Heads In Beds Show - 10 Things You Can Do To Sign More Vacation Rental Properties This Fall

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we dive into 10 actionable steps you can take now to get more homes for 2026!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads of Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, good afternoon. The pre-show today was longer than the actual show. We're having a grand old time.

happening, my friend. What's going on? Well, we got sucked into golf and football and every other. Mutual clients. It was a little more of a working session than maybe most of our pre-shows. But that's okay. This is kind of, this is, we're just getting into things. So how are you doing? How are things going in your neck of wood? Yep, pretty good. I've, I think I shared this on a previous call today, which is like a bit of a boring, you know, week or so here where it's like all my kids are now in school. Well, Madeline's in this program where it's kind of like a three hour. thing from like 9 to 12 or 9 to 12 30 it's kind of more of like a daycare but she gets hang out with other you know other kids other little girls and little boys her birthday's

coming up next week she'll be four so she's three and it's kind of like getting in that routine I think for her yeah the boys are in school and that house a little quieter at least from 12 to or so for from 9 to 12 every day which is kind of funny just the baby hanging around so yeah it's um it's been a good week for me it just been busy honestly I think people coming out of labor day um you're listening to this is probably about a week or two after that but um coming in a labor day I think everyone decided hey our uh our our marketing. We're going to work on that this fall. And then everyone signed all the contracts we had pending out there. So I'm not going to complain. If you're listening to your client, I'm not complaining,

but obviously we just want to make sure we do a good job for everybody. And when you get a rash of signing, it, uh, yeah, it stretches your team a little bit thinner than I'd like. So good problem to have, champagne problem to have, but definitely something that we're trying to work through and process on our side. That's for sure. There you go. So about those processes. Yeah, exactly. It's all about, it's all about knowing when the process needs to be followed and when you can break the process. You know, it's so funny when we talk about process because like most property managers don't have any process for homeowner marketing. This is actually, this topic idea was spawned a little bit from Michelle Marquis.

She did a LinkedIn post, I think about two weeks ago or a week ago as of this recording. And she asked, she was like, hey, I need folks out there to give me some advice or some feedback on using AI and homeowner marketing. And I like the idea. I like the post, but I jokingly tagged you Paul in the comment in the post. And I said, I think Paul would tell you, having done this now for many, many years, both at his previous agency and his work today, that a lot of people aren't doing anything for homeowner marketing.

They're literally doing nothing or if they're doing something, it's a very minimum. So let's kind of kick it off there, like maybe expanding. on Michelle's question here as well as just this idea of like, what are people doing for homeowner marketing? The answer is usually not much. What do you typically see when you go work with a new property manager on their homeowner stuff? What do you usually find under the hood once you crack that thing open? It is very, very limited. I mean, I think most people are still relying on, you know, I've got realtor relationships. I've got realtor partnerships. That is the form that they're, I will use the heavy air quotes here, marketing takes. That's great. Referrals are great. All these things

are great. I mean, in some cases, we don't even have a property management page, which we've got something else they'll go with there. So I would say the standard option or standard things that people are doing would be they have a page. Maybe they've sent out a postcard once or twice. They do a little bit of email, but there's not a lot of cold marketing that happens here. So what happens is it's a side product or a byproduct of what's happening overall. So they're doing emails, but they've got a roughly defined list. So they're saying there's some owner emails over here. Or they're doing, again, they did one postcard and they've never done a second postcard or something like that.

These are options. And I think they're a result of kind of seeing what other people do in the space and trying to pick and choose which is going to be cost effective, which is going to be kind of. of a low lift on the effort side of things or again kind of going with what works and if you get on the realtor side of things one or two a quarter in and that's enough for you to grow your business then that's satisfactory um but yeah i i think there's so much opportunity and we've talked about things that you can do at a maybe more strategic level but i think the key here today is just small actionable items because the bar that we're trying to step over is is right down there on the floor. So we are. We're going to talk through some of these things. And as you're seeing

