Heads In Beds Show - The Vacation Rental Spring Slowdown Is Here - What Can You Do To Drive Demand?

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad dive into the upcoming Google Analytics 4 "switchover" and cover the settings you want turned on and what's OK to leave OFF as you work on getting ready for a Google Analytics 4 world (weather you like it or not...).⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellAfter Sonder, Vacasa Receives Notice of Delisting from NasdaqU.S. Market Review: Sluggish Supply and Roaring Demand Maintain March RevPAR 🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 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 Beds 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, how's it going today? Good. I think we've avoided our technical issues of last week, knock on wood a little bit here for just making sure that we're all in good shape. It's starting another month away. We're

into May now. It doesn't seem like that's possible that we're in the fifth of the year, but somehow we've made it. So sun is shining. It's a beautiful Monday. How are you feeling? Yeah, I'm doing okay. I've had some personal things come up recently but we're here we're recording so i'm here to focus on the good side of things that's for sure and yeah it's do you want to hit him with a little it's going to be may from justin do you want to hit any jt right now or you good i'm gonna i'm gonna move past this time and maybe maybe next time when i'm feeling less that's the after hours that have probably yes that's an after hours we just gotta keep adding to that this is gonna be quite the episode when we go over to that after hours yeah at some point but if you missed it i think two episodes we pitched

the idea of doing build up bookings or sorry not build up bookings although we could touch on that sorry heads and beds after dark and heads and beds after dark would be not necessarily inappropriate but just like any topic goes and we would just record it and put it on a different feed and if that appeals to you let me know maybe we'll maybe'll do that. Who's having a dark time right now is the lovely company named Vacasa. So they're not doing so hot. So as we record today, Skiff put out an article, I believe it was yesterday, that last week Sonder received notice of delisting from NASDAQ. And then I believe at the time of recording this, Vacasa has also received said delisting notice. So that's not good. I'm not an expert in area. I feel like my amateur knowledge, it's not good. And we're sometimes careful a little bit to

not like overly criticize Vacasa because I think it'd be easy to clip something we say out of context. But this is bad. This seems very bad. So what's your read on this? Like you I think you flagged this and caught this even before me, but it seemed like a lot of people were sharing this on different networks and platforms and had commentary. And it seems like the general professional manager opinion of a cost is pretty low. And the general opinion of a lot of people in the industry of the cost of the company seems pretty low, which is unfortunate. There's obviously great people that work there, but yeah.

What's your take on this? Where are we headed from here? Based on what you know. Yeah, it's, they've got, I think they've got the 180 day notice now to try to write the ship to try to get back to listing and doing all that i think i think it's not 180 it might be 90 i don't i also don't pretend to be an economics professor or anything on this stuff but it is it's a bad sign i think if nothing else it's that a lot of those and i know sondra and macas are not the only companies that came in with a SPAC. And that was a very interesting concept to be bringing people,

bringing companies to market. It is. I think if you look historically at the last- Have any of them turned out good? Sorry, this is a tough topic. No, no. And I think that's really, that's what I was diving into is I don't know that a whole lot that came from SPACs have been successful. Now, again, I don't keep as close a look at the stock market as I could or maybe should, but it seems like most of those companies that were trying to go public late 2020, early 2021, mid 2021, even into last year, you just don't hear a lot of them being super successful. And I don't know if some of those were affected by the banking credit issues that were taking place earlier this year. Hard to say. But I do. I hope

for the manager or for anybody who's using Vacasa or Sonder, I hope that they are able to write the ship. I would tend to think that this will probably end up making everything go back to private. Some individual buyer, as we talked about, is going to take it back private. And if it is, if they can write the ship that way, I guess more power to them. It has been a bit of a roller coaster. I guess what I hope is that it doesn't cease to exist, that someone does seize the value, seize the opportunity that's there. Because yeah, in some markets, that's does take, sees the value, sees the opportunity that's there.

