a NEW listing site with a difference

Sam. Foreign. Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in on the replay to this. As always, my name is Mark Simpson and today I am joined by a special guest and I'm going to get into our special guest in in a second and what they're doing. But first and foremost, everybody that is tuning in, whether it is live or whether it is on the replay, please do me a massive favorite. And in the comments section below, whether you're on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever it may be, just leave a little comment and just tell me where you are tuning in from in the world. So your name, where you are in the world, but most importantly the business. Give your business, give your hospitality business a bit of a shout out, use a website link and why someone should book with you because you never know who may be watching this video in the future. So please do do that and I will give a couple of people some special mentions as we go. But as the title suggests, the we are going to talk about in this video today in a special live recording of the boostly podcast of a listing site with a difference. And for those of you that have been tuning in to the podcast in 2021 is specifically around about the March April time you will remember me talking about this site and the, the, the thing that I love about it is that it is an extra revenue stream. But back in April and March they weren't ready to push out from out of America, but now they are now in Canada, obviously in America and they're about to hit United Kingdom. We're focusing on just one specific city at the moment that we'll talk about. But I thought it'd be really good to get peers base on to the podcast and what we're going to do in this episode is we're just going to explain a little bit more about it. But instead of just me talking about it, I wanted to get one of the team members there to come on and have a little chat with us just about what it is, how it can benefit and how it will not affect your short term rental business in any way, shape or form. And we have Matt from Pairspace. Thank you very much Matt for joining us. We've had a quick chat before we went live, but if in a very simple terms for anybody who is watching this who has never heard of Peerspace before, could you please just give it a super quick introduction of how it's going to help hosts and why are we going to talk today?

Please. Sure. Thanks a lot Mark for having me. Peerspace is the world's leading marketplace for hosting any short term activity outside the home or office. And what we seek to do is partner with hosts to list their space for hourly booking as low as two hours for these different types of activities. And you can effectively have your space booked for a photo shoot, a meeting, a film shoot or an event. And you can list your same property for all these different options and different price points. And that's how you're able to maximize the utility of your space. So let's just quickly go into the use case where you're a short term rental host. Maybe you have a gap at a certain time of day, but during the daytime from 11 to 4, it's a great opportunity to have a commercial crew come in and do a photo shoot, for example. Allow you to be able to augment your calendar that way to bring on additional income.

Nice. So how long now has Peerspace been active for?

We launched the company in 2014 in San Francisco and we've since moved all opening markets all across the United States. This year we opened in Canada and we had just launched in the UK with it as our first metro area there.

Lovely, lovely. And to date, how many hosts or spaces do you have on peer space that people could, could book or rent out? If you have a rough number.

Yeah. So right north of 20,000 active spaces and that's growing, running thousands of new spaces per month. Yep. Especially as, as we move into new markets. So yeah.

And the types of listings, obviously there's two types of people who come into the Peerspace website. You'll have the host who wants to list their property and you'll have the people that want to book. So from just like case studies that are out there right now, what are the types of properties that are listing on Pairspace? Because I think the assumption would be oh, it's for you know, big warehouses or X, Y, Z. It's not going, I think a host watching this may be thinking it's not going to be for, for me. So if you could just give some different types of examples of people that are listing their, their properties on Peerspace just to sort of calm that objection that somebody may have.

Yeah, well we are interested in bringing on unique spaces, whatever kind of space type that may be. So while there are meeting rooms and boardrooms and co working spaces, there are also many, many homes, residences that are used for different activities. There are warehouses, lofts, flats, single family homes. People are listing their backyards for events, for example. You can list parts of the space as well, I should mention. So when you list your space, it doesn't mean that you're giving somebody access to bedroom and people aren't sleeping or staying overnight in a pure space. So yeah, we have many different space types, but we certainly see quite a bit of demand for residences, particularly from production segments and for our meeting segments where teams would like to get together in a more relaxed, inspiring space. There's a ton of variety in residences and every space is really different and you can find what you're looking for if you're browsing for a rental.

