Heads In Beds Show - The Only Way To Actually Get Your Homeowner Marketing To Work

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul discuss why most vacation rental managers overlook outbound marketing, how to reconnect with past guests and inquiries, and the best ways to use calls, texts, emails, and automation to increase bookings.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 and Bet Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, we're live. The red light is flashing. What is happening? What's going on? I was just doing a quick air quality check for Lakeville. Last night, we were in the 500s. Anything over 100 is unhealthy.

So things are not good in Minnesota right now with regard to the wildfires. We're down. We were a little while ago. We were at 380. Now we're down to 282. Still significantly unhealthy and not encouraged to go outside. So now you know why my children were screaming in the background during our little prep time here. But I hope you have some better news than that for what's happening with you right now.

Yeah, we've got some rain, which has helped a little bit too with respect to. We had a drought. But luckily, no fire has popped up at least nothing meaningful here in the Carolinas. So, yeah, I feel like it's not relative, isn't it? When you're dealing with, when you're dealing with things, there's always like that context and their side of your whole state or province, I think, is where these fires are in Canada. Could be burning right now. So it's, yeah, that's a lot worse than like us complaining about a little bit of dry weather.

But luckily things have been bounced back a little bit. So my grass on my lawn is like actually a little bit green right now, but it had been like dark brown. And at one point, the city was like, don't use your water. We need water for more important things. Yeah, definitely reversal there. It's funny, right? Like the weather will indicate how things are going to look in your outside environment. So too does the ability for you to generate homeowner leads.

It is a lagging indicator. That's our thesis and our topic today of things that have happened before. So this is a cool one that I think we've got structured out here. Maybe we've touched on bits and pieces of the topic before, but I think we've got a new fresh angle on it. Hopefully the listener would agree once we get into it here of what this means. So I think what I see over and over again, I'm curious your thoughts on this is that most vacation managers I talk to

think that they have more of a sales problem than they do a branding and awareness problem. So they will do things like hire a business development person. they will start some bottom funnel, like bottom awareness level marketing channels, whether it be direct mail, whether it be ads, et cetera, et cetera. And I've run some of these things before. So I'm not saying these aren't good things to do. In fact, they are going to talk about why they are a good thing in a moment. But basically, those things don't dream up the responses that you hope for

because you've actually fundamentally skipped some of the steps that are early on in this process. So today I think what we're going to try to do our best of is work that you could be doing that's going to help so that moment when a homeowner comes and checks you out at the first time, you're actually ready for it. And I think when you turn on these things in the wrong order, you try to do direct response before your brand is ready for a homeowner to get excited by signing with you. You actually do more harm than good because you've actually created two problems. Number one, you spend money that you maybe not even have to go get leads that are not

going to convert and sign for you, which is problematic. And you might have actually potentially even done some damage to your reputation or your brand. People go to check it out and they go, these guys aren't that serious. I'm not going to list with them. They're not as good as insert competitor here. So a lot of problems here. And yeah, curious your thoughts on us as we dive into it, given that you've worked on

this a lot over the years, last few years. This was probably one of the things that it was a sixth sense. He developed over time that I could tell within probably the first five minutes of talking to someone whether or not they were going to be successful. And where it became more abundant was in that scenario you're laying out there of doing things a little too early on. We had some businesses that were trying to grow their business from scratch while developing

while trying to sell owners on a concept that they hadn't really fully fleshed out and that was something that many times

it was not a matter of what's your USB it's where's your logo we don't have that yet where's your website we don't have that yet and you are

you're thinking about the concept of sending marketing to someone spending money to send marketing materials most often postcards and then you're going to

send them from that postcard to a website but dozen things are you going to get a call to a business that they're going to try to verify that really doesn't have a footprint out there so I do I think that this is something like as you were just explaining this to me and I think we we turned this from a micro idea to really something that I think a lot of people maybe don't think of it is it's we think about the traveler experience being different from the homeowner whining and dining versus more

of a quick impact type of thing. But that whining and dining becomes a whole lot easier if you've got this big elephant in the room under control and that's your branding. So I do, I think that this is going to be a fun conversation one way or another, but it's one that

