Heads In Beds Show - Tools & Lead Magnets You Can Use To Drive More Homeowner Leads

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into different tools you can use to get more homeowner leads. Creating new marketing and ad creative is one of the key ways to make sure you're always getting more homeowner leads!Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingVintoryEmail Paul For The Key Messaging Worksheet🔗 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. How's it going there, Paul? We are, we had our little internal football discussion. I don't think we need to take this one public today. It is. It's just another beautiful week in the vacation rental

and hospitality industries here. This is the holiday season where you really want to get a hold of people, but it's a little harder to get a hold of people. We do have Darm taking place while we're recording this week as well. It is the extended conference season, I'll say it. But yeah, I think things are going pretty well. How about you? How are things going in your neck of the woods, sir? Yeah, I'm heading out tomorrow to Durham. So by the time this releases, I think I should already be there. So if you're there, and you have to be listening the day of release for the day after then find me I'm doing a session on Thursday. So that'll be fun. Looking forward to it with Mr. Adam Norco. Yeah, I'll go. Yeah, of course, we joke sometimes before we hit record,

it's a sports podcast, then we hit record. And so in case you're on the marketing podcast, but all good. I also watched the Hero World Challenge, or at least the highlights of it coming back. And Tiger's back, of course, that's my when I think back to my childhood career. And what I love watching, certainly on the golf side, it was of course, Tiger, like he's the man. And there's still something there. But obviously, the outcome wasn't great. But if you go look at his strokes gained off the tee, like he's still he was driving it better than half the guys in the field which is wild to think about a 40 what seven-year-old man who's been beaten and battered yeah like just to a tee and somehow he still pumps out 177 ball speed almost 180 and on some days so tiger i'm not writing it off yet it would have to be like

a stars aligned type moment for tiger to come back and play well enough to win a tournament but you he hasn't lost the the big stick that's for sure so you got to believe he could figure out the irons that's tiger woods you know what i mean it's just to see the visual i saw at one point they did a visual of how his foot is connected to his leg now without or without the ankle oh that that seems a bit dicey i certainly wouldn't be walking 72 holes over the course of four days if i had that going on but more power to physical when it was flat he seemed fine what where he really looked really ginger was when there was over the course of four days if I end up going on, but more power to him. Physical practice experts. When it was flat, he seemed fine.

Where he really looked really ginger was when there was like elevation changes. So I feel like the key is going to be, can we get him on a flat course to potentially give him a chance? And there's some out there on tour, not Hawaii, but that would be the worst possible place for him to play probably. But yeah, beyond that,

I think you can't write him off completely. He's the greatest of his era. That's for sure. We could debate Jack versus Tiger. The greatest of his era. That's for sure. We could debate Jack versus Tiger. The greatest of his era. And he'll be playing with Charlie here next week-ish. I know the father son is coming up or the parent child because you've got all sorts of people playing now.

So that'll be fun. That's always a good time to see him competing against John Daly and John Daly Jr. Because that's just the opposite in worlds there were you ever tempted to do junior thing you ever you have two boys did you ever think about doing paul manzi jr does that it's just we're just working in the backyard now the backyard is a mini driving range right now and at some point we'll see it is were you ever enticed to name your son like a junior i don't know like he's they there's family names in both well in my firstborn so they're my grandpa's middle name is my middle name is everybody is it is so we've got a little connection there but yeah it's i don't need another ball it's we're we're good i have enough problems with someone else calling my name out because

that's we don't need two people looking and being very confused and scared and looking over our shoulders so it's just that ideals never appealed to me like i've just and i'm not against it some people are for and that's fine i just have never looked at any of my children at least my two boys and god man i really wish he had the same name as me and that's all power to you if that's you and you're listening then i'm all for it but it doesn't appeal to me personally i think if i was a junior or a third or something like that maybe you want to continue it right i don't think you want to start it necessarily maybe i don't know maybe i don't know yeah i think my brother-in-law is a fourth or something like that so he has two two girls so it hasn't happened yet so we'll have to see unless he just went bold and named a girl john i don't

know if that would work very well to be be honest with you. Awesome. Don't know how to transition that into homeowner stuff. I'm sure there's homeowners out there named John or Paul or Conrad, perhaps. And you know what we need if you're on the vocational manager side is you want more homeowner leads. And certainly we talked a little bit before about kind of the high level of marketing leverage points, if you will, on the homeowner side. Obviously, we tend to be a little bit more guest focused, but ultimately, the Heads in Bed show is about getting more beds sometimes too. There's balance there. So I thought today we'd go into tools and lead magnets that we can use to build homeowner relationships. I think the key point here that I would like for you to explain is this idea that if I do marketing or if I do advertising for

my vacation rental brand, I'm trying to attract homeowners, I have to put something out there that's compelling. So maybe you could walk us back a little bit and say with your work at Venturi, you're helping homeowners obviously do some of this marketing advertising. What are some common mistakes you see when they think of that initial ad

that they're putting out there? And how have you worked over the past few years to correct to them and get people to put out offers and things like that are actually more compelling from a lead generation perspective? Yeah, I mean, I think it just overall, the property management side of them, the owner relationship, anything like that, outside of the owner portal in a property management system, actually, like I think people just have not given that the necessary focus.

