Heads In Beds Show - What's It Like For One Of US To Book A Vacation Rental?

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

In this episode, Conrad breaks down what it's like to book a vacation rental and his experience as a guest while visiting family a few weeks ago. Paul and Conrad also talk about Booking.com ads and other updates to Google Ads RSAs.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellGoogle releases Responsive Search Ads guideBooking.com owner hails marketing efficiency in driving topline growth🔗 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, how's it going there, Paul? Fantastic. Summer continues to dwindle away. It's just, it's almost done.

We've got a vacation coming up here in a couple weeks, and that's going to lead us right into school. So I don't, I literally, I think we've talked about it every week when we recorded, but I don't know where this summer has gone. I miss it. I am scared that if they're all going to go this fast moving forward I don't know I just have some problems with this this whole everything getting

older getting fast and everything like that but how's your week going Conrad yeah it was going good I think I shared the before we hit record somehow I like injured my back a little bit now I can't move my arm a certain way we were just it's your birthday today actually I think the listeners you know they're going to listen to this and it's not going to be your birthday of course.

But go ahead and email Paul. Go to his LinkedIn wall, whatever. Click the link in the description. Go send Paul a happy belated birthday message because as we record, it's his birthday. We're both getting older, which my grandma would say, who I saw a few weeks ago. That's foreshadowing here for the topic of the episode.

If you're not getting older, you're dead. So if you're getting older, it's a good thing. That's the right way to look at it, I think. That'll work. Awesome. Yeah. You know what else is getting older? Google's getting older and Booking.com is getting older, it's a good thing. That's the right way to look at it, I think. That'll work. Awesome. Yeah. You know what else is getting older? Google is getting older and Booking.com is getting older as a company.

And they're changing things along the way. Do you want to do a quick marketing minute and then we'll dive into today's topic? I will. So Booking.com, one of those big spenders in the whole hospitality space. They've been around a little bit. Got some products, that open table, I guess, kayak. They do some things. This, they just announced in their most recent, probably Q3 earnings call, their Q2

reporting numbers. But they talked about how much they spent in Q2, 1.8 billion. So that's one of those things where I think on the quote from the call is, it's a big number. It's a large amount. And after saying that, it's a talk of why the business is really ramping up on efficiency. It is. I think anytime you're looking at the billions of dollars in ad spend of any kind, we've all seen the booking.com commercials, booking.yeah, and all that stuff. And we've had discussions about booking.yeah. I don't know. But it is. There's obviously when you're averaging about $2 billion in ad spend or marketing spend every quarter, you can get your name out there in a pretty effective way.

Is it as efficient as they want it to be? No, but I do. I think it's important to understand just how much some of those big players out there in the market. I think Airbnb is probably got to be pretty close to that in a lot of cases. HomeAway at one time, I think they were right up under the Expedia window, under the Expedia umbrella, were spending about that much as well. So it just goes to say you got to pay to play sometimes in this space. So maybe you're not paying $1.8 billion or so, but keeping in perspective how much some of those big players are playing.

So that was notable, I thought, this week. Also, Google went through and gave us a nice little guide on how to create better responsive search ads. For those who have listened before, responsive search ads are certainly my ad of choice as opposed to dynamic. Letting Google write ads just based on a URL is very scary to me. So it is. Responsive search ads are, I think, there's certainly value for them when we find them

on the dynamic side. But responsive search ads, it is. You're giving Google the ingredients to make the cake and not making them make it from scratch there is my comparison. I think it's really talking about how to write ads more effectively, giving how to write the most effective ads, how to add giving how to write the most effective ads, how to add the most assets to the most effective ads, really giving you all the characteristics of how Google's terming and defining really what are the key parameters to watch out for,

whether it's ad strength, different tools within the system as Google builds more AI into the process. I think that's certainly going to be something to keep an eye on with some of these self-serve guides is what is Google building in? Because they're going to roll it across accounts for us who manage multiple accounts pretty slowly. We'll see it in a few here, and then we'll have to catch up in some other accounts. So when they're releasing a big guide like this,

that's something that I like to take notice of and make sure that as some of those changes that they're releasing, quote unquote, are coming out, we can identify them, track them into specific accounts that we want to see and make sure that we're rolling any of those features into the strategy moving forward. So yeah, it's maybe not as news breaking stuff, but it's stuff that I think is always important to talk about when it's in the minute there. Yeah, no, I think that we always want to be like using all the best practices when it comes to advertising.

