Behind The Host with Emanuele Pani

All right, so welcome to a very special behind the Host. This is a special series of videos I'm recording at the STR Wealth Conference in Nashville. I've got my good friend Emmanuel Pani to my left. And so what we're going to do is we're going to just do very little conversation, just finding out about the tools and the tactics that hosts at this event are using behind the scenes. So E, if you could do me a massive favor, introduce yourself.

Hi guys, my name is E. I am the co host of the Short Term Rental Secret podcast. I am based out of South Florida. I've been in the South Florida short term rental market for the past 12 years. I own and I do management. We're a little over 50 units now. We have a small team, we have VAs and a bunch of local people that help us out. It's me and my wife that. So primarily what we use is hostfully, which is our PMS software. We just started onboarding Breezeway which is just kind of help us keep all the team in check. We have an awesome website that was made by Boostly that is really helping us generate a lot of our direct bookings. So we are about 70% direct booking and we just use the OTAs for kind of the rest. We use Price Labs for our dynamic pricing software. We use Hospitable for a lot of our automation in terms of messaging 50 properties.

So when you first started going from obviously like 1 to 50, what is like the one thing that you can attribute to the fact of the growth? Because so many hosts they maybe get to 5 or 10 and stop, but there's people that want to grow to the next level. So what do you attribute to the fact that you were able to go from when you first started to get into 50?

I think it's honestly with me was always the end journey. So that was always my intention. I never wanted just a couple properties, I always wanted more properties. And so the systems from the beginning, when I kind of started 12 years ago, the industry wasn't what it is now. There was not as much automation, there was not as much things going on. So I ran our business for a very long time on just an Excel spreadsheet. And I know this scare some people, but that's how we used to do it and then again with the automation. So it's actually there's no better time for you to be a host than right now through the amount of technology has come in the market and for you to grow. Because even before there were just the vacation rental industry overall wasn't as popular as it is now. It wasn't as mainstream as it is now. So it just wasn't as easy to even tell. Somebody let us manage your property as a vacation rentals or as an Airbnb, because people had never heard of it. So now it's actually a lot easier. And it's just literally just know your direction, know where you want to go, and then work it backwards.