We've both seen dozens, if not hundreds of property management pages that, I mean, for a while, the theme kind of was maybe one blurb, a sentence, maybe a paragraph. And if you're lucky, there was a call to action of some kind. So that was, I think that was the first thing. And I've seen that get better, dramatically better. I have to think that over the last few years of Venturi kind of pushing more best practice landing pages and just best practices generally, that has helped. I think it's helped the industry as a whole because we put more of a focus on, hey, I need a form for people to fill out. Hey, I need this information. Hey, I need to talk about the things that are

actually important to these homeowners. I think we just said, okay, here I am. I'm happy to take on your home. And then it was up to the individual property manager or the BD person for a property, if you have a larger operation, to sell it from there. But I think what we've seen now and understood is that it is, it's very similar to, it's a multi, I mean, it's, whereas the traveler guest experience is a multi-touch point. You're going to hopefully have a lot of people coming in from social. You're going to see the exposure from social retargeting, leading people down the funnel that way.

It's very few bookings come through on that first click. But I think we didn't necessarily put that over on the owner management side. And when you think about it, it really is, You're putting a half million, million, multi-million dollar property in the home in the hands of someone else. So you do. You need to talk about how am I going to make you money? What am I going to do to market your property? How am I going to take care of your home? And I think that's been a big omission of people not going into the details and just saying, we're going to take care of your home. We're going to help you make more money. So that's the big omission, I think. And being able to then manage those leads appropriately as well,

not just using a spreadsheet or post-it notes or just going the way of that, whether you're using your guest CRM and trying to modify that or hybrid it to be able to manage those communications. Vittoria is our CRM as well. It is. It's communicating and being really responsive to those communications and to those initial inquiries because I think Brooks, our CEO, his favorite story to tell is that secret shopping story of we called up 100 of the top property managers and like 30% of them answered on the first call. And it is there's something to just being responsive.

So I think those are some of those best practice areas where people have just taken more of an interest, built up more lead magnet type of information, whether that's checklist, whether that's, we'll talk about these a little more, but the ROI calculators and stuff like that, really helping people understand the different aspects of home ownership management or homeowner management or property management, wherever you're, however you're terming it or looking at it there, and then giving people the true value and benefits and figuring out ways to message that appropriately so that people truly understand what the value you're providing there.

That is a big overarching thing. But where have you seen the most improvement? Again, you've worked alongside a lot of inventory partners for the last few years as well. Where have you seen those improvements come or where the opportunities are still available? I think we definitely went through a period where the inventory was ridiculously valuable, right? There was certainly like, let's say tail end of 2020, all of 21 and two, I think it was fair to say that. And there was, and Brooke would say this to me too, at times when we were doing recordings or doing any sort of marketing or advertising for inventory, every property manager said, if I just had one more home, I could book it. If I had two more homes, I could book it,

which made the inventory valuable, not only from a business operations standpoint, but it also meant that it wasn't moving around as much. So there was two forces working against each other if you're trying to get more inventory, which is that it's very valuable. There's a lot of people advertising going after it. And the flip side of that is that if you were with a property manager, you seemed unlikely to want to move because my calendar is full. Why would I cancel and leave $100,000 of future reservations on the table when I could just ride it out with my current property manager, even if I'm not perfectly happy. And it's actually, again, I'm not an economist, but it feels like not too dissimilar for what happened to like the housing market side of things. Obviously there's some correlation there.

When I sold my house last year now, it was funny to look back and realize that when we put our house up, it was like equivalent three bedroom, two bath, there was like seven for sale or eight for sale in this kind of general area that we were trying to sell in. So we could sit back for a little bit price up really high and just wait for someone to come in close to that offer, which we were able to find someone that did. If we were selling that same thing today, as we record in the December of 23, I'm sure we could still sell it still a desirable area. More people are coming here, but I'm sure the price would be a lot lower. Yeah, going back to that idea of where we were for a while versus where we are today, I think that my perspective would be that now it's

certainly some of the investor rushing that was happening, I think, has probably slowed down in most markets. Because just think about it, if you could buy a house that was previously $500,000 at a 3% interest rate, that same house today might be 600,000. There might have been a period last year where it was 850. Now maybe it's 750 or something like that out, got really interested, done one or two. And then you might've been, now you look at it today and go, it just doesn't make sense. The numbers just don't add up and then you're departing. So that's naturally going to leave some kind of vacuum, I think from the inventory side of things. So yeah, there's multiple forces all pushing and depending on the market regulation might've happened over the past few years. There was a Twitter thread I saw today about the Palm Springs, La Quinta market. We had a client in that market and they were fighting regulation. And I think they ultimately lost regulation. And they had to

cancel marketing services, because who knows their business might actually be end up going the way of the dodo bird if they're not really allowed to do what they want to do. I think they could still do like monthly rentals, but I think those were far less appealing to their core demographic versus the week or weekend or something like that. So it's a as far as the actual marketing, I see on like a day to day week week to week, month to month basis with homeowners with inventory partners, you can certainly see a much better execution quality. There's no doubt about that with non inventory partners, of which we work with a ton of clients that don't use inventory as well. I don't know if they've got to figure it out yet. Maybe a handful of them do. But a lot of what I see is just here's our

