Heads In Beds Show - Grab Bag Show: Vacasa, Growth, Inventory Churn, Data, May Thoughts & More...

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, Paul and Conrad try something new: a grab bag show with news and notes from around the world of vacation rentals and all growth and the Vacasa - Casago merger. Like this style of episode? Let us know! ⭐️ 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 Head to Med show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation 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, we're trying something new. But first your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul, we're trying something new. But first, let's check in together. How are you doing? What's going on?

Uh, I might so my win for the week and like all of my level 10s over the last week has been good times on the NBA front. So I'm going to keep rolling with that. Tim Roles are it's fun to be a Tim Roles fan right now. It's fun to be a basketball fan. It was good first round series. It really was. It was good first round series. Yeah. My, my, my six year old was crushed because he is a Lebron fan. He is a Lakers fan. So did I take a little too much joy in, in maybe rubbing it in? I might have. How does one let his son root against his own team?

How does one do that? I don't think I could do that. I think I'd trade him in, get a new one. He's gonna enjoy that when he listens to this. But it's fun. It's fun to see him, hey, it's fun to see him be passionate about something. And if it's, even if it's the Lakers,

at least they were from Minnesota from 50 years ago, 60 years ago. So we can talk about that. It'll be good. Maybe maybe your son's reincarnated. He was actually like, you know, he was actually born in, you know, the 30s or 40s and watched the Lakers and their prime. And then he was reincarnated as your son. There's a lot of old soul in him. So I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe maybe there's something weird going on. Oh, man, man. No, I'll get on my side too. All right, so we got a pitch for today. We had some scheduling pieces. And we thought, instead of missing a week,

which we try not to do, well, it's called Grab Back episode. So these are things that are mine. There's no structure. There's no agenda here. We're going to try it. If you hate it, email us and we'll never do it again. But if you like it, if you like it, awesome. Because we're just going to call this Grab Back episode.

So I have a bunch of tabs open. And it's just things that I'm thinking right now. And we can jump around topic wise. So we'll try to put it in relatively logical blocks. And we'll try not to massively make it confusing for the listener. But it's just random things that we saw. All right, so maybe we can open, and it's almost like it feels like a new show. We can open with News and Notes because we talked about this before we hit record,

but the SOG of Acosta merger is now final. So all the indications were this was going to be finalized. That is now finalized. So what I said, though, before we record is, I don't feel any differently today than I did a month ago because I think we all were this was going to be finalized that is now finalized. So what I said though, before we record is like, I don't feel any differently today than I did a month ago, because I think we all knew this was going to happen. I don't know if you saw anything new that was, you know, intriguing from this, or if it's just like, okay, out to new era, let's let's see what happens. That's kind of our take on it. It's, it's good to have the completion if there is what some semblance of completion, I don't think I mean, I think that was the

other shoe that was felt like it was going drop is that we're gonna have more litigation, we're gonna keep pushing this out. But no, this is, I would agree and even in some of the things that have been said, you know Steve's done a great job of making the interview rounds here and I'm sure there will be a few more that will catch here before too long. But I do, I think you know he's being very clear about everything is gonna stay as Vakasa until it gets franchised off or does long. But I do, I into, you don't have any control over that. But yeah, I guess that is the white elephant hanging out in the room here is what does happen to all these,

I mean, now Steve is the CEO of Bacasa, the CEO of Casago. Where is the focus going to be? I don't think it can be in both places right now, but what do you think right now? Yeah, I was gonna say too, like a Vacasa is a much larger company, right? That's just the fact of,

we're just stating things that are obvious here. So, and you probably don't wanna be, I imagine the scenario that he would be in right now, and this is just my assessment from afar, I don't have any like inside information on this one, is that he probably wants to be keeping that boat on the same track that it's been on. And it's very well documented that they've been struggling, that the Acasa business has been

