SOFTWARE SHOWDOWN LIVE - Summit Special

All right, everybody, good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome. As you can see, this evening is a little bit different from the others because it's not just my face you're looking at. We've got array of amazing faces that are are with me as well. We're going to do the big intros in a wee minute. This is something that I've wanted to do for a while. This is something that has been on my mind as something that I wanted to bring as part of the summit where I get a couple of my biz besties on a live with me to talk about the solution that they have. I've got questions already lined up from the audience beforehand on the form that I sent out. But if you're tuning in live with me and if there's something that one of our esteemed colleagues and members and vendors and biz besties say, then you can drop it in on the Zoom or in the Live, wherever you are and then I'll be able to bring the question upon on stage. Every single person that you have in here and the companies that they are a part of are a massive reason why this event can happen in the first place. I mentioned this at the launch party over on Monday and I'll say it again, putting on an event like this takes a lot of time, resources and money. We spread and I spread the word far and right. And so when I do this, I reach out to people, people in the industry and I go, hey, who can help me put this on? And the people that are with us have very kindly helped me put this on, which is amazing. So a massive thank you from me to all of you that are with me right now. So without further ado, if you are in the Zoom, can you please just say hi? Hopefully everybody can hear us, okay? Hopefully everybody can see us. Okay. Those are the main things that I am always worried of, that people can see us and hear us, which is good. All right everybody to my left or bottom left, we have got somebody that's tuning in all the way from Italy, so we're gonna let them go first. If you could please just give us a super quick 90 second intro. And this is the 90 second intro that I'm gonna get all of the people on stage with us to do. So number one, who you are, where you are and what do you want the audience to know more about. When you are ready, off you go.

Tommaso, nice to meet you. Everybody, this is Tommaso CRO and co founder of Smart Pricing. I'm a Property owner myself. That's how we got started in the travel tech space. And our company was born in 2020 as a revenue management system. And now we are expanding into other ventures into the CRM, upselling and cross selling space. We have more than 4,000 clients spread across Europe. And I think what's important to mention about us is that our company is able on one side to, to help properties. We focus specifically on, you know, in independent owners and property managers to boost their revenue with our dynamic pricing algorithms which are, I would say among the most advanced in, in the industry for, you know, for the small guys. But also what's super important, we can also help these owners to make more profits. We do so by again leveraging machine learning to understand when and who to send targeted communications. We not only suggest when and who to send them, but we also suggest the type of messages to send to your guests to make sure that they will return as direct business.

Amazing. I'm going to let you pause for one second there, slightly over 90 seconds, but when you've got such a lovely Italian accent like that, we're going to let that fly. So we're going to just jump to your right, which is Becky. So Becky, can you please just do a quick 90 second introduction who you are and what you want the audience to know more about you and your company, please.

Hello, I'm Becky, work for Simply Owners. We are holiday rental advertising website and we offer direct contact between owners and holiday makers or property managers and holiday makers. So essentially people pay us for a year's listing fee but then we don't charge any fees, any commission on the bookings, any bookings that you get come directly to you. We send the holiday maker straight through to you so you get to know them a little bit before they come in your property. That's us in a nutshell. Essentially. We don't, you know, put any restraints on our owners or property managers. You run your business your way. You are in control of cancellations, refunds, anything like that, damage, deposits, all that kind of thing. You organise directly with the holidaymaker. So essentially we just send inquiries through and you take it from there.

Brilliant, brilliant, fantastic. Thank you very much. Okay, so we're going to go top, right. Suzanne, can you just please give us again, same thing, who you are, where you're from and what you want the audience to know more about what you do.

Good evening from Cold Wet London. I am Suzanne Luscombe, Strategic Growth Director for Reserve Central, which forms part of the Host and Stay group. I've Got a backdrop in real estate, hospitality and technology. And I'm here tonight to engage with everybody to talk about our smart green technology. We're very much here to support the short term rent, rental market and service departments in the fact that we have got devices that not only help manage and reduce energy consumption, protecting the planet and our clients margins, but also enhancing guest experience and comfort, helping raise review scores and also retention and last but not least the operational piece, making sure that they are helping heighten operations throughout everyone's business. So I'm here tonight to answer any questions anyone may have. Thank you Mark.

Fantastic. Jay, over to you over in Sully, California.

Yeah, so my name is Jay Ulrich. I am the CEO and co founder of Host Buddy AI. I am in San Diego, California in the US and I am a host myself as well. So I got into the software space after creating Host Buddy last year. I manage around 40 units in San Diego and was looking for a messaging solution to automate my messaging using AI. There was nothing on the market so I decided to build it myself with my awesome team of super hosts and and software developers. So now we have Host Buddy AI. It plugs into your property management system, responds to all your guest messages using an AI that we've developed to sound exactly like a human, like a super host. And so we, we pride ourselves in that natural language communication and we say that we are the most efficient and advanced AI messaging on the market for STR host. We connect into I think 10 or 11PMSs now. So realistically anything that you use, you can plug it in and have that guest messaging automated for you. We're doing a lot of additional things on top of that like upselling smart templates, review removal, a ton of other stuff. So if you are on the call today, feel free to ask me about any of those things. I love to talk about it.

Fantastic. Thank you very much. And obviously today we've been running all of the sessions in the summit. Once we get done with our Q and A, I'll do a quick recap of what we've we've gone through today. Everybody that you see on the screen with me has already uploaded their session, their session has run. So if there's anything that you hear tonight that you go, oh I'd like to find out more. If you jump into our Facebook group, the Book Dive Virtual Summit, every single one of them has the sessions from the timetable that you have, you can go and divat little bit diaper a nice 30 minute session on each topic that we're Talking about. So we're gonna go with Tommaso first for this because obviously like I say it's gonna get a bit late over there in Europe and we've got one more special guest to bring on to the live after Tommaso leaves us. So let's talk about smart pricing. So I put them the word out before today's session and I said we're going to be talking to Smart Pricing tonight. And I asked some people to ask me a couple of questions and one of the first ones was you've got a couple of other pricing revenue companies that are out there, software, that tech that is out there. Obviously Smart pricing was founded with the hotel industry but is now pivoting into the short term rental industry. So what do you say to somebody when they come to you and go well what does smart pricing bring to the market that's different to the others? Yeah, it's a very good question.