I may have a little more flesh in the wound here of being able to have some battle stories. But we do. We like, there is a process, there is a system, there is a fundamental flow that those homeowners go through. And I think that if you don't have some of that very, again, baseline information in place, you can't ever expect to be

successful with that marketing because you're lacking what people are really using to differentiate you from the crowd. It's almost like that movie The Dictator. I don't know if we've talked about this one before, but at one point they're giving them this fake tour of North Korea and that they go past the grocery store that they pretend is full of fresh fruit and vegetables and food and stuff like that. And then at one point he breaks loose from the control of the North Koreans and he goes taps on it and it's a basically like a movie set. They taps it. It's all fake. There's nothing real behind it. And that's what this can be for a lot of people, right, is that you put this very good looking postcard out. You put a great ad out. You build a good landing page. Maybe that's

one, that front facing thing. But if someone taps on it and they start to dig under the surface, is there actually something there? Is there actually apples and oranges and fresh food there? Or is it all just a facade of fake thing? So that's kind of the analogy that I came up with a very weird way to describe this. Because I think that, yeah, and by the way, like we need to go through at some point today to a little bit of, okay, here what you guys are saying, maybe someone listening, but how do you solve this? So it's how would you go if you had to go from zero to five or five to 10 or five to 15? Because yeah, at some point you get big enough where, okay, now I feel comfortable showing the proof. But before you have that, it's the hardest thing to do. So it's kind of like

this idea, the other idea that I have a little bit that maybe we'll do another episode on this in the future is that homeowner leads, the way they flow into companies, management companies, is extremely unequal, whereas guest bookings are actually a little bit more equal. In fact, a single property host may actually outperform, in some cases, a property manager, small, medium, or large in terms of revenue for that one unit or reviews that there's some data that indicates that's the case. So you could run one unit and run it unbelievably well from a guest perspective. In fact, one might argue Arupian B actually rewards that or encourages that behavior. And then on flip side for a homeowner, it's the exact opposite. If you have five homes that are

management and you're in a market where the biggest property manager has 1,000, it's really challenging to become notable, well-known, and have that awareness. So if you know that going in, I think you can set things up to be a little bit more successful. So you hit on one thing their brand. And brand to me is like, what is the promise that you're making? And then what are the attributes or characteristics of how someone would describe your company back to you with proof that you've given them? So if you say Apple is a sleek design product, you can look at the product and we can agree with that that it's designed sleekly by looking at the design of it. Or Apple computers are reliable. You use them a lot. And then therefore, I've had very few bugs and issues over the years.

I feel like they're reliable. So it's this kind of long explanation of how things are lived. but I think the brand a lot of it too, and this was Jason Sprinkle talked about this when we had them on the other show that I did with Brooke for a while, the website design element, like making yourself look really nice is a good starting point.

I've talked with clients recently about things like wrapped vehicles, wrap trucks. That's something that I think can be a strong factor and maybe why someone would be like this company is serious, that they're taking it seriously.

They have these like little proof points, little things. And what each one of these things individually doesn't mean anything. It's almost just like they have to be stacked up like bricks on top of it for someone to go like, oh yeah, this is a company I should consider

because they've invested into a lot of these other pieces. So that's where I think the ROI seeking mindset can be a little bit problematic because it's like there is no ROI in the near term on doing a logo design. Like you don't earn any benefit or brand awareness when you first do the logo design. What gives that logo meaning and what gives your brand meaning is putting a lot of effort and energy behind promoting it and putting it out there in places and talking about it and doing all these things. And then the logo has meaning. And then you get an ROI on it. But you don't get an ROI the moment the logo is created.

So when you go and pay a designer X, $1,000 to that logo, there is no benefit to that. right? When you go do the website design, when you have very little customers or very little traffic coming in, there is no ROI right away. But these are things that you're putting in place that you will then be able to unlock down the road. So that's at least how I think about it. There's some other things that maybe we can go through here on kind of our punch list. I do. I think that just the way, even the car wrap is a good example because I do. I think that's something that it does make you identifiable. But I think sometimes some people do, it gets poo-poot away because it feels more like a vanity project.

but it's not really like it is. It's maybe Godi, maybe audacious, maybe all these things. But are people going to know your brand? Yeah, they are. And I think that's sometimes you have to be comfortable with just acknowledging that you want your brand to be developed, established, and all these things, but big. And it's okay to want to put that out there and feel, again,

if you've developed that framework, the initial framework, and you're comfortable with it, Get it out there. Absolutely. It's more than willing. And this is the type of conversation. This is the type of sales process. This is the type of long-term growth. If you're looking for that, that's part of it.