So at what point of the Peerspace journey, and I don't know how long you've been in the company for, but what part of the Peerspace journey did you realize that. Hang on a second. We need to get short term rental accommodation businesses on this platform was a specific moment or was it just something that you sort of decided to target from the off, or was it something that came in like a couple of years down the line?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I want to say that it happened quite organically. I think that there is.

People who.

Are familiar with short term rental platforms, Airbnb, for example, are understanding that the value of their space can be monetized in different ways. And as wind people got wind of what was happening with Peerspace as an alternative way to do something similar. I think a lot of the organic inbound supply that we started seeing was these residences and a lot of short term rentals and vacation properties. You just understand the concept of that. And so I don't know that we deliberately went after that kind of audience to add that supply ever. But it certainly is something that our renters are saying they're looking for. The reasons I mentioned earlier that there's a lot of unique qualities about these spaces and the host is generally used to providing a certain expectation around hospitality and attentiveness to their needs. And so they just tend to do really well on the platform. And that's not to say that a photo studio or a performance space is also doing well. There's kind of different types of rentals.

Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about a question that I see come up whenever we talk about peer space in the communities that I'm part of is insurance. I know that not every insurance is the same, but how peerspace explaining this to a host when it comes to insurance and how it would or would not affect them.

Sure. So we built very early on, I want to say we debuted this in 2016, a custom built from the ground up insurance policy that we partnered with very reputable global carrier on that was focused on peer space bookings and how liability should work in the event of some sort of loss by a third party brought against a host. That was the first thing that we wanted to cover because while they're extremely rare, there is the risk of catastrophic loss that we want to make sure hosts feel peace of mind around that they use their space for any type of activity, let alone for Peerspace. So we built it for Peerspace hosts and we've extended the same program to our spaces in Canada and in the UK. And so in the UK, for example, the coverage is up to 1 million accounts Canada, 1 million Canadian dollars and so forth. And it's meant to cover your peer space activities. And what it is is it's a general liability policy. It's supplemental to your primary coverage. So if you have a short term rental, you should have this primary insurance, whether that's your homeowner's policy or short term rental policy. This will come in and say if there's exclusions around your primary policy for whatever reason or if the primary line of coverage gets exhausted due to some kind of claim. Carespace is here. We got you for this. And so it was really important to build that comprehensive coverage that will make us feel the confidence in these kinds of transactions.

Okay, so we've talked about like the benefits and you know, obviously the insurance was something that I've been asked a couple of times and now the company is growing, which is fantastic to see. Again, I'm a, I'm a big fan. Whenever, as soon as I heard about it on a clubhouse room, I reached out and I said I wanted to help in any way, shape or form to spread it to the host because I think that this is a really cool way of bringing in extra income. Now that we're moving out of usa, now we're moving out of Canada and we're coming over to the UK and Europe. Let's talk about that. Because the majority of the hosts that tune into the podcast are in the uk, in Europe. So how can somebody go about looking into Peerspace? The first question is how much commission do you take per book? And I think that's going to be the first one that the people are going to be asking, how does the commission model work? So it's obviously it's free to list on Peerspace and anybody right now can go to Peerspace by going to Boostly B O O s t l y.co.uk Pier P E E and I'll make sure that link gets in in all the posts later on, but you go there and you set up a free list. And how does the commission work on that?

Yeah, so as you mentioned, it is 100 free to list. It is our job as a platform to get you inquiries, to get you booking requests, and of course, it's your job to convert them into bookings. When that happens, Peerspace takes a 15% service fee of the subtotal value of your rental. So let's say you've listed for 100 pounds an hour. PeerSpace will pay you out 85 pounds an hour, and then the 15 pounds per hour will be what PeerSpace takes. There's also a small processing fee that we charge to support bookings and run credit cards on the guest side. So that's not necessarily a fee that the host has to think about. But, yeah, that's the way it works. And we do a lot of things for our hosts to drive the demand and the inquiries. We have a lot of secret tactics that we spend a lot of time and effort on, whether we're building them on our engineering side or we're just investing a lot of dollars into advertising and brand building. And so that's how we earn that commission. It's not the type of platform where we set you live and we do nothing to drive demand your space. Every day we're thinking about how we're going to capitalize essentially on the effort spent on having you sign up and having you list your, your photos. We're in this together in that sense.

