Heads In Beds Show - Looking Back On Marketing Changes From 2020 to 2025...

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul take a (not too far back) look into memory lane and see what's changed from 2020 to 2025 in marketing, brand, the Covid boom and bust and a LOT more. A casual chat! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 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 Build Up 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, it's so funny. You know, we're recording here January 22nd.

This will come out a little bit later. And as of this current recording on Sunday, this Sunday, I'm supposed to get snow here in South Carolina, a little bit, maybe not much. How much snow is sitting up there right now? Let's do a quick comparison. How much do you have? How much do? I have. We've been getting, you know, about an inch a day. It feels like the last week. It's not so much the heat. It's the gosh darn humidity of, I believe, our high temperature tomorrow is minus five.

Our low is minus, yeah, we're not going to get above zero. The weather terrorists, as we like to call them occasionally, are not terrorists right now. It's really going to be that cold. And I don't know. At some point it doesn't matter. though. I do remember that when I was a kid. At some point, it's just, it's so absurdly cold. You just don't even register the difference. You don't like it.

I feel bad for the kids because we have another Friday off and they're going to sit inside because I don't have enough layers in this house to bundle them up to be safe to go outside. So it's. Do you guys have a bubble? We had a bubble back home. They're a big interior facility. There's bubbles. And actually high school has a nice bubble to be able to, I wonder if they'll do like a

little open gym with all this, with everybody being off. But yes, there are some places. We could go, but I don't know, it gets real hard to even like bundle, want to bundle up to get in the car to drive someone. I mean, it's that when you have to back out and that squeaky snow or squeaky ice sound, oof, it's, it does something to you. And for those of you in the 60, 70 degrees, don't ever have to worry about that. I hope you never have to worry about squeaky, icy snow. but it's something different. So you get one inch of snow a day for 90 days in a row or more, and I'm going to get one inch of snow in 2020.

We all have our hardships. I love it. Oh, man, that's all good. Well, it's funny. It makes you think retrospectively about not only where you are in terms of your physical location, about where we've been last few years, you know, in terms of marketing. So we thought we do a bit of an interesting episode today.

Candidly, we had a bunch of ideas up there. And Paul and I kind of feel like when we have a bunch of ideas up there, We have a bunch of ideas of the podcast that we plan on doing. But we've both got to feel it. I don't know. We didn't feel any ideas up there. We've got to flesh them out better. Maybe we've got to tweak the titles a little bit.

We'll do something better next week or different next week, I should say. Hopefully not better, just different. But we thought we do a little retrospective. You know, we're here in 2026. By the time you're listening to this, it's going to tail end of January. So hope your New Year's resolution is going phenomenally well. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not.

They say most people abandon it in like 13 or 14 days. But, you know, if you made it a month in, you're probably doing really well. And just a little bit of like a retrospective. I think we often are poor at doing this because we're so concerned about the moment. Oh, it's AI right now and it's agentic stuff. And all these, you know, we're always looking for the new thing. Like the thing that dropped the other day, chaty pt officially announced. We're going to put ads in chatypte, which of course was going to happen, by the way.

There was no reason that wasn't going to happen. You know, but now people are, oh, they're, you know, pining to sign up. Oh, I want to run ads in chat. It's like, okay, okay. Let's take a little trip down memory of it. Let's go back maybe 2019 to 2020. And let's cover it through 25. We're here in 26.

And just talk about some of these changes through this time frame. Because I think there be things that happened within that five-year window that you and I both recall or remember or discussed or did in the marketing realm that we now look back and go, well, that was silly and that was stupid, you know, or why do we do that, right? But again, we don't often do that. So I don't know, what's your read on this? I mean, you've been doing this long time well before 2020, but what's kind of your read with this last half a decade that we've endured? You know, here together. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, it's certainly either feels like it's gone too fast or like it's moving like a glacier. There is no in-between. But I think that I've said it on many different occasions in different ways, probably to different people and all that stuff. But I think we've seen really a roller coaster ride of skill and hard to put another word. It's not luck. But I think there's a little bit of luck in everything that we do. Like in everything in marketing, yes, the more.

the more skill, the more knowledge, the more information you put into your decisions and strategies and stuff like that, the better the outcomes are going to be. But a lot of it is lost. Let's call a spade there. So, you know, we got to be just kind of lucky by the standpoint of circumstances. We didn't control much than 2020. You know, in 2019, we still had some control. But I do. I think when I look at even like some of the things that at that time, Google,

was doing. You know, this is when Google really started to black box some things. So the Google Express ads. The ability to create an ad account in a hurry and just get a campaign up. I think this is where Google really wanted to get more advertisers in the door. And that is something that they did. They made it super easy. They didn't make you create an account. And I use the air quotes really heavily there because it was still an account. But all you had to do, you had to give them a headline, you had to give them four or five themes, not keywords per se. And they're going to create one ad for you. And it was going to run as a Google Ads Express campaign.

