Optimizing Your STR To Achieve Financial Freedom
14 Nov 2022 · 6 min
Mark Simpson reviews Future Stay, a property management system that charges per booking instead of monthly fees. A $100 nightly rate costs $5, making it cheaper for small operators but potentially expensive for high-volume hosts. Simpson breaks down the platform's features and asks the community whether the pricing model actually works.
Questions this episode answers
November 14, 2022.
Philip Knott.
At a $100 per-night price, the host says you would pay $5 (i.e., a 5% booking fee).
Boostly podcast, hosted by Mark Simpson.
Chapters
Hello to another edition of the Boostly podcast. Boostly does pms. It's what I'm calling this series. But anyway, over the course of the past year I've been looking into and digging in and sharing some different PMS providers or different vendors or different people in the industry that are coming to my attention. And over the last week I've had five different people send me this question, hey, what do you know about Futures Day? And I'll be perfectly honest, I didn't know much about Future State apart from being in a LinkedIn group chat with the CEO and one of the co founders, Philip Knott. And actually funny enough, one of the first ever videos I did for Boosley all these years ago there was a little segment of a for a PMS blog that I was putting together and it was a segment of Philips Chat on on stage, which was really interesting because it's a bit of an arc now because Future Stay and I'm going to share my screen here. They got a little bit of attention this year, so 2022 and I went to look at the amazing Rental Scale Up. If you don't, if you're not subscribed to Rental Scale up, please do to Bolt and team have built a fantastic blog and service and all of the things that they do as well with Rental Scale up. But they got a bit of attention this year because they raised nice little summer money and it's definitely meant over the last couple of months I've been building, building, building because whatever's happened over the course of the last few weeks, they've been really pushing out the awareness of what they're doing and I wanted to take a little bit of a deep dive and just to see exactly what they're doing. So I, I went on to the website. So why is this PMS different from others? You come onto the website and it looks like any normal PMS provider helping rentalpreneurs when they're independent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it's when you delve down to the features. So let's go and have a look at the features that they have. So we've got the listing Health score again, quite common dynamic pricing again, common website builder again, the website builder is not a WordPress website. We talked about this. Never go for a free website from a PMS. Make sure you get a WordPress one pricing and payment secure bookings, financial reporting. But it's the actual pricing is the one that interests me the most. And this is something that I can see More and more is the big vendors and vendors that are coming into this space or getting popular in this space are paying more and more attention to the 1 to 10 property owners. So 1 to 10 property owners, as in you've got, you've got 10, 10 properties, 1 to 10 properties that you own or you manage, co host, whatever you want to call it. And normally what happens with a PMS provider is that there'll be a monthly cost, so you'll Pay sort of $80 a property, a listing per month, etc. Etc. 20, 30, 40, 50 or something like that. And then when you get to a certain level, you pay a little bit more. All of that cool stuff. But the, the thing that interests me about this, if you come to FuturesDay.com and you come down to the pricing, they do it a little bit differently. So instead of charging a monthly fee, they charge you when you have a booking. So if your price per night, let's just say is a hundred, I don't know why, it's a minus. So say it's 100, then you'll pay $5. So they're doing a per booking rate, which is interesting to me. If you've got one property, this may make a ton of sense. If you've got two properties, that may make a ton of sense. If you've got three, it may start to get a little bit costly. If you start to get five and you've got a really good booking business in the background. For example, you may have read a book called the Book Derek Playbook. You may be doing all the marketing and you may be getting tons of bookings. As soon as you get to that 5 level and you're being charged 5% every booking, then it may start to get expensive and you may actually end up paying more than what you would do if you were to say with somebody that charges subscription model of, I don't know, let's just say 160amonth. So it's, it's definitely a unique spin on it. It feels like it's got the OTA instant book model with it. But this is where I want to throw it over to the community. Do we have anybody in the boostly world that is using Futures Day? Do you have any pros and cons, any feedback that you want to give to us? Is that pricing something that you like? And as always with these podcasts, it's not just my opinion, I want it to be the community's opinion. So if you are aware of Futures Day, if you use Futures Day, Then please let me know in the comments if you are watching this on LinkedIn, for example, and if you are a member of Team Future State, please chime in and let us know why you do that pricing model. Let me know and let the community know, like what do you bring to the table? And also as well, I would love to know how come you are everywhere at the moment, everywhere. You are doing a big outreach campaign, ads campaign. I don't know because I don't see it. But so many people are messaging asking me. So it's, it's super cool to see. I love seeing new people come into the industry and provide their spin on things and how they're helping and whatnot. And who knows, you know, if we get enough people come to us, then we may even look to reach out to Futures Day and maybe do some partnerships, API connections in the future, which is cool to see. So this is me throwing it over to you. Let me know who's using Futures Day, what you have to, what's your pros and cons and all that cool stuff. As always, my name is Maximson. I give hosts all over the world the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to go and get diary bookings. And until next time, let's be proactive, let's not be reactive. Let's go and get some diary bookings. Sa.
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