You have to do those small little things or maybe mid-sized things or some of the bigger things that are going to move the needle to help establish yourself. Because like you say very often, I'm going to steal it from you because you're going to say it again. I guarantee it's that when these leads come through, they're not going to everybody. These homeowners are going to the bare minimum the best of the best.

And those best of the best, they did not get that way overnight. This is a long-term process of certainly, we're not in the one-hit wonder territory. This is, I'll let you speak more to that because it is. I think that concept is very difficult

for people to understand when they're looking at the ease at which Sometimes the bookings come in as opposed to the long time frame and the effort it takes to get some of the homeowner leads across the lines. Yeah, yeah, no, 100%. I think that we mentioned a few things there. I'll go more practical too for a moment here as well. So when a homeowner comes to your site and they look at it and they see no other homes that are remotely similar to their home on your site, again, super, super challenging, right, to actually create that kind of brand awareness because someone's looking at it and then they're going, okay, you're going to make a lot. my five-bedroom luxury, multi-million dollar property, but you only have condos or you only

have stuff that's there. It's a word I use probably overuse sometimes, which is this idea of congruency, that things have to be consistent. If you say you're a luxury company, then everything about your company has to present in a luxurious way. It has to present in a way that mimics that brand ideal or that standard that you want to put out there. And the moment we see something gets done, doesn't feel or doesn't look or doesn't have the perception of being luxury, then you're, again, it's just like pulling on a thread and everything just falls apart. It doesn't work well. So that's another thing, which is like your inventory will attract the type of inventory you're going to keep going down the path in the future. So if you only want luxury

homes, that's what you're after, don't take budget condos. You can't do it. Like as much as, unless you want to make the hardest path possible of convincing someone that what you've done before is not what you're going to do in the future and you have to reposition your whole company, your whole brand, which is very challenging work. Like, it's hard enough to sign a luxury home. It's going to be way harder to sign a luxury home to manage a hundred thousand, 200,000, 300,000 per year type home if you currently have $80 per night condos on your website. It's just, again, the concurrency is not there. And as human beings, we don't always identify this, I think, but we can just see it.

Like we can just notice it. We notice this inconsistency. And as a result, it just falls out from that. And you have no success with it. So I think that's a big one, to be honest with you. If this is what you're going after, you have to be very thoughtful and careful about each one you sign is going to essentially be like my proof of future people that I want to sign more of.

So if I have something that I like and I sign it, it's almost like, too, you have to put in double the effort, triple the effort, than maybe the larger property manager to make that person happy over deliver so that you've got a great reputation so that when that next one comes along, you've got the chance to actually grab it and sign it and work with it.

So that one I'm really big on. Yeah, your thoughts on that. That was something that truly, it surprised me to see the clarity sessions that came through of, I expected, once people have done the search, maybe they'd see a little bit, they'd read a little bit of the information. How many people do go over to the listing side of things?

That is such a typical path. you do, you get a little worried. Maybe they're just looking for bookings. No, they're looking for peak time periods when they expect a rental to be booked, and they're checking your calendar. And then they come back to that management page. Hopefully you've got it in your navigation, all that stuff. But that is a very typical path for people to come through. And I do. It really did surprise me because that's not what I anticipated. Again, I thought the information on that page. If it was as comprehensive and USB driven and special driven and all that stuff, that was going to be enough to sell them. That is such a small part of that journey still. And then that's not

even talking about any of the marketing communication that we're doing after the fact, hopefully, whether it's remarketing, whether it's getting somehow acquiring that email address, getting, sending out cold emails, acquiring that property. Going down the road of all the direct marketing we're doing, but it's, it is, it puts a premium on making sure that there are some clear carryover points and understanding that the way that homeowner is going to explore your website and your brand, it is, we've talked about it, it's the About Us, it's making sure you put a face to your business, it's telling about your business, it's not just saying, it's not just writing a core value, writing a mission statement, it's showing examples of those in real,