Look, by the way, we were using back in the days many of those software. My co founder and I used to run Properties also in LA and one of the things that we were struggling with, not being revenue managers, not being too geeky on the prices was actually the setup of these softwares. It was super difficult for us to, you know, there are so many settings, so many things to play with on those software. So we set ourselves a challenge to develop a much more user friendly and automated tool that would basically allow what we are, which are, you know, small property owners to start doing dynamic prices like the, like the big chains, like the big hotels. And so I would say the first thing is we are potentially a much more automated and smart software. So we calculate for example automatically the starting prices for the property. We calculate by how much this price should fluctuate up and down depending on all the internal factors of all the property. Because we connect with more than 150PMSs and channel managers across, across the globe but also we connect with, you know, the OTAs and we're able to scrape not only the prices of these OTAs but also the occupancy and how this occupancy is evolving over time. So I would say this is high level the, the main difference and allow me the second. We are probably the first RMS ever not only to offer this dynamic pricing but that can also support you in generating demand because by plugging in Smart Connect we are not only going to be able to try to drive more direct business but we are also going to be able to spot when you are having little occupancy and we are going to suggest you to send targeted messages to subset of audiences in your database that we think will be more likely to book those rooms.

So Smart Connect is something that definitely is on my radar when I was speaking to the team and finding out a little bit more about it. That is really interesting. So where did the idea for Smart Connect come from and how long has it taken you to bring it to market and what are you most looking forward about it? So Smart Connect is like three questions.

There's. Yeah, well, as usual we are very close to our customers and to our original, I call it business. That company sits together with me in the office. So we always exchange ideas.

And.

We were like super heavily dependent on the OTAs. Booking.com has the majority of market share here in northern Italy. And we sat down and we said, look, we are so tired of paying so many commissions to booking.com it's costing us a lot of profits. Can't we find a way to drive direct business without spending money on Google or Facebook? Because what you risk as an owner is taking money away from booking and giving it to Google or Facebook. And yeah, so the solution we found was, hey, let's actually try to invest in direct messages, direct guest messaging that's potentially free. The issue we found was okay, but who do we send these messages to, when do we send it, what do we write? So it was a similar problem compared to smart pricing, but now we applied to the messaging and that's why we are investing in again in machine learning on different types of algorithms to send these targeted messages to our guests. It's taking time, but we are investing heavily in this technology because we believe it can be life changing for owners and property managers. And I forgot the third question.

The last one is what are you most looking forward about Smart Connect?

Well, we are. That's a good one. We are going to integrate more.

More.

Ways to connect with your guests. So at the moment we Support email and WhatsApp for upselling and cross selling. We are still not able to Send Newsletter via WhatsApp, but that's coming really soon and we are going to very soon support also booking rooms and upselling rooms directly from SmartConnect. So these are two of the things we are working on that are coming in the next couple of months.

Nice. And how big is the the team behind the scenes at smart pricing?

It's a, it's a big team. We are around 130 people spread across Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain and, and UK.

Wow. And what is the. The 2025 plan growth plan. So obviously you have wanted to get more into the str space. Like what's the, the big goal for you guys at 2025.

Going in terms of growth or, or everything growth, what.

You want to do, what you want to achieve. Like if we're here in, in 12 months time, where would you like Smart Pricing to be and Smart Connect?

Well, I would say so we have a lot of room to growth basically bringing Smart Connect to our customer base. So that's going to be a big goal for us. We have more than, you know, 4,000 customers that are using Smart Pricing, but just a fraction of those are using Smart Connect. So that's going to be goal one. We are going to develop more and more the products, adding more functionalities. We for example, well just recently announced minimum length of stay management in Smart pricing. So dynamic minimum language management that's super important for, for vacation rentals. And we are looking so to, to to expand and broaden our, our offering there both in the, in the pricing space and in the CRM upselling space and hopefully. But that's a more financial thing and we're looking to more than double our customer base next year.

Nice. Good goals, amazing goals and thank you. Right, I'll let you have a little breather there. Thank you very much. Can we all please in the chat show Tomasso some love again. It's not easy doing this when you're in your second language, never mind when it's nearly 10 o' clock at night. So well done. That was fantastic.

I'm used to long hours, so no worries.

Love, love to hear it, love to see it. Okay, Becky, we're gonna move slightly over to your good self. Thank you very much for the intro. So again I put the word out before this session so we're going to be talking listing sites and one of the, the first sort of things that came back, which is the first question to you good self, is with the OTA model obviously being very heavy on commission, what was the decision making for you and Tim when you decided to go down the route of going we're gonna do something a little bit different here. We're gonna go for a listing subscription fee instead of the commission model. What was the sort of thinking behind that?

So Tim had a property on one of the listing sites that then went. The online model where they started charging commissions and booking fees. And essentially he wasn't happy about it and he said they're leaving a massive gap in the market behind because there are so many people unhappy that they're going to have to do everything through the system and other people are going to have control of their money and their funds and things like that. So essentially that's why he set the business up back in 2016. So you'll probably know which company it was that I'm talking about that moved away from that model about them. And so essentially, you know, that's how we became, because he saw that there was a gap in the market that we could grow in.

And 2016, when, when did you join the company? When. When did you sort of start coming on board full time?

Full time has literally been this year. I came on board around about maybe five years ago. I am a teacher by trade. That's, you know, me used to presenting to groups of toddlers, not adults.

This is all same mindset, some may argue.

So, yes, this last year I've taken on a lot more responsibility in the business, driving things forward, making sure things are getting done behind the scenes, taking control of, you know, the office and making sure that our owners are looked after. So, yeah, it's been a learning curve for me as well as, you know, all of us this year, but I've really enjoyed it.

So talk to us about the user base. How many members are there behind? Like, how many members are there on Simply Owners? What has been the reaction from the people that you've been speaking to over the last few years, especially this year? Why do people list on Simply Owners maybe as well as being on the OTAs, but why do they come to you and say, this is why we do this?