And sometimes we find little things that we then have to go roll out to a lot of accounts. But I think that process is often a good one to go through. So yeah, we'll put both links to those articles that you found one marketing week one search engine land in the show notes. People can check that out. So we had an interesting idea for today's episode. And it was what is the guest point of view of what it's like to book a vacation rental when you're someone who works in the vacation rental industry, but you and I are not on the delivery side of like delivering

the guest experience properties, getting the properties ready or cleaning or anything like that. So I thought we'd do a little dive into it. So a few weeks back I went and saw family. So it wasn't really a leisure trip. It was more of a family visiting trip. My grandfather was in the hospital. Luckily he's out of the hospital now, but that was the reason for the trip. And it was interesting because we had to book a vacation rental in Western Massachusetts, which is not an easy place to find a vacation rental, at least where he happens to be based. Not exactly a hotbed. This is not Destin, Florida, if you will, of options.

So we ended up finding a vacation rental. And I thought today I'd go through a few things that I saw that I thought were interesting from like the guest side. And it was also very interesting to hear the perspective of my wife was there, my mom was there, my cousin was there with her husband, she's married now, they have a little little kid as well. So a varied group of people that were in this property, none of which know pretty much anything about the short term rental vacation rental industry except myself. And I decided to hush my mouth a little bit as people ask questions, and just see what they were saying,

and what it was like to actually book this property. So I thought we'd go through it. Happy to hear your perspective, Paul, as we go along and maybe have some things to add in and we can see if people get some value from this. All right. So I'm going to do like pros and cons and make alternate them a little bit, the good, the bad, and we'll try to end on a high note here from the host. So the pros, number one, so I ended up booking direct. I'm putting direct in air quotes here and we saved a few hundred dollars. I say direct because the owner of the property did choose to use Evolve. So Evolve was actually where we booked the property on the Evolve website. However, my wife found it originally on Airbnb. So we already

sidestepped Airbnb a little bit in that way. Nothing that Evolve did on the listing, by the way, would have led anyone to find, let's say, this property directly, other than the fact that we put in this very tiny town on the Evolve website and we were able to find it. So our total savings of this Airbnb to Evolve sidestep was about $200, not a significant amount of money, but someone that I wasn't going to just throw away for no reason and give Airbnb the service fee or that extra fee for no reason. So that was the first little thing that I thought was interesting, which is that even though I don't know, we don't have any clients in this area or anything like that, didn't know the host, hadn't booked with them before. I felt trustworthy enough on my side,

at least to book with Evolve, knowing that they're a large, trustworthy company. And we decided to go that route. I also got to see what the guest experience was like when you book, quote unquote, direct through Evolve, because you do book through Evolve. That's who takes your credit card payment and things like that. My understanding is they take 10% as their fee

and then the rest is passed to the owner. And then what they do is they send you an email pretty much right away and they say, okay, yep, you booked, your reservation is confirmed. That's all well and good. But here is your local contact. And the local contact is basically actually the owner of the property in some cases. And this case, it seemed like they had like a housekeeper slash local property manager. Although we did learn later in the day that she also did live in the area too. So maybe it was just we learned what her job was. I don't want to say that out loud if she wouldn't want that to be known. But she invited us to actually go experience her job. And oh, there was an issue and she was like, come to this thing that I do. It's kid friendly, and you guys will have a good time. I won't be too specific there. But so we learned what she does. And I assume that she's busy doing that career roles. Maybe she has this other person helping her kind of boots on the grind type person gets the property number one wasn't ready at the agreed check in time. So I think we agreed