And I think we all know anybody who got to do work with Google Ads Express knows that was something completely different. Now, I got a smart one. I got a smart one that I'm about to post tomorrow that's still probably left over from that era. So I mean, this is. That evolved from Google Express to smart campaigns to. performance max campaigns to all these things. And I think that's, I mean,

everything is operating kind of in that way of, yes, there have been some, some interesting new enhancements, opportunities, piece, you know, systems that you can use within all the primary channels we talk about. But ultimately, for everything, you know,

think about, when we talked about voice, thinking about, you remember when you had to be on Alexa and you had to be on this at that, you know, in 2018 and 2019, we just talked about. And last time I checked, and I still get the calls from telemarketers or Google business listing optimizers. It looks like you're not present on the voice channels right now. So I think I am. I think when people do a search, they're still going to find me.

And I don't think people are using Alexa to search. And I don't think it is. I think we've seen some trends kind of come and go. But I also think that kind of going back to the luck versus skill thing, I think you could get lucky a lot more with marketing back in the late teens and early 20s here. And I don't think that's the case anymore. I really think that in order to be successful, yeah, you're still going to need a little bit of luck. But you have to try different things.

You have to try different channels. You have to be willing to fail and fail fast. You have to be willing to take a deeper understanding, not just a chat GPT level of understanding of. This is a three-sentence explanation for what's happening. No, I think you really have to dig in a lot more to get the outcomes you're looking for because that's not what. That's what the audience requires now. I think the audience may not be smarter, more sophisticated, but because there's so much information coming at them at all times, you really have to be meaningful and intentional with what you're doing.

So that's a lot. And maybe not, you know, more general themes. And again, more to chew on. But what do you think? I mean, where have you seen things change, get better, get worse? What do you think of the last five, six years? I'll go down two paths, one very quickly, and then one, like you may be a little bit more thoughts on. I think one thing that obviously happened, you're exactly correct. We benefited unbelievably

well from the COVID lockdown and the travel away from typical urban travel and towards, you know, leisure, rural, vacation rental markets. I don't mean rural, but just like, I'd rather be in the beach working from a vacation house in Florida than sitting in my apartment in Chicago or whatever the case may be. There's a hundred thousand examples. you could do of that, but that helped a lot of our clients. Not initially, by the way. There was like an initial in 2020. Spring, winter of 2020 was actually straight down for a while. People, again, people always forget about things. It's so funny. There was a very red state that I do Google ads in Georgia. And at one point, they literally barricaded the road. And they're like,

if you don't have a driver's license that indicates you live up here, you were not coming to this area in Blue Ridge, North Georgia. And again, you know, two years later, they were like, how dare you lock us down and tell us what we can and can do? But they literally did themselves back then. But to be fair, that's also, as we get new information, we can change our mind. But I'm a big fan of that. And I think that we shouldn't, you know, politicize or put people in a box and say, well, because you said this, you then have to maintain that position forever. And that's actually one of the worst things we do to people broadly speaking when it comes to things like, you know, politics that are decision making. Like, I've changed my mind on a lot of things over the last five

years, six years. That's for sure. And I would hope that any, you know, intellectually honest person would be able to do the same thing, whether it be about marketing or the industry or whatever the case may be. So yes, I think we benefited tremendously from that, from that. I think on the marketing side, it made things easier for quite some time to be like we're doing. But it also brought a lot of eyeballs into our world. And I think now that some of that has kind of shaken out a little bit and some of that has kind of gone away, it's like a lot of those things just didn't work out well. And if you, if you told me that at a time, I would have been like, well, yeah, this arbitrage model doesn't is not a perpetuity thing. Like it makes sense now.