things, what do you see when you are working with people? What are some of the recommendations you have to make on the homeowner's side? And what does that look like as you're having those conversations? Yeah. I think that this is a good topic idea because this is small tactical things. It doesn't address the larger structural issues maybe that you have. So my quick comment I'll say on that, and then we can dive into like the tactics, is that homeowner lead distribution is incredibly unfair. It goes to all the biggest companies in your market. Like, and I've seen this under the hood because I've looked at small companies in a market and big companies and sometimes even in the same market. And the distribution is not anywhere

close to equal. Booking is the distribution you could argue on a property basis is a little bit more equal or it's a little bit more, hey, this property is going to do 50K with this manager. Maybe it does 55K with this manager or 60, but it's kind of like it has sort of a floor and a ceiling associated with it. Homeowner leads, I promise you are not like that. When we work a large client in a space. We have one of the largest clients we work with up in the Smoky Mountains Pigeon Forge, Tennessee area. They get not double, not triple, but like 10x the leads of what a smaller company gets. So with that in mind, it's like, yeah, exactly. So it's like homeowners are reaching out to the biggest company because they naturally assume, well, 500 other people trusted their

cabin to this company. 300 people trusted their beachfront condo to this company. I'm just going to go ahead and reach out to that company, right? Like, why not? That's like the thought process that most homeowner go through. So if you're small, I'll be honest, like you have a heck of a battle in front you, which is probably why you don't need to do these 10 things, you probably need to do 100 things. Just to be honest. And to get that momentum to like get your things. Like the only way to really solve your homeowner lead generation issue is get really big. And then the homeowners do start to come to you. But between wherever that might be and wherever you are now is a lot of a lot of work. I mean, I'll be honest. Like that's been my experience over the years. Like it's

and I've had to learn it the hard way because I've seen like up close and personal people who do this homeowner marketing like you said in drips and drabs or a shock glass of homeowner marketing and they see nothing from it. And then they go, how is it, you know, fair? And then I go look at these big companies that just get homeowner lead after homeowner lead. Some of them actually are perturbed by the fact that they get so many homeowners leads. And it bothers them. Like, that's outside of our service area. That doesn't fit us, whatever.

And they just throw them away. They're just like, nah, we can't help this person. And then the small fish are there like, please, may I have some more? You know, just comes off the table. So it's a, that's been my, that's been my analysis. You know, I don't know if you have any reaction there. If not, we'll go in the tactics. No, I mean, I think it is.

I think that that's quite often, those companies that were the most fun to work with, but also the most difficult to work with, we're, five units to 50 units. They want to grow up to those numbers. But the results that you see just aren't, it's not, it's not that it's not scalable, but initially it's not scalable from the one z, twozy that you get and the inconsistency of your initial performance. And I think, again, juxtaposing that against the traveler marketing strategy or

campaign or something like that, it is. It's hard to continue to invest. when the payoff is not immediate one we talked about that you know gross booking revenue does not come at at one time and then and then it is it's it's when when the velocity of leads coming in is not the same as 10 bookings a day 20 you know something like that it's tricky so so holding true to your guns and and trying to make a big long-term strategy payoff is tough so again I think that's why addressing these at a micro level and and really what can you do to improve your results today for tomorrow and the next week and next week and things like that.

I think that's this is going to be actionable items that hopefully people can incorporate sooner as opposed to later. Nice. All right. So I'll take the first one. I think a lot of these are going to be ideas that you've learned from you, if anything, on this stuff, as well, for sure, stuff that, you know, you learn from Brooke and Brooke has given me.

So I don't want to take credit to all these ideas. But these are just like things that I can point out or things that you can point at that have tangibly worked. So we'll kick it off here. Number one, have the option to book a call on the property management lead page. So first of all, have a property management lead page. Make sure it's good. More on that in a moment here on Paul's end.