to check in at three o'clock. We came up a little bit past that and I tried to give someone a little bit of extra time. I think it was 3.25. We rolled up and she wasn't done cleaning the property yet. You know, I get it, right? Like the person has to clean a property, the turnover takes time. This cabin's out in the middle of nowhere,

to be honest with you. So part of me is like, all right, we're already off on the wrong foot, but I'm willing to kind of let it slide. My wife was not as enthusiastic about letting it slide. So already some early like empathy on my side for how tough I know that role is and how hard it is to find good people who will come out in the middle of nowhere and clean a property by themselves pretty big property too by the way and her perspective which is that we're paid a lot of money for this night it's three

o'clock you don't even let us in till the afternoon it's already 3 30 and it's not ready and she was a little miffed about that honestly hard to blame her because actually where she's coming from there so it's finally in. I think it's 345, let's say 350 by the time we get in. Then she actually calls us later on and says, oh, I made like a mistake and I like forgot to put something on a certain bed. So like we still had to finish like her turnover, even though she didn't let us in until almost an hour later.

So we got off on a little bit of a bad foot there in that respect of getting in the property, getting everything all settled. I will say this. Once we got in there, it appeared to be pretty clean, overall pretty solid. Kids were happy. We found their rooms they were going to be sleeping in and everything was relatively okay after that initial hiccup. I think there's a way to communicate about these types of things happening.

Even 35 seconds of her coming out of the house and being like, hey, I know you guys are here. I know the check-in time is here. I just got to finish up a few more things to make sure this house is ready for you. If you guys want to hang out in the front yard or even hang on the back deck, that's perfectly fine. I've already cleaned there and I'll be done in just a few minutes. And then I'm happy to have you guys come in the property. So I think just her not communicating was a negative thing. When that does happen, I think there's a level, again, a level of communication that helps smooth that over. That was just my perspective on if that happens and you are a professional manager,

like what's the protocol for your cleaner to be like, ah, the guest is here and I should have been ready. If it's too early, you can easily make the excuse of, hey, we, it does take us a little bit of time to turn this property over. We'll be ready until three o'clock. If I showed up at two o'clock, that would have been a very valid, I think, criticism, but I showed up after the checkout time and it wasn't ready. I think the cleaner or property manager or whatever housekeeping professional should have some kind of script to read off over some kind of like message that they could

have to make things a little bit better. So we get in and that was a chore and a task to unload everything. And then once we're there, I think the good news, it was very easy to understand how to get there. Location, direction, all the information that the property manager slash local contact gave us was accurate and we were able to get there. No issue. So I think that was a positive. There was no air conditioning in the cabin, which they mentioned, but man, it was hot. And that was one thing early on. It's if you know that's what your property has. One little line after you book was no AC in the property. Totally valid, but also not necessarily the best feeling to be 84 degrees inside of a cabin when you get

back to it and it's four o'clock. Something about the way it was situated and like the sun hitting, hitting this big glass kind of type wall was tough. So that was definitely a little bit more of a challenging situation. Once we got in the property, honestly, my wife said the same thing. Look, there were some little hiccups, but we got great value for money. And that's one thing that I felt as we were walking in that property. And then my mom was going to be there and my cousin and her husband and her little girl and all that stuff. And I thought, wow, if we went and booked a hotel room, we would have each paid, let's say $250 per night. It would have summed up to be $1,000 or something between taxes and fees and all that kind of stuff. Here we are paying maybe 20-30% more than what a single hotel room would

have cost us. And we got us this whole property with a kitchen and all this kind of stuff. Despite the hiccups, when I got in there, we closed the door and everything was calm. I thought there's a reason why this product that we market that we talk about all the time is so popular, which is that it's just a vastly superior experience for people like myself with three kids and a whole family coming in and sharing a space. It just makes a lot of sense. I felt that way. And I was reminded of that in a very tangible way as we finished our first night there. And we're sweating under the bed. Sweating under the stars. Yeah, sweating under the stars a little bit. That could be the name of my my first album when I dropped that. No, I kid. But yeah, so a few