You know, it seemed like something that of course that wouldn't work well. And there's been so many examples of that, you know, not just arbitrage. But I mean, it was crazy. Every time I opened up like Facebook or Instagram, for example, I was getting hit with ad after ad for these so-called Airbnb gurus that were telling you, hey, I did this one deal and it made all this money. Therefore, that money will continue forever. And like even as I'm watching it, I'm like, no, I've been doing this since like 2014, 2015.

I've seen, you know, five or six years of sample size at this point to know that like, how this generally good. And this is abnormal. COVID was abnormal. But it was something that I think I look back on and I just say like, it was so obvious that that wasn't going to continue forever. And I got caught up in it too. Like I started serving that crowd or that audience, the single host crowd with some of the work that I did over a guest took.

And that that had a rise and a fall, you know, from a revenue perspective. So like, I'm not saying that I'm immune and that I'm some Sherpa who knows the way up the mountain perfectly. I kind of fell into some of those things as well. And wasted time, effort, energy money, or both or all those things, all the above on some of those ideas. So those are kind of some things that initially come to mind. But I think you're right with regards like marketing in general. Like it's just the formats have changed. You know, the channels have changed a little bit, you know, to some degree.

You know, back in, like the Instagram era before, it used to be more balanced. Think of the Instagram, how balanced it was with photos and videos, you know, four or five years ago. And now you open Instagram. It's like pretty much mostly all video. We still have some statistics that work well. But like broadly speaking, the majority content served in your feedest video content. And so that's just a shift of like how these social platforms, we call it social media, as if we interact with friends on social media.

We really don't. We interact with like entertaining content or engaging content. It's not necessarily stuff that's meant for, you know, the kid you went to high school with or a friend you made in college or something like that, which is what I feel like that shift is really important as well. I mean, even the shift of who we're focusing on marketing efforts on. I mean, the reality is, is that 19, 20, 21, when you have a big boost of bookings coming in and you don't have enough inventory, a lot of people, I mean, I remember before I got to Ventory,

there was a lot of people as we were getting on sales calls at probably not still. that we're saying, we want to do owner marketing. We want to do owner marketing. We want to get new owners on. So I think that that was, I think that's kind of another ebb and flow that we've seen of people needed more homes because they had so much demand for on the guest side of things that, yeah, some of it we generated on the marketing site.

Some of it was just organic. But if you could ride a wave, you should, right? Like, I think that's an important lesson. That's an important COVID lesson too. Like, if you can ride the wave, you can ride it, ride it. Absolutely. Take it all the way to the end. but also like don't lie to yourself either, you know, and say like this one always killed me,

people who would take a spreadsheet of 2020 to 2021 growth. Oh, yeah. And then just copy and paste there for the next five years. Oh, yeah, we're going up 30%. Well, yeah, we'll be able to go up another 20%, another 20%, another 20%, another 20%, it's like, wait a second. You're telling me that someone to run this condo for $1,200 bucks a night, you know, in 2030. Like, I don't know about that.

That doesn't seem realistic to me, you know, as bad as the inflation is bad. It's not that bad yet. That's, I mean, so that is, I think that that's something where now, and again, It's being more intentional with who you're marketing to. I think that at that time it was because there were so, and not just so many people who wanted to travel, but just like you heard those gurus on TikTok and Instagram and everything like that, those same gurus were saying,

we're going to make some money. So just buy a home, let someone manage it for you, or you can do it yourself, or let someone manage it for you, and then you're going to just, it's a cash cow, and you're never going to have to worry about anything. And all those property managers said, yeah, you'll make $100,000. 50 k a year and it's going to be great and now in 2025 they're making 65 grand a year and

they may not be in their portfolio still so it's i i do i think that that's that was that was that has been a very interesting shift in mindset as well as people are still looking for owners people are still absolutely trying to add to their portfolios yeah but i can then they're just being a little more intentional with it of i'm going to take everything because i have so many guests that are coming to my website and they're just they don't have enough inventory that's not the case now it is and and we've talked about on the brands how that works with your brand how that works with you know what you want to represent as a business versus just wanting to make money and all these marketing decisions these micro decisions that we make just really do contribute to the macro vision the 10,000

