2026 Tips and Tricks

[Music] This is short-term rental management. The show that is all about short-term rental property management. With your house, you're truly lift carl. [Music] So it is almost springtime. It's 2026 and it is tips and tricks. We're so excited that you're here. I'm very grateful to have you join us. I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak today. This will be recorded and put on short-term shop plus. This has been brought to you by the short-term shop and short-term shop plus, which is STS+.com. And we'd love to have you join us over there. STS+.com. It's fantastic. Fantastic. You can't miss out on it. My co-hosts, please keep an eye on mute buttons. There are a lot of people coming in. We're triple digits already. So if you hear some noises and things like that, please keep a close eye on the mute buttons, etc. And we've got a lot to talk about. There's been a lot of exciting things going on in the world of vacation rentals in the OTAs, in pricing and AI. And how do we stay competitive? How do we keep up with our neighbors? And the best way to do that is to hang out with us, right? And we're doing the best we can all the time. And I will say that bookings are looking pretty good already. I'm at 67 bookings for the year. And it's only the third week of the year. And my January numbers are up from last year. We're expecting travel to increase 4.6% 2026 over 2025. And the future looks bright. And also, hell, we might even be able to find a deal this year, which is what we're going to turn it over to the boss. And we're going to start with that topic right now. Avery, what is it going to drive out there? How do we get a deal? What do we deal with in 26? All right. So thank you guys so much for coming. Really happy that you came. And Luke hit mute your, the main video right now. Anyway, so thank you guys for coming. And what I'm going to talk about just pretty briefly is what the real estate market, the sales market is looking right like right now in terms of y'all being able to get deals. So as of today, we're in January and in January, rates are at 6.19%, which this time last year, the mortgage rates were at that we're hovering around 7%. So you got 0.75% lower than last year. And people are getting off the sidelines of people are starting to buy houses again. We're starting to see the market pick up just a little bit, which is not a lot because the market has been completely dead and in the toilet for about three years. So you're not missing the boat by any means, but we are starting to see people kind of wake up from their hibernation of thinking that the world is coming to an end. Right now in terms of getting deals, depending on where you're buying the strategy might work better than others. If you're buying in a true vacation market, the real estate market is always worse in true vacation markets than markets, Metro markets to have a lot of primary homes. The reason for that is, you know, somewhere like the smokies are down here in Destin, 30a, Panama City Beach. 90% of the real estate in these markets is purely discretionary, like funny money. I'm either buying a beach house or I'm buying a boat and people buy a beach house or a mountain house or they're buying it as an investment. It's not something that they need. These are not need to buyers. These are want to buyers. So when the market turns like it has for the past few years, the market is always slower than down in these types of markets than in like your Nashville's your Austin's where people actually live. Maybe they're having another baby. Maybe they got another job and they need to move. So those types of markets keep rolling a little bit more than these types of markets because you have the primary homeowners kind of keeping it going because you've got those need to buyers and the need to sellers. So these types of markets always, I don't want to say easier because it's still it's never easy to get a deal. But if you're offering in true vacation markets, the market slower, you have more inventory to choose from, which means you can negotiate further with sellers. You can try. You have no amount of negotiation or logic is going to make a seller who doesn't want to come down just magically decide to come down. But where you do have leverage is that you have a lot of choice. So if you run into these sellers like Luke and I ran into this this past month, we've been trying to offer on the same house for a month. And this seller will not like they won't even respond to us. So now we just kind of waited better one came up this week that we're working on very similar. Patients and persistence making a bunch of low offers. There's no reason in this market to run off and make asking price offers on everything. Now is the time to work on getting deals because you have so much breathing room. You have so much inventory sitting on these types of markets. You can make the low offers. You have time. If that seller won't negotiate with you to go work on some other ones. Maybe you come back in a month and this property is still there and the seller is ready to work with you then. So patience and persistence is the name of the game in 2026 rates are looking a little bit better than the have been. I don't we're not going to see any major drops. I don't think I think we're going to hover between 6.25 and 6 even this year. Maybe if something crazy happens we might get down to 5.75 but I'm thinking like an average of 6% is what we're looking at this year not expecting any major drops so again patience persistence getting out there and making offers what I don't want to hear from you guys this year is when you call me up and you say hey I want to look in this market because I looked in this other market and it didn't work. And I'm like what do you mean what do you mean it didn't work well none of the numbers work well how many offers did you make none. You that's not deciding that the market doesn't work that's you didn't make any effort you didn't make any low offers there is a number at which every single property will work for you offer that number offer the number that works for you. I don't want to hear that market didn't work and you didn't make any offers you don't know until you make the offer so get out there make the offers and eventually you will find a seller who's ready to deal with you. You can do anything else you're on mute sorry tell you to mute and now it's. But they're again I'm not an agent but I'm been making offers and it's it's it's wacky you know I don't it's black bean. Get close to asking on one and then they tell you no and then you got other deals where they're willing to take much less than asking so I think. And then I think the numbers game right now make as many offers offers as you can and we're all looking for a deal right I mean that's that's it period every single person on this call is looking for a deal make no mistake about it and and they're out there you just got uncover them you know I would say they're a whole lot easier to find right now then they were three or four years ago. Well thank you every. And I'm happy to help wonderful wonderful let's go back to the party and we're going to talk about AI it's been a big hot hot topic lately a lot of management software just starting to work it in which we'll talk about that in a in a minute I actually just had a podcast yesterday with the CEO of hello host she was wonderful she's been on every program as well so they're worth looking at. And then there's host buddy and I think it's important to understand what we're talking about when we say AI this is not going to replace auto messages at least as of right now. I think in most cases we do still want to keep our auto messages. But the AI can answer kind of in between questions and you know how do I do this and that and where's the address and. So I'm going to turn it over to Patrick right now because he's been using host buddy quite a bit with owner as and he's he's enjoying it. Which we will talk about rezy after the fact but Patrick if you don't mind can you talk to us about obviously you're an owner as user. And how are you incorporating host buddy. Sure would be happy to so it's really easy to connect host buddy to other as or any property management software does the hospital and many others too but. You just there's a you sign into host buddy you set up an account you click to integrate it will download your properties pull everything and it will scrape all the data. So depending on what you sign up for two months of message prior messages three months six months I'll scrape all of your information from your property list that you've got in the property management software. And then And you can test it through here to make sure it's working. It does not, like Luke said, it does not, your system messages still need to be there. But it basically takes away you having to respond to guests when they have a question like this morning when the guest is asking me where the beach chairs are. Well, host buddies taking care of that because it's in the property description or to answer the question. This is what the dashboard looks like and how you do it. You connect the PMS, you import the property, which ones you want to do. They charge you per property and you test it and you go live. And then what I really like about host buddy is not only does it have messaging for you, but it also takes care of maintenance issues. So I haven't clicked these as solved yet, but it will text me when there's a maintenance report to maintenance issues. So this morning the guest reported the dishwasher screw had come out. It was not mounted to one of my dishwashers. Well, I'm taking care of that right now. I was actually just texting with my handyman and he's over there right now taking care of it. And it will also do upsells for you. So you can update the upsells. If you have a post day gap night, it will mess the