Using Showplace Boost Your Listings & Improve Your ROI

Okay, so today we are talking about short term rental design. We are talking how it can help you and of course as always on the Boostly podcast, we're going to be talking about direct bookings. So you're listening to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that helps hosts with the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly the confidence so you can go out there and get yourself some more direct bookings. I'm Liam Carolan, Mark Simpson's co host and this is the mini series on the Boostly podcast which shines the spotlight on on services, businesses and people that you need to know about as short term rental hosts. And today I'm excited because we've got a very special guest. We've got Caitlin Aronis, she's from Showplace and if you want to go and check them out, they are Showplace wholesale dot com. You can go and have a look at their website there. And we're going to really be diving into how you as a host today can pick up some tips on what to do design wise to try and attract more guests in into your properties. So welcome along. Caitlin, thank you for, for joining us.

Yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited, I'm excited to chat all things design and ROI and how, how to really boost your listing today. So thank you so much for having me.

Amazing. So can you give yourself and your business a little introduction, a little bit of background on your journey so far?

Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm Caitlin, I am the head of design here at Showplace. And to give you a little bit of background about our company, we came onto the scene about four years ago. Our CEO Justin Miller has a deep background in the short term rental industry. He founded a property management company called Pillow that was sold to Expedition Media Group back, you know, in the mid-2010s, 2015. So he was early on scene and really when we started Showplace, it was a destination for products to be giving away to hosts, which we still do, which is still a fun part of our business and we have a lot of brand partnerships that we work with. However, as we really started maturing as a business and as I came on board in 2020, I really was thinking how can we help hosts? How can we help them the most? And so we set out and we have a group of about 12,000 hosts that are in our network. So we have a bunch of people, resources. We reached out to them and we really said what is stopping you from going from one listing to three, to five, to 10. And number one, it was always capital, right? That's always a big one. But number two was I don't have the time, I don't have the expertise. I'm an accountant, a doctor, a lawyer, you know, stay at home, mom, I have this, I have that, I'm running other businesses. There's no way that I can go and I can stay at a property for a month, two months to go set up my short term rental. And even if I did, I really just wouldn't have a good place to start. And so as we learned more and more, we developed Showplace Wholesale, which was launched around two years ago now.

How does it work then? When say, you know, host has got empty property, it is a distance, say I don't know, a few hundred kilometers away from him. What does he do? Does he, does he need to meet somebody there? Does he send photos? How does it work?

Great question. So yeah, we do everything remotely, which is great. So we work all over right now all over the contiguous United States. We're starting to work some in Alaska and Hawaii, so we're playing around with, with that as well. But right now we're nationwide in the US and how it works is when typically we're actually starting working with people before they even close is actually a lot of the times when people are coming to us typically after that inspection period where we're pretty confident that they're going to be closing on the home. And we have a good timeline in place. And typically how it works is we would gather the floor plans so we have services where if you're not local that we can send somebody out, we can hire somebody to, to go on site, take floor plans for you or a lot of people will use local resources like their realtor or contractor or anything like that that they're currently working with to be able to give us those floor plans. From there we have what's called a design planning call. And our design planning call is really fun. I always join for those. And what we do on the front end is we really put together what's called your functional summary. And why that's so important is a functional summary is how many guests are going to be sleeping in the home, where are they going to be existing in the home, how are we laying everything out so how many beds, how many baths? And really finding that perfect balance between the two and really educating hosts. A lot of first time hosts we work with on what's that perfect balance? Because we'll have hosts that will Come to us. And they'll say, well, I have a three bedroom, you know, one bath, but I want, you know, nine guests in it. And we will talk them through it and say, okay, well, what would an experience be like with nine guests and one bathroom? Maybe is it better that we upscale the design, lower the occupancy, and really boost your profitability that way? Right. So we come up with that functional summary, and that's a really key, important element. But I think a lot of people that specialize in residential design really miss just because they're not used to it. I'm a host myself, so I have a, I have a co hosting business. I've done the same thing. I've flown out to Nashville and built bunk beds for days on end. I wish Showplace was around when I did that five years ago, because it would have been lovely. But that's really what we pay attention to on that design planning call is that functional summary. And, and then we figure out what you like. What you don't like is sometimes even more important than what you do like as far as the design goes. But we really help to make you understand who your target market is and how we intentionally design the home to pull that target market in. Our goal is to stop the scroll, right? So when you're on Boostly, when you're doing direct bookings, wherever it is, how do we stop the scroll so that someone goes, ooh, I want to learn more about that.