foot view of how effective has our marketing been. I think that is. That's kind of what it comes back to here is how effective has our marketing been? Have you know, have you seen over the last five years? And I know you've seen the abs and flows. We've talked about it. But where have you seen a lot of those shifts come from go to? Have you seen it be more specific to markets? Have you seen it be more specific to just the types of operators? I know you work with a lot of really high quality operators. So dig into that a little bit there. Well, I think for me, it has become a little bit more of a winner take-all type of thing. So, like, if you were in the top two or three companies in most these markets, for the

most part, you pretty much have all the homeowner leads that you want. You have a ton of guest demand. You're probably, if you're top two or three in a very competitive market, you probably are a 40%, 50% direct booking company. So you're not struggling, you know, to kind of figure out some things that these smaller companies are. And unfortunately, the distribution of results is very unequal when it comes to things like, you know, getting more, like ranking highly on Google or making ads really profitable or whatever

the case may be. So that's kind of one thing that I had to learn the hard way. Because to be fair, back in 2020, I really was working with mostly smaller companies. I had very few companies that were larger, you know, than let's say like 50 units or 65 units. And then over time, I've been, you know, fortunate and lucky and tried to work hard towards attracting a bigger client where it's like, my brain power is the same, whether I'm working on a client that has 10 units or a thousand units. But I'll tell you what, when I come up with a good idea for a 10 unit company, it helps them out a little bit. and they get some additional bookings and they're happy. When I do the same thing for a thousand unit company,

you know, the numbers can be unbelievable, right? We can generate another 100, 200, $300,000 a month in direct bookings on a campaign idea that we have because there's so much more available, you know, rope for us to pull on and get benefit from. So I think I've had to learn that for sure over the last few years, which is that, yeah, many markets, it's not winner take all because, of course, that's not the case,

but it's like winner take most, maybe is the way that I might describe that. When it comes to getting, again, like you said, homeowner leads and getting more direct bookings, it's it's the results are very unequal and as a result like your objective as a company if that's what you care about and what you're trying to get to should be that I think you know it really should be how do I become one of the top few companies this market doesn't mean that you have to take every single thing I don't mean that way like oh I'll just take everything because I'm trying to be the top three in this market I think top could be a lot of could mean different things depending on your goals

and your objectives and things like that it could be I'm only going to take homes to do a thousand dollars a month or a thousand dollars a day average ADR but I'm going to try to get 40 or 50 have been in one collection. Like I've seen people that are like I have a client that I work with. I was actually speaking to him today on the West Coast. It was super early meeting for him. And we were talking, you know, a little bit. I think he has 40 or 42 homes, but he owns, I think 20 of them. So he owns a significant portion of them. And he's like, well, at this point, I've approved my model. I know how I can do this. My results prove it. And I go to the bank and they give me what I want because I've proven it to time again that I can make this work. So he owns half

the properties. He's probably doing somewhere in the neighborhood of like 15 million a year, maybe 16 million year off of very few listings, comparatively, to, you know, UFC companies with 300 units that are doing like a few million a year in revenue, and because they're 20% occupied, right, and they're marketing something that's very low quality or just doesn't have a very big audience attached to it. So I think that's kind of what I've had to learn the hard way too, which is just like you need a lot of context around the numbers that people talk about on LinkedIn at a VRMA conference to actually understand how the business really is. And it would blow your mind that there's companies out there that

are, yeah, 50 units that are way, way more profitable and way, way more successful than companies that are quote unquote 200 units and that are split between different destinations and have mostly condos versus larger homes and all these other factors. I agree. Something that I think that that's, that's, it's more about the best practices. It's more about the foundation. It's more about the bedrock. If you don't have the table stakes in place, you can't find, you know, effective tools.

You can't go off the rails and try some new, some new channels that that maybe aren't effective that, you know, that just don't have the same buy-in. don't have the same audiences that don't have that type of thing. But from that perspective, now again, looking at where you've been, what you've tried over the last five, six years, what have you tried? What would you say you've tried that has failed if you had to put something in there? Because I've got a few that I can certainly add to that list. But I'm interested to hear what you've, you know, trying to pull something on the bottom.