other things. I'll clean up some other notes here that I'd love to hear your perspective on this or hear your point of view when you get into a rental and how you behave. Easy. It was very easy to see that this was an owner converting a personal property into a short term rental. And it's always easy to see that because all their stuff was in there. And I don't mean like they didn't leave like clothes behind too much. There wasn't anything like that there. No, like personal photos. It wasn't that type of stuff. But like all their pots and pans were just like beat to hell. He just like dents and scratches and things like that. And nothing matched like none of the glasses matched any of the pots and pans and that didn't match anything. It was just like a hodgepodge of almost like flea market fines of just what we were actually eating and drinking and cooking with. And I was just like,

like, I know lots of property managers that we work with, who when they're stocking a property, first of all, they would take everything out. If anything's in there, it's gone. And then when they go get that property ready to actually come onto their rental program, they're buying all the right things to make sure to put into that property. Hey, we're going to have a matching set of pots and pans, matching set of glasses, matching set of dishes, all those little things. And that was definitely not the case here. It was like all scratched and you could tell it was probably had been there since they own the property. And I think they did it since 2006 or 2007 or something like that. So that was always

just kind of the little thing. And I pointed that out to my mom, actually, when we were cooking one night, is she found what she was looking for. But I'm like, I was just like, that's amateur hour right there. Like not putting all the right accessories into the property that you're actually going to use. In this case, it was like all the dishes and pots and pans and things like that. So that was one little observation I had. Another one, the bed in every room rental conversion was successful from an occupancy standpoint. everybody had their own room and they could sleep in their own bed that was great but like clearly what was once an office with no door was now a bedroom a loft that was like had no door whatsoever no privacy whatsoever was also a bedroom and I was just like ah you just took every room

and you put a bed in it and that was another interesting wrinkle to see in action and then just realizing my cousin just wants to get dressed in privacy who could blame her and she's like going into the bathroom to get dressed because like her room is not really a room like it's just kind of this other loft that they turned into a room and tucked like a twin size bed or something like that in the corner so that was interesting and then they also took the downstairs was a garage and then they finished it like half of it and put it and turned that into a bedroom so it was like a two-bedroom cabin that somehow became like a four and a half five-bedroom cabin through their clever use of occupancy boosting tactics, which I was on board with because it

helped my family a lot. So I'm appreciative of it. But also you could tell there's people online who I follow who do purpose built vacation rentals. Yeah, that was not this was not purpose built by any stretch of the imagination. And yeah, it was interesting there. My last note here, and then I'll turn it over to you because I think this is the longest monologue and heads of bed show history. It's all good. Is exterior cameras. I always used to say, oh yeah, just close that you have an exterior camera. No big deal. And I will say this, a camera pointing at the driveway didn't bother me at all.

Hey, they want to know when we're arriving and when we're leaving. I get it. That's fine. There was a lot of exterior cameras though in areas that we were at. There was one in the back deck. There was one in the front door and stuff like that. And I don't know if I can define it exactly. I just feel a little weird about the fact that,

and she may not have listened to a single file that's plausible, but I just felt a little weird about the fact that we're in this common area. We're discussing kind of the situation that we're in of a family member being sick and us coming together and going to see him. And I just, I didn't know if I liked the fact that was just being broadcast back out through this simply safe security camera that was attached to this exterior wall and we were all sitting underneath it. don't know i can't define that perfectly but that was kind of my last parting thought was just the fact that every move that we were making outside the property was being

