What is The best Short Term Rental PMS provider? 🚀

Okay, everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to another episode of the Boostly Round Table. And today we are going to be talking about a very important part of all of your businesses. It's what powers it. In the background, we're going to talk about property management software, otherwise known as pms. So what I wanted to do this evening, and we're going to start off with Terry. So, Terry, I hope you're ready for this really, really simply for somebody who is watching this, because I did put up some pre roundtable questions. I wanted the audience to sort of ask questions. And the first one that came in, and I'll go straight to you, Terry, for this, it was what does PMS actually stand for and what does it actually mean? So if you could take off that first question, that'd be amazing.

Simply means, and I think David said it better, I think we need to find a better word for it is property management software is what it is. And that's just how it's just the hub of where you run your business. It's your universe. Everything starts from the PMS and goes out from there.

David, the first sort of question that I have for you is you have had lots and lots and lots of hosts come through the hostglue platform. Now, what would you say from all of the questions that run through support and all the questions that come to yourself, what would you say from your experiences are some of the big mistakes that most hosts make when they get started with a PMS provider with a property management software? What would you say that would be?

Well, coming from me, it might be surprising, but I'd say too much enthusiasm right away of people hitting the ground running and not understanding what they're doing. So it's complicated turning on a new property management software and migrating over and you want to make sure you're doing the steps in the right order, otherwise you could mess things up significantly. Like if you, for example, connect to Airbnb right away and you don't have your pricing set up from your dynamic pricing company, then all of a sudden your pricing might not look the way you want it to be. Or if you don't have your payment processor set up first, you can't connect to VRBO or your live booking site because you can't take bookings. So just making sure you're following through the steps, you're working with that property management software with their onboarding specialists and plan to do it in a time where you can have a few days, you can have a week where maybe if you don't have one booking right away, it's okay because it's a little complicated if you're on booking.com and you need to get off, especially if you're doing a migration. If you need to get off your existing property management software and move over, there's going to be a time where you got to disconnect and configure things in the new software and get it right. So just take a deep breath.

I often find that people will sign up and they'll expect all the automation that we can provide to just work and like. Well, yes, but not quite because you actually have to tell the system how you wanted to automate things. Right? Everyone wants to do things slightly differently and there's a lot of knobs and you have to turn them all in the right way. And it's not enough to just sign up. It's not enough to sign up and pay for the first month. You actually have to spend some time in front of a computer. You can't set it up on your mobile phone. No, you can't. Even when we have a mobile phone app, you'll still need a computer to actually set the system up to start with. So I think it's just that patience and as David was taking the time to actually do it and do it right from the start, don't get going with one aspect of the system and then a month later realize, oh, actually now this isn't working. And it's because you actually didn't do the other two, three things that you had to do to start this.

The single biggest mistake I see people make is the first thing when it's the biggest red light. As soon as they say, I only want something that will do this, this and maybe this, it's picking a software that you can't grow with. Like, you pick it, you use it for a year, you outgrow it. You just. And you know right away when somebody says, I only need this, this and possibly this that, they're coming from spreadsheets. They have never used software in their life. And then one year after, they would have the exact opposite philosophy if they were doing it again. They would say, I want the biggest and most robust PMS I can afford. So I would say for sure it's, it's going too small and not being able to grow with your pms.

I would say there's plenty of choice when it comes to a problem management software and everybody does have different needs. What would you say would be the core and the Key sort of decision factors that you would see. So obviously there was going to be lots of people saying, well, I need X, Y and Z. But from like if we're going to look at an 80, 20 sort of rule, what would be those 20% of factors that normally lie behind 80% of the decision making in your opinion?

Well, for me, I mean, it depends who's your customer?

First of all, who are you looking at? Are you looking at an urban manager with two properties or a single host of one property?

Or are you looking at somebody who's.

Got an enterprise level growth business? Because they are wildly different.

I'd say at a high level, the PMS should not define your process, but rather the other way around your process that you have in place. Because every property manager, have you seen the operations for one property manager? You've seen the operations for one property manager. So their process should define the property management platform that they're going to choose. So they should take a pen and paper out and sketch out what is important to them and how they're going about doing things. And what do I mean by that? Dynamic pricing or cleaning or insurance, digital guidebooks. And then what are they going to get out of the property management software versus what are they going to use to integrate?

I did some agreeing earlier, so I'll do some disagreeing now just to keep things a bit more interesting. I'd actually say that a lot of people in that size don't know what they want and they don't know what they need. So we have people coming up saying I want to automatically process the payments for booking.com and. And we say, well actually, sorry, we don't do that. That's how I do it. I don't want you to do it your way. So 3D secure links are a must if you want to avoid chargebacks. Now, you might not know it, but you need it.

What are some of the key factors that you personally look at when deciding these overarching awards?

Okay, so I should maybe try and explain how the Keystone Awards came to be. That we built our own software for people to go in and how to choose the right property manager software. Just like what you guys were talking about. Regardless, maybe you have three or four properties, maybe you have three or 4,000. So we built our own software and then out of that we started seeing trends. You know, what was the best for somebody with up to 20 properties, somebody up to 50 properties, somebody up to 300 properties. So we've just seen a whole bunch of trends. So we just decided we would create this awards program. Just recognizing the strengths of these, of these PMSs. Is the question that you're asking. What are. What am I looking for in a good pms?

Yes, that's it. And in my very long way around of asking it, yes.

Okay, so the very first thing I look at in a PMS is distribution. And I can predict through our algorithm, I ask one question, and that question is, tell me how many channels you connect directly to. I don't want to hear anything about Channel Manager. I want to hear how many channels you connect directly to. If it's. I can predict within 95% accuracy if it's four out of the big five, which is booking.com, expedia, HomeAway, VRBO, TripAdvisor, and Airbnb. If they connect to four of those, they will. In our algorithm, they will score right around 100. If it's less than 4, they will score right around 75, 65. The difference between 65 and 100 are two different planets. They're two different PMSs that you can't even compare. I really don't like what I see going on in the PMS world right now. And I think they're gonna. They're gonna live to regret this. Is this. I. I think this plug and play thing has gone too far. And it's gone too far in this sense that everybody else is innovating except for the pms. What they're doing is their greatest claim to fame is you go on LinkedIn or Facebook and we're so happy to announce we have this new integration with so and so. Everybody else is integrating and they're not.

I just feel that the hospitality world is way behind in terms of software. Like, okay, we're talking about not reinventing the wheel, but I can't see why. Not every PMS out there doesn't have a basic cleaning system, a basic maintenance system, a basic. For God in the sake. Linen management system. I mean, everyone in the industry deals with linen. You know, how do you know how much linen you need every day? I haven't found a system out there that does it. You know, trust accounting. I haven't found a system where I can log in and I can actually see how much money I've made as an owner of my business for that month. You know, Zebu can't do it yet. But there's just so many things that systems don't do, and I feel they're so basic. Yeah, of course you can get a BI dashboard hooked up to your pms. But the reality is it's not never going to answer the exact questions that you as a business owner have.

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