struggling long before Steve showed up and the Casago team showed up. So that's very clear. But also it's still a big company. We talked about this before. We've been critical. Everyone in the industry is critical of Acasa and all the ups and downs or whatever. But one thing that we've said that the data bears out is that they're really good at signing inventory. Their gross ads every month are very impressive still. Even throughout all this chaos, they'll have months where they sign several thousand homes across all their markets. So it's like unbelievable they're still doing that, to be honest with you. And I don't mean that sarcastically. I mean that like I'm genuinely impressed they can still sign that much inventory. And then now the downside is there's been a lot of churn. So they, you know, they,

people say two steps forward, one step back. Well, the Casa it's actually like low key five steps forward and then like seven steps back. That's the problem Casa and their whole inventory growth thing. But again, we're not trying to, you know, Thursday for no reason. That's just the facts of the situation. But I imagine you want to keep that momentum going, you want to keep signing inventory. Now how this now then comes pivoting into how things are going to go when that person or that area eventually comes area eventually becomes a saga franchise. At this point, I guess we have no idea. Maybe we can ask people who are more in tune with that

company as to how that's going to go. But I would assume you don't want to take apart the pieces that are working well. And we talked about this a little while ago. I guess we're never going to get final 2024 data at this point, are we? I don't think we ever got it in the public reporting. And maybe there was some cutoff for their financial year, and now they're not a public company, so they now no longer have to report. But there's been years in the past. I think a 23 of memory serves we talked about this on a previous episode. They were on track to do I think a billion in total revenue and they were doing roughly 30 40 percent direct. So this is a company that's doing three to four hundred million dollars or damn near that at their peak of direct booking revenue.

They're the most successful direct booking vacation company out there who's actually a manager, right? They're larger than even the companies that I hold there who's actually a manager, right? They're larger than even the companies that I hold on a pedestal, like I hold twitty on a pedestal, I hold, you know, some clients and I've been able to work with some of these people like cabins for you, you know, they are absolutely phenomenal at driving a lot of bookings directly, you know, but I'm like, it doesn't hold a candle to Vakasa, right? Because they're in 30 markets, they were doing all this revenue. So I also think the Vakasa

website, that's an asset, you got to figure out, you don't just want to strip that for parts and leave it alone. You want to figure out how to get some value out of it, particularly like how our brain works from an SEO perspective. But there's a lot of pieces to go through there to get to that final step. So I guess we don't know how that's going to go. But yeah, you're right. Like you're CEO of two companies, but you certainly don't want to,

you were the smaller one that went into the bigger one. You don't want to drop your eye on what was working well, even as you change things and revamp things in your vision, whatever that may be. It is I think that that website is there's gold in that website. It's how do you take advantage of that? Looking up on similar web, just to see, and keeping with our like, not no research theme today. Yeah, go for it.

Oh, yeah, no. Well, even I mean, going back to on the owner side, I will tell you, at Vintore, we emulate and tried to emulate the owner side, I will tell you at Venturi, we tried to emulate the Vakasa sign-on form. Get your inventory or get on our inventory there. Again, when you've got a system in place that clearly is a flywheel when Vakasa was able to sign on as many partners and homeowners as they were, there's the fact that we did an episode to compliment all that Vecasa does well, despite the fact that we give them what we do. I can see the value that Steve and the team found or thought they would find in Vecasa.

And it is, I mean, he's 30,000 runs. I mean, that's something that there was an arms race. I mean, Vecasa was a part of an arms race not that long ago with Steve by one V trips and all of these other people that were really in the in the clear to they were winning. I mean, they won in many respects, right? You know, they they had dominated so well, like, so to give you the website traffic data before we go into that thread. 50% they get so well, actually, we do sometimes when we talk about sports stuff. So I'll do it

to you right now because they don't have it in front of you. How many visitors do you think similar web estimates? So this is an estimate that the Casa got last month. What would be your estimate? How many total website visitors did the Casa get last month? So March, two thousand last month, last month. Sorry, there's no April data here. So this is March of this year. Sure.

Let's do. Well, they're doing them, but like one hundred and twenty five thousand a month. That's not a lot, but it would be enough. You think that's how many visits they're doing? I think that's short. But let's start with that as a baseline. Dude, you are so short, it's crazy. You are Isaiah Tarma short right now.