recorded just had me feel like a little queasy almost or just a little awkward i'm just like i get it you don't want to have people like throwing a party or causing property damage i totally see the reason for the camera but i don't know if i like the camera to be honest with you from a guest perspective i just thought that there were some downsides there or if you are trying to monitor parties do you need audio recording like or could you maybe have a video only option so you're just seeing video and not audio I don't know but yeah that's kind of my thoughts that was a hodgepodge of good things and bad things overall I'm happy we stayed there I'm glad it was there I would stay there again for sure if it was an opportunity given to us and we had to go back up and see my family there again

but I also think we'd look and see if we could find something better. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't this as Airbnb would have a, it wasn't a five-star experience. That's for sure. There were some flaws and there were some issues along the way. And it was interesting to experience from the guest side. So I don't know your perspective or your thoughts and what's it like when you book vacation rentals from your side? Yeah, no, I think there is a reason just hitting on your last point there there's a reason why homo and anybody who's going anti-airbnb they do they really hit on that they try to hit on those tv commercial messaging of they're staying with you or they're staying right there there's that lurking host that's always present in all those commercials and i think that it is whether there was a lurking host there physically or those

exterior cameras there's something to be said for that I would agree that's I just reading your notes I was just like yeah that's something that I don't feel comfortable about and then when you actually explained it it's yeah I I think we've all in this world we've all seen the ring doorbell terrible things that happen or things getting hacked and stuff like that. That would always be my concern there as well. So I think just off the bat, that's that first thing of that's what people are selling against with Airbnb right now. So there's something to be said that that to reduce the creepy factor as much as you can. Maybe that's one of those bullet points as you're trying to self-manage and do stuff like that. It is that late check-in. That is also something that just

struck me there that I can remember doing, not vacation rentals even, but just hotels where we walked in right when the housekeeping team is just wrapping up and it's just, what am I supposed to do? But I did, I thought about maybe some of the local managers that we work with thinking about how they put that priority on the maintenance and house care and housekeeping and all that. And I wonder if having the more fully built out professional manager management company is able to respond to that better, more effectively? I would think so then evolve. Having a community manager and then maybe an individual or a

housekeeping team or something like that. But I guess that is, is that something where do you think if it had been a professional and if there had been a professional manager in that area, might be the other question there, that would have been something that would have been resolved or would have been more easily resolved. I guess that's where those resources, thinking about it, is an involved issue? Is it just a short-term rental issue in general? Where would you say was the breakdown there? I think the breakdown was simply in communication. I think that I'm the kind of person who is fine with, if you're not going to be done in time and you know the guest is going to arrive, I think it's then your responsibility to say, okay,

how am I going to handle it once this does happen? And then I think, like I said, a 35 second conversation would have put it in much better footing. And I think most people are reasonable and I think I'm reasonable. And I think everyone in that situation would be mostly reasonable. But hey, I want to make sure it's ready for you. I want to make sure it's fully optimized, clean, whatever word you want to use for your stay. And we're just not quite there yet. We'll be there very soon. I think the labor issue

might have been the real one, which is cleaning a four bedroom cabin that's almost 3000 square feet by yourself. You got to be a beast to be able to clean that in a two, three hour window and keep it really clean. Sure. If you just do a cursory clean and who knows, maybe the guest before us was horribly dirty. Obviously we don't know because we stepped in and it looked pretty good in ours from our perspective. So that's kind of what I lean towards there is that Brooke said this to me recently on a recording that he and I did. I think it's from Rob, which is that the absence of information, people assume the worst.

So when you're just sitting out there and not getting the property, is this going to take forever? What am I actually going to get in here? You start to assume things that are not really true. Right. And 35 seconds of, hey, guys, welcome. You guys are going to have a great time here. Here's what's going on. I'll be done in roughly 25 more minutes hang out here while we wait if you don't

mind and i'll grab come and grab you guys when we're you're fully ready to go i think that would have solved it's a professional manager or not i think that it's understanding that person who was just in the car for a very long time what their perspective might be and then how do you actually make them so that they can know what's going on have a quick context and then they can go into the next thing that's my perspective yeah i would agree that they can know what's going on, have a quick context, and then they can go into the next thing. That's my perspective. Yeah. I would agree.