If they come to us with a complaint about another company saying, I'm leaving them, because the major complaint that they come to us with is, I want control over my business, they're taking money from my business, but they're not actually doing what I want them to do. So I had one today, for example, who said that the person who'd booked her property had ended up in hospital, in a coma. So the family of that person had contacted her and said, can I cancel the booking? She said, yeah, absolutely. They couldn't cancel the booking because the booking was on his phone and they couldn't get into the booking to cancel it. So she cancelled it and they gave her a negative penalty and knocked her down the listings because of it. And they knew full well what was happening and why that, why that was happening. And they knew that she'd got to cancel it, but it still happened. So she was really, you know, frustrated. She wants to run her business her way. We have a very, very fair listing system. So essentially every single day, the properties in that region will just rotate. So with, if, say there's, I don't know, 100 properties in your region every 100 days, you will be number one. It does rotate fair. Everybody gets a fair bite of the cherry. We don't do any additional adverts, so, you know, we don't do any paid listings to get to the top. Any gold, silver, bronze levels it is. Everybody gets the same service, everybody gets the same bite of the cherry and you are in control of your business. So from the very first moment, when the holiday maker contacts you, you send them your booking form, you send them your rules, and if they're happy to book, they book with you. If it's not for them, then it's. It's not the right fit and they move on to. To somewhere else.

You've managed to answer two questions or three questions in one. So I really do like that. So let's just recap very quickly because there was. There's a couple of very, very good, very good little things that you said there. So with a listing site. So I've been around in this industry for a long, long time. I know I only look 21, but I've been in it for a long, long time. And when I first got into it properly back in 2011, when we're in the farm, the, you know, there were a lot of listing sites then that had the. And we would get contacted from all the time and, and the main question I always asked was, well, how do you decide on the ranking factor? You know, we're maybe part of 100 properties in our area. How do you decide on that? And obviously they then do the upsell, which is the, the banner listing, so to speak, the bronze silver golfing that you're talking about. So I really like how that you have not only navigated that potential objection, but you've done it fairly. And where everybody gets, like you say, a bite of the cherry in your session. If you haven't seen Becky's session, please go back into the group at some point today or tomorrow or next week, because all the videos will be still up in the group next week. And go and watch it because it is a masterclass on how to get a reservation and then how to convert that reservation request into an actual booking. So the, the next question is then, what are your plans? So yours and Tim and the whole simply owners plans for 2025, what is like the ideal goal that you're all working towards? Next year.

2025 goals for us. We want to get some integration in there with some channel managers. So at the moment we integrate calendars, so we've got the ical functionality, but we don't integrate the other back of house things, such as if you change your description or your pricing, anything along those lines. So that is our major goal for next year. What's our next thing that we're working on? Next thing we're doing really is we're bringing Holidaymaker accounts on board. So that sometimes, with it being direct contact, we've found that when the owners email the Holidaymaker back, it sometimes goes to their spam or the junk, and so they don't get that initial email. And that's very dependent on the owner's email system and how it's set up. But we're trying to kind of conquer that by bringing the messaging on board. But we're still not going to interfere in their discussion with each other. They can still have completely free reign over, you know, they're booking, their conversation with each other. But we're just trying to combat that initial message somehow ending up in a spam folder, because obviously you're never going to get that booking if they don't get your reply to their inquiry.

I've actually had somebody send me a question in my DMs. They slid into my DMs because they said they couldn't do it in the, in the zoom. And they said, is this. Because obviously you've got a lovely northern accent. They said, well, is this just for British people or can the rest of the world get involved? So what is the answer to that question?

Absolutely, anybody's welcome. So we've got around about 8,000 properties at the moment. About 4,000 of those are UK based and about 4,000 are abroad. We, we've got property managers on board, we've got owners on board. It's such a varied range. So we've got things from like, you know, a shepherd's hut down in Cornwall out to massive villas over in Florida. It's, it's, you know, very wide and varied. Who we've got listing with us.

Fantastic. So it is all over the world. So go and check it out. And somebody has said, what is the. What is the listing site? So what is the domain? Somebody wants to know, where do I go? Where do I go? Check it out. What, what is that domain?

Perfect. So we're www.simplyowners.net.

Fantastic. Now, we all don't have a lovely banner behind us like Tommaso So it's obvious where Tommaso is. So Tommaso, give us that, give us that domain again for. Hang on a second. I've turned you down on the turnies up. Give us that domain for snap smart price and people want to go find out more.

It's very simple. It's smartpricing.it but it's very soon gonna turn in January to smartness.com.

Wow, we've got an exclusive. Is that an exclusive? Is that breaking news?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a breaking news. Yeah.

Oh, there you go. Smartness dot com. Oh, I like that domain. Well done. All right, very soon, Tommaso, what I'm going to do is I'm going to let you go because it's 10 o' clock at night there. We've got Matt Metros. I've managed to track him down in Puerto Rico. He's gonna, I'm gonna into the room. Obviously. I would love everybody to go and check out the session that the team Rebecca and team put together. It's in the Facebook group. This is not the last that you're going to hear of smart pricing, smart connect our smartness. We should say they're going to be around lots so please do go check them out. Give us that domain one more time. Did you say smartpricing.it smart pricing it.

Yes.

Fantastic.

Thank you everyone.

We'll let you go.

Lovely day.

You've got a lot of love in the chat. So thank you very much everybody and we'll, we'll let you go. So, all right now let me see how I can do this right. So I'm gonna try and bring our guy in. Not entirely sure how, but I'll figure that out as we're letting our next speaker speak. So go on and let's keep it in the uk. Suzanne, thank you very much for doing this. You are here as part of Resi Central, Resi Air. So this is really important. What I would love for you to do is to break down the different components of what you spoke about with this technology, with this device, what it can do and how it can help owners. And obviously everybody's got to be aware that yes, you are UK based, but this is going so much further very, very soon. So if you could just please explain all of that while I try and figure out how to get Matt into this lovely Zoom Room with us.