Because yeah, in some markets, that's still a very powerful tool. It's an engine still. You don't get the amount of bookings that Picasa has had, that Sondra has had over the last years without having something in place. So there's value there. I just hope someone can find that value and is able to kind of spread that out. And it is, again, it's more of, it's one of those where if Vakas is successful, we're probably all successful as an industry. So having that as another outlet that is, is I think overall beneficial for the holistic space. space. How much harder is it going to be for someone else down the road to go public knowing that the first time they tried this, it failed. And then I feel like there would be the classic comparison of whatever fictional company, insert name here, I won't say any names, but I think

there's some out there in the industry that are trying to go down this path. I think V trips being one that would be an example of that. They're certainly on that trajectory in some sense, in terms of amount of inventory, they at least have, they're at least in the same discussion. I don't think they're quite as big as FACASasa is today by any stretch, but I feel like they would be very critical of the company. And I wonder, like you said, if it's actually not really good for our industry, because how are we going to attract, like, I wonder if a guest were to hear that they might like not trust the platform. It's like, Oh, what if my, what is the, what is the company managing my home goes out of business like Vacasa did or something? I agree. That would be a bad thing for our industry and

the investment that comes into it. I don't know. I've said that before. I did a LinkedIn post a while ago about we were over-indexed for a while on venture capitalists investing into our industry. And I was like, who cares? They're wrong 99% of the time. And I meant it as a flippant comment of don't worry so much about a company getting venture capital funding because I feel like it doesn't mean a lot, to be honest with you. Because since I've started not really studying that space, but just understanding it a little bit more, I just realized, like I said, they're wrong 99% of the time is it doesn't really mean much that you get venture capital money. A lot of people have gotten venture capital money and have done absolutely

nothing with it. Obviously, the cost of technically succeeded, like you said, they went through the SPAC, I did a quick Google and I don't see a single SPAC company that appears to be successful. I guess DraftKings, these are outside of my... I don't pretend to understand the industry. I do know betting and I know sports betting a little bit, but they're not profitable and they've tumbled down quite a bit. Virgin Galactic, which I think is the... What is that? Richard Branson Space Company.

Open Door, I think. I was about to say Open Table, but that's not right. Open Door was another SPAC company. They did, yeah. That appears to be another kind of failure. At least it's way down. It's not under a dollar like the cost is, but it's kind of on the the wrong path so it seems like this was just a flash in the pan have you seen the zerp things but i remember that terminology c-i-r-p i have not oh so it stands for zero

interest rate phenomenon and it's basically like people saying that this only happened because we were in this like weird little bubble period where interest rates were zero and money was very cheap and free and all this kind of stuff and it feels like the spac was that the like spacs were like this zero interest rate phenomenon which occurred and bacasa slid and free and all this kind of stuff. And it feels like the SPAC was that the like SPACs were like this zero interest rate phenomenon, which occurred and Vacasa slid in there and was successful, I guess, in getting listed. For a while, their stock price was 10 bucks a share. And they were a company that was worth I think, on paper, 20 $30 billion, something like that. Now, obviously, it's crashing down to the floor. Someone shared a thread on Twitter, I shared this, I think on I should reshared it on Twitter, I asked author on Twitter,

they were basically saying that Vacasa had less than $50 million of cash left, and that they owed owners like 30 million or something like that. So they were basically insinuating that the cost was about to run out of cash, like money. And this was about a week ago. So if that's the case, or not, I'm disclosures, this is not investing advice. We're not your CPA, etc. But if that's the case, that seems very concerning. I'm on their investor website right now. And it says that they are releasing earnings, I think again on May 9th or something. So even maybe by the time this comes out, we'll know a little bit better of like their cash picture, but they cut a bunch of people. So I feel like maybe their cash picture might actually be in

a better space because they cut literally millions of dollars of salaries that they were paying out, perhaps foolishly, but they did that. So I'm assuming just literally to get money in the bank, like to actually have more coming in than was going out and try to, that's stressful. I can't imagine what it's like to run a company of that size. I get stressful over our receivables amount, which is probably like 15 seconds of a cost of revenue. So it's challenging. Look, we're not here to dunk on the cost. So it's more so just like a commentary on that. This really hasn't worked. Maybe they figure out a way to turn the ship around. Like you said, a little bit and stay a dollar 50 company or something in the stock market. I don't know, but they're on the wrong path it's unfortunate hopefully they can

be a success story and not a sad oh it just doesn't seem like that's going to work but for our professional manager clients that we work with i don't think they're shedding too many tears over this either to be completely honest with you no and that's i think that's where it's not airbnb but I think Vacasa has, they haven't done themselves a service to the professional managers. It is. The ones they bought are super happy. Right.

Time their exits. Timing wise. Right. Exactly. And I think that is on the Venturi side of things. That's one of the first questions we ask is who's your major competitor? And maybe there's a local or two in there, but it's evolving. Is it an intentional thing that they're trying to dig on the professional managed? No, it's not. That's just the reality.