That's certainly something. For me, when I've booked vacation rentals, it has primarily been for single use, not with my family. I've traveled a lot since we've had the family around. But that's been something where, for me, it's cheap is good. I'm usually looking for the cheapest option possible. It's cheap is good. I'm usually looking for the cheapest option possible. I think the last time we actually booked a vacation rental was going out to the Ryder Cup in Sheboygan,

where I got to tell you, probably pretty similar to Western Massachusetts, where there's not a lot of rentals around there. A couple of resorts, but I think where we actually stayed was about an hour away from Sheboygan. But we stayed there for 49 bucks a night in a shared house with someone else. I think that's important as well. Just understanding what that experience you're going to have is, and kind of setting yourself up for that. If there's something to be said for your pain, you're getting what you pay for. I think that certainly the functionality of a vacation rental for those who don't want just the four walls and a bed and something like that of a hotel, I think it's fantastic. There's just a clear, better value

there for the space you're getting, sometimes the amenities you're getting that are not too far away. Maybe not having a onsite pool. I think that would be the main draw of a hotel there, but typically it is, you're going to have more, more there. That's, I don't know, I get, and the more you can, I think you, maybe you can select where you're going more. It is, you're not just plopped in a hotels, just feel like they're in a city center or something like that. No, you can be, maybe you need to be closer to the outskirts of the city, or you can be, you can really customize your stay more with those vacation rentals as well. I think, and then going back to the other personal property of the short-term rental, you, when I look at, go to Verm and I see a Sojo or a Host GPO, I'm like, well, why, why is that such a big deal? You nailed it right there. It is. It's that uniformity of that experience.

That would be more of a standardized hotel experience of I have all my pots and pans and all my dishes and everything like that. And it is, I've listened to, I think Jeff at HostGPO talk enough now. I'm just like, man, that makes a lot of sense that you would want that you're trying to give the hotel experience without doing that. And that's a, I think so often because hospitality kind of revolved around hotels for so long. You're trying to give someone a hotel experience, but you're not really giving someone a hotel experience. You're giving someone a hospitality experience. But for some reason, I think we default maybe with a bias there back to, oh, I'm going to give them a hotel experience or a resort experience. Well, you're going to give them a vacation rental experience, but you're going to

customize that to whatever they're looking for. There's, I don't know, there's, I love this breakdown. I love that it's one of those big national players and it's fun to peek behind the curtain there and see what they do better, what they maybe have some limitations with and understanding, trying to get a better understanding of why people choose an Evolver or a Vicasa instead of a local property manager and maybe what goes into that. I think it'd be interesting to do some of these bookings, do some of these and then follow up with them three to six months later and say, hey, so I work in the industry. Just wanted to ask you a few questions and see what your thought process is here on why you manage the way you do, why I'm sure you could

just ask anybody from Evolve or try to reach out to some of those hosts and see if they'd be interested. But that just seems like another opportunity to have that touch point. It's always interesting to listen to the calls from people who do currently have their properties managed by Vacasa or Evolve when they're calling into prospective new property managers in the Venturi system. But it's very, I would say, superficial in how they're describing the areas of opportunity or what they don't like what they do so i think it would be interesting to come back from someone who's booked with them from that perspective and say how'd you get into the space and as a kind of just a vocational nerd i'd say it's one of those things that how'd you get into the space and why evolve and have you tried something different and why do you do the housekeeping this way or why you know xyz i would love to get more of an understanding now after you had stayed with someone because i think

you can fill in some more of the dots on the guest side of things that would be interesting i'm not opposed to reaching back out to this person like i said we may stay there again last thing maybe on my side that is interesting because it's the last part of the stay i don't think we ever got a review request and i wonder if it was something that was like manually flagged as not to ask for a review request we had an issue with a shower there was like little things during the stay that we you know in a friendly way okay like just so you're aware we let them know about certain property issues we also saw mouse the last day so that was also something we let them know about and i wonder if they hit some button in the back end that was like don't ask them for a review because they might potentially leave a negative

one i actually asked my wife on the way back about that. What would we do? I said, if they asked for a review, zero out of five stars, what would you leave? And I think she, she sat there and she thought about it for a minute and I could tell she was waffling between three and four. She said, I'm going to say five. And she wasn't going to say two. It wasn't, it wasn't like a disaster or one or anything like that.

