The Importance of Maintaining Brand Fluidity

If you go and stay in one Marriott hotel, it will be very similar when you go and stay at others. And it's something which is so, so important for hospitality in general, but it's really hard to replicate as short term rental owners. So what we're going to be doing is discussing today how to keep that brand fluidity. And here to help us with that question is an awesome short term rental host, somebody who has got over 80 short term rental units based across in the USA and is going to help us really understand how you can keep that consistency throughout your short term rentals. So today my name is Liam Carolan and this is the Boostly podcast. If you've not listened to this before, that gives you the tools, the tactics, the trainings, most importantly the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. And every, every few episodes we dive into a host's journey and that's exactly what we're doing today. We've got AJ Raber and he's from BNB Breeze Co. So if you go and check their website out, it's absolutely awesome. As I say, he's got over 80 units so he's well placed to, to give us some help today on our journey. So let me introduce aj, welcome along.

Well, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

So many people listening to this might not be familiar with your brand and your business. So what I'd love to ask is can you give yourself an introduction where your business is in the world and anything you'd like to share? Yeah.

So our business started with a guy named Landon Schlabod in North Carolina who was well connected with a lot of different investors. And that's actually been interesting. Our company's grown through investor relations, not post mailing, going after owners. It's been through just nurturing relations. And once you prove it once to a homeowner, they want to invest again. So we have homes anywhere from Pennsylvania, up in the mountains, Poconos, everywhere outside of Pittsburgh, Amish country, Lancaster down to, down the east coast, down to Sarasota, Florida. So kind of just grew due to our, where our investors were going in and where they wanted their vacation homes. And it's actually grown since 2019 when Landon would have brought, got the first company, first property started. Then I actually would have joined in 2020, no, 2021 and kind of just went from there. Have a little bit of a background in corporate sales and marketing and so knew that's not what I wanted and transitioned into this space and it's been really awesome.

Ever since, what advice would you have for somebody listening who wants to get into the midterm rental space? What should they be considering in their units which has attracted you to stay at these places, you and your partner to stay at these places. What things have either frustrated you that hosts should have or some of the that they have got, which you absolutely love.

So when it comes to short term I, I'm a huge fan of going all out flashy, appealing. It's marketing for medium term.

I'm.

It's completely opposite for me. So practicality, logic, what works. And so like comfortable places to work. If you can have a nice spend a little, maybe the money that you would have spent on a hot tub and some of these others, nice office chair, nice desk, big refrigerators, big couches, comfortable beds, king beds, TVs and bedrooms because they'll be spending more time there. So like take, take all the things that you'd want in your personal house and put in this home. It doesn't have to be the one that has the $5,000 article couch and all this everywhere. But functionality is at the root of all midterm rentals.

Obviously we're here to talk about the brand fluidity, the 80ish units that you've got at the moment. First of all, how do you keep them consistent considering there's ones in different locations and also perhaps different. You might be serving slightly different guest avatars, different size groups. What, what is the key to keeping fluidity and consistency?

And first, you're right, it that's been one of our biggest struggles is when you have a home that sleeps 30 in the mountains of Pennsylvania, in a apartment in Greenville, South Carolina. Very different people. And so it's you. We're not marketing to the same avatar. However, one of the ways that we've found that works to keep everything fluid is to have really good back end systems. So like really good information for our communications teams, really good automated messages that are taking care of everything and spending time not just hey, hope you checked in, hope everything's great like spending time customizing things, taking care of guests, checking in on them at the homes, going above and beyond with their experience. So like there's never a guest that would check into a home in Virginia and Florida that would be getting a different experience from us, the same type of communication. It'd be the same thing like when you go to Chick Fil A, you talk to somebody, you're going to see that same kind of verbiage coming from them as you would anywhere across the country and that's what we're trying to do.

You mentioned some of the systems, so let's dive into the tech, the systems and some of the cool I guess apps and things that you use. What are they and why do you use them?