It's competition and they've provided national competition in a lot of markets. And it is it's competition. Competition can be good too, but I think America that it is once when you've got the big entity of Airbnb and you've got the kind of the vacasa on the other side not it is they have served the traveler side as well but you just have two giants that you can always point at i can't you know i can't be successful because airbnb is taking a look i can't be successful it's that little convenient scapegoat there that yeah again i do hope that it'll whatever happens is going to happen with

vacasa but i think that it is still going to be notable and it's going to be something to watch and as invest and there's probably some people out there who did invest in vacasa and probably are asking some questions there so that's a whole other thing but yeah i know there's people i won't name any names but there's people that i believe on your side of things who have a bunch of options or stock based on employment with Vacasa, previous employment with Vacasa. So if that was once worth, let's say they had 10 or 20 grand, and now it's worth $1,000 coming down to $100 coming down to nothing, that obviously would not be a great situation. situation a client of mine that i had done a project with i think was part of turnkey and then turnkey obviously bought out and then he has a bunch of he owns a bunch of stock in that company but he said i don't know he's i don't think i can sell it he has some way for something so not good we'll put a bow on that conversation the best of a cost so we don't we i don't think either one of us wish ill on you there's other people that might we're not we're

not those people there's you can find them out there on linkedin if you want to find people who will wish ill on vacasa i'm not necessarily one of those people so hope they can figure it out hope it's all good hope we can compete as capitalism in America would provide us the opportunity to do but if they do end up getting delisted and go under I like you said there might be a few people dancing on their grave switching gears a little bit so we had another thread to go down today specifically around what I've been calling a little bit the spring slowdown and to be clear I think this is one thing that you know you and I were saying before you hit record the spring slowdown happens every year that clear, I think this is one thing that, you know, you and I were saying before we hit record, the spring slowdown happens every year. That's always been the case.

I went and looked at 20. I think I went and pulled, I have a Google sheet with one of my clients who's been with me for a long time since 2016. And I just add a new tab to the sheet every year. So it's a pretty detailed Google sheet at this point, but it's his budgets by month. So it'll be like his Google ads budgets for January through December. And I have sheets all the way back to 2016. So I clicked on one of those the other day as I was doing his I was putting his May budgets in for this month. And it was

interesting to go and see Yeah, he always spends way less in the spring because the booking slow down there was really no shocked me. But it's weird, like when I go and follow like, it seems like people were just not used to that happening the past few years, the bookings kept flowing in things kept going the same way they normally do. And when I go and look at the numbers, it seems like that's falling back a bit. We'll include some links to what we're referencing, but there was an AirDNA post that was published April 19, 2023. And I do think AirDNA does a good job of summarizing data or summarizing what's going on, information and things like that. I know some of their data scrapes, so I've certainly been not skeptical, but just like, hey, take this with an understanding that this may not

be perfectly accurate because they are scraping data. But they have so much of it that I feel like it's a fair comparison because even if some was off a little bit over here, someone's off a little bit over here, over the volume they have, I feel like they generally are pretty accurate when I go and look at general occupancy rates over a large set of time. On an individual property level, sometimes they're not perfectly accurate, but over the market, they're pretty accurate. What was your takeaway from what I'm calling spring slowdown? And is this just temporary normal seasonal blip? Or do you think this is like danger coming this summer for the short-term rental market?

It's, I don't think it's the danger point. I think the, one of the key numbers in that, in that, in the findings was available listings reaching 1.35 million of 20%. It's, you can have demand, you can have demand rise all you want, but when availability, when inventory is up 20%. You can have demand rise all you want, but when availability, when inventory is up 20%, it's going to be hard for that demand to catch up. And demand did. Demand by nights rose 15%. So that's close, but you got to think that that's overall across the entire ecosystem.

In specific markets, there are much bigger rises in just the total number of listings that are hitting these markets. And I think it is. I think that's probably the most concerning number for me. ADR being where it is, I think at some point we are going to see ADRs start to come back down again. I think that everybody using dynamic pricing gets us to a point where maybe the appeal of a rental at one point was you're getting outside the four walls of a hotel or resort, but you're also getting more value. Now with owners and managers taking the power back of pricing, I think it is at some point we're probably getting to a point where ADR is consistently going up and rising. It's probably going to stop. And it's going to be, and I think it is, it's supply and demand there.