And what I love about Pierce Basin, obviously with the UK team, and I've been chatting to Emily and whatnot, but it's very much in the infancy. So when you do register your business and if you're one of the early adopters, you're going to get looked after. You're going to get a bit of help in hand in how to submit your listing, how to create your listing and how to get it live. Because obviously, right now, with peerspace, every listing that goes live, you want it to be top notch because it's, you know, it's the, it's the first out in, in the uk. Just imagine when Airbnb first went live and they wanted to help you. They used to send around professional photographers, they used to help you with the listing. This is because it's in the embassy. You're getting that first sort of treatment. So early adopters will, will benefit. Now, let's talk about. Because if I'm a host right now, I'm in the uk, I'm thinking, fantastic. I want to get on Peers base. They go to the link, they register. Where are you focusing right now? Because it's not like you've got the manpower to just go everywhere. Where's the focus right now and where are you then going to look to expand to, as in geographically speaking?

Yeah. So we just last week officially announced that we are now live in the market of London. So obviously we're thinking about adding supply there every day. We've already have over 200 different spaces and the platform there. I would say very shortly after our team will incorporate other areas of the uk. As you can imagine, there's plenty of other cities though. We will accept a host who wants to list their space from anywhere in the uk and we are striving to increase the operations side to be able to provide that white glove onboarding experience that you were mentioning to any host that is wanting to list their space in the uk. But you can imagine Manchester is a target for us, Leeds, Liverpool, Edinburgh, et cetera. So yeah, I would say just, you know, if you're interested in listing, don't hesitate to get started. Sign up. You can even send an email to us@Healtheerspace.com and let us know that you're a host that is trying to get going in the UK and we'll be happy to figure out how to help you.

And what about Europe? So we've been talking about uk, what about the rest of Europe? What is the, the plan? Obviously, like I said, you can't do it all at once. Have you got a roadmap for Europe yet? Because we do have a lot of hosts in Europe that have got amazing properties in, you know, in France and Spain, etc. What's, what's the sort of the next steps we're talking here?

Yeah, you should expect Europe to be coming on. We have been spending quite a bit of time on all of the prep work that's required to operate our business in many different countries across the world. All the countries within Europe are part of that. And so in 2022 and potentially before then, we will start bringing on supply in those markets as well. And it's really important to us as well that when pure space is available in a market like Spain, we're able to work with Spanish guests as well as Spanish hosts. So we're not going to be that American company that comes in with an English only site that, you know, is trying to make something work that just doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel authentic. So that's one area that we're spending some additional care and attention to detail on. But yes, I would say keep your eyes peeled. Please check in with us. You can email helpeeresearcheerespace.com anytime. If you have a question around timelines and we'll be happy to keep you in the loop.

I know that there's one host in Cairns in France who is really excited and wants to get listed. He's got about 24 properties that he wants to get on peerspace. He's very excited for it. I've told him to hang fire. It is coming, but really, really interesting. And again, just going back to the booking. So the booking process, the 15% service charges is more than fair when it comes to the guests details and data. Do does me, the host, do I get like the email address and the full contact information of the person that booked or is that, is that restricted?