No problem at all. So I guess where we define ourselves in the market is that we are an all in one tech stack solution. So what we're not trying to do is help people on one part of detection within a property. We want to be able to give them all the data and information and then help them with the smart automation of doing that. So our devices sit as a hub, which is known as the resi air and within that you've got a number of different sensors which are constantly pulling data points in, let that be humidity levels, air quality, ambient lighting, noise, all these kind of different parts to it. But what it is actually then combined with, which is really super cool, is actually occupancy detection. And that is where the magic happens. So I'm going to give you an example of this because I always love an example because then people can relate. So we work a lot with property managers who often then have a whole array of different properties. So it could be a one bedroom apartment through to a 10 bedroom property, sake of argument. So they're very, very conscious about first of all being a sustainable provider, sustainable host and a sustainable business. But also how then do you help those individual landlords and, and hosts actually look after their margins and their utilities? And one of the hardest parts with that is the word all inclusive. And when I say that, you know, we're very much part of an all inclusive industry where everybody focuses on, well, I paid the money per night, you know, that's the rate that I pay. And so, you know, I can have the heating on 30 degrees, I can leave the lights on and you know what, if I want to go out, I'll just leave it like that. So I guess the starting part is really looking at smart rules and automation. So what we will do is we will create rules and will say, right, you've got a guest in situ. So we will again integrate with certain PMS systems, pulling the ical information to actually know if a guest is going to be arriving, say at 3pm so normally the guest arrives at a certain time and somebody will go out and hopefully make that kind of homely, comfortable feeling. So it could be the 10th of December, freezing cold afternoon and one of those team out in the field go and turn the heating on, hopefully and the lights and make it feel really comfortable. But they might have to then pop out two hours beforehand to do that. And then you've got lighting running, you've got heating running, or actually maybe one of your guests is checking in late because that's the reality of life. So what do you do? Go send somebody out to you at 6 o' clock at night and let that stay on for four or five hours or actually do you use our smart technology, which actually draws in those booking details and actually automates it from the system. So the guest arrives, they check into their property and guess what? Is it a really nice ambient temperature and the lights are on perhaps in the hallway and the kitchen. So it's a really nice way of using everything. But then we look at communities and a lot of the issues within this are how do you protect someone's asset, but at the same time, how do you protect the community that they're within? And complaints. And this is a major thing, you know, and we get it a lot. Oh, what stops somebody having a party or the neighbour complaining? And it's normally the call to one of these companies at 2 o' clock in the morning going, someone's having a party in the property. Or the next day when the neighbours then start saying, well, actually, I'm not very happy that you're letting out your property. Why wouldn't we just have a device that could transfer sound into decibels? And actually what it will do then is create a smart trigger that will go out to the estate manager, perhaps, or whoever is that that team on the ground all night to say, one of your guests is having a party? And I guess, bit tongue in cheek. But you have two choices, do you join the party or do you go and try and solve the issue by quieting it down? So we have two ways of managing things like that can either get whoever the management company is to actually liaise with the actual resident or the guest, or perhaps, actually we could create an alert which goes to them directly and, you know, we're all about that safeguarding bit. Also, from a triage perspective, one of our kind of big goals with ESG and sustainability is how you react to perhaps maintenance issues. So we always talk about reactive and proactive, but actually by having devices in the property which are looking at stuff like water flow, so we have able, we are able to track water flow within a property and if we know it's not occupied and there's anomaly in water low, generally that represents there's some kind of leak within the property or actually somebody is within the property and the same thing happens. Now, normally that gets picked up when a cleaner comes in or a complaint comes in, or perhaps the heating isn't working and you have a guest on the line, well, what if actually those things happened and it triggered an alert straight away and you were able then to go, right, I can manage the guest expectations by, first of all, getting there before they. They realize that there's been a problem and making sure it's sorted, or the other way, triaging it. So instead of saying it'll be two hours and you can sit tight, I'll get someone check your heating. Why wouldn't you just go on the dashboard and go, well, hold on a sec. Actually it's because you've just been out all day, you put the heating on for five minutes and actually it's going to take a bit longer to get up to the optimal temperature. So we really focus on these operational efficiencies through the smart data. But the one thing I really like to hone in on is how can you create operational efficiencies if you're telling someone to sit in front of a dashboard, right? And with all this technology, this is what often happens, that someone then has to sit there glued to a screen and go, oh, I've seen this data come in, something's gone awry. Well, why would you do that? Why not work with us on smart rules and automations that actually either, number one, do an action for you so you never have to do it. Sake of argument, Actually, our guests are only allowed heating at 23 degrees because actually that's plenty for the time of the year. And if no occupancy is detected for an hour, so take a Vulcan, they've gone off, reduce that from 23 down to 19, if no occupancy, again within another hour, let's take that back to either a standby or a comfort setting of maybe 15. So all of that is just happening in the background, which means your usage of utilities is massively controlled. So is waste, but also the protection of the margins. But then the other end of the scale is actually then how you can use it to create triggers and alerts. Because actually, what about the well being of your guests? If there's something really poor with air quality or actually perhaps someone's smoking within the property or something like that, certain triggers can then go out. So, yeah, Mark, it's. I could go on, as you can probably tell, saying how wonderful this stuff is.

Nice.

It.

It is amazing. And again, when I was at a recent event and you were talking about this and we were sort of showing the savings, it was crazy how anybody can save money on this. Because when, you know, with those of you that are based obviously in the, in the Northern hemisphere right now, and let's say you're based in the uk, like you say, today's cold, right, and those of you that have got property say in, in colder climates right now, the first thing that a guest does, even maybe at home, if they have their Property at say 17, 18 degrees, 19 degrees when they go on vacation, the first thing they do if they've got access to the here, they say they just whack it up. They don't care. And for you, or if you're a manager, your homeowner, you know the profit margins aren't that big, right? When you, when you trim it all down and if your bills are unnecessarily high, then you're going to be losing even more money. You've got unhappy homeowners, etc. So this, this technology is fantastic and I know there's other technologies that's out there, but you tackle this from so many different verticals, it makes it just a whole win. And efficiency is just one part. Security is obviously like you say, another part. And I love it how the expression that you said, you've got two options, do we join in or do we, do we shut it down? And security is going to be a big concern going forward in 2025. Not just in the UK but, but all over the world. But there's so many different angles from it this. And that's before we even get in talking about sustainability, which, you know, depending on what your views are on sustainability, there is going to be a large demographic of guests that are going to be traveling in 2025, 2026, where one of their key decision makers of where they go and stay will be around how sustainable your business is. And again, this, this device definitely helps with it. Now if there's obviously now you've been with the company, what, five months now, A couple of months, would you say? So you've been with it five months and you've obviously been on the road, so to speak, at the events all over the world chatting about this. What has been the one remark that you've had back or the one thing that you've had, but the one comment that is really sort of giving you that aha moment since you've been at the company and how you're going to go on and explain more about this moving forward, what's been like the major sort of thing that people come back.