property management services, we do a good job, click here and fill out a form and we'll get back to you. So it's like a D plus C minus is what I see most commonly, or just when we're researching, we just signed a client in like the Gulf Shores, Alabama market. And I started poking around that market and just seeing, okay, what are the top 10, 15 companies doing? What does their landing pages look like? What are their offers, et cetera. And I don't see anything there that necessarily makes me think that there's a ton of advancement going down in a lot of markets there too. It's one of those things where it's, if you, my philosophy on this has been for a long time, I think we might've talked about this before. If you're great at guest marketing, I think it

bleeds into homeowner marketing so effectively, right? Because you have this idea of capturing attention, putting an offer out in front, the offer on the guest side is obviously like a property and a price and your terms and conditions for booking that property. On the homeowner side, it's a little bit different. But my assessment of this too, is that homeowners can see good guest marketing. When you're just doing homeowner marketing and nothing else, this has always been my contention. It's really hard to prove that you're as excellent as you think you are. I think today to go through some of the ideas of ways around this to say, okay, maybe if you're a small property manager listening or even a midsize property manager,

but you're not the biggest, certainly almost no one listening is bigger than Vacasa, for example, right? You're going to have to figure out clever ways to approach your messaging and marketing. And I think you have to be a little divergent in your thought to come up with different ideas because hitting them with the same postcard over and over again of, hey, we're great, trust us, sign up, call us, is good. Like I said, that is D plus C minus marketing work, in my opinion. So it'll get you somewhere. But I think the A plus version of it looks a lot closer to some of the ideas that we're going to talk about today. So maybe you could go through, we have this key messaging building blocks worksheet.

I don't know the source of this. I'm sure you do better than me. So I'll let you talk about it. But this is something that you, I think, Evitore does or someone on the account management side does. I love this one. I don't know who sent this to me. I don't know if it was you or someone else on the team.

I was like, this is fantastic. I put it in my swipe file folder inside of Basecamp and I dig it. So maybe you could walk us through this features and benefits section. I don't think we're going to go through every one, but we're going through some of these top ones about there's a feature and benefit that you're going to talk about on your landing page. So for example, the first one is revenue management. How do we turn that into something that's going to drive leads for us on the front end so that we can then get the right homeowner in the door? So I'll let you take the floor on that one. Yeah. And the revenue management side of things,

So I'll let you take the floor on that one. Yeah. And the revenue management side of things, certainly that's, I feel like it's something you have to mention on any landing page that you're doing, whether you're using a third party software, whether you're going through and manually updating your rates every day or doing something like that, that, that is something that people want to know that they're making money and really how much money they're, they're going to make. That's something that on the, on our landing page side of things, our ROI calculator tools, probably some of our best performing pages. And they're not crazy. It's really, it's simply a

select what type of home you have. Do you have a home? Do you have a condo? How many beds? How many baths? What does your view look like? What is the location of the property? And really it does, it breaks down, gives you kind of a monthly or an annual, what type of revenue you should expect on that side of things, as well as at the bottom, we show people that 12 month graph. So really helping people to understand that seasonality of, okay, you're a traditional summer market where January through March revenue will be steady. April, maybe to August, you may see that kind of bell curve type of visual. And then coming back down, depending on the holidays, depending on where you are there, you'll see that kind of maybe much back out again towards the mean.

But it is just giving people something where they can see a number. Now, I think you do want to guard that a little bit. You want to gate that a little bit and make sure that people aren't just taking that number and saying, and taking it to your competitor and saying, Hey, I heard I can make this much. What do you think I can make? Or something like that. I think anytime you're giving people an estimate or some kind you do, you want to make sure there's a little skin in the game. So making sure you have their contact information so that you can market to them down the road and remarket to them and do all of that specific information or just stay in contact with them. That's something where it is.

They're probably not going to make that decision after just toggling the numbers over and seeing, hey, I can make $12,000 a month or hey, I can make $5,000 a month, whatever that is. That's something that I do. I love the idea of giving people because that is one of the first things they're thinking about. Now, if you have people that are solely focused on how much money they can make, that may be something.

If you're starting with that conversation, that's the conversation you're going to have for the next 12 months or 10 years or however long you have that particular property in the inventory. So I think there's something to be said there for you want to be able to present that information, but you don't want to necessarily rely on that information because again, ebbs and flows of travel, ebbs and flows of everything. The number that you made in 2020 and 2021 is not going to be the same number you made in 2022, 2023, stuff like that. It's a great tool to be able to just let people

see if they're in the home buying process. Okay, what type of home am I going to look for? Should I look for a two bedroom or should I look for a four bedroom? Because I can get X amount more and that's worth my investment. So that's a tool, a lead magnet that we find really effective. Again, something that I love. We put clarity on all our pages so I can go in and actually see how are people manipulating this bar? Do we have more two bedrooms versus four bedrooms?

Do we have more people who are self-selecting, hey, I'm in an amazing spot or hey, I'm actually in a not so great spot? There's something to be said for that as well. But giving people that feeling of being able to see, okay, this is what my property is. And then being able to come back and tell them, this is what you think it is. This is in reality what it is and how it compares to the rest of the portfolios, the rest of the properties in our portfolio. So I think that's the one right off the bat that how much money am I going to make? That's the first question a lot of people ask. So being able to give them something where you don't necessarily have to reach out to them, they can self-serve and do something like that.