guest and you can click on, if you've got it enabled, you can set. If you want it two days before, three days before the guest checks out, the minimum time and all for them a discount. And host buddy will take care of that. With that, you have to go in there and click it will do pre night stays. And we'll do inquiry follow up so you don't actually have to follow up with a guest if they've been quiet about your property. You can actually teach host buddy. So if we go into, if we go into messages into the inbox and I can see that this guest right here, host buddy has said, you're very welcome. This is host buddy. And I can tell it, if I like it and why I like it, I click the like button here and I can set an inner a note to say why this was a good message. So it takes about maybe a week to train host buddy to sound like you. And it's very, very easy to use and it's actually much nicer than me. I'm very direct. So me, this is me, I immediately message the guest last night when they message about want to change their days for a book and they just put in. I said, not a problem. And then host buddy comes in and they make me sound like I'm the nicest personal earth. So overall, it's very easy to use. It's very user friendly. It will text your maintenance people when there's an issue. So if there's a bug issue, it'll text my pesky that there's an issue and tell them the property. It will text my cleaner. If there's a cleaner issue and it will do everything you're asking for and it's very easy to use. So I can't say nothing. Nice things about it. I did attempt to use the the Rezi AI in on a resin. I was not a fan. I went straight back to host buddy. And why is that? It's just limited. It is on the newer side, correct? It was still in its beta phase. And so, and it was not actually sending the messages. I had to come in and click the messages. Host buddy will automatically send messages for you. It makes it a lot easier on you. And if you move to that open voice phone, it will actually send the text messages and communicate with the guest. It's text messages as well. So it's got a lot of nice options there. When you say open voice, you mean open phone the software? Open phone, yes. You can integrate open phone with host buddy. Yes. Oh, very cool. Like that. Can you say host buddy, you're too nice? Yes, you can. Okay. And I should clarify friends because there's a lot of you here and we are extremely grateful that you are here. We are not giving, giving you any kind of affiliate code or any of that with any of the stuff we talk about today. We're just here to give you the most up to date information in this space. So every single thing we talk about today is just an honest opinion. So very important as far as work and certain to let you know that. So thank you, Patrick. So that was actually going to be my question. Is Rezi any good? It is an upgrade, right? I had to pay extra for Rezi. You're paying similar price for Rezi as you would for host buddy. The only difference is that I could tell was Rezi is actually in on a rest and they were still in the beta phase and they're still working out kinks and host buddy easy up and running and is making it very easy on me. I probably spend 80% less time talking with guests than I was before I integrated the AI. Have you ever had a situation where it responded in such a way that you were not happy? Yes. So the initial phase like talking about the pool heater and what it can do and I went in, I put a down button on that response. I corrected it and let the guests know that there was an issue that my assistant had given them wrong information and it has not had an issue since with that message. So you can go and correct it. It corrected that particular information as well so it won't happen like that again. Is that what it says? Yes. So now it knows exactly what to send. Yeah. Now it knows how you want to respond to that question. And it will get you upstream too because if you have frequently asked questions, you can actually put those frequently asked questions in host buddy when you're doing it and write the answer you won't host host buddy to give and it will give that answer. So you can get upstream of those frequently asked questions that you normally have into answer or you have a template for and go ahead and tell host buddy what those are. And for those of you that are not familiar with that term, that is from a book called Upstream by Dan Heath, which is gospel around here. We all love that book very much and thank you for mentioning that Patrick. Okay. Great. There's another one that's an option. They seem to be very similar but you know, obviously different companies and I interviewed the lady from a hello host literally yesterday from my podcast have not personally tried it just yet. But you can find my podcast short to rental management every Tuesday and every podcast every Wednesday, which is the short term show most appropriately titled podcast of all time. All right, back to the presentation. Thank you, Patrick. You're very welcome. Look. Management software is a couple of updates that we would like to discuss before we get too deep into this. I should mention that for the most part, we hear about onerous and hospitable most often around here. So those are the two we have the most experience with. Again, no affiliate codes of any kind. Hospitable also has, well, we're going to skip. We'll go to that next security deposits security deposits are now in your dashboard on hospitable. Do we want to use these? That's up to you. No wrong answer here. We will cover this a little bit more in depth when we talk about verbo updates here in just a few minutes. But this is something fairly new from hospitable. Not new for onerous, right? You guys have had this for a very long time. We've had it a long time and I love my security deposits. It helps prevent parties in my opinion. How much would you say, and I see Chuck shaking his head as well? How much are we putting a security deposit on a particular property? I do 500 bucks. I thought about going up to maybe a thousand. Okay. I should get some context here. Patrick's houses are beachfront and extremely high dollars. So that's, you know, keep that in mind. So you can actually animate the security deposits in your area like that Margaritaville beach resort that's right near near us and PCB is charging 2000 for a beach front house. So got it. Chuck, what are you doing for security deposits? My bigger place is I'm doing 500. For me, it's more question of what damage might not be covered by something else. And in my smaller places are 300. Most people don't even blink at 300. Really? And you do this across the board, all all OTAs. Yep. Interesting. We will revisit this topic when we get to the Verbo section of today's program. Again, this is hospitable AI similar to what Patrick was talking about a minute ago. We are finding that hospitable AI is extremely simple. You basically just go to your, it's just called inbox AI on your message, guess messaging section. And you can basically turn it on or turn it off. And then you can have it escalate an escalation policy. In other words, if they keep messaging and then what do you do as far as a, you know, particular operating procedure, which this one is set to if the guest is locked out, it will escalate to use the last four digits of your phone number because that's what most of us are doing anyway, right? With the slag and the Yale integrations. One thing I will say is that on my AI messages, you do need to consider, are you going to tell the guest that is an AI message or not? And again, I think there's no wrong answer here. If you're going to start implementing AI, whether it's coming from a third party software or if it's coming from your management software, you do need to consider, like what Patrick said with the water, the pool heater. Did we say, hey, this message was sent by AI? We are currently doing that. This message was sent by AI. If you need a human, we're available, you know, seven days a week. during these hours. But I could see where if you're using a more sophisticated AI software, like host buddy or hello host, where you would probably maybe want to lean towards letting folks think that that's you. So get no wrong answer there. We are currently telling them it's AI. A couple of owner-res updates again, Patrick and Chuck, I feel free to speak on this. This is Rezzy. We already covered that. It is very simple and not sophisticated in any way. And how much is this expensive? Is this inexpensive? Is it an upgrade? Yes. Yeah. Go ahead, Chuck. This is going to be $9 a property as an add-on. You know, in most cases, you say, AI companies are using a large language model like chat GPT or Claude or Gemini and they have to pay them. So it's not exactly a profit grab. They're just trying to integrate services. Not that they're not making money on it. But yeah, so it's about $9 per property. It's supposed to, owner-res is releasing it full. So they say at the end of this month. So we're coming off the beta period and we'll see how well that goes. So I've been using it. But I got to be honest. I've been at this a long time like you have and I've got so many automated messages that I found AI was only doing about eight or 10 a month for me and that wasn't worth my time to keep it up. So I have not integrated an AI tool into my messaging string yet. You bring up an excellent point because we have dozens and dozens and dozens of auto messages. And some of them are turned on and some of them are turned off. But it has been fairly rare that my I'm using a hospitable AI right now with very good possibility. I'm going to upgrade to one of these third parties. It's very rare that hospitable even responds. And also again, with the hospitable AI messaging being extremely simple. Oftentimes it'll say we're not going to respond to this and basically, you know, where it's we don't know what to