I mean, one thing I mentioned earlier, so the guest acquisition that I did in 2020 worked well at first and then it was completely crushed by AI writing. So that's one thing for sure that I knew the AI writing was maybe somewhat around the corner at one point. I thought, no, like what we offer is different. The early beta versions of these AI tools were pretty bad and I wasn't overly worried about it. I thought we were too niche, too small for people to really come into our space. And then I realized, no, this chaty BT thing is going to get or Gemini or whatever when you use, I don't care. It's going to get, everyone's going to be using this just like they use any other app on their phone or any other app that used in their desktop.

And I expected it to get there and it got way faster and way bigger than I initially thought. And it completely crushed the demand of that business, like to where there was months where we would be doing 50, 60, 75 descriptions all written by hand. And we were charging a few hundred bucks per description, a little bit cheaper if someone was buying in bulk. But broadly speaking, it was kind of in that price range. And I mean, we just got, yeah, I mean, that business basically just got destroyed by AI writing. And I think that it's a good, again, a good lesson and just like things outside your control. I think the product we were offering proved that people wanted it, pre-AI writing tools. The reviews we had, we write people like the product.

I mean, we were 95% of time. We had like very little edits or revisions. People liked it. And then the moment there was an instant solution that was, oh, by the way, free or let's call it a dollar, you know, what they're paying $10 or $20 a month for chat GPT or something and they can, in theory, do 50 property descriptions, you know, for the cost of that plus some of their time. I realized that our product wasn't convenient enough.

And the AI solution was more convenient for. from that perspective. So I had to learn that if I think about like my own lessons and businesses that I've been involved in or that I've, you know, run myself or whatever during that time frame. I think when I think about our clients, probably some of the things that haven't worked, I mean, or that have failed poorly. I think about that a little bit more. I think some of the video stuff is still a struggle for most of our clients.

I think that the assumption would be that most people inside these companies will be able to latch on a video and get video and get it to work well in their business. And it's like everyone will nod their head and say like, yep, video is really important for my business or, yeah, I will. want to run videos, ads on social media, and I want to give you guys all the best assets. And then like their actions don't match their words. Like if I ask them about that, they'll agree with it. And then I'll be like, cool. So let's hire videographer and get him or her to walk through 20 properties or let's train someone on your team at least to do this in the meantime.

And that just seems to more drip out. It doesn't come out at a high pace. So it's, it's funny. Again, some of the biggest creators on social media are like small people. It's not a big company. It's like sometimes it's one or two people that are just like, I'm going to learn Instagram really well. And I'm going to master this platform and this interface. and get really good at it. And those people have done better almost in like a big company where it's like, all right, who's in charge of Instagram?

Like, you know, that could be a second thought, unfortunately sometimes. So those are things that come to mind on my side. That's those those are things that I mean. I do. I wish,

I wish people. And it is. And I think it's hard to see the value in video when you don't have any video that you can use to create and kind of show the proof of concept to be able to say this is, this is how it's going to perform for you. I think about the programmatic display side of things where trying to hit those micro audiences that I think micro targeting is great. I think being able to customize that message, it does. I mean, when it is effective, you can see how effective it is.

Conversion rates double, triple in some cases. But you do have to find that right match of hitting the right people and putting that right creative in front of them. And I do think that that does get a lot more difficult with the larger audiences you're going after there. So that's something that, you know, it is. I think we've certainly talked about on and off the mystery meet that is display advertising more generally there. But I think that we did. We took every effort that we could to really refine and not make it just the average display. You know, we want to make display work.

Because specifically on the owner's side, search wasn't there. Search isn't that easy just because not many people are doing the searches or X, Y, Z. We can go down the list of what we talked about there. So I think that display is always one of those things that low cost seems nice, high number of impression. You get in front of a lot of people, your reach is good, all these impressive things. But ultimately, I think that's when it comes down. to and the effectiveness of your marketing.

What are you trying to accomplish? And if you're trying to accomplish more direct bookings, more owner inquiries, more of those higher level KPIs that really drive business and drive your trajectory upward, you kind of got to go with the tried and true. And then until we find something that chat cheap and like until we find that chat cheap ads work, until we find that there is a secret sauce to show up in the. the LOMs until we find that there's there's not by the way it's still just best practices as you I'm just got I have to say that every time we say it because that's the reality but I do I think that

that's you know we can talk about what's gone right what's gone wrong but there's a reason why we keep talking about email search and social because those are continued to be and and until proven otherwise so we got to see really see something that's going to move the needle which Do I see increases in chat GPT traffic? Absolutely. We're almost a triple digits in some cases. Triple digits. What in the thousands?