I think that's a huge thing for the revenue management side of things. something like that. I think that's a huge thing for the revenue management side of things. Anything you've seen from that side as far as being able to position revenue management is a huge feature and benefit when talking to homeowners? Well, I think the only thing, everything you said, I think they're spot on. And I do agree with your assessment of, I think from my perspective, the worst owner to have would be the penny pinching sort of revenue at all costs homeowner, right? I think the homeowner who has the emotional investment in the property and likes it and enjoys it is going to use them him or herself or as a family. I feel like he's always going to have a very different perspective on revenue because the most revenue maximizing opportunities potentially for a lot of traditional

vacation rental homes may not always be the most optimal for the homeowner. Or it may be something where I'll give you an example. We have a client who has condo rentals. And he was going through and doing all the upgrades to the TVs. He was doing lots of shower upgrades in some of the units. And he was doing lots of wall accents where they would go and paint. They do the shiplap stuff and do all the new interior decoration. All those units did perform better. But there's homeowners that he was dealing with who just didn't want to, you know, spend the money for whatever reason on doing it. So he had to convince them he had to spend years convincing some homeowners like two years convincing some homeowners that this was a worthy upgrade because they didn't like it. Oh, I don't like that shower. That

doesn't suit me or I didn't like the way that looked. So why would I do that in my unit? So it's, and then when, of course, when it was all said and done, yes, it was a net positive for the ones that did it. But to be completely honest, is it necessarily wrong for the homeowners to have that perspective purely from a revenue maximization opportunity question? Yeah, it's not ideal, right? Like I didn't do the upgrade, therefore it didn't get as much revenue. But if the homeowner uses it 10 weeks a year and likes it or eight weekends a year and likes it, then it's also you're in a tricky situation as a property manager.

Do you accept the inventory somewhat as is and try to make sure it meets your standards? Certainly you're not going to let a property be unsafe or something like that. If it's something that's, again, a C plus property and all your other units are A minuses, do you accept it, tolerate it, or do you move on? That's a tough question to answer. It's like our business, Paul. We have clients. Not every client is our favorite client. Sometimes we have to deal with clients that we don't necessarily love because it's revenue coming in and we can't always have these flawless, perfect relationships between the two parties. There's always a little bit of give and take. There's always a little bit of what's best for

you, what's best for me. It's best for me is doesn't always line up flawlessly. So that person versus the person who's, I will do, I want this to be a specific cash on cash return and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying there's not a place for that in our marketplace, but I think that that person is going to be a little bit trickier to deal with. I think when you look at a lot of these funds and a lot of these people that raised and bought, there's Twitter threads that I can link in the show notes for people that share this stuff a lot more frequently. Some of them have been just massive flops. So this idea that because they approached it from an investor mindset, they're going to do a good job. I don't think that necessarily has the best

correlation effect as you might expect it to. There's a lot to it. So going back to the homeowner side, when you're trying to recruit new homeowners with revenue management and like having an ROI calculator, I think you need to have tools that more mimic the top property managers in our space. And I think the ROI calculator is a good example of that. Certainly there's different, more than one way to skin the cat, so to speak with how you present that information, but having the option of, I want an answer now, I think there's a lot of powerful ideas behind that sort of idea of give me an address, some metadata about the property. I think in a perfect world, you would have to give as little as possible. Maybe that's one improvement that could keep happening on the Venturi side of things.

But ultimately, this idea of give me some information, I'll give you range, high, low, medium based on my data, I think is really powerful. So I like that one quite a bit. I think the other side of this is there's when you see the landing pages for any of their ads that Vacasa sends people to and evolve to, it's basically the same thing. Give me your property and I'm going to give you some type of estimate on what you're going to make. for any of their ads that Vacasa sends people to and evolved to. It's basically the same thing. Give me your property, and I'm going to give you some type of estimate on what you're going to make. And if they've got that much of a – it is.

They've got a flywheel of sorts going. So if they're doing it, again, whether you can mimic it exactly or you can take parts and bits of it, there, there's something to be said for if, if, if the big guys are doing it, find out a way to present something similar. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. Then you don't have to ask for the geo coordinated,

the specific MLS, whatever pro forma, anything like that. But you have to be able to give some type of information, let people know how much money they're going to make. Cause that is going to be a factor, whether it's the number one factor or the last decider that's going to push them over the edge. Yeah, you said pro forma, someone told me recently, that's guessing with a spreadsheet,

and I've never heard anything more accurate as opposed to reform, which sounds like this fancy, like for official document, I feel like that word is even Latin or something for my like pro forma, like sounds like something that you'd hear in like a courtroom. And it's Yeah, it's called guessing with spreadsheet. All right, sorry, that's gonna piss some people off. But that's just I had to say that one. I like it too much, because that's what it is. And you're making your best guess. And going back to something that I've said over and over again, I don't want to beat this dead horse. But I'll say it in this case. The reason that I've had clients say this to me in the past, oh, I sent a projection over to XYZ, a homeowner, and I didn't get them. Oh, no, I can't believe they went with Southern