What mistakes do you see and how would you answer a host who is thinking like that? What would you say to somebody who is worried about the budget of whether or not they could afford these sort of services?

Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to design, I would say there's two big mistakes that I see people making in the short term rental space. One is playing it safe, right? This is a short term rental. People want to stay in a space that looks different than their everyday home. They're on vacation. They want to experience something different. So whether that's designing local, right. Designing with that type of environment in mind, where are you going to be? You know, can you really bring the local aesthetic into your space and, you know, playing it, playing it a little safe. Safe. But on the budget side of things, I would say one of the biggest pieces that we do here at Showplace is helping you understand budget allocation. It is so incredibly important to understand the cost of something and then the true cost of something. And this comes from someone who has made that mistake a million times. As a host of talking from personal experience here. But when you think about investing in certain pieces or investing in design, you really want to think about the longevity of that piece, the durability of that piece, and what pieces actually matter for where your budget's going to go. So, as you mentioned, those five hero shots, Right. What are those five shots going to be? More than likely, whatever you love about the home, whatever made you personal purchase that home is what your guests are also going to love about the home. So whether that's a chef's kitchen or whether that's an outdoor space or that you love that there's a game room in the basement, whatever that space ends up being, that's where we want to allocate the budget. And so we really help you budget plan. I always tell our hosts, no one's booking your house because you spent $2,000 on a coffee table. A coffee table is a functional piece of furniture. It needs to look good. The only thing I need it to do is I need it to last. I need it to have a finish that's going to last and be cleanable. And if you have a sleeper sofa, you need it to not weigh 50 pounds. Right. You need to be able to pick it up and move it so that somebody can put out the sleeper sofa. Other than that, it's a functional piece of furniture. Yes. Can you find some that are really cool? Of course you can. But when we're thinking about the budget, we're thinking about where to put it, that it's going to have the biggest bang for your buck. So that. That's really one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when it comes to budget is, you know, finding really cool pieces I think is amazing. So whether that's a piece of artwork or something that you might be able to build a room around. Right. You find something and you're like, I love this. I really want the rest of the aesthetic to match this. That's something that we do often. So hosts get really excited about something that gives us a really good direction to go with. And then I talked a little bit about, you know, actual cost and true cost. And this is personal story time a little bit. But early on, you know, we've had different hosts that have said, hey, I just. I just need to get things set up. And so I'm going to buy the $200 bed frame, the $300 bed frame. It just needs to be functional. It just needs to go in the space. I just want to get things up as quickly as possible, and I'll Buy something on Wayfair and Amazon and I'll deal with it later. And what nine out of ten times ends up happening is within six months, within a year. That cost of that bed frame is not $300 because it breaks in the middle of a guest stay. So maybe it's in the middle of the night and the bed frame breaks. Now you have an unhappy guest where maybe you have to refund them for that night. Then you also have to pay a handyman to go pick up another bed frame to go replace the bed frame that broke. So now that $300 bed frame is not a $300 bed frame. It's a fifteen hundred dollar bed frame because you have and a bad review. And so thinking through those things of where do I put the budget? Sturdy bed frames, comfortable mattresses. No one has ever complained that a couch is too big and too comfy in a short term rental. So those are places where we really want to focus Putting the budget and everywhere else we save. Everywhere else we focus on what are decor items that are going to pack a punch but not necessarily going to break the bank. Side tables, coffee tables, things like that that we can find really, really affordable options that are going to accent your pieces that maybe you spend a little.

Bit more money on having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Boost Lee like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.