Boston Celtics Isaiah Tarma short. 1.7 million visitors in March of this year. 1.7 million visitors per month. And in theory, it's only going to get better, right? As the month goes along. Now, again, this is estimated data from similar reps. Take that with a grain of salt, perhaps, if you're listening in. And maybe someone listening is from a castle they know, and they're like, that's not accurate at all.

Okay, we realize it might not be accurate. But compared to, and again, this is from similar rep Casago data. I don't have Casago data. Although I have seen some facts and figures in the past, but this is what similar rep says, that Casago made a jump on 37,000 visits last month, when I facts and figures in the past But I did this is what similar rub says that cassago made a John 37,000 visits last month when I put them both in I can see and that's that's that was that's Where that mindset?

You like this even better half of a costless traffic in March 2025 according to similar web was direct traffic So they get they do get a significant amount of traffic through a Google organic They actually were still running some paid advertising because according to analytics, they got similar analytics. They got 144,000 visits in March from paid traffic sources. So they were running still some advertising, which just surprised me a little bit to be candid with you. They estimate 3% from social, 5% random referrals. And you know, there's really nothing meaningful past that. But think about that 1.7 million visitors in March 2025, according to similar web, half of it being direct, like there's hundreds of thousands of people, there's multiple football fields

of stadiums of people going to the cost website directly every single month that you don't want to lose, you want to figure out how can I take the value that they have driven over this long period of time. And they've generated a lot of direct bookings, they signed a lot of homeowners, how do I take the good parts of it, you know, the analogy we did before we hit the record button here is like the Picasso was a deer running down the highway and unfortunately a car hit that deer and now that deer is on the side of the road but it didn't kill it. You know, it's not dead as we're alluding to here but it is injured. So now we've got to take it apart ethically, you know, presumably and fairly and figure

out what are the good bits, the good pieces here and maybe we can grow those up and have some medicine and what are the bad bits here that we want to move on from, right? Because you can't argue, right, the fact that this was very impressive how much, you know, traffic they're generating. Now compared to an OTA platform, they're nothing. Like when I go into SimilarWeb, it's saying, like, compared to Verbo, Verbo did 42 million visitors during that same timeframe. But I'll give you another comparison just for fun.

Compared to Home2Go, they're basically on very similar trends. So Home2Go did 1.8 million in March, according to SimilarWeb. Vecasa did 1.7. And there's many sites that they're getting significantly more traffic than that are more of these like smaller OTA, you know, hybrid listings. So we talk about home to go as like, oh, maybe that's gonna be the fourth channel. That's gonna be some people get bookings from there.

The data would indicate most of my clients. That's not the case. That's really the big three of Verbo Airbnb and booking.com are the big three. But yeah, but the cost of slides into, you know, get them on traffic and it's their inventory, you know? So you gotta say the good bits there for sure and kind of figure out the backside of it.

The other thing we couldn't figure out, this is this reporting, Denish shawl over at Skiff so we can put a link in the show and as people can check that out. But there's an email in here about Roofstock being a part of the, let me say, let me make sure I get this correctly. This is an email from Steve as far as I can tell.

Today I'm thrilled to share that our first official franchise operating partnership, a glimpse into our future as a franchise-driven organization. Makes sense. Roofstock, one of the key investors in the Vakasa-Kazako merger, will be our first franchisee partner.

That's the end of the quote there. I don't really know what that means. I guess, as we talked about, we're just going to have to get more data as time goes on. So now we've got three companies or three brands involved in this. We've got the Roofstock part of it, which I realized they were the paycheck or they were part of the paycheck that got this done. We've got the casa, which I think we agree is like the

biggest horse that we want to move on from. But we got to figure out how to do that. And then of course, we've got Casago who's going to be kind of leading from the front now. And it's like, how does this all shake out for the homeowner and for the guests? Like that's kind of where my brains are. And from a marketing brand perspective, like, how do we go through that? Well, it is. And I hadn't even thought about it before we started recording, but even as you started saying,

and the Roofstock thing just stuck with me, because again, we looked on the website, it is tends to be a little more long-term, but there is someone in this space that is trying to, they've made their, I mean, PMI, Property Management Inc, they made their space in the long term, made their money in the space that is trying to, they've made their, I mean, PMI, Property Management Inc., they made their space in the long term, made their money in the long term and have slowly tried to transition over. And they do.