Company, or I can't believe they went with the national company or whatever the case may be. My initial reaction is maybe somewhat of a harsh one, but I feel that way sometimes. I don't, then they didn't believe you. So whatever you sent over, maybe you sent over something that you believe was accurate, but you may not have done a good enough job backing it up and proving it. And this is something that I learned a lot from the direct mail world, actually, and studying that world where the best direct mail marketers spend a lot of effort, time, energy, et cetera, into proving that their offer is legitimate, real, and that other people have had success with it. I think at the online world, we tend to touch on that, but skip over it. We

tend to, let's talk about loud and proud all over the page about how great of a job we do. And I think this applies to revenue management and everything we'll talk about today from a lead generation perspective. But I think the reason that you want to lead with when you can and when you need to lead with more of these offers, stuff like sharing information, sharing the lead magnet, sharing additional context, is that I think it makes you a lot more believable. And then if there's a small, especially small property manager, if you're a small property manager, a small fish in a big pond, that's probably what you're struggling with the most is that people read your copy, they read your offer, and they shrug their shoulders and go, okay, everyone says that it's like, how do we actually

back up what we're saying with proof. So I think by sharing step, let's, so let's go into marketing next, which is the next feature benefit that you might talk about on the landing page. How do you turn that into an offer? So this is something I feel like I can speak on a little bit. I think a lot of our clients do a bad job of actually talking about how much marketing they're investing in, correct? How much marketing may be that they are the actual cost, sure, but also the brand value that some of our clients have. We have some that do it really well. We have the property manager I'm talking to you later today, that's in kind of New York, upstate New York, who's actually a Ventura partner, by the way, I'll message you who I'm talking about. And he spends a lot of time in that initial homeowner

meeting talking about like actually our relationship, the relationship that I have with him and the buildup team with him. And it's not an advertisement's not an advertisement for us. Obviously the homeowner is not going to hire buildup to do anything, but it's, Hey, this is our brand. This is what we stand for. This is the type of home that we track all of our marketing, all of our media that we put out, all of our social media, all of our email list ties back to people that are like, you know, that like your type of property. And here's the other 25, 50, 80 success stories that we've had with other homeowners. And it's not just me saying it, go look for yourself, go look at our website, go look at our calendars, go look at this.

And I'm sure there's a lot of data and stuff that he shares too, but his claim is so believable because he just, he does it in such a great way from a branding perspective. And he talks about the power of the brand that he has and people are drawn to him and he gets a lot of direct traffic relative to his overall website traffic because people just go to his website and he gets a good amount of lead flow just from that on the homeowner side. And he gets a lot of direct traffic relative to his overall website traffic because people just go to his website and he gets a good amount of lead flow just from that on the homeowner side. And he gets a lot of that from the guest marketing side. So having some kind of marketing claims, right? But one idea that I had for to bring it back to the lead magnet thing, talk about what

you do from a marketing standpoint or explain if you're looking to market your home in Myrtle Beach, here's 10 things that you could do. And then that could be a lead magnet or that could be some kind of informational article. And you could break down what your marketing strategy actually is, but explain it in an educational, useful way. And then the homeowner reading that goes, oh, I can't do all that. Maybe I should just hire these guys. So it's teaching from expertise and authority, the people that get the most inbound, right? It's our people that can prove that they know what they're talking about and talk about it. So I don't know your perspective on this, but I feel like this is one of those ones where the small property manager feels very

outgunned here. So they feel like maybe they can't talk about marketing and maybe that's true to some degree. In my mind, you've got to get clever. If you can't be the outspender, then you've got to be more clever than the other approaches. So I think with a lot and a lot of this stuff that we're talking about, whether it's lead maggots, whether you're just talking about it in more of a packaged way, I think talking about it as a marketing package. It is. How are we doing the marketing package?

We're using these channels and we're using how we're going to read to do or re-photograph your thing. And I think a lot of people put in that lead magnet or offer or whatever is the free photography. We've all seen free photography, free something like that. But it is making people understand that I think the dollars and cents can be tricky, but I don't think it's a bad idea to actually tell people, hey, on average, we spend X amount per property on marketing. It is. If you're further down the sales, and maybe that's not an upfront thing you're going to give people. Maybe it is,

depending on how open you are about that. But it is, it's not just the, there's the work, but there's the costs associated with it. So like when people are putting up a little bit of objection to your management fee, really break down what part of marketing that goes into. It's an investment in your own property. It's an investment in your own bookings. It's something that, you know, it is, we have talked about it for listing sites and everything else for a long time. So it makes sense that part of your subscription, part of your ownership management fee, whatever that is, goes towards marketing, goes towards this and goes towards this. And if people feel like, hey, maybe that's I'm not seeing the numbers I need to see. That's something they know how much you're spending. Maybe it's a recommendation to

put more money toward them. Maybe they're willing to pay up a little bit just to have that enhanced marketing opportunity. Now, we know it's never going to be one-to-one. Okay, I put more money in, I get more money out. We don't print money on this side of things. But I do think anything you can do to package that or anything you can do to give people a little peek behind the curtain is going to be valuable because it is. It is complex to travelers and it does take a lot. So to have people feel like they have that skin in the game and they know what's happening behind the scenes, I think, it just increases the trust that they have in you, in your business, in your ability to take care of. And again, going back to the revenue management,

drive the numbers and drive the money coming back in that you're going to need to do. So yeah, whether you're talking about a marketing package or maybe you have different levels of marketing that it is, it's going to allow you to, you can have the mini level where we're just going to take new pictures and you'll be put into our queue or you can enhance that. And I think every business is different in their ability to do that. But those are definitely some of the talking points that we see most frequently.