Yeah. So first of all, I would say we take privacy very seriously at Airspace and so we make all efforts to ensure that a user is sharing only the information that they're comfortable with. However, there are certain standards that will happen when a booking gets made where we will put them in touch with their contact information directly. If they have a phone number on file that's been verified, they can coordinate additional details through there. We encourage everybody to use our messaging system. We actually require it to just make sure that the activity is kept on the platform. And that's really also what our guests are telling us they're looking for. Ease of use, low friction, types of transactions. If you can imagine the types of activities that guests are looking to book, whether it's a meeting or event or production, in the past, they had to source them from all different services, online and offline. They've had to go through numerous back and forth on contracts. We seek to streamline all of that and standardize it. And so we built all of these tools to make it easy for you to run your PeerSpace business on the platform. That said, we encourage hosts and guests to get the questions answered that they need either prior to booking or after they made the reservation request. And we work with them to allow them to communicate in the way that works best for them.

The reason why I ask is that this is obviously a marketing podcast and I've always got my marketing mind on when I think about these things. And you've got a guest that uses Peerspace to book for a meeting or something else. And obviously this is an accommodation business and there's a huge chance here for an Upsell. So somebody comes from me and they go, oh, hang on a second. This is actually accommodation business. And you could say thank you so much for using PeerSpace, by the way. We also have accommodation as well. So next time you're in town or if you need X, Y or Z, we could accommodate you. Is that something that is allowed?

That's right.

And is encouraged, yes.

In particular, that example you gave Peerspace does not do overnight accommodations. It's not something you can book the space for. We're not in the travel business in that sense. Now, certain hosts have that other business that they run and I think it's perfectly fine for them to say for this. If you want to do this transaction, it needs to be separate from your needing rental, for example. But you can book on. Book me on my website that I have a separate overnight calendar for. That's perfectly fine. Host do that on occasion. And as long as the activity is not something that we can help them facilitate, which we don't prefer not to have that happen too much, that's. It's fine with us. And you know, if it helps make the guest experience all that more better so that they feel like it was a very serendipitous experience to be able to find the space. And that's great.

Yeah. Amazing. Because again, it's. This is another reason why I'm very excited about PeerSpace and putting it in front of more hosts is it is an extra revenue source. And again, it's something that will not get in the way of your hospitality business. It can actually benefit. So it's. It's free. You might as well go and register your interest. Even if you can't totally set up your listing right now. Even if you go and register interest, register your details, go to boostly.co.uk forward/pier. So b o o s t l y for boostly.co.uk forward slash p e r takes you to the peerspace sign up page. Go on there, input your details. Doesn't matter where you are in the world for follow the steps. If you need help, the help team are fantastic and they can help you get your listing up and running. And who knows, you may be one of the first people to get the one of the first UK bookings in your cities on PeerSpace or in Europe or wherever else in the world. Thank you very much for coming on and answering the questions that I didn't know the answer to today, which is great and I hope that many people see this and take some action. Matt. So really do Appreciate it. Again, can you give that email address one more time if anybody's got any questions that they'd like to ask?

Yeah, I appreciate it. That's helpearspace.com that will come into our customer experience team, which is world class and they will route it to the right team if there is further follow up that's required. I mentioned Emily, which is a colleague of ours in the UK right now. She can go deeper with us on an individual basis to kind of give them the ins and outs of how it works, what the best practices are, et cetera. But we're really looking forward to connecting with hosts right now. As you mentioned, these are early days for us and while we are a well oiled machine, I would argue in the US we are launching anew in international markets and this is an opportunity for the hosts that join to be part of that experience with us to help us shape the community that we ultimately built there. And we've found historically that the hosts that come in early really get it. What we're trying to do and start getting those early bookings are the ones that continue to drive the bookings even as the variety of supply continues to grow.

Amazing. And I will be providing all the, the helps and the hints and the tips behind the scenes. And when you are getting live and more, I want to feature more boostly people who do get on pair space because I do think it's going to be big. So again, please do go to boost code. Okay. Forward slash. Pierre, Matt, appreciate your time. I know you're busy doing all the launches and all the things, so it's, it's much, much appreciated and thank you to everybody that has tuned in with us live. And for those who are going to be watching or listening back on the replay, I'll be back again very soon with another boosted podcast episode. But until then, thank you so much for tuning in and I will see you when we see you.