That gets to be a little more basic of as there's more supply, you've got to drop your rates just so that it's appealing for the actual travelers that are going to be staying with you. So there are some of those numbers. Again, if you just look at them at face value, two percent down two percent of 15 of 20 but peel that onion back a little bit and let's think about what those numbers really mean and it is i'm starting to get a little concerned when i see numbers like that what about you what are your thoughts overall on just the numbers and everything like that i said this too before you record but i was like i'm always curious about this when they say inventory

in a market is up 10 or 20 okay in, that sounds like that's a decent chunk of inventory growing, especially in a market, let's just say a market to make it simple had 1000 homes last year. And by the way, that's probably way up from 2019. If a single market has 1000 homes in 2022, probably have 500 in 2019. It feels that's been happening now the 20% is happening. It's like compound interest, but instead of interest, it's like number of additional listings that you're competing with. It seems like that's just happening so much more aggressively every single year. It's okay, 20%, but then 20% of the previous number is actually a bigger number than 20% before. So that's one little metric that gets you a little

bit crossed up is okay, we started with 500 listings before COVID. Now we're up to 2000 on this market. How much can it actually support demand? And it makes me really a lot more, I guess, like sympathetic and understanding of the demand and makes me really a lot more, I guess, like sympathetic and understanding of the short term rental advocacy folks who are like, hey, we have two way too many homes coming off this market. There's used to be only one out of every 200 homes, a short term rental. Now it's one out of every 10 homes or 20 homes. And I totally get where they're coming from. When we look at numbers in that way, it's a bit of a different way to think about it. Instead of just looking at this gross number total number,, you look at it in terms of percentages. I think it's always

a much more interesting thing. But what I said before we hit record is that what type of inventory is coming online? See, I think that's a key part of the discussion. So in a market where inventory is relatively hard to come by for legal reasons, for example, it may be a shared home inventory that's coming online. So if you're a professional property manager, you manage homes, whole homes, and a shared property comes online, that has no bearing on you whatsoever. Like a single person traveling and going to Las Vegas was never going to book your five bedroom vacation home that you have in Vegas if you're able to get that legal standing. So they could add 10,000 new single or shared properties in Las Vegas and it wouldn't impact

you whatsoever, because literally, it's just you're fishing in different ponds. But they could add 25 bedroom homes, if that's what you happen to have. And they put them all within a half a mile radius of you. And that could have a massive impact on you. So I guess that's what it is. This is a macro discussion versus a micro discussion. And I think at the micro level, there are things that can happen to our clients that we've seen happen over the past little bit where it's like a micro boom in a given town or community or area of the same type of inventory that they have, I think can cause really downward pressure on rates, downward pressure on occupancy, etc. Whereas on paper, it's oh, that's only 1% difference in inventory. That may be true. But

if it's the 1% that competes directly with you and your professional property manager with 50 listings or 100 listings, that can make a huge difference. That's the difference between fighting with one hand tied behind your back and fighting with no hands tied or fighting with both hands. It's a huge difference. So I guess that's my takeaway looking at some of these numbers is not the macro makes sense to me, I get like the broader picture of what AirDNA reports. And again, I believe that they do their best to make it as accurate as they possibly can, given the data they have. So I'm happy, I'm happy they published this data. But by the same token, it's not necessarily my same experience when I go look at it narrowly. When I go look at it at the micro level, I see examples where I go on a listing site for a

client and I go, interesting, you're here. A year ago, there was two pins around you on the map. Now there's 14 pins next to you on the map. Again, the percentage change is small, but the impact to that client can be huge because now the you're on the guest side, it's probably pretty good because you're probably staying in a nicer place than you were two or three years ago. And you're probably paying the same, if not less than you might have been two years ago. And with inflation, you probably are paying less because like your dollar is actually worth a little bit less than it was before. So if you paid $1,000 per night before and pay $1,000 now, it's like a pretty good deal.

So those are some, I have swirling thoughts about it, but that's my thought, which is that it would be simplistic, I think, to take these numbers, copy and paste them and go, oh, ADR is only down 6%, 7%. That's not that big of a deal. Maybe I'll be fine. Maybe I can weather the storm. But I think it depends heavily on what type of inventory you have, how replaceable it is, or how many equal alternatives exist. I'm reminded of like my economics class we took in college, or it was like, how many substitutes exist for your product? The more substitutes that exist, the less pricing power you have. And I think that's happening for a lot of our clients right now. They have so many more properties coming online that are directly competing with what they have.