say. And then when it does respond, it's pretty rare. And sometimes it, you know, I'm pretty okay with what it said. Sometimes I'm very impressed with what it said. And then other times I'm a little bit like, I'm not sure. So it's getting there. It is helpful. But for instance, what Chuck's talking about, guess says, what's the Wi-Fi password? If you're new, which I'm sure many of you are, it would be easier. I would assume. Again, you got to understand most of us on this. They're speaking on today's call. I have been around a long time. We're old school. So I already have an automated message set up that is not technically AI, but it is completely auto triggered to respond to the word Wi-Fi. And it responds exactly how I want it to. So in essence, that is sort of AI in the form of an auto message that I don't have to pay extra for. And I don't have to worry about whether it said the right thing or not because it was coming directly from us. So what we do is we just use the word Wi-Fi as a trigger. And then we will send an automated message that includes the Wi-Fi section from that properties guest book. Guidebook, I should say. Because I as a host, I'm always trying to push people to guide the guidebook because it gets me out of trouble. And as we all know, nobody reads the guidebook, but it does get you out of trouble. And it's very helpful in most situations. So if somebody says Wi-Fi, it takes me to the Wi-Fi section of my guidebook. At that point, they can then be like, oh, this guidebook tells me literally everything I need to know about this house. I don't need to bother these people. Again, that can all be done without AI if your auto messages are set up. But again, if you're brand new, it's a lot of work to set up all those, especially with multiple properties, all those Wi-Fi auto messages is a lot to deal with. And if AI can do it for you, you know, all the better. And I say another area that shines in Luke is like, I have a lot of guests because all my properties are dog friendly. Say, oh, I forgot to add dogs to my booking. Can we get a dog's added? And AI will come in and say, I will let Patrick know that we need to get the two dogs added. And the fee is this for the pet fee. And we're so happy to host your two fur babies. I mean, just puts it on there, makes it seem like a five star experience. And so it does a great job of that. Or if they're coming to celebrate a birthday for grandmother, it will put it on there for you without you on a booking inquiry, without you having to respond and really set the tone right for the guest right on off the back. Short term shop plus has live and recorded sessions on the following topics. Creating compelling listings. Marketing your STR property. Setting up a new listing. Managing from a distance. Finding and acquiring your first or next STR. Live revenue management audits with the pros. Analyzing an STR for gross revenue. All of this and much, much more is now available at your fingertips with short term shop plus. Everything you need to know to have success in the world of vacation homes and STR. Please join us at stsconsultation.com. That's stsplus.com or stsconsultation.com to learn more. That's next note use. Love it. We did actually experiment with Hellis Buddy. Now you got me make me want to try it again because that was really, I didn't know you could click that thing and say, Hey, do it this way next time. That's pretty cool. Yeah. All right, let's go back to the. Patrick, can you explain this to me again? This only applies to cohost and managers, is that true? Yes. They just came out with PMV2 on owner res, which what was happening before. I listened to their little podcast on it and basically your incidental damage protection wasn't showing up and some other expenses. If you were a cohost or a property manager weren't being put to the owner statements and so if you're a cohost or a property manager, they've now changed that and those like the $37 fee for if you have damage protection with owners or some other fees that aren't weren't being shown before now being incorporated in this statement for you and they're trying to make it easier for owner res to be used by cohosts. It's basically the change. Love it. Again, I was on a res specific there folks. All right, let's see about the OTAs. A lot of goings on in the world of the platforms if you will. Lost your beautiful faces. There you are. Airbnb has quietly, very quietly updated their minimum age, age minimums for homes in the United States. So guys, we're not here to get into super in depth on this because again, we're talking legal territory to a certain extent. But make sure you understand this new policy. It's actually kind of hard to find. If you Google Airbnb age policy, what's actually going to come up, we actually did this just before the call and what comes up is the one for the experiences, not for the stays. So do a little digging to find this and just understand it and it's possible this might not last very long because they didn't make any announcements of any kind. But as of right now, they have changed their policy to make it so that you can put an age minimum up to the age of 25 on your Airbnb profiles for a particular property. It's important to mention that Airbnb, that Verbo has always had this. You can put an age, there's actually an age section on Verbo. With a drop down menu, you can put a minimum age on all Verbo properties. It's always been like that on Verbo Airbnb. Traditionally has been 18 and older and they were fairly quiet about it until in Chuck, correctly, if I'm wrong, I think it was last summer. They got a little more vocal about 18 and over only. Yep. Bless spring, actually. It's the four spring break of last year. Yeah, they were really pushing it hard. You got to be 18 and over only period. So that's where I got a little weird because you could be 25 on Verbo and 18 on Airbnb and it's like, how do I keep track of all this? As of right now, Airbnb has changed the policy to be 25 and up to 25 and older. And that on Airbnb, the most important thing I think about this particular policy is that that is the booking party, the person that actually books the home party was wrong word there in this room. But that person has to be your minimum age. They can bring, according to this policy, and I'm no lawyer, I'm not interpreting this policy here. But take a look close look and I think you'll agree that they can bring 18 year olds if they want to. So keep that in mind. This is a bit of a change here from Airbnb. All right, let's talk Verbo. And how do I get more Verbo? This is every do you agree? This is probably the number one management question we get. Yeah. I would agree because so many people get mad at Airbnb and then they're like, I'm not getting any verbo, I'm not getting any verbo and they just kind of quit trying on verbo is what I see anyway. - Yes, and this is something we discuss every single week on Management Monday, which we would love to have you there if you join short-term shop plus or you buy a house with the short-term shop. We do discuss in particular how to get more verbo literally every single week. And it's real. The struggle is real. I will give you that. If you're the type of person that's been doing this for two or three years and has zero verbo, you're not alone. That is fairly common. So we're gonna talk about things that have come to light recently and maybe some tricks to help you with that. First being that you do need to understand, this is extremely important and nobody realizes this, especially my folks that are not getting any verbo that you just don't realize they have different payment term capabilities on verbo, which is actually a major win for me on verbo. On Airbnb, we do not get to determine how the guest pays. They have their set way, which by the way, it's 14 days prior to checking, they get charged. We don't need to deal with it on Airbnb. We never hear about it on Airbnb, but we also don't have options. Okay, verbo, you get options. The downside is there's no way to make the options on verbo, nuts to nuts with Airbnb. So also on verbo, and this is where my antiverbo people are gonna be like, yeah, this is what I don't like verbo. If you do more than one payment, this is a double-edged store here, it's a tough one. If you do more than one payment, meaning two or three payments, you are in charge of making sure they pay the second or third payment. Verbo's not gonna keep up with that. So there is the possibility, and this has been like this since back in the home away days. I have all the confidence in the world, they will change this, but it is this way right now. If they don't make payment number two, and you don't pay attention, they can come to your house having only paid half of the trip. Now, you can set up auto messages. Again, I'm a hospitable, so I know on hospitable, there's a trigger for payment updates, et cetera, where you basically just click that box, and if verbo sends a message that says, 'cause they will send an email, doesn't mean they may be paying attention to it, but hospitable can catch that and say, "Hey, if you don't make your second payment, we're not gonna send you the door code." So you can, for the most part, automate it. That doesn't mean they're not gonna show up at the front door having no door code and having not paid, so keep that in mind. The way to fix that on verbo is to have one payment, the only option for one payment, which I can't click this 'cause it's a screenshot. If you click the one payment, the only option is 100% upfront. So that solves our problem to where the guest is not going to show up having not paid in full, but at this point, it does make verbo incredibly less attractive than Airbnb, where they don't have to pay until a couple of weeks before checking. So they start clicking around, they might book it on verbo and then they realize they gotta pay everything up front and