How to Get Your Property Booked Out 🚀

I invited on Scott Weir. Scott Weir is the founder of a company called Pillow Partners. He's been involved in property for years.

Thank you, Mark, and welcome to everyone this evening. So, really interesting times and I hope to share some nuggets and some perhaps opportunities that are going to come out of this and a lot about positivity because we know the negativity, so let's make some opportunities. So, yeah, I've been in pretty much in property as long as I can remember, Mark. I bought my first property when I was 17. That sounds impressive, but in 1997 they were a lot cheaper than they are now.

Be really interested to find out from your eyes, your team, what are sort of the things that you've seen them doing? What are the sort of been the levels that you guys have been going to be creative with your marketing?

See if we can pick out anything where I record. This is our Kinney media studio and next door is our training centre. So when we train our new regional property managers with two types of One's.

At HQ that you can train and.

They'Re in our building. But we have regional property managers scattered all over the UK and when they come up to do their training, we don't have it here, but we have a very first thing they do when it comes to getting bookings and managing properties. We give them a little document and it has 20 boxes, just a word document, nothing fancy. You guys can do this and I suggest you take this nugget and write it down, make a word document or just make a list of 20 things. And at the top of that document, I didn't have time to show it. It basically says to the team, imagine there's no online travel agents. How would you get bookings? So there's no Internet. How would you get bookings? So that wasn't. That wasn't something smart I devised in case of a mass pandemic. That was just, we don't want to rely on booking portals, so they need to get creative. So from day one, all the property managers who come through the training literally do 20 things and each area is different, so they come up with creative things that don't work. But of all the property managers, there's probably 10, 15 things that everyone independently comes up with. The first thing I would say for that is it's a lot of work to get direct bookings. We said it's proactive and, and it's nice and easy to list a property on the booking portals and you know what, your channel manager will sync it. But it's physical work, so it isn't as easy as saying, I want direct bookings.

Don't be scared of promoting yourself at a time like this. There will be a few people that might give you a little sly look, but they're not never going to be the ones that buy from you anyway, or book review. There are going to be a lot of people out there that need your service. There's not a lot of people right now fuming at Amazon because they're providing a service where they can get items to you in the next day. So why should there be people fuming at you because you can provide a service and accommodation for those that need it. And Scott's example is fantastic. And I massively encourage everybody, stop blaming people for your current situation and start being proactive in how you can turn it around and actually make this into a positive for you.

There will be some support from businesses on this. If you watched it yesterday, how many times did that guy say, and I don't watch the news ever, but I happen to catch it. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. They will look after us to some degree. So there's going to be opportunities for business. They need to stimulate that economy and we are in the hospitality business, so that's been decimated. There will be support there. Sa.