And she was like, I think she ended up saying, I think I would do a three, honestly, because of some of the issues we had the late, it wasn't like one thing. It, honestly, because of some of the issues we had. It wasn't like one thing. It was like four or five things over four or five days. It wasn't like we were there for that long. They kind of all piled up into a little bit of a better thing. And I looked at the property and gone, okay, we paid whatever, 300 odd a night for the property. I look at it and go, I guarantee you this could be a 500 to a thousand dollar per night

place with all these things fixed. I saw the potential in it, but it was like they weren't really doing all that could be capitalized on it yeah understanding to your point the last piece there understanding the motivation of the host is such an interesting piece of the puzzle here because the reason that this stay can be so appealing for a lot of people is all the benefits that offers but yeah what does that person on the other side want out of it do they want something relatively stress-free hey i'm gonna i can live leave i can live with some three or four star reviews i'm not trying to make some unbelievably high-end boutique hospitality experience, especially in a market like this where there's not a lot of other options. They may say good enough is good

enough, and I can empathize with that line of thinking, even if I don't perfectly agree with it because I look, man, you could make so much more if you put so much more effort into it. They may say what a lot of people have said. Mike Harrington has talked about this publicly in the past where he said that the origin of this industry in the leisure market is not let's make money and let's get rich off it. It's I want to have a second home at the beach, cover my costs while I'm not there. And I'll tell you what I'm going to come and you block out those weeks and make sure that a renter is not there when I'm there.

That's the origin of this leisure market, at least at a beach market, which is where Mike has most of his experience. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. And this is a situation, like I said, if we lived in the house, I'm assuming they bought a different house or had to move to the other part of town for this new job or something. And they said, may as well rent it versus just having it sit empty. And there's probably some logic in that type of thinking. So yeah, understanding the motivation, back to your point from the inventory side, what can we learn from this? Yeah, what are they after? Maybe they're perfectly happy with Evolve

and their 10% cut for what they do. And they may find the idea of technology or marketing or these things very overwhelming and stressful and hard. They may find, in this case, have found a really hard time of finding that local boots on the ground property manager. So they may have said, hey, 10% for Evolve plus kind of rolling my own solution with a handyman, handy person, housekeeping professional, and doing it that way, paying them per job or per hour or something is probably the right mix. In many markets that you and focus on obviously that's not usually an issue it's not that there's lack of professional property managers but in this case it was yeah always good to see like what people's motivations are maybe that's something an idea for a future episode is like

interviewing someone and kind of understanding their mindset more so than the mechanics of the property that they're putting out into the marketplace yeah anything else you want to put in there is this our this is our experimental guest review episode. I think we put a, this is Bo worthy right now. Awesome. This was a different idea. We'll be back next week. We'll bring dud or stud back next week. We'll just have to pick our topics. So stay tuned. We're not going to tell you. I think that's called a teaser in the business. So that's a teaser. You come back next week, you listen, then you'll know what the topic is because it'll be in the subject line of the, the episode no no tricks there what would really be awesome is if we had we shared our experience with you you should share your experience the listener with us

so you go to your podcast app of choice now the difference is there's no there's nothing less than a five star in this that's right five star yeah call us airbnb if you want to on that one leave five stars or we fail and we feel like we've let you down so no i, but we appreciate if you listen as far as to leave a review. A different episode this week. We'll be back on the marketing grind a little bit more next week. And we thank you for listening. Thanks so much. We'll catch you next time.