they're like, "Oh, screw this, I can go over to Airbnb." And wait a little while. If you do the two payments, the first payment is a minimum of 25%. Again, this will be a drop-down menu on your verbo. Can't go to zero on two payments. In other words, the first payment is zero, second payment is 100. That's how Airbnb does it? Sort of can't do that. So it's a minimum of 25% on the first payment, which is actually good because if they decide to cancel, they're like, "Let's say you have a 14-day cancellation policy, whatever they wanna call it this week's strict firm, blah, blah, blah, they change them all the time." You could do a 13-day second payment, meaning cancellation policy has expired. If they now cancel it, you get to keep that first payment. So this is actually a better option than what happens on Airbnb. It's just that we don't have choices on Airbnb. So keep in mind, you wanna do your best to keep your payment terms as attractive as possible on verbo knowing that, to be honest, with the payment terms on Airbnb are probably always going to be more attractive. Check anything to add there. You good? - No, good. I mean, of course, if you're an owner-res, you're taking your own payments, it's entirely up to you, and you know, Unre-res does a little bit different. But there is one more thing. If you do only pick one payment for it all upfront, then the guest is also presented with an option of using, it's not clarno, but it's one of the other paid later services through verbo. - And that's one payment only, is what you're saying. - Yeah, that's only if you pick one payment, yeah. - Excellent point. Patrick, anything to add, please don't give me any pro, I love owner-res stuff, but 'cause I know you like verbo. Anything to add there? - I think Chuck covered it. I mean, a res is awesome. (laughing) - A little shorter moral humor for you there, guys. Okay, cool. - Kelly, anybody else on that verbo? Actually, I have more verbo anyway, so let's go to the next slide, and if any of the coaches or anybody want to chime in. - Luke, I would say one thing. One thing owner-res did just update is they now are allowing you to do the discounts in owner-res for verbo to help push the verbo. Like you can do an early booking discount and all that kind of stuff. Like if they put more than 90 days out, that's been another way to drive verbo bookings for you. I'm so glad you brought that up. Verbo this year did, or I should say last year, did release the promotions, which you can find on your calendar. There's several promotions you can choose from and that make your listing look more attractive. Certain dates look more attractive, it'll give you like strike-throughs and such, much like on Airbnb. I have multiple thoughts about this. I am using them, mostly using them for last minute. The problem there becomes, it gets very convoluted, and we're gonna talk more about this when we get to bookin.com here in a second. But it's almost like, how do I remember, how many discounts I have stacked on verbo versus what my price is on price labs? And if you've got a lot of properties, it's hard to keep track of all that stuff. But verbo is going to reward you much like Airbnb in a lot of cases, or at least making more visible if you are doing promotions. What Patrick is saying is in owner-res has the capability to do that right on their dashboard. Hospital does not. They do for Airbnb, but not for verbo, although my hospitable folks, I've heard through the grapevine that that will come out, I believe the date I heard was the last day of March. So it should be coming soon, which will be very helpful. Still hard to keep track like what discounts am I using, and which ones am I not? But it'll be a lot easier than having to go from, two or three, four OTAs back to your price labs, et cetera. - Can I add something here, Luke? - Yes, sir. Recent meetings with verbo, one thing they made very clear, if you want better visibility on verbo, then you need to set up a promotion for their one key members. That's their loyalty program. You can do that through their promotion suite, or if you're using owner-res, you can do it in owner-res. There's three levels in it. There's a blue, a silver, and a gold, minimum discounts 10%. If you do that, you get some merchandising, you know, a little badge mark on your property, but they said that the way to get the biggest boost in your search appearance is that, that right now, I guess 'cause they're pushing it, it's giving a big boost. I've done some simple testing, and I gotta say that it's true. - Coach Jim, you've been doing this as well. And again, I agree. I'm doing 10, 11, 12 for the blue, whatever the hell the colors are, blue, gold, silver. Jim, you've actually been having success with this, yes? - I'm doing the same, 10, 11, 12. - 10, 11, 12, and you, last time you sent me a screenshot, you had several bookings from doing that. - Yes, 'cause when you go and look at it, it actually tracks how many people are using it. It's helpful. It tells you if it's working. - Yeah, yeah. Each promotion you set up on verb but we'll tell you how many people actually use it, which is kind of cool. So then moving forward, if you got one that nobody's using, get rid of it and focus on the ones that are working. But again, it's like I always say, how hard do you wanna work? You know, and this is actually a good opportunity for me to, I should have mentioned this up front. The whole mission here, friends, is as always to provide amazing places for people to create memories while they're on vacation. And that is the goal, that is the mission, period. The people that are going on vacation to these homes are always number one for us. And we wanna provide them with a fantastic experience at all times, even if they're mean. I didn't say that. They're never mean, I love them, I love them. Another thing on verbo, for my folks, they're not getting any verbo. I have a verbo sucks. Again, I wanna mention, $10 billion, $10 billion, on verbo last year, there's money being exchanged on verbo. It's not a publicly traded company, it's privately owned, so we don't have exact numbers. But our research shows somewhere around $10 billion. Basically neck and neck, by the way, with Airbnb. And so when you tell me that you're not getting any verbo, I hate to tell you, but you know, you gotta hold yourself accountable here. All right, so, one thing to note is the damage protection. This is starting to change, [BLANK_AUDIO] a little bit, but I will say that up until recently, Airbnb did not have any sort of damage protection on their platform. And Verbo always has, which is again, to me, it's a win for Verbo, but it does make Verbo bookings. It can make Verbo bookings less attractive. Because for instance, like Patrick, he's got these very large beautiful beachfront homes in Panama City Beach. And if he's charged a $500 damage deposit, old school way to do that would have been Verbo only. And then you would have to do some sort of third party to get it on Airbnb. And it becomes more complicated, of course, than with the onset of ownerrest. And that's what Patrick's using. So it's a bad example because I don't want anymore ownerrests. You know, anyway, I'm just joking. Love you, ownerrest folks. But for the average user that's kind of an anti-verbo person, or I'm not getting any success on Verbo person, if you have a damage deposit, and this might be some of you right now, if you've got a $300 damage deposit on a Verbo property, and you don't have one on your Airbnb because you're doing it on platform, and Airbnb doesn't have that option. You are again, making Airbnb look way more attractive. If I book this house on Verbo, and it costs me $400 in escrow until I check out, or if I book it on Airbnb where there is no escrow, damage deposit, which one's more appealing, you know? Now, oops, I thought I had a screenshot. Oh, yeah, I think we already covered that. Most of the OTAs, or the management software is including, hospitable, now have damage deposits built in, hospitable, it will be in your properties, under properties, click on the property, and then in pricing, there's a tab for damage protection. They are charging 2% for this, which it seems like every time we turn around, host, I know you're feeling the pain, it seems like every damn time we turn around, somebody's hitting us with $5 a month, $20 a month, 2% a month, you know? But to me, I think that damage deposit from a hospitable users is probably worth it because it keeps it uniform for all platforms. Patrick's is, does owner has charge for damage deposits? You're taking those directly through your credit card processor and it ends up being a hold on the credit card. So I take a $500 hold on the credit card two days prior to check in, and I have it set up automatically release seven days after checkout, that way my cleaners can get in, see if there's any maintenance issues. - But owner res is not taking 2% like hospitable is? - No. - Okay, interesting. What should my damage deposit be? For me, good rule of thumb is maybe one night, you know, something like that. I would imagine Patrick's probably $500 a night average. So that's probably pretty close to what he's looking at. If you got a less expensive property, you know, maybe only $150 damage deposit, something like that. Again, legal territory here, you guys got to do what's right for you and your family and your home, you know? - And I know you are hospitable with the other thing I love about owner res is my guest also have the damage protection built in and I have silver enhanced protection. So when there's an issue, I try not to take a security deposit unless it's a bad guest. What I do is I go to straight to damage protection, violent insurance claim for the damage, and till the guest don't worry about it, I got you covered. Try to use that to get the five star review, and it's only if I've got the bad guest that I start hitting