But one thing that I've seen work very consistently, almost without fail this year, is don't just have a form there. Yes, have a form there, it'd be clear, but don't just have a form there. Have an option where they can, a phone number, call their number there. I will say maybe you consider taking the phone number off if you truly can never answer that phone. Like we have a client who's like a part-time property manager, a part-time employee, you know, and so like that's tricky one because they've never answered the call,

it becomes a little bit tricky. But one thing that's worked really well for a lot of our clients is we put a I know the other systems will have their own call type workflows there, but we use Cali only. That's just what I'm most used to on my side. On the page, you click, you choose a time, and the connection rate on a homeowner lead, when they choose the time that they want to be called,

is so much higher than if you just leave your phone number on there and they don't answer. Obviously, answer if you can. Or just a lead form where it's like they fill it out and they may or may not respond to a follow-up email, they may or may not respond to a follow-up phone call. When they are in control, when they're in control of choosing that time, I've just noticed the volume of leads doesn't change drastically, but the quality of leads changes tremendously.

my experience, you know, working on a few clients with this, where it's like, hey, I called that person. They knew I was calling them at, you know, Tuesday at 4 p.m. And they picked up, you know, so, and that helps get that initial thing in place. So it sounds simple. But like, again, something you can, if you don't already, you can actually embed Calonly on your website. If you know, use that system before, you can go to Calonly sign up and then embed it on their website. Once, just some other tips here, make them short blocks 15 minutes, try to make it as available as possible as far as choosing time zones. Maybe the homeowner's not in your time zone. We have a client in California who gets some East Coast investors. So like I kind of told her, like, try to open it a

little bit earlier and leave it open a little bit later. Maybe, you know, you might get some people calling it different times. That's worked well. She doesn't get overwhelmed with these calls by any stretch. You might get a handful, you know, a week. It's not really anything that's going to overwhelm her. And then don't use like Zoom, Google Meet, et cetera. I love those platforms, but they're bad for just someone who's maybe not super tech savvy. So just have it like name, email, phone number, their phone number that you want them to call a field for like address or like, where's your property at or have an option like don't have one yet or buying one so that, you know, maybe they want to reach out to you there. And then some kind of message field. How can we help

you, how can we, you know, assist you get that. You get them to confirm the call. You're going to get better quality leads pretty much pretty quickly in my experience. The book a call call to action, that is something. I'll give bizcore a lot of credit. They optimize their top of fold on their property management pages pretty early on having the form field on, you know, fill out the form on the right side and having that call to action, both of those above the fold for book a call. Most of the time it was just a button, click to call, stuff like that and not putting the median link in there, but I love that idea, too,

having people have control over when you're going to call them. I mean, I think most people are trying to call immediately or they're trying to do things like that, but that's not the reality. Someone might not want that call immediately. This is something where you kind of got to play by the potential owner's rule.

So I love that idea. I mean, I think that's something that truly people put a ton of content on these pages and then they forget to put the calls to action in. So having that form fill, having those book to call is just critical because the last thing you want to do is have that homeowner go to that page and not be able to reach out to you or not, you know, it's something that's intuitive outside of the go to the contact us. Well, now we've lost them along the step. We, you know, another click along the way just doesn't help our conversion rate there. So I do.

I think anything you can do to optimize your overall property management page, those book to call and putting a form on there are certainly going to help out. quite a bit. But also what you can do is put some more data on there. So putting case studies on there, putting testimonials on there. I think that that's something that for those people who have only done selling through a realtor, through a referral or something like that, that's how you're doing it right now. You're doing it by word of mouth. I mean, you're what you should push to do. And I think for people who do have more investment driven homeowners or maybe a realtor right in your portfolio, having people do those testimonials, having someone get record with their phone, do the vertical video, that's the type of stuff that people are looking for. I mean, having those

case studies, how many times did you go on Facebook and see Evolve put homeowner case studies of over 18 months, this person increased their ROI by 87%. That is very compelling if you can, if you can put those, that type of information right out in front of people. Now, that's going to be more helpful if they're driven by ROI, but even, you know, I had this little maintenance cost or I had this and that and being able to have people tell that story. I think that is so important because it goes in line with the same reason why so many people get, so many of the larger managers get so many leads is that they have that trust. They have that trust baked in. They don't need the testimonials. Many probably have them. But the testimonials is the fact that they have 300

units in their in their portfolio or they have 500 units in their portfolio so that is content that if you're tracking gross booking revenue if you're tracking all these things which you should for your business that's available so being able to put it together in a way that is good for your marketing team good for your sales team whatever that is and then for some of those case studies where you've had great success reach out to those homeowners if you've got a good relationship with them and say hey I was just taking a look at some of the great performance that we've had. Would you feel comfortable in doing this, doing that? I know, again, for those realtors, you have to let them put a business card in one of your units at some point.