I wonder if that's not kind of part of the game here is that 30,000 or 50,000, whatever that long term number of inventory is, you're going to franchise some of it. But there is a reality that you might be franchising some long term and short term now I think I think there's something to be said for that model. While it maybe doesn't I don't I don't disagree. My only my only thought process on that though, and I've had this happen with clients that I've worked with before, is the pace of short term puts long term rental

managers in a blender, like they cannot understand how it opera like they think it's Oh, it's this is an operational thing. I know how to deal with tickets. I know how to deal with issues. And it's like, you really don't, to be honest with you. And like, I don't mean that as a slight to long term rental managers, I've actually believed that the way that like a short term rental manager will get 20% in commission and a long term rental manager gets 10% is actually a gross misrepresentation of the effort

involved in those two things. Because a short term rental manager. Now I realize that the amounts are different, but like a short-term rental manager is absolutely putting in double the effort that a long-term rental manager is on like a stabilized, you know, well-run unit. They're putting significantly more effort into it. Now I get that they're compensated more because the short-term rental was going to fetch more revenue than a short-term rental manager, even ignoring that whole 10, 20% split, but that's undisputable to me. So my experience on that has been, oh, we're gonna start we're long term rental managers, we're going to get to short term, a lot of them almost have to

completely reset their expectations and be like, yeah, there's some similarities here. But it's almost like two completely different sports. It's like pickleball and professional tennis, like these are just not the same things at all, honestly. And I think you're right there. It's but it truly it's one of those things that at some point along the lines, short-term stays that you only have so much. I mean, in some of these, and I think really we have to think about where their

markets are right now, because they do. They still have a lot of destination markets that we know, that we're very comfortable with, the primary travel markets. But, Vakasa's got a lot of inventory that's in some more of those metropolitan markets where they're fighting, and we'll say fighting, more with the booking.com, with the Verbo, and some of those under the Expedia umbrella to get some of those bookings in. I think with roof stock being a part of it, it would be, I think, not thinking, not considering that long-term was at least part of the long-term strategy there. I think you just got to put the pin in it and know that there are some other franchises that are trying to make their

way into short-term rental space. And PMI, they've got quite a few franchises. I mean, they've got hundreds and hundreds of franchises again split between their different pillars there. So it intrigues me a little bit more because you will. You'll have some people who will try to chunk off maybe a hundred rentals over here in New York market or a let's Miami market or a New Orleans market or something like that. Something where obviously New York and New Orleans have heavy regulation. That's a whole other thing. But on the long-term side, you can do a little more. And there's got to be some debt inventory out there from the perspective of they still have it, but it's not getting rented out because it is in a market that is prohibitive or they literally can't rent it out

because they just don't have the permitting, they don't have all these other things in place. Part of the cost of having so many single owners, single homeowners, you're gonna have a lot of people who aren't gonna go through and do the due diligence to make sure that they've got everything that they need in place, whereas a professional property management company

probably is going to do that and make sure or they're not going to be running effectively there. So yeah, Well, maybe that brings up a little bridge for us to walk on then because that that that problem that you just described there where it's something I've thought about a lot, by the way, over the years with this idea of a lower information buyer versus a high information buyer and I made a assumption sometimes that are not did not turn out to be true about how knowledgeable an owner was when they were getting into this game. It blew my mind a few years ago,

and this is nothing against the AirDNA guys, because I think they do the best of anybody at this kind of stuff, but it blew my mind that someone would take an address, a property address, 123 Blah Blah Blah Street in Sevierville. They would take that, paste that into AirDNA, click a button and say, okay, it's gonna do 50K or 80K or 100K or whatever the number was.