the damage protection. I mean, a security deposit. - Yeah. - Makes sense. - Yeah, I'm on board with that too. The damage, the deposit is more to cover the things that may not be covered by damage insurance, like extra cleaning as an example, or the damage insurance, most damage insurance products won't cover linens any longer. So that's what the deposits for. - My own. - We have our set to seven, I'm sorry, we have our set to seven days, but we tip it, as soon as we hear back from the cleaners, everything is okay. Next time I'm on on a res, I'll just click the button and have it go back. - And keep in mind, all management software is starting to go this direction. So your management software may have this very similar situation to what they're talking about. Everything's getting more and more sophisticated, guys. We gotta keep up with the times, 'cause otherwise your neighbors are gonna take you down. All right, booking.com. Oh man, booking.com. (laughing) Okay, so if you're brand new, I should cover this. If you're brand new, it is our opinion that you need to be on Airbnb and Verbo, and preferably at the same time. Don't get on Airbnb first because it's easier, and then worry about Verbo later. It's a great way for Verbo to get left behind. Booking.com traditionally has been more difficult to deal with, with, you know, possibly less upside. It is getting better. And I will also mention that booking.com does spend three times as much to market themselves as Airbnb or Verbo. So they are putting themselves on television, et cetera. Internet ads three times as much as the others. But man is it a pain in the rear. I will say that the last property I went live with on BDC, they didn't ask me to do a video, which was the first time I've ever had that happen. I think Chuck mentioned he had the same recently, because if you guys are not familiar, booking.com has always made you do like a facetime of the property and they make you literally walk down the street to the street sign to prove that it's on that street. They seem to be maybe shying away from that a little bit and my most recent one, they didn't make us do that. But let's talk about BDC in some ways we can maybe gain some traction here. Some of this stuff's gonna be pretty similar to Verbo. For instance, they have a ton of promotions, a ton of promotions. And the one that's been working and I know Kelly's have some success with this recently is the winter, I don't remember what it's called, as a matter of fact, you can't see it here because I already used it so it went away. Some sort of winter, within the next 30 days, special type of a deal and you get to choose what the percentage is and then they highlight your property, make you look more important, that kind of thing. The downside with BDC is they make it difficult to set these up, although they have recently released a new feature to where you can do it at the same time. So you can do a bulk edit. There's gonna be a bulk edit section on the, I think it's second from the right where you can, this one here, you can see we already clicked promotions and then you can choose which promotion you want to use. Mobile rates, they always push this mobile rates on BDC. This means that if they book it on their phone, they get a discount. For some reason BDC is very proud of that one and like thinks it's important, so keep that in mind. But you can take action and then you can select all your properties at one time. So keep that in mind because when you're first playing around in BDC, it's very clunky how they've set this up. But just look for the bulk editing, that definitely helps out a little bit. Anybody else have anything there on BDC? Anybody who's having success on there? Where should we move on? Go ahead, Kelly. - Yeah, I think I started with a couple of my properties about six months ago and I did use that early winter deal for one of my cabins and it's almost, then almost accounts for all of my bookings for January and February for one of my cabins. So I'm really pleased with that. I think they definitely like the promotions for sure. - Yes, and the problem with BDC and their promotions is that there's tons of them. And there's actually a website called My Data Value. I'm gonna plug them real quick. Again, no affiliate codes. My data value is not gonna apply to most average hosts. They do require a minimum of 30 properties. So it's gonna be more for like property managers, et cetera. But what they do is they stack all the promotions at one time and then they raise your nightly rate to make it so that whatever you have on price labs is still the end price having applied every single promotion. They charge again. Here we go, Nickel and Diamond, $5 a month per property, My Data Value. But it seems to be a very unsophisticated company, but it's a good concept and I have to talk to some friends that are having some success with it. But again, you do need to have 30 properties or more. So otherwise you're gonna need to do the bulk edits on your own. And you'll start to realize, man, they need to figure out a way to do this for me, which is what that software we just mentioned has figured out. But it's not for everybody, that kind of thing. All right, let's go back to the PowerPoint. We having fun. Don't anybody fall asleep on me? Lunch break Friday. All right, price labs. First thing I wanna mention here, and if Tamer's in the house, I'd like to hear from her. Listing Optimizer on price labs. Very cool, not gospel, okay friends. I'm using it. I like it. It's inexpensive. Again, it's a nickel and dime. It is, we're just getting everybody's biting at our heels. But I believe I paid $100 a month for all my properties. And basically what this is is built in an enemy method on your own property, right? It's almost similar to a ranked. where he's kind of a thing where it'll say, hey, here's where you need some work. As a matter of fact, you can see here on this screen that there's a C right there. I will mention that I have been playing with this since it first came out and our very first month we went in and corrected literally everything that it asked us to correct, which most of the suggestions I will say were pretty good. In other words, your listing says that you have a 50-inch TV but your photos say that you have a 70-inch TV, please fix this discrepancy, stuff like that that you may not catch, especially if you're running around with a bunch of properties. I will say that I did basically all the suggestions, the first month that this came out and it did change some of my B's to C's. After I made the changes that it wanted me to make, so keep that in mind. It's definitely, I don't want you to look at the listing optimizer like, oh, this is exactly how I'm gonna fix my property up and this is how I'm gonna do exactly what Price Labs says, but I do find it very handy and we've had some success with it, but it's not gospel. Is Tamra here or anybody else is using listing optimizer? And it never used it. I used it. I used it. I used it. I used it. I used it. I used it. I used it a lot and I like it and I like that. It used to be when you ran it the first time in a month then you would only, and you would go make your changes and rerun it. You could only run it twice within a month, but now they're letting you do it. I believe up to four times. So if you do it the first time and you've got a bunch of C's and you go through and you change it and now you've moved up to B's, you can still rerun it another time. Like I said, I believe up to four times until you, you know, are in the green, preferably your A's. But I've found it really useful. I mean, yeah, it does find all those details, but I'm a really bad speller. And it finds typos too. So like one of my listings has a trundle and I spelled it wrong and it caught that and fixed it. So it really does not just look at, you know, are your, you know, details matching, but it checks the smaller things too, which I found helpful. - Fantastic. I didn't know that because the first month that it came out, I did exactly what you said and I refreshed and it told me I couldn't refresh anymore. So I just assumed I could only refresh once or twice. I didn't know they updated that so we can go back in there and do that. So a couple things. Number one, it is a great way to kind of refresh your listing. If it's been a long time since you've looked at your description and your photos and things like that, it's not a bad idea to run the listing optimizer for a hundred bucks or whatever it charges you to give you some ideas. Number two, I do not want you to be the person that says, well, I did everything that listing optimizer told me to do when I still didn't get any bookings. All right, no sad sack of yours around here guys. Positive only. Don't take the listing optimizer for gospel is just a helpful tool, just like any, any, you know, rank breeze or anything else. But I'd be honest with you, I am liking it. I do like it. I kind of like getting my grades and going in there and being like, oh, I wasn't good enough. It reminds me of college, you know, oh, you're not good enough. Okay, we're gonna try harder. That was not the only looking at Airbnb. It's only looking at your Airbnb listings. Excellent point, Jim. Airbnb only, which is a downside. Although theoretically, we could just, you know, translate the info over to Verbo and BDC and GVR, et cetera. But yeah, it's Airbnb only. Speaking of GVR, make sure you're on there guys. Google vacation rentals is gonna push your website. You do need a website to use it, which you can do through your management software, push it to GVR, go play around on GVR. It's cool. I'm actually very surprised it's not taking off more than it has because it's cool. It actually compares prices from direct to platforms, et cetera. And it's Google at the end of the day, right? So you would assume that we got some big dollars here and things like that that it might take off. I know Patrick's getting a lot of GVR. Matter of fact, I asked him yesterday, I said, how are you getting all this GVR? He said, I don't know. I just pushed the GVR button. Next thing I know, I had some bookings. I'm like, well, that's what I wanna hear. That's the easy button right there, man. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Also, make sure your house is pink. Go on GVR, Google vacation rentals, search, you know, your map, et cetera. If your house isn't pink, it's not working, okay? Pricing tips for 26. Let's just go over and I want everybody's help on this. My coach is, everybody involved with the shop, et cetera. Please help me here. First and foremost, if it's between now and the end of February, it's freaking garbage, right? That's a technical term. - Mostly, yep. - It's garbage. You cannot, in my opinion, okay? This is an opinion not a fact. You can't go too low on whatever's left between now and March 1st. And even the first week or two, because again, as you guys know, if you've been hanging around here a while, we consider March 15th to be go day, that's where the season is in full swing. We are back to work, paying attention, kissing everybody's rear end, making sure they all have what they need, right? That's March 15 go day. But between now and then, get rid of it, get rid of it. And then, you know, we do need to make sure that we're looking at next fall. It's not too early to be looking at next fall. Where's your August? Where's your September? Your September should be lower than your August. And of course, we all need to remember that May is difficult. If you're new, keep that in mind. A lot of new folks don't realize that May is generally hard. That being said, last year, May wasn't as hard, which was really weird and it's hard for us to prove that May is hard when it wasn't that bad last year. But April made up for it. April was not in a lot of cases as heavy as it normally is. And May was slightly easier than it normally is. So again, every year is going to be a little bit different. But it's time to be looking at your prices here, guys. Fashion forward. If you still have Christmas photos, you're way in the dust. You've been left behind. OK, so go through your listings. Make sure the Christmas stuff is out. Let's start putting in the spring leaf pictures. Let's make sure that our prices are where they need to be to have some success in 26. Also, keep in mind, we are still recommending the custom seasonal profiles. In other words, have multiple base rates as opposed to one base rate. This is from my price lab, folks. Before I get deeper into that, I should mention, again, hospitable has their own pricing now. A lot of the management softwares are starting to come out with their own pricing situation. I will say that hospitable is extremely simple. And that's kind of the name of the game for hospitable. I don't expect it to get a whole lot more sophisticated. Maybe a couple more bells and whistles. But it is very simple. Basically, you can set close in prices, far out prices and a medium price is basically value you can do on price labs. I'm sorry, I'm hospitable. From my folks that are brand new, we understand price labs is complicated. It is. When you look at price labs for the first time, it's a little overwhelming with all those bells and whistles. And we can help you with that. You can come to short. SDSplus.com. We have coaching sessions available, very inexpensive. Short-term shop plus is not here to make money. It's a value add to you. We want to make sure to grow the community and make sure you have what you need is the whole point. And also price labs has lectures as well. They have about once a month. They have their own presentations where they will go over things for a month. I'm sorry, once a month for about an hour or two. And you just got to sharpen your sword. It's all you can do. But again, we are recommending seasonal profiles. Basically, a base rate for every month is extremely helpful, especially for my beach folks. Because guys on a beach property, you might be looking at $150 in January and $1,300 a night in June or July. I mean, we're talking massive swings on price per night throughout the year, particularly on beach properties. So you can't expect, in many cases, one base rate to do the heavy lifting. So while back we came up with this multiple season, basically multiple base rate way of doing things. And I love it. It does take some time to set up. Here's like first part of the year. This is just a random property I chose. Second part of the year, third part of the year, that kind of thing. And basically, and this is a little too much. In a lot of cases, we would generally recommend, especially if you're just gonna try this out, maybe 12, one for each month. And again, with all things pricing, you need to know what these numbers need to be. I mean, yeah, you can do that. Help me choose a base rate. But after a certain amount of time and experience, you need to know what your properties should be priced at. That's the biggest mistake we see with price labs folks, is people just assuming that price labs is gonna do, is going to be their revenue manager, basically, gonna do all their pricing for them. And then the next thing you know, they don't have any bookings and they're angry and they're like, oh man, why did I buy this thing? It's stupid, I need, now I need to sell it. And the market's not as good as it used to be. And blah, blah, blah, blah. So most importantly, whatever software you're using to price your property is not your revenue manager, okay? So in multiple base rates, they take a lot of effort to set up, but very effective. Anybody have anything to add? - Yeah, one of the other big mistakes that we see when people do set up the deal, seasonally, and professional calendar and profiles is not turning off the seasonality. When you set up those seasonal profiles, especially covering the whole year, you're doing the seasonality. And if you don't turn that option off in price labs, then you're double counting the seasonal effect. 100%. It's worth mentioning that a lot of those customizations on price labs look like they're off when you're brand new. A lot of them look like they're off, but they're defaulted to basically the average, which is, you know, like right underneath aggressive and right above conservative. So it's turned on, but it looks like it's off because the green toggle's not on. To me, that's a flaw. They should do that differently. It's very confusing for a new person. In order to actually turn them off, you got to go in there and put no seasonal, whatever that top, the very top one is on the season, on the same thing for, I mean, there's several of those settings right there in a row on the left hand side. If you are going to do multiple season profiles, like one for each month, turn a seasonality completely off, because you created your own. Thank you, Chuck. Anybody else have anything to add for pricing or anything before we open it up for questions? I was going to say for the off season in the beach markets, don't have a minimum price on there. If you want to get booked in the off season, it's low rates. I understand why people want to put a minimum price on there, but always tell people something, something the door is better than nothing. I will also hold on a second now for my beach properties. I will sometimes put a minimum in there to make it even lower. In other words, a lot of times price laughs will take my base rate and not really going any lower than that in January. Sometimes you can put a base rate in that's lower than what where price laughs is putting you. Then it realizes, oh crap, we can go a little lower. So you know, it's again, all about paying attention. Put your price in, save and refresh, go back to the calendar, see what it looks like. And if you're new, and this is like overwhelming, like, I don't know what the hell to put all these numbers, that will come with time. That will come with time. Patrick, what he mentioned there, we call that naked. When you leave the the min base or max empty, we run it, we're running a naked. Because it's fun to say. Anybody else? Hey, another little tip. You know, we talked earlier about doing promotions on the platforms, or maybe you're doing them in your PMS. But then you're sitting there looking at price labs, and you can't remember what promotions you had in place. Just as a way to do reminders, you can go ahead and do what we call blacklining. It's normally where you override dates. But you don't have to override the prices. You can just fill in the memo field. And that way you get a line across the dates that you set up a promotion for. This is particularly valuable when you're doing like an Airbnb custom promotion. You know, you pick 15 through the 20th of February. Meanwhile, you're sitting there working in price labs, messing with those prices, and they're not going to change on your custom promotion. You can just highlight those dates, put a little note there in the memo field saying, Airbnb custom promotion, 20%. There you go. You got it. You start to put all your pricing in one place that way. Just to get away in the weeds, you can also do that on your management software calendar. Do the same thing, put a little note, but it's going to be much. The way Chuck mentioned is better, because that's where you're doing your pricing. You know, in most cases, it's going to be on price labs. Also worth noting, if you don't let, guys, here's another good tip for you. Go through right now and do your no check in checkouts for the next two years on your calendars so that you don't have to worry about your cleaner having to do a turn on Labor Day. All right. Let's get that going right now. I'm a hospitable. I find it's best to do that on hospitable. You can also do it on price labs. You can also do it on the OTA's multiple ways to do that now. I've created