It is working on Facebook, working on Instagram. We're here, we're there. People want to see that. Not necessarily that they want to see the ads, but they want to see you're on those channels that they're familiar with. Saying that you're on GoTuckGo or whatever that is, doing some search ads there might not exactly bring people in. Saying you're doing things on LinkedIn and you're doing things on some of those major

channels that, again, they're familiar with. They might see it. They might not. But at least they know what's happening there. So yeah, and it's you never know. I feel this way. Sometimes we have situations where clients bring on people that haven't been a part of our engagement into a call like a monthly call.

And I go, look, I don't want to talk way over your way under you. So give me like 60 seconds, 120 seconds. I'm like, you're a marketing knowledge. So I'm not way upsetting you or anything like that. Or okay, so this is Google. I don't want to be like that. But sometimes I have to give away this basic info. And sometimes I'm like, oh, cool.

Like I can dive straight into it. But yeah, you're going to treat the homeowner. I think more like you assume that they have basic understanding of what's going on. And you have to sit down and explain each phase of the journey. This is an old thing. I need to redo it because I've said this 50 times and I've never done it. The list of all the things the property manager is doing, in each phase of the journey. This is an old thing. I need to redo it because I've said this 50 times and I've never done it. The list of all the things the property manager is doing,

the vacation rental manager is doing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis. And then when you look at the fee, actually, I've said this before, I think 10% is almost too much to be paying for the long-term rental manager, a property manager who's putting someone in the property one time.

And then there's months where nothing happens, right? There's months where your rent check comes in and they do nothing and then they pass along the 90% that you take. And then the property manager, the short-term rental property manager, vocational manager is supposed to charge 20%. And their list of things is like this deep. You know what I mean? Like I always thought that would let those ratios were actually way off. I feel like the long-term property manager should be getting like five or 7%. And then

the short-term rental property manager needs to be getting 30%. But it also depends a lot on like the fees and how things are broken out, which goes back to kind of something that we talked about actually we had this conversation recently on a recording i did with broke and it was this idea that they had my understanding was the property manager who had a homeowner that still had two units with another company competing company in the market and then one they swapped over to this property manager and they said your fee is higher your commission fee is higher but they actually showed after a few months look look at your statement, look at our statement, their statement had revenue minus the fee, that was their payment. Their other, you know, property manager had revenue minus the fee,

which was a lot less, the fee was a lot less, meaning that in theory, they would have had more. And then the line item started of charging for this and X and Y and Z and A and B and C and D. And they said, Look, these properties actually did somewhat similar revenue month this month. But look, you put 800, 900, 1000 thousand more dollars in our pocket because you didn't kill us with these fees. And she's like, I know I've been saying that to everybody. So it's a funny story. And of course she's going to hopefully get the opportunity to manage those other properties. The numbers were made out of 900 maybe, right? But the point was the homeowner looked at it and went, this is proof that your messaging is correct. And that's in my mind, I would have told

that property manager right there, hit the record button, get him or her to say that out loud again. And then that's such a powerful thing. Because yeah, you do when you have to sit down and explain the fee. And I don't want to say justify the fee, but just give the fee full context. It sometimes can catch people a little bit flat footed, especially if they have in their mind, oh, I can go find someone that's going to manage for 10%. And they're going to do marketing. They said they were going to put my property in Airbnb.

What do you tell me? That's not marketing. It is a version of marketing in the same way that mcconnell's is a version of food but it's not exactly maybe what you're after if you're the property owner who wants the most stable long-term relationship or something like that and to be fair we talked about evolve earlier evolve is tilted the market in their favor where they have this hybrid approach and you and i may feel like that's not necessarily the same thing as what most of our clients do it It's not. It's very different. But ultimately, it does appeal to a lot of people.

Otherwise, they wouldn't have all those things they have. So there is something where there's a homeowner out there who, you know, that that seat fits their butt, so to speak. They like that approach. And I think for a traditional vacational manager to look at that and dismiss it entirely is potentially a little bit foolish. I'm not saying you should go mimic Evolve if that's not your model. But I think it'd be foolish just to dismiss it and say, oh, no, there's never people in our market that would want that because I think you can learn a little bit foolish. I'm not saying you should go mimic Evolve if that's not your model, but I think it'd be foolish just to dismiss it and say,

oh no, there's never people in our market that would want that because I think you can learn a lot from them. Well, yeah, so we gave some different ideas so far. Maybe we could go to this idea of like local support that's on the sheet as well. I think that's a good example too. What do the nationals do?

What does a local company do? And then this is in my mind where a local company can set themselves apart, right? The infrastructure they have, the team they have, the response time. What's your take on how could we turn local support or like local boots on the ground stuff into a lead magnet or into a more compelling offer or marketing for property owner? Yeah, that's I think that's the one where. Based on this, I think there's more people now today doing more remote management than there were three, four, five years ago, anything like that, a couple of years ago, maybe last year even. I think that's incredible that they have the vision that they can do this in multiple markets.