They'll do a lot for you there. So just creating content, case studies, and testimonials are so great opportunities. And you can kind of dive into the next one here of the other content that people find valuable. Yeah. I'm going to hit a nail harder on one thing you said there, just so people, because again, I've seen this work well, and I know you know this as well, but just for the listener, one thing that I would say, like, order of opportunity or order of effectiveness, a poll quote, or so an anonymous case study, I took this property and it was doing 20K, now it's doing 40K,

that's like, let's call that a D. It's better than nothing, but it's not great. One level up would be like a little poll quote, like here's Paul Manzi, he owns a cabin here in Wisconsin, you know, here's the before and after or whatever the case may be of, you know, it. And then here's Paul and his wife and talking about how good it is and a little pull quote. Okay, let's call that a C-Mine is better than nothing. And then in my opinion, if you really want to actually punch this through and make this stuff work well, it's like you said, a video of them actually giving feedback and then even better take that video and run it as an ad so more people see it, homeowners see it, or have like this we're working on right now with a client that we have up in Virginia is like a page for like the whole case study story. And that's what evolved us so well. It's not just a little quote on the page. That's a good starting point. But again, click here and read the whole story from John Doe and Mary Doe and they bought this property. And here's their video. Here's the link to it. Here's how much revenue. It's done. All this kind of stuff. And like you said, all the data is at their fingertips. And like I was, you know, when clients are a little hesitant to this stuff, I just say,

okay, let's stop for a second. Which home has been in your program the longest? And they say, oh, well, this guy's been with me for three years. I'm like, he likes you. Like, he wouldn't be with you if he didn't like you, you know, after three years. Like he would have moved on at this point, right? It's like, you know, it's like, you're married to him, you know, at this point you would feel.

So it's like, let's just ask him. But I do think there's a little bit of nervousness or there's a little bit of like, I don't know. You know, there's a little bit of hesitancy there. So I get it. but the same token, like that is what's going to get you, you know, this, like, how do you become an elite homeowner, you know, marketer? It's like not that hard. Like, it's probably five or six, 30 minute phone calls with your owners that you record and put on video, you know,

I mean, I think that rule of reciprocity, you know, it's tricky when you're asking for something. But, you know, after you've delivered a check to them and that's good time to be able to say, you've just got your month. Yeah, yeah, do it then. So here at the beach, like, yeah, when they're, when they're July, direct deposit hits and it's $10,500 for that month, you go, hey, by the way, Paul, you know, like, ask. them then, you know, and buying dinner on top of that. If you want to be super generous, we actually do this. So we have a client who we asked for case studies, not to get too meta about buildup here.

But at the end, I'll be like, hey, I asked to do this. Thank you for doing it. I realize it doesn't really help you. It helps me. Can I buy you dinner one time? And some people turn it down. They're like, no, I'm happy to do it. In which case, I'll like try again.

And then they say no, and that's fine. That happened recently with the most recent what we did. But yeah, sometimes I take it. And I'm like, please, like, have dinner on me. Like, that's the least I can do. You just help me out. it didn't really help you. It helped me. So thank you, have dinner on me. And then you can, everybody feels good. Like everyone got to win in that

scenario. And I'm all for that. That's one thing I love. So, right. So number four, kind of handing down the list here. So add a book a call on the page. Get a homeowner case study. Get a homeowner testimony. You'll make him video. Market reports. Number four, market reports data on how you're doing versus the market. So what I'll say here is everyone says they produce revenue. It's a, it's a nail that I hit over and over again on LinkedIn, for example. Everyone says the same thing in this messaging. I know we're going to talk about USPs in a second. But everyone says they're great. Don't say you're great. Show that you're great. proved that you're great. Use the data that you have and say, a unit in this building does 50K