rulesets on hospitable, basically one for every day of the week. So I'll do a, I've got one Monday. And then that rule set says no check in, no check out. And so if I need to highlight my entire portfolio on Monday from top to bottom, I can click the Monday button. That means no check in, check out on Monday. Bad example, because in most cases, if it's a Monday holiday, I'm cool with check out. I'm just not cool with check in like Labor Day. I'm cool if you check out on Labor Day, but it's very good chance nobody's going to check in anyway. So I'm okay with, you know, just making sure my cleaner doesn't have to work basically. Good point. Luke, something else in price labs, especially that I felt like we see a lot of new host is, you know, we talk a lot about the enemy method around here and in price labs, they give you the ability to create a comp calendar, which is kind of like the enemy method on steroids instead of having to have 12 tabs open on your computer at once. You can create a comp calendar and put, you know, ten of your enemies right there. You can see them all at once and see their prices at once. And it's also helpful when you're choosing those base prices for your seasonal profiles and just to be able to look at everybody at a glance. I believe what you're talking about is going to be neighborhood data. Is that right? Yeah. And then down towards the bottom. In true price labs fashion, it makes everybody wait all the time, but you're talking about here. Yep. So you can you can build in your enemies on your price labs dashboard. One thing to note, some of these enemies that you thought were going to be good may end up not being great. In other words, like there are a lot of times we'll see property managers that aren't even actually booking people on Airbnb. They're just using it for whatever advertising, that kind of thing. So do a refresh of your your competitor calendar, you know, every every few months, every six months, that kind of thing. But it makes it pretty easy to see, okay, this house is too bad. It's got 4.2 out of five reviews, which is not great. Right. You know, so this one's got 4.96 out of 122. It's nice to kind of see like the really kick ass enemies versus the not so good ones. And this one's proving my point because it's very booked. Right. So that kind of thing. Thank you, Brooklyn. Anybody else. I'm a little nervous to take Richard's question because Richard is extremely intelligent and sophisticated and he has a lot and I'm a little worried. But this would be a good time to for anybody to ask any kind of questions. And now we'd be happy to continue the conversation. Go ahead, Richard. Please blow all of our brains up. I appreciate the kind words. But I do have, you know, I'm still trying to work through this pricing things in my mind. I do like using the seasonal profile of the seasonal profiles. But I'm, you know, only may will be a year since we've been in it full time. So I'm still trying to get a sense of the market. I'm trying to get into setting my base rates for each month. I'm kind of trying to use it off of the neighborhood data that price labs has compiled over the last two years and provides us. I'm not sure if I should use that as the base price or if I should use something else as the base price because I know the average daily rate is just that the average daily rate versus the base price. So I'm just trying to figure out setting up the custom seasonal profiles month to month, what I should be using for those numbers. Can you take that one? I have to admit I missed it. One of the coaches, please take that. Nobody see this Richard, you make us all nervous, dude. Yeah. Here's Brooklyn came to say something. I was just going to say, so the general question is you're just having a hard time figuring out what to choose for your base rates for each month. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, I have been, you know, I have, I have made that pretty low. It like a base rate of like 140 and then because I'm in the Orlando market for Kassamese. So I and then I have September set, you know, pretty low and then January was that pretty low as well. But as far as some of the other months and, you know, also kind of an issue that I'm running into. And because since we've went live, I've been to heavy on booking.com. And I actually have like probably 30% of my bookings come through booking.com so they're international travelers. So they don't follow the same school schedule as the US market. Yeah, Orlando is, you know, it's almost year round, especially as we get more and more international travel. But one of the things that you'll learn to do is to also follow the strength of the dollar. You know, as a dollar weekends on an international basis, that number, that number can increase to 20 or 25% of the visitors. But to answer your media question, a lot of its trial and error. If you need to do a little bit of your enemy search, you know, and have your, your competitor set up and see roughly what they're charging, what their rates are, and then play around with your base price for the day. So let's call it month just to make it easy. For that month to see what price slabs calculates out your rates to be. It takes a little while, I'm not gonna kid you. In the beginning to get those things just right. But once you do, then we're saying it happens as you may go in and change them five or 10 dollars. But it takes a little work to get them right if you want to go the, and you should go the custom seasonal profile route. - Yeah, and I will also say that I make big changes, especially on beach. I keep going back to the beach thing. Price changes on my seasons to pace on the time of year. So in the fall, my custom seasonal profiles will be much different than what they are in the spring, et cetera. Not necessarily as different for like a smoky property, which is a little more fluid, that kind of thing. But I make a habit of like we get really sit down and look at every seasonal profile, at least twice a year. Fall in early spring, late fall early spring, and probably summertime also, especially if it's a beach property, just again, huge seasonality swings on the beach. - Yeah, yeah, Orlando should be a little more even. - Yeah, a little bit easier. - I'll chuck you to live there. Yeah. I would like to live at the castle if possible, but. - Disney adult. - Yeah, yeah. I read you can get married in front of the castle, but it's like a hundred grand or something. Anyway. - I do get that question a lot in coaching about how to figure out what that seasonal base rate should be. And what I do is I'll go after, now you have to have your competition set up in price labs in your neighborhood data to be able to do this. So you have to have seven to 10 enemies in that list already. And what I'll do is I'll look at my slow season, my January, February, and I will just eye across what it looks like the average price is during the week between all of my enemies and what the average price looks like on the weekend. And that gives me a general idea of where I should be falling. And then the other thing that I'll do is if you go into price labs and you, I'm sorry, if you go into the calendar where you're actually looking at the calendar of January, February, and you hover over the monetary value on a date, you can see the seasonal demand factor. And that lets you know if that date is in high demand or in low demand. And if it's a low demand date, then whatever number I'm putting into my custom season profile will be closer to that actual number that shows up in my pricing. And to explain that a little bit further than if you were to go into July and you're trying to set your base rate for the month of July, well, that seasonal demand factor, even if you have it turned off, price labs are still thinking about it. People are going to obviously becoming a lot more. So if I put 200 into there, it's probably going to put my number for that night around 300 because it's going to factor in at more people are coming, the occupancy is higher during that month. So those are things to consider when you're trying to figure out what your base rate should be for each season or each month, however you're setting it up in your profile. If that makes sense. - Yeah, it does. And then another quick question. How much stock do you put in a graph on the neighborhood? On the top there where it talks about the 70, you know, the, - Yeah, yeah. Like with any other piece of information, I don't take it individually. So I'll look at that information and then I'll also compare it to what I'm seeing with my multiple enemies. And if it's, you know, looking to be pretty much the same, then I'm going to trust it a bit. But there are times when I know what you're talking about. On average, I try to have like that black line running in the higher move if I'm an established property. If I'm a newer property, I try to have that black line running closer to the high gray so that I can build up as many reviews as I possibly can. But anytime that I'm not set on just what that line is saying. So I will also go then and I will make sure, you know, that that information is congruent with what I'm seeing across my enemies. So I look at that. - Yeah, I was just going to add to Erica that that top neighborhood data graph, you have to keep in mind that's taking into account everyone in your market that fits underneath of that, you know, bedroom count that you have put in there. So if you're a forbidden smokey, you could be a basic forbidden smokey, or you could be a forbidden smokey with a really awesome view and a game room and your own private pool, right? And so I tell people to take that graph with a grain of salt and to compare it with your comp calendar at the bottom as to like what your enemies are charging. And Holly hadn't asked in the chat how to set up the comp calendar. You just go to that neighborhood data tab in