a life. I think you have to be in a world where there does feel to be some big boxiness. And again, and the single property managers that don't make you feel local and welcome and special and appreciated, you do. You have to go that extra mile. And I think that's something where when we do think, I guess, you got to pull back that, peel back that onion and try to get into the mindset of all those different people that are going to interact with your business. And certainly homeowners are volume-wise, not as never going to move the needle like a traveler will, but potential-wise, very important to your business. It is. Again, it's one of those where all of those trust signals that you can find,

they have to be visible. They have to be very attainable for that homeowner or for that guess for that matter. That's something that is going to play in if you're booking a $25,000 a week home. I'm going to want to know that you're not just a fly-by-night, someone who's going to take my money, and then maybe not have a home there when I get to actually check in. Yeah. My comment. 100%.

I think the trust kind of is built from all angles. And I think that that's the other thing about trust too, right? It's easy to say you're going to do something or say that you have this great standard or whatever the case may be. And then it's like you can build that up over a long period of time. And then it can get destroyed in a matter of a short period of time as well. The moment that there's some, they go and read a one-star review, it's on they might start to question everything you've said before, even if they believed it, the moment they read that one-star review

from a previous homeowner from a previous guest, they might start to doubt it at that point. So I couldn't agree more. I had a few other things that kind of I thought were like these activity check things that maybe you can grab right as well as someone that's looked at this a lot. Activity of your social media channels, activity of your email list. So these kind of things of, again, a homeowner maybe going and checking out for the first time might go on your Facebook page. They might go on your Instagram page.

Now, are they looking for homeowner educational type content there. I don't believe they are really that often. I think they're looking to see how you're marketing these homes. What kind of engagement are on these page? and a client that I have that I would say has the least trouble right now of signing homes has one of the most engaged social profiles of any client that I work with. We don't run it to be clear. They've an in-house team and they've done some contracted work with some of their vendors in our space, but they do a really good job on social media and they get more inbound leads off their

homeowner marketing. I think because people go check them out and they go, oh wow, these guys have the best properties in this market. These guys have the best social profile in this market. It gets the most views, the most engagement. This is awesome. I want my home featured in this way. Like once you say it aloud, it's like everyone can nod their heads and agree and go like, yeah, that's important. But every most mechanical manager that I talk to, just keep calling back and what's the ROI, what's their ROI? I need to prove that it's working right now in this next five-day window or I'm not going to keep doing it. And it just doesn't work that way. As much as I wish it could, it would make my life easier if that was the case.

It just doesn't work that way if you're trying to build a brand. So I think that's a super valuable thing. Two more things that you hit on there that I want to maybe pile on with slightly different examples or slight nuance would be trust verifications that, and you said this before it, I'm stealing it from you because you stole from me a second ago. Trust verifications that the homeowner can acknowledge or understand. So we were saying before we record, the homeowner doesn't really know what VRMA is. Probably not.

Maybe as I did some digging research, they may be willing to verify what the RMA is. Everyone in our bubble knows what VRMA is. They might know what something like a better business bureau is or like Google reviews or Yelp reviews, these things might be things they know. But Ball, you'd said something to be effective. The chamber is for sure almost something that they're aware of. So if you're listed on the chamber and you're a gold sponsor platinum, whatever for this local chamber site, that's going to be more persuasive than saying that you're a member of these

organizations that people don't know about or brands that just don't have a lot of meaning in the mind of the homeowner or the mind of a guest. That's not saying that winning vacation rental management company of the year for Verma is not a big deal. It is. But winning the county award for the best local vacation manager is probably just as impactful for some of those people that are actually doing the due diligence and looking into the scenes. That was something that we did. We wanted to make sure Airbnb Subaru, the host and stuff like that, that's recognizable.

