home technology. So I’m very familiar with NFCs, but I haven’t seen it used as much. So it’s actually quite. Interesting to see, see you leveraging it.
Gil: It’s a magical experience when you do it, right? Yeah,
Gil: Nice. Nice. Um, kind of moving over to, you mentioned some of the stuff that you do on the traditional marketing side to get more co hosts of dropping leaflets in people’s mailboxes. Kind of moving over to the hosting side of things. What are some of the tactics that you use to drive direct bookings or more bookings in general?
Gil: Silence.
Vee: for that, obviously it’s the hardest one is call your guests because now everyone is texting, but. calling. It’s when you actually can learn the most about your guests, the experience, what’s the main reason for their stay. Are they returning guests? You’ve put the details into your CRM and then you just stay in touch with them with the good promotions and the valuable content.
Vee: Of course, this is a living breadcrumbs from OTAs because you’re not supposed to advertise your brand on airbnbbooking. com. But if you do not promote your brand on these platforms, then you basically being an ambassador of airbnbbooking. com, you effectively becoming their own employee, but you’re not getting paid for that.
Vee: So with this, we optimize every single listings with the keywords. With the good structure in the description, then similarly, we translate this on our own website. So as soon as I guess, gets into the property, they know. It’s us, it’s HNFC stays property. They know exactly how to find us. We making sure when they type the keywords, we are the first one ranking in a, in a Google or any other search engine.
Vee: And of course the different keywords that we’re using to attract different guests. For example, we do have a lot of promo codes. That guests can book and check and as a result, they also come into our funnel and that’s how we build relationship with them. We do write a lot of blocks and articles for landlords, for guests, for local events that guests again are checking, they’re getting into our website and because it’s well optimized, they book with us directly.
Vee: And as a result, we have now around 15 to 20 percent is a direct bookings as the result of leaving the breadcrumbs and having a direct communication with the guests.
Gil: Yeah. That’s awesome. How long have you been getting into, like, when, when did you first establish your website?
Vee: It probably, as soon as we’ve started, maybe eight months after, and then we had the website, but it’s nowhere near where I want it to be because there’s a lot of features I wanted to add.
Gil: Yeah.
Vee: But it’s just, we’ll take a different kind of level, uh, of a website, but the whole, the most important point probably I want to share with everyone who just thinking to start out their own, uh, vacation rental business or short term rental business is if you want to get the right bookings.
Vee: Your website, the whole booking experience should be as good as Airbnb or Booking. com. If it’s not, the people will still stay with Airbnb. That, it’s very common when the guests stayed with you and then in three months after they know of your existence, they know you’ve been great host, but they still decided to book with Airbnb.
Vee: Because it’s very easy to find the past bookings. It’s very nice way of communicating. There’s no legs, there’s no glitches. It’s very good support. There’s a real ability and trust factor. We’re very heavy on the trust marketing. I don’t know if you know the term. Yeah. So we try to build a lot of trust so people will feel confident, uh, booking with us through getting the reviews on various platforms, Airbnb, Google business.
Vee: Uh, video interview, video interviews and video reviews are very helpful. Currently, we do have them in a pipeline, so hopefully we’ll update the website, things like that.
Gil: Got it. Got it. Um, when you, when you think about your website and some of the things that it’s important there, you mentioned, mentioned like the reviews in there and kind of like making it easy as easy as it is for someone to book with you as it is on the OTAs. What are some of the other aspects that you think about on your website specifically that you learned over time?
Gil: That’s important.
Vee: So the most important is communication. Before we had the WhatsApp widget, which is very easy. Most of people do have a WhatsApp. However, the biggest downside to WhatsApp, it’s only can be used on a one phone number. Before, of course it was me. And that’s another thing, as soon as you grow three plus properties, then you can’t manage it all on your own.
Vee: You need a team member. So that’s why I said right at the beginning, set your structure, right? With the team members involved, or later on when you need to scale, you won’t be able to implement the system you need. Because right now we’ve implemented Tok2, which is a live, live chat with our guests. We’re still testing the waters.
Vee: So I’m trying to get myself out of the being the main point of contact for everyone. Because if something wrong with the guests, they call me. If anything wrong with the landlord, they call me. If there’s issue with the guests, they send me a text. Uh, last three months we’ve implemented the life chat with implemented and landline where multiple agents in my team can actually access.