How many on Google though? Triple digits. So again, this is again, let's just keep everything on a level playing field here and make sure that we're continuing to focus on the right things, acknowledging what has gone right? What has gone wrong? Where could we have done it better? Because everybody could have done it better somewhere along the line.

That's the reality. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have mentioned like things, again, things that we've learned or whatever the case may be. I guess my logic, too, would also be, is the leader in your company involved enough in the process to be able to provide, you know, marketing with the MO and the oxygen and all that that they need? Does the leader of your company see things in a more comprehensive, cohesive view? Or to look at it only from their lens? Like, if their lens is operations or an operations person, I understand that's going to be their bias and that's fine. But can they at least like put on the market? can they take off their ops hat for a second, put on their marketing hat, have a conversation, go through it and figure it out. Just like we sometimes need to take off our marketing hat and see it from other perspectives. We need to see it from a salesperson's perspective. We need to see it from a revenue manager's perspective. We need to see it from all these other perspectives. And I think that's kind of how these businesses have evolved over the last five years is that I forget what year this was. I don't remember what it was. It was one of the VRMA events that

was relatively soon after we kind of paused for 2020 and parts of 21 for COVID. I think it was. and, you know, there's all these vendors there and, like, very few property managers. I think this was the very end of 2020 now that I think about it. It was down in Destin in that area. We all went into this conference room. And it was like masking was optional or you could mask or whatever the case may be. And it was like all the vendors who were there and some property manager made a joke or whatever. And it was like, yeah, I think what's going to happen in the future is I'm just going to have 27 vendors and I'm going to have just me and maybe one employee.

And that's it. And then everyone started laughing and was thinking like, oh, come on. That's silly. Of course you're going to have a team. And now I'm like, I don't know. that's kind of how things have gone a little bit with a lot of these companies in that middle tier. You know, the big ones start to be able to be like, all right, we can bring people in house and afford it. But it does make me worry about this model a little bit where it's like everybody, like what core competency does the property manager have now?

Because I feel like before 2020, like in 2019, it was like the property manager took a lot on their plate and they were doing a lot of things that the homeowner didn't want to do or couldn't do. And their fee was so justified. Now I think the homeowner has the same mindset too of like when I'm hiring a property manager. What am I actually getting for that? what am I paying that fee for and how hard is it for me to recreate it? And they don't know, honestly, until they do it if they like it or don't like it. I would say, like, broadly speaking, most people don't realize how hard that is and how time consuming that is. And then they do it and you see that all the time.

And I'm sure you saw it when you're up inbound leads or people that are like, yeah, I'm doing this myself right now and I don't want to do this anymore. But it can be a little bit of a what's it called like a golden handcuff type thing too, or if you have a home that does 100,000 year in gross revenue and then you give it to a property manager. And maybe the property manager is not as detailed or, as you are. Maybe the property manager takes it from 100 to 90 and then they take their 20%. And then they have fees and you go, oh man, I only got 65 this year. Like you took a big pay cut on

that and you go, is it worth my time and my effort, my energy for one property to make an additional X dollars in revenue. It depends on so many factors. So I think it is something I think about a little bit. And I'm saying this as a vendor where it's like, please hire me to do your marketing. But at the same token, I'm just like, what competency do you have in your own company? And how much do you like wake up every day like hair on fire to be like, I'm going to figure out how to do the best pricing in insert market here. Destin, Florida, Hilton Head, San Diego, whatever market you're in. I do worry about that a little bit. I don't know if that's actually the best thing for a lot of people to outsource everything and then just say, oh yeah, this person

does my pricing, this person does my marketing, this person does my website, this person, and I understand why people do it. And again, I'm the benefit of that. So I'm talking gets my own business model here to some degree, but I do worry if that can go too far in a company. And then it's like, what's your actual identity of some of the different external contractors? It's, So the one trend, I will say that I have observed more just, we'll say visually, but just to understand, I mean, the industry is getting younger. And I think that's, it's interesting. Just to think of a lot of the people who entered the industry in the odds, in the early teen, stuff like that, had done something else, had grown. had grown a different business and then came into this.

