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- Founder, VRMB
Danna Kittell is the founder of Starfish Luxury Rentals on the coast of Oregon. Her enthusiasm and positivity for the industry is eclipsed only by her hard work.
After doing some rehab to her family's vacation home, she and her husband Jeff realized the potential of having a renovation aspect to their management services: upgrading a diamond in the rough has now become Starfish's secret weapon.
It's not a...
- Founder, VRMB
IDEA: If you want guests to actually read what you write, make it pleasing to the eye.
ACTION: I challenge you to use these four rules in all of your writing for the next week. If you're like me, once you start doing it, you will never look at text the same way again.
Keep your paragraphs short (2-3 sentences max)
Bold the important words or phrases or headers or titles
List things using bullets
Use numbers...
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Latest reply by - RuthM
@Matt Landau I think this might be the MOST powerful thing you can share with us. WHAT and HOW to communicate is KEY.
Write, read, EDIT, EDIT, and EDIT some more. Practice makes perfect. I am in the process of...
- Founder, VRMB
Zaira Guzman is the Director of Sales and Revenue Management at Bluewater Vacation Homes in San Diego. Since San Diego is such a competitive vacation environment, Bluewater's recent occupancy growth (month upon month) isn't attributable to much other than Zaira's dynamic pricing skills, which means changing the nightly rates of properties to generate a fair return for the owner and a great value for the guest...
- Founder, VRMB
Jean-Philippe Ramé of 2 Be Apart in Lyon France is something of a vacation rental icon: he’s one of those entrepreneurs that sort of transcends industry and his management fleet is about as personality-driven as anything I’ve ever seen (check out the website if you don’t believe me).
It was in Barcelona, Spain at the KigoWorld event that Jean Philippe was sharing with me his strategy for baking flavor into...
- Founder, VRMB
- Founder, VRMB
Jeff Jensen and his team of concierges at Utopian Luxury Vacation Homes believe that personalization is luxury: that placing your favorite newspaper or a hat from your alma mater in your vacation rental can convey thoughtfulness and win repeat business.
But in order to personalize you need to know something about those guests — something personal. So from the moment of receiving the inquiry, Jeff’s...
- Founder, VRMB
Mike Harrington was the de-facto head of VRMA up until a few hours after our conversation. He’s also the President of Topsail Realty in North Carolina which was hit by a nasty hurricane in September.
Almost 75% of Mike’s properties had damage so this was a pivotal learning experience for him and his team. Mike’s big saving grace was trip insurance.
If you’re the kind of person who thinks a natural disaster...
- Founder, VRMB
IDEA: Vacation rental marketing is like the local pond where people catch fish. Take care of your pond today -- keep it clean, manage plants, control algae, and throw back fish that are too small) -- and the pond will sustain you all for a while. But forget about the pond's health and everyone's fishing eventually dries up.
ACTION: Do a quick 'audit' on your marketing portfolio to make sure that for each...
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Latest reply by - RichardC
If a guest has a problem while staying with us, we not only sort out the problem as quickly as we can, but we send a gift approximately two weeks after the guest returns home. This seems to be just the right amount of time. They have sort of forgotten there...
- Founder, VRMB
Eric Bay is a connector. He’s the kind of guy that every neighborhood would be lucky to have: he shoots straight, he respects opposing viewpoints, and he’s willing to work hard for the community. Pretty much a model small business advocate.
He’s also the President of the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity, which, based in New Orleans, is one of the most influential short-term rental advocacy groups in the...
- Founder, VRMB
Jeremiah Gall is a vacation rental pioneer: he was one of the founders of the listing site FlipKey, which was eventually sold to TripAdvisor. And not willing to leave the industry, Jeremiah’s latest brainchild is Breezway which is an app that allows hosts to optimize the operations of their vacation rental businesses. After the Streamline conference in Phoenix, Arizona I got the chance to challenge Jeremiah...
- Founder, VRMB
Durk Johnson is a housekeeping guru. He’s the director of the Vacation Rental Housekeeping Professionals (VRHP) but he’s also the consummate systems thinker: Durk is always looking for a way to systematize or temptatify or create a framework that can be followed and scaled: it could be argued that Durk's ability to do this has the potential to unlock the vacation rental industry as a whole.
This interview...
- Founder, VRMB
Warning: What I am about to share with you holds little weight in a formal business setting. It's not something my professors ever covered in business class. It never shows up on the profit loss statements at the end of the month. You won't find it in any formal contract and it's certainly never mentioned at "Disruptive" tech summits or conferences. And yet it might be our greatest secret weapon of all.
When I...
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Latest reply by - MeganM
Megan, How is the diffuser received? I love one in my own home, but am concerned that tastes vary so much, and people are sensitive to smells, that it might not be a good option in our rental.... thoughts??
Very well. Only do VERY LIGHT drops of lemon and lavender...
- Founder, VRMB
It's not often I meet a mastermind like Jeanne Dailey, she's the Founder and CEO of Newman-Dailey Resort Properties in Destin, Florida.
Like many vacation rental professionals, Jeanne is keen on the idea of diversification. But unlike many vacation rental professionals, Jeanne views this concept through an industry lens: having built several pillars in her business to avoid having all her eggs in the vacation...