You mean I don't have to buy all these individual parts to a stack tack and, and have them all in different platforms and try and collate it all together. It can actually just do it on its own? That is the major thing.

It's, I feel like there's going to be a big consolidation in all aspects of, of our industry and this Is definitely one somebody's asking in the chat, what is the name of the domain? What is the name of the company? They missed it. Go, Suzanne. What. What is the domain?

Resi Central. So you can Visit us at www.rezi so R E S I central dot com.

Fantastic. Go and check that out if anybody wants to. To get in contact. What's the. What's the best way. Do they do it on the website? Can they email you? Where do they go?

We are open to any option you want. Feel free to PM me directly on LinkedIn if you'd like. It's Suzanne Luscombe through the website email address, which is Suzanne Luscombe and Luscombe's L U S for sugar, C O M for mother b e resicentral.com and.

Another question is, again, is this just UK based? What's the plans for 2025? Is this going worldwide? Like, what is the. The plans moving forward for. For Resi.

That is a great question because every time we go to an event or we do something like this, a gateway open somewhere else. It's never been something that. Which was particularly focused on the uk. It's based on the industry. We've got some really firm roots actually into New Zealand, Australia and America. We just recently come back from Dubai, so I think it's prudent to probably say that actually. We've had so many people ask about it for us, the device remains the same. It's just how it's customized for the end user.

Fantastic. And for some unknown reason why, the camera has decided to freeze. So I am moving, I am still here. It's just the camera. I fucking hate technology sometimes. Right, Suzanne, thank you very much. That is fantastic. Right, let's very swiftly move on to Jay and then we will bring Matt on. So, Jay, we are at a time now where AI and automation is chatted about a lot. Right. And you are obviously a host who's scratched your own itch, so to speak, with. With this technology that whenever we have anybody that's coming in talking about AI agents, AI chat, all of that good stuff, the question is, well, what makes it different from everything else that we are currently seeing right now on the market? So you've obviously been on the event circuit this year. You've obviously chatted to a lot of people. What and how are you coming at it where you're going? Well, this is why host buddy is different.

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And the perspective that we always take is from the perspective of a Host because we're hosts ourselves. And the biggest question that we were wondering when we started using AI was is it going to be able to actually answer questions that my guests are asking? And I think that's the most important question that you should ask as a host as well. Is the AI actually going to work?

Work?

Anyone can plug in a chat GPT into, you know, a general response program and, and have it run. What we've done is we spent countless hours perfecting the language of the AI to sound like a host. So the biggest part of that is the troubleshooting aspects of has a lot of problem solving capabilities. It's going to ask the right questions to figure out what the solution is. And if the AI can't do that, then there's no reason to plug it in and replace a view. Right. So the way that we've designed it is that it can actually replace the human in responding to these messages. It saves hosts a ton of time, a ton of money and we pride ourselves on that aspect of it, that the core functionality is the most effective on the market.

And when it comes to host buddies like core Focus, obviously that is a question comes in, you answer it. Right? What, what else have you been able to see that your technology can do behind behind the scenes? Like we're sort of talking upsells, Are we talking guest inquiry? Like what, what are you finding that you all can do?

Yeah. So after we've mastered the, you know, automated response portion of it and really what that is is it doesn't need to be turned on 24 7, you can create custom hours for your coverage. So sometimes a host will just need that overnight coverage. So they'll turn it on overnight. Sometimes they'll turn it on for certain hours of the day. You're back.

You know what I've just done? I've just given it a kick. I've literally given my computer, I've just given it a kick. Sorry, I've literally stopped your mid flow. I've also got some good news. Liverpool are winning as well. Free too. I've got some really good news. Liverpool are winning 83 minutes free too. Oh, okay. So I'm happy now. Come on NJ hit us with all the good stuff it can do.

Yeah, of course. So you can customize it for whatever hours of the day you want the coverage for. It breaks down to really around 6 or $7 per listing per month. So it's super affordable for anyone looking for an alternative to coverage where they feel they, they don't need human coverage. For a certain amount of time. Most of our hosts use it for 24.

7.

But with that being said, we really started to focus on what are the next steps within the AI automation that we can leverage to provide value to our, to our users. And the next steps there were action item tracking and upsells. So action item tracking is a lot of times, you know, another question that hosts will ask is what if the AI can't respond to a message? What if it doesn't know how to respond, doesn't have the right information? And we program the AI to recognize when it can't provide a firm solution to something and therefore it generates an action item and those action items are stored in action items board on your portal so that your team can go and manage all these different things that are going on at all your properties. So you can manage it by cleanliness, maintenance tasks, reservation changes, things like that. Make sure that you're always staying in the loop. All of those action items get sent to you directly through text or email. Or we have enough, have a Slack integration, which I love. You can basically just reply directly to Host Buddy within Slack, tell it how to respond and then go on with your day. And so we make it really easy to make sure that the host stays in the loop. And that was kind of a, that was an initial, I think gap in the AI automation just in this industry in general is like if it can't, if it can't 100% solve absolutely everything, like if there's a burst pipe at your property, the AI isn't going to turn into a human and then go, go fix it. Right. So there needs to be a solution there and how do you keep the host involved? And action items tracking is our solution to that. So beyond that, I think the next step would be. Did you have a question mark?