And they're from, in some cases, unsophisticated owners and hosts that just don't really know how to price their property. They're undercutting them. And I think they're getting hurt by that in some cases. And I think the other thing, I mean, that 20%, let's think about some of the markets. I think we all know markets that are, yeah, they're year-long markets, annual markets. But we also have a lot of markets that are, they start middle of April, they end end of August. And they don't extend anywhere beyond that. That's just a lot of those Northeast kind of coastal areas. That's it. They've got 12 weeks. If they don't make their hay during those 12 weeks, it doesn't matter where the other demand is. And I think that's something to take into consideration here is

these are annualized numbers and rates and everything like that. For those smaller, more niche markets where you only do have 12 to 16 weeks or something like that, a four-month window, what does that look like? Are there impacts here? That's where I always like to dig just a little further into that data, or I wish AirDNA would dig a little further into that data and tell us market-specific. I mean, for the top five markets, for the top 10 markets, because I think we know what some of those top five markets we would put in there, obviously. But what does that look like? Because I have heard some of the pain of in the Gulf Coast area, all the way around really, Texas, all the way down around to Florida, is those numbers are, their inventory is up maybe 30% or 40% because people are seeing that opportunity. That's, it is, it's all great data. But I think then the next part is how do you use this?

That is, how are you actually interpreting this data? And how are you then moving that into your marketing strategies? And if someone does see that inventory is up or demand, like what are some of those, I guess, what are the KPIs you're looking for as you're looking at a report like this, or even taking into analytics to make some of those decisions, pull some of those levers or change some of the levers maybe as we're hitting this spring swoon? Yeah. So I like that question because this is something that I think is a bit more useful. So I love now every client can't do this and I'll explain people that can do this and people that can a second, but I like to go in search console and I like to look at the non-brand terms, what their

year-over-year traffic looks like. So for example, I have a large client that's in the Gatlinburg market. And when they had their first slowdown a little while ago, I went and shared with them that I think it was a month-long period I was measuring. I forget when this was. But it was a month-long period I was measuring. And there was like 8,000 fewer searches for Gatlinburg cabin rentals in the previous, in like the last 30 days

than there had been the same 30-day period a year ago. So just think about that. That fills up like a multiple high school basketball stadiums full of people that were searching last year that are not searching today. Now, to be clear, you can only do this if you're ranking very well in search

and you have been for some time. So if you're ranking the top one, two, three results and you pretty much have been there for a long period of time, you can use that data. I would caution you to use that data if you're comparing for some time. So if you're ranking the top one, two, three results, and you pretty much have been there for a long period of time, you can use that data. I would caution you to use that data if you're comparing against last year. And last year, you didn't rank that well in Google. And you weren't getting enough impressions to constantly or pretty much always be on

page one, because then you're getting very muted look at what's going on. Now you could go into a tool like Keywords Everywhere or Ahrefs now has month by month data. ClearScope does the same thing if you export it. And you could look at month over month data, or a very simple tool that anyone could use Google Trends, you could go into Google Trends, and then just put in a keyword like that, and look year over year and see what's happening. But I think search demand is a pretty fair way to measure interest. Now, it doesn't necessarily map to booking, you could have a high search demand

period, and modest bookings overall, obviously, we can't see the analytics and data from other sites. But we have months where traffic is similar. But like for whatever reason, this month, we do 225,000 in direct bookings. Then this month, we did 350,000. And it's not always perfectly explainable why other than just people book more during the Christmas time than they do during the fall time or something like that. I like that number quite a bit because when I'm talking to a client, obviously, they're like paying us money and they want to make sure that their investment is well placed. And if when things are down, it's always, let's be honest, right? That's the thing they might consider cutting. And we've had

a few of those conversations and they're not fun ones to have. So I'm always open to that. Let's look at what's happening and see what's going on. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that we're batting a thousand. We've never had a campaign not produce a positive ROI. That would be ridiculous. But when I go and look at it and I say, okay, here's what we're doing. Here's the impact of what we're doing. Here's the things working in favor of us. Here's what's working well. Here's not what's working well, or here's what's working against us. And we've had clients that have been super honest with us. We did a pause with a client years ago for red tide. He was like, oh, I've read tide on my beach. No one's going to book for the next three months. Can I