And then they would go buy a three to $500 to million dollar home, you know, without doing much due diligence beyond that. And then they would hand it to maybe a Vakasa, maybe a Casaco, maybe a local manager, maybe whoever, and say, okay, this one should do by 80K. You know, here's the paperwork, you know, for the home, here's the address. Awesome, let me know what you

need that kind of thing like that that happened regularly. That was I didn't I'm not making that up in my head like that absolutely happened so much in 21 22 and 23. And, you know, one would presume that that activity has gone down a little bit or perhaps the what's the expression that we've been separate separated from the chaff a little bit like the better quality the cream rise at the top, you know, on people that are more dealing the due diligence on that side of things. But I, the cream rise at the top, you know, on people that are more dealing with the due diligence

on that side of things. But I saw this quote the other day and it was like, as low information buyers become more higher information, margins decrease, meaning that business might have an advantage on you at some point in time, right? Like I think back to buying a car. Like if you bought a car, like when we were kids, you bought a car, you just went to the dealership

and like, you didn't really know. Like if anything, maybe if you're lucky, you can go drive across town. Like maybe there might be one other dealership. But it's kind of like you got to call them on the phone, you got to show up in person. That's how it goes. Nowadays, you can like buy one online and go compare, you know, 20 prices across 20 different dealerships. Now you still sometimes games get played once you get there. But if you don't like it, you're just like, oh, like, I'll just go somewhere else. Like you have so much more information on purchasing

a car today than you did, you know, several years ago, ago. I wonder if the same thing has happened on the property management side, where it's like the buyer is getting more information now. In this case, the buyer is the homeowner, the property owner. They're doing the research, and they're gonna find the best company. This is something, a drum that you and I bet

be over and over again. But I will say this on the flip side, they're gonna try to do their best to find the best company, but if they don't find the best company, they will kind of stick with it, even if they don't love it, because the switching costs are so high, the inertia to be like, oh, man, if I take this out of this program, let's just say it is the Picasso

program for the sake of it, I'm going to have to like figure out what to do with all these bookings. Sometimes there's laws that prevent you from like not servicing those bookings. You have to think about it. Like it becomes a problem, you know, it becomes a problem to not rent your home anymore if you want to do it that way. And that was was I was struck by that when we were talking to a mutual contact that we were talking about the other day, that person that we were referencing that we both know. And he was saying that part of this contract sale process is the pitch of go buy some of these homes from our inventory here that we now own. And some of these homes are doing 10 to $20,000 per year rental revenue. In fact, I was told reliably by someone who was pitched one of these portfolios, let's say there was like 25 homes, and he's like 10 of them. To say I wouldn't take them is, you know, is a simple statement. He's like, I don't think anybody should take them. I wouldn't give this to like my worst enemy, you know, as far as the homes that were in that program. All right, so it's like, there's such a difference was what I'm getting at between who actually should win over the long term. And some of the stuff kind of flushing itself out and taking itself out is probably a good thing. But it's not going to feel that way when we're seeing

like huge inventory losses or, oh, no, all the inventory is down, because then therefore what will happen? Well, if we lose 10 homes that reach doing $10,000 a year, we all know anyone listening who savvy been doing this for a while. That's not desirable inventory, but that's still $100,000 of revenue that is going to just go poof. So that's where you get these metrics from Eridu and the like, where it's like, oh, no, it's not things are not going well, the demand's down, the stuff is down. I'm like, but is

that good demand down? Like, are the guests that we actually want the product that we actually should be offering? Is that down? Or is it the again, is it the C tier D tier type stuff is actually going away? I don't know. I like talking about the seasonality of everything. Everything we do has a season to a certain extent, the travel season, the shoulder season, literally in figure signing season. We got the seasons. Um,

but there's something to be said for this deal has happened right at the beginning of summer, but right at the beginning of summer that we know is showing signals of being soft. No, we don't know whether what what it's going to look like. But right now, we're seeing some signals that's that are telling us, starting with the airline agency, with the airlines right now, this could be a softer summer. Drive-to markets, we usually do pretty well as a vacation rental space, but I think that's another layer that we're going to have to put on top of this is that, yes, there is some, let's say 10-15% is undesirable. That's the 10% of the inventory is just undesirable. So it's about 3,000, 500, 4,000, whatever that is.