No. Well, I was going, I was going to say that number one, somebody's asking what's the, what's the website? So host buddy, AI how are you spelling host buddy? Because people can't understand my accent. So I do apologize. Go on and Jay, give us the, give us the spelling.

Yeah, Host buddy. AI so H O S T B U D D Y dot AI do.

Go and check it out. Okay, so here's something that's top of my mind. Number one is I've been messing around on, on my phone with chat, GPT's latest version of Voice. So it's really smart. Like when we go in a car journey now and I've got my boys with me, they want to ask it. They want, they get this, this AI to ask it football questions and they absolutely love it. And it's like they're having a conversation. It's a dream for me because I can sit and I can drive the car without having the nine year old in my ear the whole journey because he's talking to this thing, asking it questions about Liverpool Football Club, which somebody's accused me of saying that I froze my camera on purpose so I could watch the game. That is not the case. I did not do that. I have not got the goals anywhere. But so voice is now really good. And you know, we all know everybody in here has served guests in some way shape or form, in some way capacity over the years. Right. And we know that there are guests who yes, will do text to text, but there's those that would want to get on a, on a call. So with Host Buddy and with your projections and with your lofty aspirations, with, with all of this tech that you have got at your disposal, how far off do you think that we are at where you could have somebody be on the phones 247 and you won't even have to pick up the phone to speak to a, a guest.

So you're saying AI would pick up the phone for you and talk to your guests?

Yeah. How far are we away from that?

I would love to have that be a reality in the future. I think that is one thing that is going to be very hard to master. There's a lot of coordination in the hospitality industry when it comes down to okay, here's the issue. Now I need to go coordinate my specific maintenance person to go and take care of that. I need to get a quote from this person. So like there's a lot that goes into that. I think some basic calls could be in the near future. I would be hesitant to say that it can take over a good portion of the phone calls that come in from guests though within the next year. I could be wrong. We're always staying on top of the, the industry and the tech that's coming out and making sure that, you know, we can leverage what, what's, what's out there. But yeah, it's, it's exciting to me as, as well as, as you.

So here's, here's a question that's come in. How so Host Buddy. So AI and Host Buddy. So you, you know, a question comes in, a response comes back, but the response has to be based on somewhere. It can't just make it up. Right. You want to be able, so if, if, if, if I message you like, Jay, I'm checking in. What, how do I get in? Where's my key code? You say, yeah, you find the key under the doormat. That's like totally false information. So how do you train this technology? How do, how do I train Host Buddy so that I can give. Well, I can make sure that the robot is going to give the right answer to the human.

Yeah, that was one of our main focuses when we started designing the AI and programming it to give accurate responses. And I think anyone who's used an AI has noticed that there's hallucinations that come up. And that's the term referring to just making up information to satisfy the query. So we wanted to make sure that that was addressed. And so all of the knowledge that Host Buddy shares comes from its knowledge base. And that consists of all the information that's pulled in from your property management system. So that's your property data, your guest data, your reservation data, availability. All of that gets loaded up into the knowledge base for each individual property. You can also add welcome documents in the form of a PDF or.txt docx file. So it's going to scrape your. All of your documents, say it's a welcome document or an sop. You can upload whatever you want. It's going to use all that information to respond to your guests. And then it also takes six months of conversational data within your PMS to learn about the things that you've already provided to your previous guests. So if the information is provided in any of those pieces of knowledge, it's going to be able to give the guest an answer. It also has access to general worldly knowledge. So things that can be found on the Internet that are essentially confirmed factual things, not just random articles that it's going to find.

Yeah.

For example, if your guest asks, how do I use a Roku TV or something similar like that, maybe you haven't provided it that specific information. It might be able to go and find that as a resource using its online database. Outside of that, if it can't respond, say, now it doesn't have the proper data. You can have it either, just not respond at all to the guest. You can have it respond and say, I don't have the exact information for you right now. Let me go and ask my team and get right back to you. Let me go ask the host and get right back to you. There's a lot of different options. There's probably like five of them that we have. And so you can configure it, depending on how you'd like it to respond, but it's never going to make anything up. And so when you have those situations where it's. It says, hey, I don't have the right information, that's, that's, that's a signal to you to go and add additional information within your property profile in Host Buddy.

And when that does happen, I assume that Host Buddy will send a prompt to the owner to say, hey, this question's come in. I can't answer it. It needs manual intervention. Is that. Is that about right?

Yeah, that's where the action item generation comes in. So it'll send a text directly to the owner or an email, or you can set it. It can be the owner, it can be a maintenance person if you want specific things to be sent to them. What I really like is the Slack integration. So we get it on our Slack channel, and then our virtual assistants or whoever's working on our team can go and take care of it that way, because we still have virtual assistants that work for us during the day. They're picking up the phones, they're coordinating things, they're ordering different items. So, yeah, and then overnight, it'll still send that message, but it'll always respond to our guests to make sure that they're not left alone. Nice.

Somebody has asked. They don't have. So this individual doesn't have a property management software tool. They just use booking and they just use Airbnb. Now, could Host Buddy work with this client or do they need to have a pms?

You'll need to have a pms. I think down the line, we'll probably have access to do, you know, direct to Airbnb, direct to whatever other OTA service. But a lot of our value comes from us being able to respond on any specific channel. So let's say you only have Airbnb covered or you only have booking.com covered. There's still going to be gaps in your responses. So, yeah, we, we like to. I mean, we don't necessarily focus on the bigger property managers, but anyone who has a PMS is allowed to. To connect.

Nice. Brilliant. And give us that domain one more time. Somebody asked.

Yeah. Hostbuddy AI.

Fantastic. Thank you very much. And if we've got the battle of the plants, I can see your plant behind you, and I can look at Matt Metros, and he's got a plant. Now, Matt looks like he's just coming from the beach. He's got the sunglasses on, he's got a nice tan. He's in Puerto Rico. Matt, go ahead and just unmute yourself for a wee minute.

Hey everybody, here we go.

Right? We can hear him, we can see him. Look at that lovely face. Right. So Mr. Matt Metros, if you could please give us a 90 second introduction. Who you are, where you are in the world, what's your company and what would you like people to most know about you?