pause? And hopefully this clears itself up. And I was like, yeah, okay. That's a weird situation, but yes. And we came back and everything was just fine. But if we'd kept marketing during those three months, we wouldn't have got a single booking. Like people are going to come red tide during that Florida issue a while ago. So what I'm getting at is that there's things that can work against you and things that can work against you, but you are your own person in this environment. So regardless of if you think inventory is up 30%, 40%, 50% in your market, it's still your job to compete within that confines of that market that you're in, unless you're going to pick up shop and go move somewhere else to hopefully a better place. But

guess what, someone else is going to find that place later on. So that's not even a permanent moat, honestly. But if you're in that market, and you're competing in that market, then I think you just have to be honest and say, what can I do within it and rate is an obvious lever to pull if convert if your traffic is still pretty strong, and people are checking you out and not booking, I think that's a very obvious lever to pull. It's not the only one you can pull to be clear, but I think it's a pretty obvious one to at least consider and test and see if that actually is going to move the needle for sure. Agreed. That's how it is. I think that's where I think that assessment of those quick ways to find, to find those triggers, to find what is driving the performance. I think that's

huge in being able to identify that because if you don't know where to find that data, then you are, then you're behind the eight ball a week, two weeks, a month, three months behind and your search volume's down and you don't know what's happening and you're waiting for those bookings to come in or anything like that. Yeah, I don't like thinking about that side of things and worrying about making those quick lever decisions and pulling those levers and turning them off and turning them on. We focus on consistency a lot. Is that a strategy that you would recommend more frequently or more often than not is just turning it off, keeping the budget low? How have you typically, when that kind of swoon comes in, how have you

reacted when that has happened? Yeah, I think for the clients where we can have that kind of honest conversation, it would be like, what can we promote right now that would actually be moving the needle? So if people don't want to come during this time period, or people are cutting out that extra trip they were making, and that extra trip they were making was a spring trip, and we pivot our marketing into summer, and we focus on filling the summer vacancies that are there, that may be a perfectly valid strategy. And then it may be a rate reduction and a push on seeing what people are searching for last minute and seeing if we can move the needle there. Because most of our clients that we see, very few people get over one or 2% conversion rate on their website. It's out there, but very few people get that. So if you're driving

a few thousand people into your site on a daily basis, or sorry, on a monthly basis, then you're really only going to get a handful of bookings per day if you're doing things really well. And that would be a good outcome for a lot of people. Changing your rates like that or changing things like that, you don't always know because it takes a little time to see how well it's working. So that's one thing that OTS can give you is like typically more eyeballs pretty quickly. So if you slash rates and you're then the cheapest three bedroom cabin in this market and it's not moving at that stage, then I think you have a demand issue. And there's really you have limited ability to influence that in many cases, right? There's just not as much levers for you to pull, like it's just not as desirable to be there right now. So that's usually what I think we typically

end up on is let's promote the things that people do still want. Let's focus on these summer periods or these other periods that they're still good demand on, and then pivot our marketing in that direction. And then at least fill up the time periods where we know there's good demand. And then we can always come back and try to do backfills on last minute email campaigns, do some retargeting on people that are looking right now and seeing what they're looking for going down that path. So I think those are valid ways to approach it. But it's not always straightforward.

You don't always know why the reasons that are occurring, why the lack of demand is coming in right now. But when I look at it right now, I feel like there's a lot of seasonality that's just getting mischaracterized or it's getting inaccurately measured to all these other problems. Because the trouble with this equation is that there's, it's like a complicated calculus equation on a whiteboard, you're trying to figure it out. And all the variables aren't known, like you may know inventory, but again, what type of inventory, you may know demands. But again, I would argue the same thing, what type of demand if couples are coming in and traveling solo, then your five bedroom house is no good to them. It

really wouldn't matter how much demand there was for if it's all smaller groups coming in, whereas we have a client and they do a lot of larger group homes, like family reunions, things like that. We need a lot of people to say yes for them to actually get a booking on their calendar. It's a lot more complicated of a process than a condo. They get paid 2000 bucks a night to figure out those problems. So there's some benefit in doing that, but it's never just so binary. Or obviously we saw a lot of this year was snowfall, like during the winter season, right? Having too much. It was a strange problem that occurred for some clients that we have out in that area, out in the California areas. You think snow is good. Oh, great. People are going to come skiing. Oh no, there's too much snow.

People couldn't actually get there. Cancel bookings. It's oh my goodness. A lot of things I think can come into play. And I think your job as the marketer is to be somewhat light on your feet. I don't think you, we like to plan things out. We have a lot of clients that like to make those plans with us. But I also think that I never want to plan too far out, to be honest with you, because I think that what's the expression? Man makes plans, God laughs or something like that. I think it's the same thing with this kind of stuff.