on average. My units do 86K. Here's a screenshot from Streamline. He's a screenshot from whatever PMS you use, whatever the case may be. Here's data from key data dashboard, AirDNA, whatever your flavor is, prove it that you're actually good. Terry White, one of our clients, does a really good job with this on LinkedIn. He talks about it at length, key data dashboard. He shows his condo performance compared to other people in that building, other people in that same complex, and it's clear that he's really good job. So that's a good example in my mind of just like not just saying something, but reinforcing it with proof. And then write that up. you know, alongside other information.

Hey, by the way, here's what I'm seeing in this market. Here's what we're noticing. Hey, this new law is about the pass on this day. Like, just have like five or six talking points on every single homeowner newsletter. I think monthly is great if you can do it quarterly, I'll take. Like I'll take it over nothing, that's for sure because it can be something, some kind of touch point to be like you have something to send to someone who's a homeowner

in your market that's not a blatant sales pitch. Again, they get blatant sales pitch after blatant sales pitch, right? Paul sent a lot of them, you know, and that's fine. And those are going to some pool of people in the market, by the way, are buyers at any given moment. So I have no problem with the sales pitch. The sales pitch will get you customers. We'll get you homeowners. They'll get me wrong. But it's so great to be able to have a reason to reach out to someone. That's not a sales pitch that they read. They consume that content. And they go, man, this guy, Conrad kind of knows what he's talking about. He knows the revenue. He knows the

rates. He knows the ADRs. He knows everything. And you become an expert in their mind. And it doesn't take that much. You're not trying to be an expert in all things finance. You're not Dave Ramsey. Right. You're trying to be an expert in like vacation rental demand in Palmer Springs, California. Like, it's not actually that hard to stand out from the crowd in that in that situation. One of the best market reports I ever saw was someone who did the market report and did it by location, did by location, and they were in multiple locations in the Northeast. So, you know, it was some interesting data. But I thought the most compelling data that she had on there was comparing it, like, because what she was dealing with was a lot of people thinking about long term versus short term and talking about like, yes, obviously what kind of money you can make. But then again, thinking about the assessment of how your home is going to get taken care of over that long term or midterm stay and then rolling that into rolling some of that cost analysis into what she was talking about on the market report.

And it was like that was one of those things where for her market, that was perfect. That's exactly what people were looking for because her long, you know, the biggest competitor she had were people that were stealing the units on the long term side. So I do. I think any way that you can personalize that, customize that to your specific market, again, it doesn't have to be nationwide. It doesn't have to be meta regionwide. Do you have to cover the whole smokies if you're in Gatlinburg? You have to cover Townsend County or severe county, whatever that is there. Excuse me. So I do. I think that that's the more you can get and that data is so readily available in a lot of cases, the more you can get that and really customize it's your location. I think that that's something. that that's what a data-driven homeowner is going to like and appreciate and enjoy and certainly that's something that you can use to to sell them down the road there but also you know how we're getting in front of those people well now now we got to get into the ad side of things now I think you know five and six I held it for a second I mean we did we did and I think we've done a really good job of going traditional marketing and sales routes but now we got to be realistic and

say how are you going to get in front of these people and running PPC ads is a really good way to get the high intent traffic running retargeting ads to people who have visited is a really good way to stay in front of those people. Now, the effectiveness of PPC ads, I will be the first to admit it's tough. It's tough to run a really good PPC ad campaign. Well, real quick, though, Paul, explain, here's how I would say this. Explain it this way. You're fishing in a very small pond, right? So that's the way to think about it, is that there's a limited amount of demand. The pond's not super deep. There's fish in there, but there's not many of them.