Maybe it's something that probably moves the needle more than Burma or a BRCA nation or wherever we were looking at any given time there. Not saying that involvement isn't good in those organizations and there's value there all over the place, but that's not going to move

the needle for ultimately these potential homeowners. So I think that anytime it is, we tried to do some advertising in Quora. We tried to do some advertising in Reddit to try to find some of the subreddits where people were doing some of that research. I think those are opportunities that are a little more hit and miss, but understanding that is a potential that someone's going to use.

I think we don't really know right now, and it's the scary part about how people are doing their research for the management site. of things. I have a mega prompt that I use to do evaluations of the counties and the cities and who the major players are. And it's always interesting to see why those businesses are chosen. And again, I think my prompt is pretty comprehensive. So I'm wondering, there are other people doing the same thing that I am in Claude and Chad GPT and Gemini in doing this deep research. So how are the, we know that the trust signals they look at are, that you? Yelps, the Reddits, the highly reviewed areas, user-generated content areas of the internet,

which may not always be, I don't know, as favorable to some of our businesses. So I do. I think that's something that even the concept of what we think of as online reputation management now, think about the, I can go back to the X scans where you scan your business, you had the 75 websites that you showed up for, let's optimize those listings and do your, everything. like that. I still think there's value in that. I think you want to know where your website shows up. But we don't know what that next step of that is. We don't know really what the true gauge is going to be for someone when they're saying, who is the top property management

company I should consider for renting out my vacation rental or Airbnb? We don't know exactly what it is. And one prompt is going to be different than the next prompt. It's going to be the different from the next prompt. And we can go down the AI bubble all we want. But it does. It demonstrates all those different places where people can do that research. And you're talking about social, not just your own social feed, but getting back into those Facebook groups as well. That's places where we, that was a lot, we got a lot of anecdotal stories from property managers who had either created their own Facebook group, for admins in a Facebook group,

didn't even have to do that much work within it. They just, every once in a while, would have a, one of their owners pop in and say, yeah, this is what works for me. The self-referrals there are pretty valuable. But again, that's not necessarily the direct work that you're doing. You're not doing that to gain homeowners. You're doing it to build a community, foster the communication, hopefully get some insights in, yeah, if you can get a few passive deals to come in through that channel,

then yeah, it's a great opportunity there. But it's a long and varying path that people take to ultimately vet your business. And that's what I would do if I were doing you giving away or putting the keys of a million dollar, $2 million, $3 million asset into the hands of a property manager. Yeah. I think it really a good point, which is the, and I've talked about this concept before, too, the homeowner is pretty smart, right? And I think sometimes we, I don't know if you think we can trick them.

I don't know what we think, to be honest with you. But it's like you can't trick them, right, very rare cases. It's the thing where they probably have that property because they had success in business or life elsewhere most of the time. Of course, they might have inherited or whatever the case may be. But the majority of the time, they earned that and they purchased it. And as a result, you have to pass a pretty high bar in order to earn the privilege. It's a privilege to manage a $5 million home and $2 million home that should not be given to anybody. You know what I mean?

You are going to have a meaningful story or you're going to be meaningful part of that person's life and their financial trajectory of what might be their second most expensive thing they own their life. they might have spent 20 years saving up to buy that property, right? If you just think about all these things and say them out loud, you realize, yeah, this is, this should be hard. It just be easy. But by the way, if it's really easy for you to get inventory, wouldn't it be easy for you to lose inventory as well? So you expect when you sign inventory that it's going to stay in your program for a long

period of time, right? Well, if that's the case, then it needs to be hard to sign the inventory. Otherwise, if it comes on your program, it would come off your program right when some guy down the street says, I can do it better than Paul. Paul's terrible, hire Conrad's company or vice versa, right? Well, and I think, like, ultimately, you're accountable to whatever you say on those calls. Like it's this thing. You can't just say,

or you're going to make you $75,000. If you make $35,000, that is not going to work. So I, like, this is, it's where I struggle with those rental projections. Move it up a little bit. Why? That is what, that is the standard you are being held to now moving forward. You make that decision. This is not something that we need to, like, play.