Marketers make plans and God laughs. Like you might have to be light on your feet and adjust your strategy a little bit when it comes to email, when it comes to, we have banners on all of our clients' websites now and we're testing different things that see what people will click on there. I think continually testing that is key so that we can see what's exactly working and how we can pivot into the right opportunities that are going to drive the most direct bookings for that particular client. And it's going to change per market. It's not always the same as each market goes along. So what you're saying is people don't need to just shut down the business if their

bookings are down. We don't need to go quite to that level. It is. We have a few panickers. I'm not going to lie. I hope they don't listen because I think they don't know who they are if they are listening. But we have a few people that do panic when things are down. And then we have people who maybe don't tell us enough. So there's certainly middle ground too. We have people who we don't really know exactly what the numbers are because they get so much phone in or they get so much OTAs. So we have a limited view of just the direct and we're like, oh, things look okay here, but how's it going? And then we learn like they're down more than we thought. And we could have acted maybe a little bit sooner or been a little bit more

aggressive. Yeah. I think you have to find the right balance of working with your vendors, communicating and just being, being even keeled for sure that these things are usually somewhat solvable problems. And I think that homeowners, homeowners have been spoiled last few years. And that's probably where I think some of the pressure comes from is not always the property manager, but it's the homeowner applying pressure to the property manager who then applies that to their team that they're working with or their internal or an agency and says, hey, we're down. How can we fix this? And then I think if you can have a productive conversation, you can come up with different ideas and ways to move the needle as opposed to a,

how dare you guys? There's certainly other people out there are booked and we're not, and it's your fault type of conversation. That's not always the most productive in my experience well i think it is i think you brought a really good point there of the needs of the traveler like you have more couples traveling you have more families traveling do you have more i think there are fewer maybe fewer people that are traveling in larger groups and doing stuff like that so having a large scale image of all luxury five ten bedroom houses where those are more a better fit for those larger groups. Maybe that's not quite the right inventory to have and something on our side of things

inventory. It's okay. Finding the right inventory. Oh, you want all five bedroom homes. Are you going to get those all booked up? Are you actually going to get your desired gross booking revenue for those homes when there are fewer people? Are there the same amount of people? I think that's other data that I don't get to see quite at the PMS level with a lot of our partners, but I'm wondering if you see that where you can start to identify, oh yeah, all these bookings

that are coming in are huge group properties. We need more of these large properties coming in as opposed to some of these smaller size properties. Certainly, that's just another variable that gets thrown into the fray there of demand, search volume. Okay, now the actual demand of the traveler that is looking to customize that experience for themselves, what does that look like? I think a lot of PMSs probably need some better reporting around this because I'll ask clients this a lot and they don't always have that at their fingertips, to be honest with you, or they'll, it's more anecdotal. Like they'll just randomly look and they'll be like, there are gaps everywhere. And I'm like, okay, let's try to quantify that a little bit as opposed to just saying there's

gaps everywhere. Yeah. I think there's work to be done on that. Honestly, I would love to be able to look at a report and slice it up by you. For example, we have a client where they have ocean front inventory. That's very desirable. That typically doesn't have as much of an issue. They have a sound front inventory. That's typically not as desirable it's priced a lot lower so understandably but usually that stuff moves later so it's the oceanfront stuff is booking up and we're happy with that although all the sound front stuff is empty for late summer but we're not surprised by that because that typically wouldn't book until 30 days before anyway so that's where you get that's where it's tough to react a little bit when you especially some of our clients may only have 40

homes so trying to swap a slice those into like lots of different buckets, it means you might be looking at a two home set of data and that's who knows, right? About a two home set of data. That's not data. That's just more so randomly crawling the ground and hoping to find some kind of insight along the way. So that's my sentiment of it. I think that should be a little bit easier and could be a little bit easier.

We're working with a client, I think a mutual client that we both work on that's based in Arkansas, and they have a revenue manager that they work with. It has a very interesting tool. There's four quadrants in this tool, and it shows you like properties that are down on rate and occupancy in the top left corner. So that's what needs the most attention. Then I think it shows you properties that are okay on rate, similar in some cases up on rate, but down on occupancy in the bottom left corner. So it's, hey, these are like people want these properties, but they're not booking as much. Check it out. See what's going on. Then I think the top right corner is up on rate, up on occupancy, which I still like to see because it's like, those are going well. What is it about those that makes them maybe perform better?