So, like, explain that for the listener. Because they may think, does that mean PPC ads are bad? No, they're not bad for renting homeowner rates, but it's infrequent. So expand on that because I think it is. And I think it's the effect. How can you make those ads the most effective? Yes. There are the tens of thousands of people who are doing searches for lodging in some specific area. So city plus vacation rentals, destination, stuff like that. Tons of traffic out there. you're going to fall into with a good direct booking website, a booking. This is what's going to happen. There are, where there are tens of thousands, thousands of people,

maybe even hundreds of people doing searches on the traveler side, it's dozens, in some cases on the owner's side of things. So Google likes to play the supply and demand game. So when there are only dozens of people doing the searches, as opposed to hundreds or thousands of people, you pay a premium. So that cost per click that you're used to being maybe a buck, maybe 50 cents, maybe 75 cents turns into $5, $10, $15, depending on your market. Now, again, we think about the reverse engineering it and doing the math to say gross booking revenue and all those things long term. Yes, that lead that cost me $15 to get potentially more depending on what marketing you're doing.

it's that's all that's all we have we only have so many people who are doing those searches so we have to be in front of those people same thing with home like the we'll talk about data a little bit later but getting the right data to be able to serve adds up to a list of 500 I don't need to serve adds up to 5,000 people if there aren't 5,000 homeowners in a given market I need to serve ads up to the right people so I think that that's where PPC is a different game based on different metrics. We are ultimately looking for that cost per conversion as opposed to that cost per click. The cost per click is something we want to keep in mind, certainly.

But it is. If you're only getting 20, 30 clicks from PPC ads in a month to a landing page, it is. You really have to make sure you're not only getting in front of those right people, but then again, running those retargeting ads to people who have hit that page and staying in front of those people. because the list likely will not be large. You're probably only targeting 100, 200, 300 people that are regularly hitting that page. So it is. It's more about the quality than the quantity.

We all want more quantity, but the reality is that if you get them to that page, you've done three quarters of the work, I would say, just based on audience you're going after. So, yeah, that's one of those things where I think PPC is effective when it's run well. But I do think that not a lot of people. And I've seen your setups. You're in good shape there. But there are. There are a lot of people who rush to put the same reporting numbers up there as they have on the traveler side

without actually seeing the long-term benefit of getting more people to the owner page and getting more of the right people to that homeowner page. So ads are effective. I think you should run them. I think you should run them with the right people helping you out there. And that's more of a limited set there. Right, right. And I have a few, again, things to add on just from recent experience as far as tactically.

So here's an interesting thing. We have a client who we have Facebook, you know, pixel tracking on when they get a booking from their guest in the tent campaigns. But I would say every month, I see a handful of homeowner lead forms fire in from a guest focused Facebook ad. And what that tells me is that actually your property, so your, your guest retargeting, If someone may go on the website, do a search, look at properties, and they're not looking to book. They're actually a homeowner in the market. And then when we're serving the ads, when they come back on Facebook and they see a carousel with the feature property, they click through. And again, they're not booking on that property.

They go, wow, these guys must know what they're doing marketing-wise. Look, I saw this home on the website. Now I'm seeing this home over my Facebook Instagram feeds. And they start to get impressed by some of the guest marketing you're doing. So that's a whole other layer to this, right? As far as like, how often are you actually targeting the homeowner or how often is the homeowner kind of digging you out and thinking these top people from the pile of like, oh, they seem to be. doing a good job. I'm going to choose that company. And that always makes me giggle a little bit. You know, we're trying to get bookings. Then every once in a while, we, quote, unquote,

accidentally get a homeowner lead from these campaigns. And some months, it won't be that different from our dedicated homeowner campaign, you know, that we're actually retargeting and doing there, which actually has homeowner messaging on it. Hey, sign up for our property management services. Here's all we do, blah, blah, blah, blah, like we said a few minutes ago. So yeah, just important understand there that like homeowners are usually successful, smart, intelligent people. Some of them know about marketing. Certainly some of them can just see decent marketing, you know, when they see it, they're drawn into it. You know, they go, okay, that's kind of interesting. I want my home presented that way. I want my home marketed that

way. And that's a brand thing. That's a photography thing. That's a videography thing. That's an advertising thing. That's all these things. But yeah, I would say one, you know, I've had someone who was, you know, you were running their PPC ads before on homeowner and they weren't happy maybe in some ways. And I was like, well, the problem with that and their expectation was wrong. It wasn't that you, anything was set up incorrectly. It was that they thought, hey, there's this unlimited pool of buyers, you know, in my market that are actually switching. And I'm like, No, this is, this is a good, there's good fish in this pond, but it's a tiny pond. There's only a few fish in it.