I think it is somehow you have to establish that you are local. I think that's something that it is very difficult to compete with someone who is local when you are not local, unless you do, you have those boots on the ground. So having the, it is, it might be something of having a business card for your housekeeper or your maintenance people, anything like that. I think a lot of the support does go back to more of the home care type of things as opposed to, I'm not as concerned about the revenue management. That doesn't need to be local to anything like that. Marketing, yeah, you can market from just about anywhere. But really giving people that peace of mind that there is going to be someone there if something breaks, if there's a guest who needs X, Y, Z, if you're having a poor experience of some kind, you want to have someone there within an hour, within 24 hours, within something like

that. So as far as messaging goes, I have, I've seen people say responses, we guarantee a response within an hour. Okay. So that's, it's not really a lead magnet, but it's that mindset of, okay, this is our promise to you. It is looking at giving people that peace of mind that you are taking care, you are looking after things, that checklist for the homeowner side of things, whether it's an inspection checklist, whether it is just your maintenance checklist. I think that's something that tangibly you can give people, hey, here's the hundred point checklist that we go through so that all of these things are what we're looking at consistently, post-stay, pre-stay, all that stuff. But then these are the things that we go through so that all of these things are what we're looking at consistently,

post-day, pre-stay, all that stuff. But then these are the things that we want you to reach out. If you have concerns about any of these things, reach out. This is where we're locally available to you 24-7 and making sure that we have a team right there that's going to be able to help you out. I think certainly the vacasas involves can't say that the same way because yeah, they may have a team, but it's a semi-local team or it's, they'll be with you in a given amount of time. Anytime you're putting, the other thing is anytime you're putting 24 seven, make sure you can deliver 24 seven. The last thing you want to do is put on 24 seven and have someone call you at 3 a.m. and with the expectation of you're going to come out and help them right away. That's going

to be a deal breaker for some people because we've all had those emergencies come up and we've all had to react in some way. And if you're not able to do that and you're talking local 24-7 support or local support or something like that's going to be a deal breaker for people and obviously you never want to need that support but if you're going to say you're going to do it you got to deliver so i think that's something that tangibly the lead magnet side of things give them the checklist give them something that give them a business card give them something give them something where give them a feel that they have control of the vendors you're using, or you have a say in the vendors you're using or something like that, where if they are a local person, if

they're a local owner, and they've worked with someone previously, and it was a great experience to vet that person out and make, I think anything you can do to include homeowners in any of the decision making that you're doing, whether you're still ultimately making the decision or not, again, build that trust, build that more of a partnership as opposed to, yes, you're working for them, I think ultimately, but it does have to be a partnership. There does have to be some give and take on both sides of that on the homeowner side and the property manager side. And you will have longer lasting relationships if you can see that more as a partnership as opposed to you're just another vendor for them or they're just another person for you. A person, whether that's you're not seeing them differently from a homeowner or a guest, they're just another number in the system.

That's over time. That'll run itself dry, I think, and you will, you'll see the negative aspects of what can happen there. But have you seen like specific examples of that local 24 seven support that have really jumped out to you there? overlooks which is this idea of physical presence i've had two situations recently with clients where having the trucks wrapped and having the the team member wearing the shirt and walking into the local restaurant has actually turned into a whole that company and then a google search later and then they're on the front doorstep of the company saying i actually need a new service company so that's one example the other example being like a sign in front of the yeah part of the property which is very common here in the beach markets it was so funny because i've seen those signs for years when i moved here before I ever was in the vacation industry. I would always see, oh, it's a rental house. You can tell because there's a sign out

front with the name of the property manager on it and then the name of the house typically. And then even there's some, I would say owners that still do this here where it says like Verbo and then it'll say the number, the time VRBO and it would just say the number of listing. And there's listings here in the North Middle Beach area that have a four digit, five digit numbers. So they're pretty early on. They've been around for that long since probably the 90s or 2000s or whatever the case may be. So that's also kind of something that I think is maybe underrated with that local support. But yeah, you say you have local support. I've seen this on a property manager landing page before too, where they showed four trucks,

six maintenance people standing in front of the trucks. So they didn't just say we have local support. They literally took a picture of their entire team and said, Oh yeah, I can say it, but I can show it. I have six rep trucks and I have this whole team of people, et cetera. So they didn't just say we have local support. They literally took a picture of their entire team and said, Oh, yeah, I can say it, but I can show it. I have six rep trucks, and I have this whole team of people, etc. So I like that kind of stuff. Again, it goes back to this idea that you repeat it multiple times, I think today, which is so important for the listener to hopefully embed in their brain, which is the idea of believability and showing and proving not just saying, Oh, I'm the best or I have local support. But a picture of five trucks certainly does that a lot better than saying it on a bullet point in the landing page.