Now we're talking about locations where people are doing less travel. We could get to the end of the summer here and we might not feel that good about the deal as it stands right now. Now I think 12 months from now I think, my hope certainly, is that things are going to go well. But this might get a little deal as it stands right now. Now I think 12 months from now, I think, my hope certainly is that things are going to go well. But this might get a little rickety and it might feel a little, it might feel like a bad decision here for, and I would not want to be in Steve's shoes and have to watch behind the scenes and try to make those decisions and be the puppet leader to say, this is what we're doing and this is how we're doing it. And all those things now he's got a great team around him. But again, we're, we're going to run

into an interesting summer here, I think on top of everything else that's happening. But this is what we talked about earlier, which is that how much of this is in your control versus not your control. Like you can be the best CEO the world has ever seen. And like things can happen outside of your control. Like what blows my mind,, we're not political show, like we don't need to get political. But like think of like the whole Apple, I don't know if he followed like the whole Apple tariff situation. Basically, Trump was like, terrorists for everybody. And then Apple was like, Oh, exempt us. And they're like, okay. And I'm just like, how is that fair? Like, that's obviously like dealmaking from Tim Cook at the highest level, like I guess respect to him. He's figured out a

way to remain neutral enough where like, he exempted himself, I guess, in a way from these tariffs initially. And who knows, right? Because that changes with the wind. And again, a fun fact, like Trump has changed his opinion many times on that. But it's like going back to vacation rentals, it's like, okay, let's say travel is down by some percentage point, we can pick a number between three and eight or 10 or pick a number in there. I guess the question is always like, what do you do about it? Like, because if you're pricing logically, if you're marketing the right way, and there's less demand, like in theory, you should just be standing out and offering the best product available to the marketplace. Were you not

trying to offer the best product before? Like, presumably, no, like you were trying to offer the best product the whole time. Or if you were not, you know, doing what you could be doing to get more, you know, demand, then like, I hate to say it, but like, that's on you. You know, I mean, like, that's your fault for not putting the proper infrastructure in place to like make your business successful on the demand side of things. And I'm sympathetic to that, but at the same token, it's like, I don't really know, I guess, like how to solve that. Like if people are not taking their marketing, their brand seriously, they're not seeing

their advertising seriously. And they're what I believe is like being attached to the Airbnb barnacle. And some people are perfectly fine with that. There was some bait over the weekend I saw where someone was like, oh, direct bookings are silly and you know, there's no value to the traveler. Actually, I think that's an interesting statement to make there, right? The direct bookings, do they benefit the traveler? Well, maybe, potentially, there might be some cost savings, you know, side of it. That's a smaller portion of it. I don't advocate direct bookings necessarily as much for the traveler.

I advocate it for the property manager. I want their business to be healthy. That's actually my customer, right? Now the property manager only exists if they have customers coming in on both the homeowner side and the guest side. That's kind of the whole schtick that we have going here. But direct bookings are, I guess I don't advocate that as like, oh, it's gonna be better for the traveler because I've said this before

when we talked about this before in the show, I'm actually an advocate of having fees on your website if people want to book directly. Now I still think that you should charge less on your website than if you charge in the OTA platforms. Same dates, same property, that sort of thing. But I don't think that's the hook. I don't think it ever has been.

I think it's you make your business better by doing that, right? It's like some of my payment terms and conditions that I have are for me. They're not for my client, but it's like we have to run this business profitably. We have to run it in a way that's fair on both sides. And sure, I could have much more loose payment terms, but then we would not be able to exist as well or I would have to do things differently, or would have the same talent that I have. So I guess that's kind of, you know, maybe where, you know, I end on

this idea, which is like, you have to do what's best for your business, it has to fit into the overall demand of the ecosystem out there. So like, if you were, you know, to your point, maybe there's someone that's gonna go pick up those $10,000 per year properties, and they go, actually, I know how to manage these and make money off them, because I can get enough of them, right, I have a different system, or you weren't marketing them the right way, they're actually are desirable to a certain set of population.