So the first that this is not a flashy one. We store all of our data just in Google Drive and have everybody source to whoever needs to see it. Some of our other data like our tech stack that we really like is stay fi for collecting emails. Thanks Boostly Mark Simpson. That's been a big one. Key data. So data analytics, that's been a really nice one just to plug into our company, pull out owner reports, you can see adrs, your rev pans. Occupancy rates are super easy for any given amount of time. Guest view guide is another one that we just merged with. So I forget they're probably like two by three foot photo live screens that you put in your walls that guests can. That's a way, that's another way that we keep brain fluidity. Every time somebody clicks on this, there's a video of US3, Me, Heather and Landon in our company saying welcome to our home and giving them kind of a little bit of a 30 second rundown of who we are. Every single home that has one of these gets the same video and then when they're done watching that video on the screen it says shows our website a discount code to rebook and that's a way that you can retarget Airbnb guests once they get to your home. Another tech stack would be we use Breezeway for our cleanings. The fact that I don't know how to use Breezeway shows that it works. If I don't know how to use it, doesn't need fixing. One thing that's been really nice lately even it's not a tech stack. Just built a new custom website that's just been performing really really well and it's very. Our old one was pre built with a PMS and to get to a home was not the easiest thing and now we just every every filter, every icon, every how everything's set up. We would have brainstormed on why we want to do this and with a guest experience. So like we spent the last year we actually we haven't gained that many homes this last year but it's because going this year we realized we wanted to pause we were growing fast and get all these systems in place automations so that we can give a smoother experience for the guests going forward.

In terms of the team that you've got on the ground doing this sort of thing. You mentioned you use breezeway. Do you have. Who uses breezeway? Is it the, you know, do you have maintenance people in different locations and if so, how do you find them?

Yeah, so because we have remote, remote locations either homeowners, we like for homeowners to find their maintenance person on the ground. Now if they don't, we do so like in populated areas that we have more than five homes, we already have the same plumbers, handyman, maintenance, pool guys, cleaners, and we just plug them into the system. However, if there is a homeowner that if they bought a house in Utah right now, we don't have anybody there, a lot of that. We like for them to find relationships on the ground because it is their home and they'll be having that for a long time. But who's in charge of that? Internally we would have a full time person that's over maintenance and cleaner relations and we're actually expanding this, possibly bringing on another person to do this. That's one thing we found for certain people in the business to be able to focus on increasing revenue, bringing on owners and all the like stuff in the business that's increasing in value. You can't be worrying about a lot of the day to day problems that are going up. So like outsourcing that bringing on good people that can think for themselves and tackle those problems is an amazing key. And then she would deal directly with us. But yeah, we have. Were you asking about company structure? Like how we have people doing what? Is that what you were asking as well?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

All right, so then we'd have our CEO who would deal with a lot of the. Just overseeing, who still stays very involved and is in the process of branching out. We'd have Heather who's over in charge of onboarding and design. It's good. Onboarding and design go hand in hand because you're buying furniture, you're starting at properties. We have a photographer, we have one of our. This is one of our favorite things that we have a listing optimizer. So we used to always go in like whenever you play with a listing on Airbnb and you boot. I don't know exactly how the algorithm works. However, we notice when you make changes, bookings come in like it just. It's. If we go edit a listing that hasn't been touched, almost guaranteed the next week two bookings will come in just by changing title. So like we usually like to go back and forth, like, have two revolving titles. And so our listing optimizer just plays with listings, goes into them, changes them, updates them, plays around. And usually those homes that they follow with do see an increase. So. And that's actually that's been a probably we've had pretty good ROI on that position because of that. One of the biggest things that we did then was having a VA VA team. So we have a team of five that's handling our communications, and that has made all of our hair not fall out. So that's been that's been a really good growth in the last year.

Having a blast. Going to get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Like Bruce Lee. Because it's so hard. And the T is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.