- Founder, VRMB
John Dean of Only Provence is what I like to refer to as one of the most limited edition property managers in the world. His fleet of properties are widely recognized as the best properties in the Provence region of France.
But this distinction does not happen by accident. I was in Barcelona, Spain at KigoWorld when John told me about this tactic. I asked him to step into the side room and we archived it for...
- Founder, VRMB
Brad Stewart of Stewart Mountain Lodging in Sundance, Utah is one of my best buddies in the industry. I think it’s fair to say that I admire his work as much as he appreciates mine.
More specifically, I really admire how Brad thinks in systems and processes. And as a property manager, one of Brad’s big turning points was with regards to his owners: like we’d strengthen any good relationship, he and Vicky created...
- Founder, VRMB
Over the last five years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of you around the world — sometimes only for a few minutes after a presentation, other times at length over meals, walks, car rides..etc.
And although our industry is so diverse and all our businesses goals so unique, I began to notice a pattern about your businesses (no matter the size/age/location) when compared to others in our industry. Some may...
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Latest reply by - Crafty
A suggestion re. the idea of Golden Ratio calculation: simplify it by calling it Earned-to-Bought index of revenue. Where "Earned revenue" is from bookings where the host paid no commission to any third party platform. "Bought revenue" is bookings where a commission was paid (in other...
- Founder, VRMB
Alex Barba was the General Manager at BCN Apartments when we recorded this conversation -- it's a boutique vacation rental fleet in Barcelona, Spain. And while he's not there anymore, the way he helped change my perspective on start-ups, acquisitions, and problem solving in our young vacation rental industry still whispers at me regularly.
It's a creative solution for any property manager not satisfied with...
- Founder, VRMB
Mailie Green manages three vacation rental villas in Bali from her home in South Africa. And like any manager, she is constantly on the lookout for ways to boost occupancy in the low season: she is always open to ideas that result in a win for everyone involved.
This particular technique started with a skeptical email...but it has turned into one of her regular booking channels, while simultaneously benefiting...
- Founder, VRMB
This past weekend I had dinner with a cornucopia of business professionals.
At the table sat a video game software developer, a painter, a special education teacher, an intellectual property rights lawyer (who also happens to be my upstairs neighbor), and a shrimp broker (who literally sells fresh Louisiana shrimp to restaurants around town).
And when it was my turn to introduce myself, someone leads in like...
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Latest reply by - CJ Devries
Great stuff here! I've always known professional photography to be of utmost importance as it has been my families' business for well over 100 years (excepting the picture to the left as we opted for a more...
- Founder, VRMB
Lawrie Lawrence is a real estate guy. He loves real estate. he’s really good at real estate. And only recently has he become infatuated with a new kind of real estate, and that’s vacation rentals.
But in his typical renegade style, Lawrie doesn’t do anything textbook.
What I like most about Lawrie’s boat model is that it is based highly on statistics and evidence. He wouldn’t invest in something that he wasn’t...
- Founder, VRMB
Trust comes when a vacation rental host is genuinely more interested in ensuring that the visitor has a great vacation than in getting them to book his or her property. The vacation rental business that builds the most trust, wins.
Question: What are the best ways to earn trust with future and former guests?
(I’ll begin posting other responses that come in from non-IC members below)
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Latest reply by
- Matt Landau
Hi folks, I'd like to try to do these kinds of MMMs more often in which we take a deep dive into one...
- Founder, VRMB
Bernardo Retana of Otium Residences in Marbella, Spain has a great pedigree of hospitality and finance. But what I like most about his topic here is its unconventionality — it’s innovative in that no one taught him or instructed him to do this. But simple enough that pretty much all of us could do it too.
I was drinking beers with Bernardo in Barcelona, Spain at the KigoWorld event, when he shared the Whatsapp...
- Founder, VRMB
When we talk about the “holy grail” of vacation rental marketing we talk about the repeat guest: the guest who knows and loves your vacation rental: the guest that you consider almost a friend. And to cultivate repeat guests, there are two spheres to consider:
Sphere 1: Activities that cost money and activities that only require time.
Sphere 2: Activities that are done a) pre-booking, b) during the stay, and...
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Latest reply by - DK
Yesss! Easy to do with a decent CRM or property management software.
Well, I'm still kinda stuck in Excel haha. We're at 8 now between owned and...
- Founder, VRMB
This week will mark the end of an 8-month vacation rental fact-finding mission around the world filming Season 2 of A Sense of Place (premier in just a few weeks!) In this time, I visited 14 cities (Las Vegas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Boise, Bowen Island, Park City, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Lisbon, Budapest, Bali, St. John, Lindsborg, Kansas), gave several keynote presentations, hosted a number of...
Hi All,
It's been a while.
Have a quick question for the group.
Over the past two years it's become clear that our core markets are...
a) family gatherings / reunions... usually multigenerational in high / shoulder season - summer, Christmas, Easter etc.
b) group...
@Sallie totally. :)
Welcome to VRMB!
I’m Matt Landau, the founder of this forum. It was created in 2016 when a group of us wanted a safe space to discuss our growing STR businesses.
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