Yeah, my name's Matthew Metros, I'm from New York City down here in Puerto Rico right now trying to do some vacationing but didn't really work out that way. I'm the owner of CS Outsource. We help companies outsource and build virtual assistant teams. A lot of our team is in South Africa, South America. So think of countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, these countries. So you know what I've generally found is you know in those regions you obviously get the time zone alignment, better cultural understanding of the west and United States. You get bilingual obviously Spanish, English and you know, that might be good if your business calls for that. And you know we're helping with a lot of guest services. So guest communications, vendor communications, maybe disputing any negative reviews that come in, you know, helping with damage claims, ordering inventory and supplies, working with all your cleaners, listing optimizations. Right. So a lot of those day to day operational parts of the business. Then we're doing digital marketing, you know, maybe retargeting those past guests with email campaigns, social media posting and then we do bookkeeping. So sending out owner statements, reconciling your accounts, categorizing transactions, remitting any local lodging taxes. So we're an end to end service for vacation rental operators to outsource their back office work.

That's a very long 90 seconds but thank you very much for that. So now we do a lot.

We do a lot.

Yeah, we do a lot. So this is, this wasn't planned but this ties really nicely with, with Jay who was before you because Jay is obviously building out AI and you are building out virtual assistants. And there's like people will say well doesn't having somebody on board that's talking about AI, doesn't that just contradict with somebody that is doing in person? And I say absolutely not like AI and all of this cool technology that is coming, yes will, will change a lot but it is only going to enhance human capabilities, human skill sets like virtual assistants. So what I like about what, what Matt does and again I have used Matt's company to hire people for Boostly. We've got Mauricio, Right now, AKA Hollywood, working literally right now. And the company is fantastic. And this is why I wanted him to be part of that, of this. And as I've got to know Matt mom not a company more and how he works and how he has people all over the world, it is definitely providing a service. And I feel like the reason, one of the big reasons that I see so many hosts get burned out and management companies get burnt out is that they try and do everything themselves. I know me growing up in on a hospitality business, you know, parents working pretty much every single hour of the day, trying to do every single aspect of the job themselves. When you're stuck in the business and you were doing in the weeds of it, it really is hard for you to grow. And every single company that I've got part of it. And everybody tonight I've asked them like, what's your growth plans? And everybody has said, well, we're kind of happy staying where we are, thank you. You know, that's not the case. Everybody wants to be able to improve in some way, shape or form. And with Matt's company by bringing in the people that he has at his disposal is, is going to be a massive attributor to that. And I know people can go to insert website fiverr upwork phjobs.com and anybody can go and find somebody. But what Matt's company does is they not only train up the, the, the, the, the person that you're going to potentially hire, they actually train you up as well. They put you in touch with their team, they make sure that you've got all the, the right things behind the scenes of your business, the systems and structures to make sure that you're not just going to bring in anybody, you're bringing in the right person that can flourish and build out that system system with you. So the question I have for you, Mr. Metros, is you've obviously been at all the events this year, right? You've tried your best to be present everywhere. You've flown, you know, non stop and you've been at all of the big industry events and you've met a lot of people. What would you say is the one big mistake that you see business owners making when they start to think about outsourcing, when they start to think about recruiting somebody into their, to their business?

Yeah, I'm gonna say it's, it's not putting enough time into training and being present with the virtual assistant. We get a lot of people that say, you know, I just flat out don't have the time to train anybody to get them up to speed. And the reality is that even someone like myself who knows this industry like I still need to be trained up on your business. I wouldn't be able to get in there and know what to do right away.

And.

That is truly the number one way I see people fail with this is they're just, they're not present enough, they're not investing in the relationship and they just want somebody who can really mind read. And it's unrealistic. Anybody, any employee you bring in, regardless of their experience, is going to need training. So that's the number one message I would leave everybody with is if you're going to bring someone on board, you need to, especially for the first 30 to 60 days, create an onboarding plan. Here are the things that I want to start tackling. By week two, they should have these things done. By week four, they should have these things done and just set them up for success that way.

So when I put a poll out and I did a couple of questions around the attendees of this event and I said we're going to have somebody from an outsourcing company, one of the things that they're asking is what exactly can you help with? Somebody just thought that it was just guest comms. Now you mentioned at the start that you offer way much more but from everybody that you are bringing on board from customers now and they come to you and go, right, Matt, I need X. What is the, the roles that people are coming to you now that you're like, okay, that's surprising. I didn't realize we needed to provide this service and offering is there anything specifically that the people are bringing to you and bringing to your company? And you're like, oh, I didn't think we would need to provide that as a service.

Yeah, I'd probably say the having someone who is just dedicated to vendor management. Once your property management company gets large enough, I see a lot of people bringing cleaning in house, maintenance in house, and that becomes like an additional revenue stream for them. So they hire a maintenance coordinator through us and that person is responsible for touching on all the work orders multiple times throughout the day, following up with all the vendors, helping with hiring housekeepers, reviewing their work, firing them, getting quotes regularly on all the, all of the maintenance, you know, workers and you know, making sure that quotes are up to the mark. But that was a role I didn't really, I wasn't expecting that. But now looking back and as I know more about the industry, it's kind of obvious that that would eventually come. But yeah, maintenance coordinator. Because you can turn that into a huge, you know, revenue stream for the business.

How so?

Well, if you're bringing, you know, your cleaners in house and your maintenance in house, you know, those cleaning fees add up and those upcharges to the owners add up. And if you really want to, you know, operationalize maintenance, well, you need to have somebody responsible for it. So the maintenance coordinator role helps them keep that part of the business very profitable.

Somebody's asking, what is the name of the company and what's the domain? Where can we go to? So where do you want people to head to, Matt?

Yeah. Csoutsource.com it stands for customer service outsource. So just csoutsource.

And there's another question here, Suzanne resi Central. Is it.co.uk or is it.com people are getting a bit confused. We've got people over, over the pond asking this.

So on the website it is. You make me question now. Sorry.co.uk and same with my email address.