Vee: So the guests will still call one number, but it’s a multiple agents that can get back to me, get back to them. Therefore, it’s not just on me receiving the call, greeting the client, and then transferring this call onto my team. So again, it’s freeing up a lot of my time.
Gil: Got it. Got it. So when you mentioned earlier about making it easy for someone to book with you on the OTAs, one of the things you think about is for instance, like on communications, like if you wanted to reach out to a host about a property or inquiring about it for the first time, or you’re thinking, or probably you’ve already booked your stay.
Gil: You want to chat with the team. You want to make it as seamless as the messaging within the OTAs. So what you thought about is Actually using some of those chat bubbles, not only to help answer questions, but really facilitate that same seamless communication that folks are so used to.
Vee: Yes, and it’s hard because it’s actually an application. So as of today, we have three different services. So one is the website where you build a relationship with your guest and say, this is what we are. This is our reviews. This is our awards. This is the reviews we’ve received. This is the key benefits of booking directly.
Vee: and it helps us to generate the traffic and trust with the guests. But then the second bit is the separate platform, uh, like a booking engine where the guest actually books the property quite often still in the UK. It’s on inquiry basis. So you say, here’s the property, please fill the details, fill the form, say what dates you want, and we’ll get back to you.
Vee: No one want to wait.
Gil: Yep.
Vee: for people to get back to them. It might be a day, it might be a couple of hours, it might be never. So we want to make sure when the guest is there, they click a button, they select the date. If it’s available, they booked it. It’s all done. And if they have any questions in between, it’s very easy to get in touch with us.
Vee: So we can help with any of the hesitations or clear anything they’re not sure about.
Gil: Yeah. That’s a, that’s a really good point. Like for us in our business in practice days, like specifically, we don’t help any hosts that doesn’t have a PMS channel manager. Already in place because if you don’t have a PMS, you don’t have that booking engine behind the scenes. You have no way of blocking calendars.
Gil: You have no way of syncing rates. You have no ways of actually controlling the experience. Um, when I guess once a book, but also like you can’t really automate actually taking a booking. Um, it’s, I’ve seen people try to do phone numbers or forms on their websites and they’ll then go on Airbnb and block off the calendars there.
Gil: It’s just a very clunky experience. But I think the, the channel managers, the PMSs. They do a really good job and pretty much all of them have a pretty, pretty good job at managing the booking flow there. Um, but on top of that, like a lot of them helps you kind of back to your original point, like point number two is like the automation side.
Gil: Um, it makes it so much easier to operate your business because you get to pretty much automate all messaging, all rates, all that stuff is operationally taken care of. So like, The maintenance stuff is not something that you need to worry about. It’s more of the kind of the edge cases that your team has really built around.
Gil: Yeah.
Vee: is having the channel manager and it being your direct booking engine, you have no control over it. And that’s a problem because what really should be happening, you should have your website and a booking engine under the one system.
Vee: So for us, it’s two different entities. We even have like a sub domain, but effectively you cannot change anything on your booking engine. Unfortunately, apart from raids, but you can’t track the experience of the guests. You cannot record their stays with you unless they have their own login in system and a portal.
Vee: So right now we do developing our own app where the guests can just log in, see their stays, book everything. And we can also scale this up because Most of guests, they don’t even know that when you book directly, you can save the money.
Vee: Many guests that just don’t know that they can save 10, 15 percent if they just book with the same host that provides the same or even better service to them because they work so much closer to one another. And as a result. This translates in a just better business overall.
Gil: Um, I’m not sure if I missed this earlier, but you mentioned that there’s like three components that you think about it from a tech stack perspective. You have your website, you have your booking engine. Was there a third one that you were, that you were mentioning or was it those two kinds of primary ones?
Vee: Oh, the third one is the communication, which is a life widget, life widget that we have. So if you have more than three properties, you probably need life agents who are going to be chatting with the guests. And obviously for last month, we had over 1200. Uh, bookings, and I was around 100 to 200 guests. So with that, you need to ensure that you have multiple agents who can still be in the same chat, aka Airbnb chat, where they can see the history.
Vee: But it’s still a problem because when you don’t have your own software or your own stack, Then the histories are go missing. They can’t go and back to scroll everything. Or if you stick with the WhatsApp, it’s only one person in the time. There’s some life hacks in between, but still it’s not being very efficient.