If it's that important, if that moving the needle, this 3% or 4%, is that important to them that you need to fudge in the number to get, don't want that. You don't want that homeowner on your, I'm going to tell you, you are not interested in having that person in your portfolio more than 12 months, but it is like, that's the, why would we, I think there are times, again, people newer into the business where it does seem very transactional of the guest engagement is very short. We have very quick sales cycle, maybe, and it is, Maybe you do have a compelling offer or something like that. But ultimately, I have never seen that work long term or be sustainable or certainly scalable.

You can get a little flash in the pan every once in a while. But as I understand it, that's not something that those successful businesses really like to do. They like to build sustainable and scalable strategies that are going to help them grow over the long term and not. roller coaster around a little bit. But that's me. You bring up a memory for me. Those not our outline, but it's something I've heard a long time ago. And I've probably given this to about a dozen people since.

And they all nod their heads and think it's a good idea, but none of them do it, which proves how hard this is. But it's okay. Paul, what did you do last year with your property manager that had the property before? Make it a round number. I did 50K with revenue, gross revenue on this property in 2025. And you go, okay, cool. We're going to do better than your last property manager did.

and I'm extremely confident. Here's how confident I am. For the first 50K in bookings, we're going to do a 15% commission, which is 10% less than you're paying with the old manager. So you're going to make more because we're going to drive that same revenue.

Every dollar I get over a 50K, we split 50-50. So you're still making more money if I outperform what you did last year, but I'm making a lot of money too. And therefore, it's very incentive driven for me to get over 50K so that I can outperform by a wide margin

and then get that 50% commission. So for every booking I'm getting towards the end of the end of the end up being very meaningful, right? So imagine a scenario where you can do that and consistently termed properties that used to do 50K with the old manager and do $75,000 properties with your management skills and ability to give how much more commission you could earn. And it's a good offer because if I don't beat the old guy, you get more money in your pocket.

If I do beat the old guy, then I can do it. And shall we not remember, there was different versions of rented when Andrew McConnell sold the company. But one version of this company that I do remember distinctly was this idea of guaranteeing income. It'd be like you are going to, what do you want out of the property? I want 75K. Okay, we'll guarantee that. And if we have the funds to back it up. Here's the proof of our funds.

We can guarantee that for you. And if you're less than that number, we'll make up the difference. If you're at that number above it, I don't know what the, I don't know exact parameters were. This was like a decade ago. But it's a really strong, compelling offer, right, if you think about it. And I think if you're that confident in your ability, and this going back to what I said a few minutes ago, maybe we can tie into that for a second. If you're new, you got to kind of have some kind of hook.

You can't just say the same things everybody else is. So if you say, this home, I'm very confident we'll do $55,000. I guarantee you it'll do $55,000. If it's less than that, I'll take it out of my pocket and write you a check on December 1. If we're not going to hit that, maybe we'll know it, December 1 or whatever January 1, if it's not going to hit that metric or not, and I'll make up the difference. Because you said you were happy with 50K from your other manager.

I guarantee I'm going to do 55 or better. And then, yeah, I get it, right? You have to be confident in your ability. If you write 20 of those checks and you can't cash them, then it's concerning. I understand that. But it's like you have to sometimes break through the noise and have something that's somewhat novel or unique there. And it actually forces you imagine that scenario how honest and ethical that forces you

to be. Because you're like, I better pick a number here that is good enough for the homeowner to sign, but not so good that I'm guaranteeing some number that I would be very uncomfortable if I couldn't reach it. And then it's like the truth serum comes out quickly. It's like everyone thinks they have that kind of tolerance for risk until you actually set it up there. And then it becomes a challenge. So that's a really good one, right? Where it's, if you want to be small and stand out from the crowd, it's, I guarantee you that I'll do better to your last manager. If not, I'll pull it on my pocket and hand it to you. That's the difference.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is. The offer is, I think the offer is much more important in those competitive markets when it is. It's not just that you have half a dozen good options. it's that you have a two dozen really good option and like top performing options that are viable solutions for the problems that you have. And I think that's where some of these, I don't know, some of the, it does feel like it gets a little gimmicky in some of the bigger markets where you do like you've got to be gitch, you got to be off the wall a little bit. And I think that's, again, I think that's fine from a relationship. management type of thing of if you can establish a positive relationship with that homeowner, then whatever it takes to get there, I have no problem with that. But when it becomes more of a caricature and like it's a joke,