It'S.Co.Uk so it's a tricky one, isn't it? You know, for when you're based in the uk, I get with Boostly all the time. If you go to boostly.com that's an SMS marketing company over in the. Over in us get it all the time, but very, very make sure you go residentral.co.ukcsoutsource.com hostbody AI, of course, and simply owners.net Come on in, Becky. There we go. And then it was smartpricing.it but it's about to be called smartness. All right, gonna give every single one of our esteemed panel a final 60 seconds to give a pitch on why somebody who is watching this. Whether you're live with us in the zoom around the Internet, we are streaming this everywhere right now. Why should they come and get in contact with you? We're gonna go. Jay, Suzanne, Matt, finish with Becky. 60 seconds. And I mean 60 seconds, Mr. Metros of why they should get in contact with you. Why should they come and chat with you? And then we're going to close and wrap this out because it's getting late and I've just seen that Newcastle have equalized so I need to go have a little cry in the corner.

Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I would say go to HostBuddy AI. We are the only AI messaging solution that puts our AI on our front pages for people to go and test out. It's called Meet Host Buddy. So you can go on there and ask it all the questions that your guests might typically ask. That's just how confident we are in our product and how it's going to respond. It's the same AI that you'll see that you're going to be using as a user. You can set up a free demo on there. We have a free 14 day free trial for anybody who wants to get going. There's a lot more to the AI, but the biggest part is that you're not going to have to message all of your guests with repetitive answers all the time. And that's the most important part to us and that's why we build it that way. So feel free to email to JHostBuddy AI or go to our website and you can sign up for a free demo.

Nice. I need to get a sound effect for when people get close to that minute. If anybody watches Kill Tony, you'll know what I mean when they get close to that minute. All right, come on in, Jay. Fantastic. Suzanne, over to you. Thank you very much.

So why work with us? Because we are affordable, sustainable and we focus on guest comfort and satisfaction, operational efficiency and waste management. We combine everything in one. And the best part about it is all automated with the essential for you and at the touch of a hand. So please make contact. And just to confirm, it's www.resicentral.co.uk or suzanne.luscombresicentral.co.uk Fantastic.

And someone just asked, does it work in France?

Absolutely.

There you go. All right, Matt, Metros over to you before we finish in and wrapping up with Becky.

Yeah. So the reason why you work with someone like myself is what I've realized is VA's come and go. You know, they tend to have a lifespan of a year to two years before they go to another company. But what ends up happening is we become the sticky part in your company and we're helping creating a hiring engine in your business, helping hiring, train, supervise, manage and retain agents for the long run. So, you know, regardless of who comes in your business, we're always there. We bring continuity into your business.

Love it, Becky. We're gonna see this out with your good self.

Okay, so simply, owners, you should come and work with our business. If you want control back over your rental, if you want that direct contact and you want that management of your own money and your own rental income, then that, that's what we offer. Can I tell them about the discount code, Mark?

Please do. Please do.

So we've set up a Special discount code just for people who have watched this talk this week. And that is Boostly Fry F R I 24. And if you use that as you're uploading your property, you will get a 40% discount off your listing up until we break up for the Christmas holidays, which is the 23rd of December. And so that is Boostly Fry F R I 24. And so that will knock it down from £298.80 for the year to £178.80 for the year. So it's a nice saving for you as well.

78, 80 divided by 365. That works out 48p a day. 48p a day is absolute bargain. All right, everybody, thank you so much for being part of this. Fantastic. We just went over an hour. Karen, I'm gonna pop that code. Someone just asked me for the code. Boostly Fry 24. Boosty 5 24. Yeah, there you go. Put it in the chat. Thank you very much for everybody being part of it. It is nearly 20 to 10 at night over here in the UK. Becky's had a mulled wine earlier as well, so I want to make sure. But before she falls asleep on us, I want to let everybody go. Wherever you are in the world, Matt, I'll let you get back to the beach. Jay, thank you very much for tuning in from California. Tomaszco better be asleep by now because it is going well on 11. I'm about to get to sleep as well. Well, thank you so much, everybody for tuning in. We're going to be back tomorrow, obviously. We're going to be back tomorrow. Let's see if I hit this. What does this do? Right, there we go. Let me just quickly show you the Facebook group before we do close this out. Obviously, with the tech and the fun and games that everything that social media has thrown at my way this week, we are not streaming live in this group. Instead, what we're doing is we're doing Zoom and we're doing all this good stuff. Every single video that has been so far this week has got its own standalone. So you can go back and watch it at any point. Okay. Today alone, we've had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 sessions. And, you know, there's everything ranging from, obviously, our amazing biz besties that we've just been chatting to, but we've also got other fantastic sessions from Rose. Who else were we? Kim? Today we've got everything that you can potentially want and more, and it doesn't stop there. Tomorrow We've got even more sessions. Nine more sessions coming up. We're going to do a another daily debrief tomorrow and then before we wrap everything up on Friday, one final, final shout. I'm not going to mention this again because to be honest, I keep forgetting about it. I need to get off my brain. On Friday, we are going to have a special VIP session. Now, this is a paid event. Now, it's only going to cost $20, but Maddie from Mount, we're going to team up with the team at Mount and she's got a content creator army. These are legit content creators, influencers, content creators, whatever you want to call them, they legit know how to use social media. They are going to give you their top tips, their top strategies, how you can work with content creators. And we talk about direct bookings and if you want to work, do direct bookings, go and team up with these content creators because they are phenomenal. Head to boostly.co.uk VIP session. There's only about 25 people registered. Be a nice small event which will be fantastic, but please do go and check that out now to get the discount. So it's 35 to everybody else to get the discount. You go in and put E. What's the code? I want to say Boostly. Does that work? No, I'll find the code, I'll get it to you. It's late, give me a break. All right, with that being said, let's call this. I'll be back tomorrow at 8:30. The first session is going to drop 8:00am in the UK. We've got some absolute gold coming up tomorrow. You do not want to miss it. Thank you very much to everybody that's joined us in the live and elsewhere there and we will see you all tomorrow. All right, Tata. Thank you everybody. Bye bye.