And then I think bottom right corner is the opposite of what the other corner is. So I don't look at this tool a lot, but it's down on rate or yeah, maybe you don't have an occupancy or something like that. yeah yeah yeah so it's people are not confused at this point then gold star to you but i like that i like that sentiment quite a bit i wish more clients had a tool like that that we could look at because basically then i can look at the 7 or 10 or 12 that are down like on occupancy right right yeah okay they've already lowered the rates to what they think is the lowest level that they're maybe even the homeowner is willing to accept so additional rate cuts are no longer on the table how do we get more eyeballs on these

properties or to your point what do these properties have in common? I think that's a valid question to ask. Is it the size, the view, the location? Is it the quality of the property itself? In some respect, interiors, photography, we did a bunch of description rewrites on some of these low properties last month. And we're hoping that's going to help move the needle a little bit there too. Tested some different cover photos, et cetera, to try to more clicks, because there's some good properties in there. It's not like duds, there's some solid ones in there that aren't really going the way they want to. So I think those are all valid discussions to have for sure. And I think ultimately, like I was saying a minute

ago, you have to be willing to try different things. If you're it's not always a cost equation, certainly driving more traffic and may help get you more conversions. But if you can't do so profitably, I would be cautious with that. I wouldn't just pull the cost lever as hard as I could and just spend more with Google because it may not be traffic that's willing to convert. It may be a rate discussion

plus these other modifications that we're talking about. And I've got to get through this kind of, like you said, the spring slump and then get into the early summer where the last minute stuff will start to fill up at higher rates. And I think there's reason to be optimistic.

I say then out to Guesty, Track, Streamline, Libre. This is hostfully anybody out there, please. Let's get some additional reporting that's going to give these marketers a better way or the revenue managers a better way to see and visualize all that. Just give us the special, we'll take the SPF or whatever that's associated with the finder's fee for getting these reports out there. just conrad at paul at venturi whatever we need to do there just make sure we see our slice there but yeah that's i think it is that's something that you know that it's that think about the marketers when you're putting these

reports together think about those ops people that are really gonna turn the lever there yeah for sure anything else you want to add in anything on the inventory side or is that a pretty decent summary of the spring slowdown and some ideas on how you can bounce back and then a plea at the end for reporting? I think we're good. I think we've discussed a lot of the numbers. Hopefully we gave a little detail into why we look at them and what the numbers we're looking at. And hopefully we're helping you drive some better numbers and insights for you all too. Perfect. Okay, so last week, we did part one of our GA4 series. We're not we discussed before we hit record, Paul and I, we're probably not going to do that every week. So we're going to alternate

here. So we'll have part two of the GA4 discussion coming up next week, we'll plan to record that one and publish that in the feed next week. So keep an eye out for that. If you have any feedback on the GA4, what you're planning on doing, and then our last episode should drop roughly in timeline for right before you need to actually make this GA4 switch. And yet at that point, you'll have no choice. So maybe we'll do some, we need some sound effects, Paul. Maybe we need like a siren at the beginning, like it's the last day to switch over. And then we'll publish that one the day before.

We haven't done that. I know there's some podcasts that have like soundboards and things like that. We haven't gone in that direction yet, but maybe that's what we need. Maybe we gotta jazz this up a little bit. That's like a client, make the logo bigger, make it pop. That's me right now.

So that'd be the worst person. If it gets us a review, I will find a soundboard that's going to really demonstrate just what we've got going on here. Yeah. Y'all want some soundboards? Happy to provide those. Just toss a couple of reviews our way. We are shamelessly, we'll shamelessly ask for that plug every time because we know it helps us out and hopefully it gets more people listening to the podcast.

So on your podcast distribution network of choice or whatever you're doing there spotify apple apple something like that google podcast there's a million i'm an overcast listener myself it's all good yeah we appreciate reviews wherever you can write down a review in a letter and send it to me if you email me i'll send you my address but i prefer you do it inside of itunes that's probably ideal but no we appreciate it we're back next week like i said with part two of the ga4 series mini series that we're going to be continuing along as we go down that path. So looking forward to that. If you have any questions, feedback, comments, do please reach out to us paul at ventoria.com so I can reach out to Paul. He responds eventually. I try to respond

when I can Conrad at buildupbookings.com. We would love any feedback that you have and we will catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much. Bye.