Vee: What I really would think is probably the best software the starting landlords can use. It’s pricing, dynamic pricing software. For us, we use wheelhouse because they use a different. uh, pricing algorithms, and it helps you to take the most money on the table in a high pixel analogy. At the beginning, it was all static.
Vee: Of course, you can put some markup on the weekends, but you’re missing out on a key events, on a shortages, on a local demand and supply. And as a result, you probably leaving out 20 or 50, 15 to 20 percent of the money you could make. And similarly, you’re not charging probably low enough, low enough when it’s a dead season, but because their algorithm is so advanced and they’re collecting millions, if not billions of data points every day.
Vee: You’re missing out, uh, on a lot of things and just say that you don’t have to do it manually. It’s all done automatically. So you can have a lot of time on your hands for 13 properties. Imagine if you need to do 15 minute adjustment per property, suddenly it becomes three hour job just to adjust in minutes and every single property.
Gil: Yeah. I also use a dynamic pricing as well, too. And I find like, honestly, like probably the graphs are probably the one of the most helpful tips there. Um, I don’t use wheelhouse, I use a different, a different provider there, but, um, I like how I can see what the market occupancy is for that, what the booking window is for a particular period.
Gil: I like knowing when, uh, the. It’s particularly, I don’t know wheelhouse does has this, but, uh, I use price labs and price labs has like seven day pacing. Um, so I can take a look and see for that market specifically, are there specific weeks in advance that are getting pretty high upticks? And those are the weeks that I pay attention to when I need to do revenue management, when I have to actually look into a particular week.
Gil: And I see that for instance, the week before Thanksgiving is starting to have a 10 percent booking increase in the last seven days. That’s where like I need to then enemy method and look at my price compared to the market at a very micro level. That’s kind of like I use that macro data to understand where I need to surgically make changes myself.
Vee: Yeah. Yeah. They provide so much data. Useful data and what’s your competition is charging. How much they charging? What’s the average occupancy? What’s the average rate in the particular areas? They also supply a monthly, well, monthly, weekly report. We also use. a ranking system where we can track our positions daily on Airbnb.
Vee: And as soon as we make any changes, like with pictures, with title, with the description, arranging hero image, because all of this has a direct effect on the conversion rate. And if we just, because when with an Airbnb, it’s like any other search engine, you have a click through rate. You have. Uh, how many people find you in the first page?
Vee: How many people actually click on your listing? How many people convert and actually book from that listing? So even if you can move like 0. 5%, I would say even like 1 percent on every funnel, you would get not a 3 percent return. You will get 5, 10, 15 times because it takes a compound effect from it. And with this software, you can actually track.
Vee: But if you don’t have this software and you can’t measure it, therefore you can’t improve it. It’s hard to improve on something when it’s not being accounted for.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Are you using rank priest for that? Are you using a different software?
Vee: Yes, we use RankBreeze
Gil: Nice. Nice. Yeah. There’s a bunch of technologies that’s really come to market in the last three, four, five, six years that has really up leveled the game for a lot of hosts. Like we have a lot more capabilities. We have a lot more data that we had than, than before.
Gil: And that allows us to really, really much be very mature host. Even when we have dozens of doors there, and it’s, it’s amazing. Like, we have the same tools that a lot of hotels now will have.
Vee: and also what’s been interesting, one thing I came to realize, which was kind of fascinating for me is probably it’s, it’s not surprised to most of the people out there, but the person with the most data who can analyze this data in the most efficient, timely manner will win. And as you add more properties.
Vee: Or as you grow your average revenue, like a monthly revenue, you get access to better tools that you can make a better and a more well informed decisions. So when we had two properties, we’ve had. None of this, um, software that we use it because right now we spend around 700 pounds just on a software loan every single month, which is roughly around thousand dollars and for a person who just starts in out, they just simply can’t afford it or it will not be viable to them.
Vee: However, because of this, we will have a competitive edge over their listing because even with a rain breeze, you know, what are the best amenities that translate it to being. In a highest ranks. So maybe you can add the list of X amenities. And as a result, it will push your rating like 20 points up. And as a result, you will get a high conversions.
Vee: And therefore that’s how you get 75 percent occupancy versus 55 percent occupancy for your competition.