like, and then we all have seen and heard of those, like it was just funny. And then you're literally joking on yourself. I think that's always my concern is that it's going to be taken. Like you do still have to run that professional. and I think there are more people, there are some companies, there's some brands, there's some markets that just you do need to be more traditional with the way you run your business and be, have that full, fully ingrained hospitality and whatever that looks like there. And so again, I think that's where I think if nothing else, what we're identifying here is

why it is so difficult to, and I think we talk about it every time we talk about owners. And it's more than just they live in the market, they own a property in the market, they own a property in the market. There are so many different types of homeowners out there. There are the investment driven ones. There are the, the, I want, this is, you can have it for four weeks a year. I just want to get 10 grand, whatever that number is, something like that. Like, understanding and keeping those homeowners happy might be the most difficult part of that sales process. Is that getting them in the door is ultimately going to be easy in the grand scheme because once they're there, but again, just as easy to get them out. Because that's when the actual work of marketing yourself begins again, because now you have to market them on the promises that you made early on and make sure that they understand the value versus every other postcard and every other email and every other phone call that they're getting from other BD people and saying, hey, we think you can do.

We can do better for you. So, I don't know. Yeah, I want to pick up a few odds and ends before we kind of come to a close here because I think that there's some factors and some things that you can look at that kind of indicate how you're going to have the success. So one thing I skipped over earlier that I didn't mean to intentionally was testimonials and more importantly, video testimonials from owners. So I'm a big believer in this.

Anyone can say that they're good. I can go out there and say whatever I want. I can go enter a new industry tomorrow and say, I'm an expert in blah, blah, blah, AI for pet rental companies, whatever, or for pet companies. I don't even know what I'm saying right now. and whatever, right? But the moment that someone else says it, who's actually your customer, who's actually your homeowner that you work with, it is significantly more convincing. We all know that people are going to be self-serving, but there's something in our brain where we

believe the testimonial or the feedback from someone else who, even more ideally is similar to us. Oh, I'm someone who lives in Myrtle Beach who owns a second home in Florida, and this person is giving a video testimony for this company and why it's great. So I think that's a really important one. Again, things that, you know, I joke about this before. This is one I've given to a lot of clients. Very few have taken action. One that I've worked with is taken action on it incredibly well. And his homeowner sales have been excellent this year. He signed more inventory this year than I believe any other year of his company, except for maybe one of the boom years. So his ability to get inventory even during peak season is really impressive.

And I think those things absolutely assist. Are they all the credit for it? Of course not. But they absolutely assist in that sales process. So couldn't be, couldn't agree more. Things that tell you for building a brand, by the way. I've said this before, but just kind of the idea of someone searching for you specifically on Google. So all the best companies that we get a chance to work with and collaborate with, when I go in their search console data, what do I see is their number one keyword almost every single time. Their brand name. People go on Google and they look specifically for insert company name here.

That is a great sign that you're heading down the right path from a brand building perspective. That reflects in real life. Engagement on your social posts. People responding to your emails. People leaving you good reviews without even prompting. I have clients that I work with. And I go, oh, have you asked anyone to leave Google reviews? They're like, no.

And they have 400 Google reviews, like 4.8, 4.9. I'm like, I bet you're really good because people wouldn't go leave these review unless they felt like they needed to or they had a really good experience. So the moment we like sprinkle a little bit of marketing into that, it's like putting gas on a fire, right? Like it just makes everything so much better. Guest marketing is your homeowner marketing. Owner of Secret Shop, you, Paul alluded to this earlier, but they go online, they search, they look, et cetera. I love the idea we talked about this earlier. Online or real world marketing stuff.

A billboard, why not? But like yard signs or signage, if you can put those on homes, if that's allowed in your destination, love it. I think it's a great thing to invest into. And not the cheapest one possible. If anything goes the other way, make it the most premium sign possible. It's really nice. It's notable. People see your brand.

they see your company, put a QR code on it. We have a client we did that with in San Diego. People scan these QR codes nonstop, again, both a homeowner and a guest marketing thing, I would say. We guess marketing is public. People can see it. They know when it's not there. So when they can see it there, it makes a really big difference.