That's for sure. They're both helpful, but one really drives the point home a lot better for sure. I know we're at a time here that one I wanted to maybe close on. I think this is a relatively easy one, but I think it can be really compelling. And to my knowledge, you've tested it before is the smart home technology. It goes back to this idea of homeowner doesn't realize if they're a first time vacation rental homeowner, what's involved in getting a home ready for rental and smart home feels like kind of an easy thing to offer to folks. So if you sign on, this would be my, if I was running a vacational company or if I was doing more homeowner marketing

like you do, I'd be pushing clients into saying sign by January 31st and I'll give you this and this. The value of these things combined is $5,000 or $2,000 or whatever the value is. I don't know. Obviously do your own research there, but we give it to you for free because you are a homeowner. And so many property managers have those things that they do. I convinced a client a while ago, actually pre-Ventoria, to talk about the deep clean they do when they sign a property. I'm like, why don't you say I do a deep clean when I get your property? Because it's a $500 deep clean. They pull the ovens out there, down there in the grout with toothbrushes, making everything look spotless. So it's that first guest obviously gets a great experience and they're like oh you have to clean

it before you rent it i'm like i know that but the homeowner they may not know that so it's it was one of those messages but anyways go to go back to the smart home tech idea yeah your thoughts on that and maybe we can put a bow in this one in our time yeah absolutely that is that's something i see still linkedin posts to this day where people who have been in the industry for 15, 20 years who have managed properties, but haven't done them a lot of their own. There's still trepidation in people who are industry vets in renting out their own home. So if we're concerned, yeah, your guests are going to be a little concerned too, especially if they're a first time homeowner turning it into a short term rental or vacation

rental or whatever you're doing there. So that is, that's a classic curse of knowledge thing, which is all of us, right? When we get good at something, we forget that the beginner just doesn't know anything. That's so easy to forget that. Exactly. And I think, again, that's part of that, the marketing package, the onboarding package. That is, this is stuff we just do to give you that peace of mind and to help your your to help the your home ultimately perform better digital locks and that noise and noise monitoring software that's great it does it it gives people that peace of mind okay parties aren't going to happen here i'm not going to have a lot of damage is that really going to change that ultimately who knows but at least it gives

them that peace of mind and idea when you're putting it all up front, a lot of this stuff that we talk about in the key messaging, for us, it's common sense. Oh, yeah, of course, we're going to do 24-7. Of course, we're going to do reporting taxes. Of course, we have an owner. Of course, we have housekeeping. Of course, we have smart home technology. But for someone who's just brand new to this, they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. So you have to do a lot of education. And I think ultimately everything we're talking about here with the lead magnets, with the homeowner marketing, with everything we're talking about, it's so much more about education. People know how to travel. People don't necessarily know how to use their second

property as a short-term rental, long-term rental, whatever you're doing there. So giving them all of that information that they need, and it might be a landing page. It might be a book. You might have a homeowner-specific book that's a little lengthier that actually dives into all this in great detail. That could be another lead magnet there where you're putting all of this together into a homeowner book of some kind that is your onboarding playbook of, this is how we're going to get you live. We've got, here's your steps, one, two, three, four, but then this is what we're doing. These are all the steps. Okay, you're worried about revenue management. This is what we're doing. Marketing, maintenance,

everything like that. How are we keeping your home safe? How are you keeping your guests safe? Because it's not just about your home. It's about the people. I think for people who are moving from a self-managing model to a property manage, they've had all those relationships previously, and those are important. So making sure those guests are safe with those digital locks and making sure you are bringing in the same kinds of guests with that noise monitoring software. I think those are some things that are going to trust, peace of mind, all of those things. This is not a small decision that people are making. And the more you can educate them, the more information you can give them, the more tangible things you can give them to have in their hand, to read, to give them. It's not just that first 30 days. It's not just the first 60, 90 days, six months, whatever that is. You're hoping to have a long-term partnership and relationship with these homeowners. So you put that investment in upfront

and you have a much higher likelihood of having that great long-term relationship and experience. And hopefully they'll recommend other for other owners. And then you're doing your own marketing and it's a flywheel that can really benefit your business long-term. Total sidebar, we need to do a word of mouth episode. We really do. That could be a good one. That could be a good one. Number one, how to stimulate word of mouth, which is not as hard to use as you might think just by asking. So if you like that idea, then email us. We'd love to hear about it. So we've been referencing this key messaging document today. Can you give this out?

Or does someone have to be a Venturi partner? No, I can still give this out. Yep, absolutely. Okay, yeah. This is fantastic, I think. So again, you should use Venturi. Obviously, we'll put a link in the show instead of Venturi. If that hasn't been clear at this point, if you're doing more homeowner marketing, but

maybe you have some things you're doing on your own, or maybe we help homeowner, some of our clients just run Google ads or something to their landing page. I always tell them, go check out what these guys are doing because they've mastered a lot of the specifics of everything. But this document, if you went through these two pages, it's only two pages, by the way, it's not like some and understood what each of these different things meant. I think you're training yourself on how to actually create better marketing, how to create a better ad, how to create a better offer, how to make your messaging a lot better. And ultimately, if you're a good property manager, you do a great job, you deliver revenue,

you have happy guests, you have happy owners, you owe it to yourself to get more and do a great job for more people if that's what your goal is in the business. And this document will help you. So you can email paul at venturi.com. I think that's the best way to reach out to you. I'm sure send him a message on LinkedIn.

He might be responsive there when he's not debating the value of Vikings or backup quarterbacks or something like that. So we went a little bit long today, but hopefully the listener on the other side got some value out of it. We also would appreciate a review at this point. So if you made it this deep, then you certainly not only should get the worksheet from Paul, but you can also leave us a five-star review. That's our key message for the end of the episode, is to go on your podcast app and choicely five stars.

We appreciate it. We'll catch you on the next episode of the It's In Bed Show.