They're desirable people who want to do 30 day rentals. They're desirable for other reasons, transitional, and between apartments, that sort of thing. So it's like, cool, that's awesome. That's capitalism, right? That's what we should be enjoying and that sort of thing. But I don't know, I guess I'm winding a little bit here. But I guess the way I look at it is like,

our contact form is actually on fire over this weekend. And I'm like, it's not a good sign. Now, I think these people who are reaching out are desperate. They're not thinking logically and clearly, they're thinking like, let me just sprinkle a little marketing into what I was already doing. And let me solve my being down 20%. It's like, that's not gonna work that way. Like we can help, but it's a more fundamental issue at the base of the system. It's not a little thing you put on top that hopefully gives a little more flavor. And then equally, your signup sheet was open. I guarantee Steve's inbox was getting a deluge of or the curator collective Casago inbox was getting a deluge of inboxes increased

just finding out what's happened. I think that's what it's going to be interesting to track over the next weeks here in months here is who are the first ones. So we know Roofstock is number one. Who's number two? Who's number three? Because I do think that that's going to be part of this push here is Steve's got to demonstrate, Casago's got to demonstrate that this is desirable. This is what people want. We want more people are signing up franchises. More people are coming in. They're coming under the umbrella. They're onboarding. They're doing this. I think those are the kind of the headlines to watch. Last week it was, okay, when does the ink dry? When are we officially together? Now it's, okay, rough stocks first. Who's next? What markets?

What locations? What did those look like? Because that's how he's going to sell more of them down the road. That's the reality is that if you don't have the interest, people are going to know we are a semi-incestuous industry, as in we all know each other. And in a lot of cases, we've worked with each other and we've worked with each other multiple times. So everybody's going to know what's happening behind the scenes. I think it's a matter of who comes out winning. Hopefully as a greater industry we win because right

now this back and forth, this pause, this dead period for lack of a better word, hasn't been good for us I I don't think. Because when you couple that with the macroeconomic we're going through right now, there is, there's just questions. And I think at the very least, we answered a question and we get to move forward now. So let's move forward. I guess it's like, you know,

there's not always gonna be a winner, you know, I guess, in any sort of war, maybe it's a business war, you know, but there not always going to be a winner, you know, I guess, and then you sort of war, maybe it's a business war, you know, but there's not always going to be a winner. I think Ficasa has now been, you know, targeted as the one that lost and they've kind of had to like, you know, they burned forward a billion dollars, basically, $3.9 billion of enterprise value in a little over what three years at this point, right. So like, that was obviously that didn't work in

the way that everyone anticipated or intended for it to be. And, you know, out of my team will say this to me a lot, which is like, we've tried this before. This is not the first time that we've tried this path. And, you know, we've had we've had a failure before. This is different. This is a new idea, but it's some similar, you know, problems that we have with respect to this, you know, national brand. It's like, everyone seems to think everyone with a lot of money seems to think if they get enough money

in here, they can solve the issue that is, you know, the inventory side of it that is the marketing side of it that is the homeowner recruitment side of it. Yeah, this will be probably attempt number five in recent memory of, you know, doing this, I guess, in a way, because, you know, in a way, you know, we don't have to go too far back, right. But there was an acquisition, you know, the Vakasa made a while ago, right to like fold. I'm blanking the name right now. That's really bothering me. Which one? No, no, no, when they bought the company out of Austin, Texas, this is really bothering me. Not flip key. Bad way to end it. This is terrible. We're really sorry about this. Turnkey turnkey. Sorry, that was really bad that I forgot that. But it's been a while.

I was saying flip key in my head, which I knew wasn't right, obviously, although flip key. Yeah, I mean, it's like, that's where we're at right now. So it's, you know, every a lot of changes, we'll see how it all shakes out. So this was the end of our Grab Back episode. We'll put a bow on that one sort of crash land our own plane here, just like Riviera over the weekend. And hopefully we can figure it out from there. So if you like these kind of more off the cuff discussions, let us know we can we can do this from time to time.

Maybe it could be bonus up so the feed does not be on the main thing that we do all the time. Otherwise, we'll bring you back next week. We'll have an agenda next week and we'll go strong on it. So thank you as always. Leave us a review. We appreciate it. We'll catch you in the next one.