the price labs and you scroll towards the bottom and underneath of that map, there's a red button that just says manage your comp calendar. And you can add to my knowledge as many as you want. It can get overwhelming. And that's why we kind of recommend people to stick to that seven to 10 listing, you know, listings that you've got there. But you know, like Erica said, you shouldn't just live and die by the neighborhood data graph, make sure that you're using that with your competitors and then also going in and seeing, you know, how price labs has you priced with seasonality and demand and whatnot. - Yeah. - That made me think of something. - Go ahead. - That made me think of something else, Brooklyn. When you are putting that information in and, oh my gosh, now I just lost when Luke jumped on. I lost my train of thoughts. - I'm sorry. - When it comes, no, it's okay. When it comes back, I will totally let you know. Like that's how quick things come in and out of my brain these days. - Yeah, I do the same thing. But I was just gonna add that, be patient with yourself. Not just you, Richard, but just everybody. You know, the folks on this call, I've been doing this a long time and honestly our perspective is different than somebody coming in today. But if you don't know exactly what to put in on all those, you know, base rates and setter on price labs, it's totally fine. You just, you know, honestly, just give yourself a grace period and some leeway. And if you make mistakes, who cares? You'll learn from them. And then over time, you'll start to know exactly how the property should be priced. And then, be honest with you, at some point, it's just old hat, you know, like a, again, guys, it's just a damn house, right? It's not that big a deal. And I know price labs is complicated and can be frustrating if you're new. But we do personally, I mean, as a whole, the short from shop does feel that it's the right way to go. It's a universal language for pricing properties. Again, sometimes it can come across as a little too complicated. I go ahead, Andrew. Think a couple questions here, Andrew. - Yeah, they kind of build off the AI conversation. Hospital did a masterclass or whatever they call it, nowadays, on listing optimization. And what they did, they implemented a conversation and chat GPT that asked questions and you put in your Airbnb listing and stuff like that. And then it spits out, hey, this is 10 listing titles that you should probably consider. And it looks at your description and says here's a better description and kind of does optimization on your listing. And I don't think you have to be a hospitable client to use it. So if you're interested, you may go look at their hospitable YouTube channel on their masterclasses or whatever they call them. It's very helpful. - Yes, thank you. We actually use chat GPT for lots of stuff with our listings. And I know Coach Ericka does as well. I mean, all kinds of stuff. It's extremely handy and useful, obviously. And you could definitely run your Airbnb link through chat GPT and say, how do I make this look better? But again, you gotta just hopefully get one or two things out of it and don't treat it like gospel. I know Ericka, go ahead if you have any comments there. You use it a lot. - Yeah, so I use it a ton and I was actually asked this in coaching the other week. They're like, well, aren't you gonna, it isn't Airbnb flagging you for using, you know, chat GPT image? And my answer is I'm not going in there and asking to make up my pictures and make them beautiful. But what I do use it for is I help it. So I can ask it, you know, to put some snow on the ground and it can do that. I can ask it to put the Christmas tree in the corner and it can do that. Those kinds of things are perfectly fine. I'm not asking it to change the whole structure of my property. But it's very helpful when, you know, you might be bringing in some new types of linens or some new decor and you want those things to be in your pictures prior to them being delivered and without having to pay a professional photographer to come back and do it again. So chat GPT can be really, really helpful that way. And the other thing too is when you're creating a new listing and you're looking at some of, you know, enemies that you really love. like their listing description, you can grab that and you can put that into chat GPT, the actual listing ID and you can ask it to create you like a sister property or a property with similar types of amenities and then you can add in your own pieces afterwards. It just saves a lot of steps. - This is exactly how we did it 15 years ago. But fun, you know, back when Airbnb was a baby. I would go find the coolest, you know, like best looking listing in the area and man that description is killer and I would rip it off. Unfortunately back then I didn't have chat GPT to make it better for me. I had to do it myself, but yeah. - Oh, I remembered. So what I was gonna say was when you are doing finding your enemies like we're talking about here. So you can gather ones from around you in price labs. That's really important. But I also always go in incognito mode and I'll look, I'll put in all my filters, all the things that make my property pop up and I'll see who Airbnb considers my enemies. So who's on the same page as me is on a regular basis or maybe the page before mine where I want to be sometimes and I'll make sure that they're good enemies and I might pull them too. So don't just rely on the map and what's close to you because Airbnb doesn't just pull your neighbors. - No, another point about that is you have to think about the way the guest shops for a place to. Especially in New Guest to an Area. Smokey's is a great example. You might be in Gatlinburg, but if you put in Gatlinburg in Airbnb, you're gonna get homes in Pigeon for Origin, severeville, where's Valley? So it's not just the people within a mile are you using your competition? - Yeah, and I would, Eric and Chuck just said, a lot of times a guest doesn't even know the difference. The guests, a lot of times they don't realize they're gonna be in Shale Village, like right next to the park in Gatlinburg versus Little Valley Resort way up by, or Shag Park, so keep that in mind. - And back to what Chuck said in the smokey. So when you go in a price labs and say, help me choose my price and you look over there, you can take that polygram and change that because price labs is got you hyper focused, right? And so it takes your pricing and compares you to such a small area. I go out and make that area much bigger because I know that if you type in Dollywood, you're gonna be from Gatlinburg to Pigeon forge, and that space should be so much bigger. So I changed that on my price labs. So when I go in and ask it to help me pick a price, it's giving me a better price than overall market and it goes with really small spots. - This is why I'm here. I love it. Tips and tricks. All right, world famous pop of Georgia, what you got, man? - Not that famous, but hello. I have two questions if it's okay. The first one is based off the AI conversation. Has anyone had any luck reading the initial reservation message someone sent? So for example, we're traveling to wherever for a birthday party or for, you know, to visit for a family reunion, where the case may be, incorporating that message into this subsequent automated messages. We have set up whether it's day after, check in for us to see how they're doing or the check out message that says, we hope you enjoyed your property. For those of you who use AI, have you had an opportunity to incorporate, to use AI to incorporate that original message into your automated messages for tailoring? Hopefully that makes sense. - It's not something that host buddy will do right now for your automated messaging, but when it does respond to the guest, it will say we're hoping it will pull off those messages the guest has previously sent, but it won't be an automated message that automatically goes out. - Yeah, John, I figured, thank you. And then the second one's probably a lot more specific, but for those of you who are using booking.com and have multiple properties under multiple entities, how have you been able to set it up to have one high level booking account? Chuck, I think you're not gonna be happy, but one high level booking account with multiple payouts and multiple entities. And Chuck, if you wanna just type out this one on one, we should do that. (laughing) - Yeah, that's been difficult. However, and I'm sorry, I'm gonna plug out a res again. Own res has is, let me think, can I say this? Yeah, I can say this. They've got a beta program going on with booking.com now, where you can basically have different entities all together under a single master account. Everything still goes to the right places. It's been a little rough and it's been a little slow. It's, you know, BDC is, they're a big company and they don't turn fast. So, but I've seen substantial improvement in the last four months. So. - And it's all the way down to the payout level. - Yep. - Oh well. - Okay. - I'll stay out of that 'cause it is a borderline legal situation there, but Lucas, it should be able to be done. I'll leave it at that. - Yeah, yeah, got it. Thank you guys. Have a nice weekend. - Thank you. All right, we're at an hour and a half. So, we'll let you guys go and we really enjoyed it. Again, you can find us every Wednesday, every night, asking, answering questions, et cetera, which is stsconsultation.com or strquestions.com and you can find all of us at stsplus.com. And if you want to buy a house, that's why we're here. We'd love to help you with that, the short term shop.com. I'm Luke at the short term shop.com and we appreciate you. We love you. Hopefully you have a wonderful hosting season and make sure the guest stays number one at all times. So thank you guys. Don't overthink it. (rock music) (upbeat music)