Like, I don't think there were as many people that started, like that started a property management company and grew it with a true business, planned business goal. We've talked about that. It's just you fall into the business a lot of times in what we do here. But I do think that as we've gotten younger, this is, this is going to feel old man, shouting at the clouds here. I can feel it. But we're going to try to keep it not,

not to that level. But I do. I think that with that, the people who had to bootstrap, who had to put in 12 hour, 14 hour days, that mindset is different than some of the younger property managers who are coming in who see an efficient way to run the business. And probably saw a video or two or went to a boot camp or workshop or did this, did that. But I think that that kind of leads to those old school property managers, they have the in-house team because that's, now again, are they wasting some on labor? Probably. They probably held on to a few people that shouldn't have been there and vice versa. But I think that is. It's when you're running it as a business versus running it as a hospitality business, those are two very different things. And I'm not saying that we're losing the hospitality.

I think we're working around that a little bit. I think we're in that quasi weird area of AI trying to find where AI can improve the guest experience without removing people, remote removing the hospital. Like we want to give them a good experience without removing the hospitality there. So this massive shift towards tech, towards 27 vendors, towards this and that. Yeah, you can run what on paper looks like a good business, an effective business, something like that. But ultimately, are we driving better hospitality experiences, more sustainable businesses? I don't know that that's the case. And I think that that's something that when you're focused on that GBR, like 10K,000, the 100K, whatever those numbers are,

you do start to forget about those four people that are staying in that home or the two people, the couple that's having a long romantic weekend or the pet, you know, Fido who comes along with the family and make sure that they have a good experience. I hope that that is still front of mind with any, because it starts with the marketing. Like any of the marketing messaging that you're putting out there is going to drive and set the expectation for that homeowner. or that guest when they stay with you, when they enter your program, when they do all those things.

So all the marketing that you're doing does have to be geared towards setting that up, setting up that experience. And if it is hands off, low touch, maybe less hospitality. I don't know. It's where I don't mind us getting, making more money as an industry and growing the industry.

But are we growing the industry by taking those actions? I don't know. Well, it also comes down to like the guest expectations have changed a lot over this five years too, right? Like I think there's stories of this, you know, where the first like my entry point into the space, let's say again, let's call it end of 2013 beginning of 2014. Like I saw back then, you know, these property managers that were offering these properties with like here at the beach markets with like VHS players and box, you know, old school like box TVs in them. And in my head, I'm just like, come on. Like that's a little bit absurd. Right.

But then I'm thinking back to it. I'm like, well, this probably were bought in the 2000s at some point. And they just left them there, like not broken, right? Like, hey, you're at the beach, go outside. You know, like there was almost that mindset of just like the guest expectations were like, hey, is it kind of clean? Is it kind of what the picture looked like? Is it reasonable enough?

And they just kind of roll with it, right? They weren't really sitting there and, you know, having this, this idea of like, you know, four season standards. But to be fair, the prices were a lot cheaper back then. But yeah, what do you? I mean, is that way you were kind of going to go down the price. And I was going to say, and the alternative was four walls. That's it.

Like that's that's like we didn't have to do anything better than this is not a hotel room inside a massively stacked hotel. Yeah. That's like this was this was the nuance of oh, I get to go somewhere special. Yeah. This is someone's house. Yeah. This is someone's house.

Yeah, exactly. How cool is that? And I got it to myself. But, you know, during that temporary, I think the moment you start charging 500, 700, $700 a thousand a night, you then start to be like, well, the guess, expects this level of premium experience that they don't always get. So I think that is a bit of a change in our industry of the last five years as, you know, and there was a post on LinkedIn the other day talking about it, which is that if you get a bad score on value, you know, somewhat regularly,

it proves that you're pricing things to your maximum ability. You know, I forget who posted it. It might have been Taylor. It could have been someone else. But, you know, it stuck with me a little bit after I read it because I'm like, that's, that makes a lot of sense to me around the fact that like if you're if you're undercharging, and I think a lot of single property host do this on Airbnb so they can be fully occupied. Oh, it's so rare that I'm ever, you know, unoccupied. I'm like, yeah, because you're charging 200 bucks a night for a property and you're delivering a $500 per night experience. So it's like, yes, I believe you because you're basically working really hard to make, you know, whatever, 40, 50K a year off this property. Maybe a little bit more

