how to pivot your business 🚀

Foreign.

Podcast, you are in for a treat. We have got Julian Sage from the Vacation Rental Machine podcast. Also. Listen, enjoy, but most importantly, implement this advice with myself, Mark Simpson of Boostling and Julian Sage of the short term.

Thanks so much Mark for having me on. You know, I really appreciate that you know what you're doing and during this time I think this is a wake up call for everybody.

So rental arbitrage for anybody in the UK who is watching this or in Europe thinking, what is that? That's basically the serviced accommodation model, the rent to rent sort of model that you hear us talking about so much. You know, the co host and things like that. That's basically where you manage properties. How have you noticed it for hosts around the US in particular? Like how is it affecting the hospitality and the rental world?

US we're behind what everybody else is going through. Like in the uk, Italy, China, we saw everything that was happening and there wasn't, you know, we kind of saw it almost like at a distance, like, oh, that's, you know, it kind of sucks to be them. Some states are a lot more serious. Like I've heard in Seattle, like they're actually, they're actually sending people to jail saying like, hey, you're, you're going out past this curfew, you're not supposed to be traveling to places like in the D.C. area where we're just now starting to say like businesses have to shut down. We're going into a, about a three, three week month long kind of like quarantine. But there are no actual restrictions on if you, if you leave your house. So each state is handling it differently. But across the board all the events are getting canceled moment in time.

When it comes to you being able to accept bookings, what's the current state of play? Can you accept bookings? Can you welcome in guests, business guests, whoever. Is that allowed where you are right now or is it changing day by.

Day, step by step really is changing, you know, day by day, state by state. And that's one of the big things. If you were just listing on Airbnb, even some locations, like I just, I just talked with a host in the St. Petersburg, Florida area where, you know, she, she had to quickly change her whole model to doing long term stays because people were, you know, trying to, you know, everybody was canceling. So she was saying, okay, you know, what we're going to do is we're going to book long term like you said.

And this is my observation of American and how I see it and I can bring this observation because I'm in a lot of Facebook groups, I'm in a lot of Facebook groups for hosting and there's a ton of them for Airbnb. And with America, more than probably any other country that I notice is that you've got hosts, you've got business owners who say get more direct bookings. We're not saying this for our own good, we're saying this for your good. Because when you get a direct booking, regulations, it's all of that. So this is why we really talk about it now more than ever now. You personally, for you and John and your property that you have. Just describe the last sort of 10 days and describe that feeling that you had when you woke up one morning to see the email from Airbnb saying that they were refunding everybody. Doesn't matter what the policy is.

The feeling was, was, you know, it was. It's just kind of the way that it is at the moment. You know, we all kind of know that Airbnb, it's going to be hard for Airbnb to be able to give a priority over guests or hosts. You know, I believe the way that Airbnb sees it is that because the majority is, is coming through Airbnb.

What I see so many more people now, particularly in the all over the world, are going to really invest their time over these next couple of months while there is so much uncertainty and whilst we can't take bookings or can't take as many bookings as we like to look at pmss, look at property management software, looking at channel managers, looking at becoming multi channel businesses, not just relying on.