I would say both review quantity and review quality are important. Gun to my head, I'll take good reviews over not a lot of them and hope that we can get a lot more over a company. And I've worked with a few, unfortunately, over the years that have thousands of reviews, but their average is 3.7, 3.8. It takes a lot of math to undo that hole. you've dug yourself into, you've got to get a lot of five-star reviews if you've had two, three, four hundred one or two-star reviews to balance it out and get it back up to a four point two, three, four,

five, six, whatever the case may be on Google. So really hard. And yeah, I think the more you can involve yourself into the community, the more examples and proof that you can give from other notable things in your community, I think the better you are. So doing a co-branded webinar presentation with the best realtor in the market, if you're not a real estate agent or don't have realtor attached to you, that's a really compelling, interesting idea to me as well, right? Like you saying, hey, I partner with the best agent and we're going to give you the report, the lowdown and what's happening to real estate values in this market in 2026. Those are all really valuable things. So yeah, a lot of things there. Maybe, Paul, do you want to bring us to a close here on that? I need inventory

now section. So people may listen this and go, okay, there's great. There's a lot of things there that we could maybe be doing. But I think there has to be things that there's no tactic that, like, a stranger is going to just sign up right away. We can agree on that if you don't have the brain awareness. But what are things that people can do to kind of maybe mitigate that or move the need a little bit in the short term? Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that we always talked about the owner referral program. If you can get other homeowners, your homeowners talking about how great things are for them, most of the time, especially in some of those condo communities and on-site property management situations, if you can get them talking to one or two people,

then a lot of more conversations can happen there. Same thing with realtors. I think that's something that a lot of people who are just getting into the business, that's how they got their initial inventory on. It was through word of mouth that, hey, my brother and my cousin and this and that, they can, can you take care of their homes too? Yeah, same thing. You get a partnership with a realtor or getting someone who, I think realtors are something that we did a lot of those co-branding items and we talked about putting business cards in for the rentals, for the rentals themselves and doing some of those. But I do think that making those relationships, developing those relationships early is going to make all of this a whole lot easier because they're the ones who are,

they know when the homes are on the market, they're the ones who are early on, higher up in that buying and selling process, and they're the ones that if you do have a good relationship, regardless of how many other vacation rental managers they maybe work with or refer to, if you have a positive relationship, you give that homeowner a great experience, you are going to get more of those leads to come through there as well, because ultimately, if they are a realtor and a market, where they're selling a lot of vacation rental properties, that is something that they want to be able to recommend out to someone who is going to make people happy. That's something, their reputation is on the line as well.

But yeah, I think that for those items, it is, if you can get more of a direct hook, if you can make a special offer, an onboarding package, something that is going to make people feel like, oh, this is the thing that's going to move the needle for me right now. And I think especially as we're looking at, we're recording this second week, third week of July, over the next six weeks, that's when these rent projections, the switching incentives are really going to start to come into play where people are evaluating the last seven months and saying, am I happy with what I saw? Am I not so happy with what I saw? And this, I think we consider the next three months for non-mountain markets to be premium selling time. So this is your opportunity

to really foster some of those relationships as you're tailing off of busy season, hopefully heading into shoulder season, making some of those realtor, consider something for your homeowner, see if you can get more people to refer you out, get some realtor relationships in place, and again, put together some type of income guarantees, some type of whatever it is. Maybe it's just an onboarding package. Maybe you're just leveling up their home to what your standard is across the board. Something can happen right now. So those are some needle movers that people can look at as we're heading into Q3 and Q4.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. You know what else people need to do, Paul, to get more homeowners? They've got to do a lot of marketing, got to do a lot of brand building like you talked about today. They need to keep listening to the Heads of Bed Show. So the best way that you can make sure that the Heads and Bed Show keeps on going is to leave us a review so we get more downloads. So we get super enthusiastic about recording next week. Go on your favorite podcast, Appalach, iTunes, Spotify, click five stars. We appreciate it.

And we'll catch you on the next episode. Help you have an awesome rest of your day. Good on.