You're only finding people on PPC who are like bottom funnel about to book, about to make a reservation or about, excuse me, about to sign up, book my brain, that's where it goes. They're about to go and switch over, but that's only one, two percent of the market, maybe at any given time. So if you're in a market with a thousand listings, there might only be a handful of people that are even up and available. You know, there's only a few singles at the dance that you can actually even partner with. So it's like, don't be upset if you go talk to a bunch of people and they don't sign up there.

They may come down down the road, which we could talk about a little bit more. So I'll let you go back in the USP one. I'll kind of hit these two. I know we get a handful minutes left here. We want to get through these. Refined and refresh the homeowner data. This just requires constant refinement, doesn't it? Right?

It's just always having the right list in place. So that's one thing. I think that's often, yeah, I got a list. And then we asked when it was acquired or when it was downloaded or when it was referenced or accessed and sometimes that's a bit older. Again, this stuff is like milk. It goes bad quickly. You know, unfortunately, you have to go and refresh and get new data on the

homeowner side. So I'm bullish on that side of things for two. And that matters both, I think, with any direct mail you're doing and obviously it matters on you know any sort of like outbound messaging in general you're doing phone number email cold email whatever the case may be so yeah the data as brook would say right the data is kind of the gold and if you got bad if you're going through the mine and that the gold's not there anymore then you're going to be wasting your time that's for sure so yeah yeah i'll kick it back your way for the usp and so yeah yeah no i mean it is

i'll just echo that on the data side it's it's it's not about the numbers it's you don't it's not about 500. It's not about 1,000. It's not about 1,500. It's about getting the data for the homeowners that you want. And making sure that's as up to day as possible. USP. I think everybody wants to make more money. I think that is something that pretty much is universal across almost everybody you're going to deal with in this space. That is not a USP. I'm sorry, the fact that you're going to make more money is not truly a USP because it's not something that you can guarantee by it. I think really being able to define yourself somewhere outside of the ROI game is really important because at a certain point, you don't want to be judged by things that you can't control.

You can't control the market. You can't control demand. You can't control any of these things. But you can control the hospitality you're giving to the guests. You can control the care you're taking of these properties. You can control the way you communicate with both the potential homeowner and the potential traveler. These are the things you can control. And I think really creating and defining a USP by that as opposed to, we're going to make you more.

We're going to make this. We're going to do that is just a better bedrock to stand on when you're having these conversations. Because I think inevitably, a savvy business person is going to say, well, how are you earning more or how are you doing that? And if you have the levers behind the scenes, cool. But you don't really have the true control there. So I do. I think defining your USP through the values of your company, the values of your brand,

something like that as opposed to we make you more. If we talk about the postcard game, everybody's seen that postcard. Talk about the email. It's not believable. Everybody's seen that subject line. That's not going to make people bad an eye. Really, you know, whether it's putting your family for,

putting something else forward, making that what what truly defines how you're defining success and what makes you unique i think that's that's going to give you a much better leg to stand on as you're as you're trying to get more of these homeowners in and this is the time so yeah well it's like there's so many possessioning angles and messaging angles you can take off of that by the way so for example like yeah if you're just looking to rack them rack them and stack em and ironically this name of the podcast so it's like just put more heads and beds um you know we may not be the right fit for you by the way like we're really looking for homeowners that want to take