if they have one or, you know, two or three properties or something like that. But it's, I think that that's another thing that professional, quote unquote professional property manager is brought in, which is funny because Airbnb in the past, up until a few months ago, I would argue, kept all these professional property managers at an arm's length and almost kind of didn't want them on the platform. Like they tolerated it, but they almost didn't want it. Only recently they said like, okay, we better embrace these people and figure out how to get them to provide a good service so that, you know, we can do it there. And there was some Chesky quote that leaked. I think it was in a skipped article or people that I knew that were there. We had a few clients that

went to that event in San Francisco a few months ago. And they did another one, I think, in Mexico City. They said, Brian Chesky said something to the effect of professional property managers on our platform are our worst rated and our best rated. So it's like there's such this delta between like a well-run property ownership company where it's like, wow, we can actually provide way better service than a single host because you can ask at any moment, hey, you know, the dishwasher broke and, oh, we'll have a tech on a truck rolling over to you in five minutes, right? Whereas like the single property host is just going to call Rob, his maintenance guy and hope that Rob's not, you know, out skiing or out of the beach depending on the destination and then, you know,

doing that kind of stuff. So I think that's another shift or, you know, for sure is that professionalization has brought people that are in it for all the right reasons, to your point. And then in it for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately as well, which is like, oh, this is a great way that I can make more money and I'm going to get all these, you know, whatever. And I'm going to make more money off this, but they're not really actually acting really to guess best interest. They're, it's more of a get rich, quick kind of thing. And that's not really exactly what's going to provide our industry with the best light.

And again, you know, when I, I always say this when I go outside of our bubble and I talk people that are not in our industry about the short term mental industry, a lot of them have pretty negative feedback. If you go on Reddit or if you go on X or, you know, formally known as Twitter and you just search Airbnb someday and just click at the comments and reviews, you would think that we're like, that we're, I don't know, like punching grandmas in the face over here sometimes. people, a lot of people hate the short-term rental industry, both from a guest perspective and from like a neighbor perspective. Like there's a lot of vitriol and anger out there towards us. And yet

somehow we keep growing. You know, so that that's often what I find too is a bit odd is when I think back on it. You know, if you told me, and I think Tyana talked about this previously with when VIRME did these studies way back when, when they were kind of how many people had even heard of a vacation rental or stayed in one or used at the time and platform like VRBO. I mean, the number was so low. It was like less than 10% of people. Now that, number is like well over. It has to be, right? Over 70% of people. If we went in New York City and stopped 100 grand of people in the street and said, have you, are you, wherever Airbnb, what does Airbnb do explain it to me? Or have you stayed in Airbnb, quote, Airbnb before. It would be

like 90%, I would imagine, or more people that have done it. You know, someone like my grandpa hasn't, he's 92, but he doesn't travel anymore. But, you know, other than that, right, like anyone that travels is probably considered this as an option. So now it's like, yeah, how do we keep it from here? How do we keep it the product that people want from here? Keep the quality high and and keep building on it, it's going to be hard because there's so many forces that are working against us. And the complexity of these businesses is so high too. Again, going back to things that I've read or picked up over the years, there's like 70 different discrete things that a property manager might do on a regular basis. You know, pricing and marketing, which is what we

talk about, of course, but, you know, accounting and property maintenance care, you know, owner reporting financial taxes, like there's a thousand things you have to do. And, you know, the profit margins suck on top of that. All this work. And, you know, you're going to be a master of all trades and we're not even going to pay that well to do it. So it's really challenging. Right. It is. It's, I mean, I think that that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's easy to not be able to look back. It's easy to get sucked in the bubble. But I think this is, it's an important conversation to have. And for us, let's just look back in the time machine and say, who those were not such fun times. Or this is kind of a tough time or this is what's making

this time. Sometimes it's, it's just saying it and identifying what, what was good, what's not so good and just acknowledging is helps us grow, helps us heal a little bit in some cases, you know, a little bit of everything. Well, that was a fun little trip down memory. Lane Paul. We'll put a bow on this one and leave the dear listener remade at the end of this one. A request for a review. Go to your podcast app of choice.

Click five stars. Leave us a review on iTunes, Spotify. That's where we get the most downloads according to our fancy, shmancy analytics. So we appreciate a review there the most. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day. And we'll come back with a more marketing focus one next week. But this was fun. So we appreciate it.

And we'll catch you next time.