Gil: Yeah, that’s a good point. It also helps you optimize your, your listing data as well, too, which are what you include into your titles, your descriptions. If you find that there are certain Uh, highlights that your competitors are doing and they get higher occupancies. It allows you to kind of peep into that data and add that into your own internal listing data. Awesome view. We went through pretty in depth and into many different parts, your, your whole entire journey into, uh, service accommodations, what you’d learn along the way to, as you grow in your portfolio into direct bookings as well, too. Was there anything else you want to share with, uh, with the listeners today?
Vee: Uh, yes, it probably, I’d say don’t be afraid to start because at the beginning I had no idea that we could be making 25, 000 pounds in a month when in the first month you see 400 pounds and then you see a thousand pounds a month and then two or three. So the growth is not linear and most of people maybe know it.
Vee: I don’t really understand it or feeling it when you say, okay, I have two properties and it’s 4, 000 pounds. And if I want to have eight, it would be four. But now by having four, you being a more efficient. You can apportion the cost on a greater number of properties. Therefore, you’re going to save more money.
Vee: So I would say just don’t be scared. Start with a spare bedroom as your Airbnb. It’s still very much alive. Learn all the basics because there’s actually same principles you will use. On an entire property, but your downside is so much lower because it’s just a spare bedroom. You’re not going to lose as much money in your furnishing, staging, practice your key skills, staging, photo shoot, editing, and making sure you the best in your spare bedroom and then get a better properties.
Vee: And that’s how you’re going to scale your operations in less than 12 months.
Gil: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like as you’ve grown through each stage from even your spare bedroom to, um, where you are right now with quality states, and then the next step is like really locks your, you’re always trying to reach for high quality, even though they’re, they’re The type of stays are different.
Gil: They’re smaller in scale.
Vee: And for me, it’s always interesting to improve my skills as an interior designer or stager, because with every property, you want it to be better. And it’s only as much as you can do when you’re getting a mediocre properties. So you think, okay, how can I make the next best thing? And I think this strive for excellence that you probably will never achieve. I think that’s what most of people should have who has passion for a hospitality sector.
Gil: That’s like, awesome. I usually end with two questions. One’s a mindset question, and then the other one is a more tactical takeaway question. The first one, what’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new? You may have kind of gone into this already, but you can kind of reiterate it if you want.
Vee: It would be just start, don’t overthink it. A lot of people overthinking it and they try to get even more data, more information. Uh, try to watch, um, YouTube videos. They see a lot of horror stories in the industry and they never start. I would say imperfect action is much better than perfect inaction.
Gil: I love that. Love that. Awesome. Last question. What’s one piece of tactical advice? Uh, it could be in direct booking specifically or in other realms that you want folks to take action on today.
Vee: I would say, try to get yourself a mentor. I think if, uh, in my point, I had someone I could reach out to who has what I’m trying to achieve. It would make my life so much better because we’ve lost thousands of thousands of pounds and made so many bad mistakes that could easily be avoided if we had this go to mentor that could have just talked to us, let’s say for an hour.
Vee: a week, we would be in a completely different space today.
Gil: That’s a good point. Awesome. Thank you. That’s a very good point. And you don’t need necessarily a mentor that’s light years ahead of you. I think having someone that’s a few steps ahead of you is actually probably the most beneficial ones. The folks that are, that are living your, your position a few months back, they are the freshest in providing you with the best insights.
Gil: I find that a lot of times, if you find a mentor, that’s too established too far from where you are, it’s hard for you to get tactically the benefits from it. But if it’s a peer, that’s just a little bit, a few doors above you or a few years ahead of you, you can actually be watching them and thinking about how you apply what they’re doing already into your business.
Gil: I found that from a mentorship standpoint, I find that those are the best ones.
Vee: Yeah, I agree.
Gil: Awesome. Vee where can folks find out more about you? How can they follow you? How can they kind of follow your journey?
Vee: Sure. They can easily follow me on Instagram. It’s Vee Venski. Uh, I would be more than happy to answer any questions guys may have and girls, of course, uh, if you want to check more on our properties, uh, on HNFC stays. And similarly, you can get in touch with me there or through any member of our team through the live chat.
Vee: And it would be. Very happy to have a chat about your dream and your goals.
Gil: Awesome. Vee thanks for being a guest on my show today. Thank you for sharing all your knowledge. It was a huge pleasure getting to have you on our show and talk about that.
Vee: The pleasure is all mine.
Gil: Thank you. Bye.