care of the home. They want to take care of the guests. They're looking for a good experience. You know, our company's built on these brand values. It's, you know, experience, it's hospitality. It's sharing our local community that we love. We live here. We love it, et cetera. That's, that might turn you off from some homeowners. The guy with the spreadsheet open and he's focused on his cash on cash return and the numbers have to work and blah, blah, blah. That person may be turned off by that. But maybe you didn't want that person anyways. And then the person that's turned on by it is like, oh, good. Because like, when we retire, we're actually getting moving this home. So if you take it, if you keep it in good shape and you get us a little bit of money in the meantime, we're actually

thrilled with that arrangement. You know, we're happy with that arrangement. It's like, perfect. You just found a person that's more philosophically aligned to your business ethos and your strategy that it's better than like, yeah, we're going to make you more revenue. The other analogy I'll do there would be a lot of these homeowner landing pages end up looking like a feature list on a car. So if you bring up the Honda Civic product page right now and the Toyota Kurola product page right now, guess what? They've all got radios and electric locks and doors and a gas engine. And so it's like on a page, why would that make any sense to be like, yeah, we've got a heck of a gas engine in this thing. You'd be like, are my buying a

Honda Civic for that. Am I buying a Toyota Corolla for that? I guess I'm buying more like reliability, safety. Like I'm buying other things, but there's a lot of like feature comparison stuff that goes on there that they don't lead with that. Like the brand marketing for Toyota is not like, yeah, you click this button and the window goes down. But that's like what a lot of property management marketing or it's like, we've got this thing called dynamic pricing.

It's going to blow you guys away. We're going to charge different rates on different days. And they're like, yeah, you and everybody else, dude. You know, it's like, again, it's like your car has a transmission. Like awesome. I'm so excited about that. Right. It's like, no, you're not.

So, yeah, I would say that's the thing that most people miss, which is like, what is actually a USB, and it's not a list of things that everybody else has because then it's not a USB. You know, it's something that other people don't have. So I'll bring this to a close here. Obviously, direct mail, you know, Paul could, we could, Paul could do an hour on direct mail, but yes, direct mail onto that list once you have it. And I don't say the final thing that I just see miss so often, you know, I ask people that sometimes when we talk about homeowner, it's one the first things they bring up, who are all the people

that you talk to you that didn't sign in the last 12 months, let's say. And they have no record keeping, they have no CRM, they should probably have one. Well, they sign up for something like Ventura or they build something off the shelf. I don't really care where it's stored that much, to be honest with you. But it's like just have something so that we can actually market out to these people. Because I find that people get people close to the finish line. They don't sign for whatever reason. And they go, shoot, I lost it.

And they feel like they lost a chance to get it back forever. Not true. You can get that person back. And it's usually putting them on that communication list. It's putting them in a retargeting list to get those ads. It's like just kind of wearing them down maybe almost over time. And like, yeah, you're not going to get everybody back. But like, how many be backs are you actually going to get if you just say,

I'll be back. I'll consider it down the road. They leave and you just say, well, I lost that one. It's not over. Like, there's a good chance for you to bring them back. So, like, I would never take anybody off a list on home or the side because it could be five years of their old property manager that they thought they liked. And then they come to you and they go that way. So that's my party thoughts here, which is like have a list that you continually add to over time. Obviously follow consent laws. You know, don't, don't market to someone. If they opt out, that's right. But yeah, if they're not telling you, like, leave me alone, like keep marketing to them, be gentle, be helpful. Give them information. Give them guidance. Put in their retargeting lists,

show them content. And I guarantee you, you know, a good chunk of people that you sign will be people that you talked to before. So that's it. Well, Paul, I think we're at time for today, my friend, because we had such a long pre-show. You know, we have to cut this one a little bit shorter than normal. But hopefully you, you the dear listener, like a 30-minute episode that's all about very tactical. Homeowner Marketing techniques. Thanks to Paul for most that outline. He is the genius behind the scenes. There are a lot of homeowner stuff here on the podcast. One more thing before you depart. Please leave us to review. Go to your podcast, happy choice. Click five stars on Spotify and iTunes. That's where we get the most downloads. Appreciate a review there the most. And we'll catch you on a future episode. awesome day. Dear listener, we love you. Bye.