My Best STR Insights After Attending 25 Conferences

Over the last 10 plus years, I've attended well over two dozen industry conferences and spent well over $100,000 at least on these conferences. They really add up. But you know how many of those conferences were actually worth it? Not all the ones I attended, but the recent IMN conference that I just got back to delivered. This is my second time attending and this one packs a punch. So I'll be breaking down my top six takeaways for you to help you along your short term rental journey. Everything from operations to design trends. Stay tun. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm happy you're here again. I can't believe how fast time is going. I've been traveling around a lot and so I know that speeds things up, but we left Brazil, we went to California to visit some of my family. We were there through the New year. Then we went on a little cruise in the Caribbean. Then we went to Orlando, Florida where I am in contract for a new property. And I know you might be thinking Orlando, Florida, isn't that the most competitive short term rental space in basically the whole us and yeah, it definitely is one. So it's actually going to be a really good test for me and our team to manage a property in a market that has thousands of very similar properties. But the property that I'm in contract for, it's actually a little different. It's got some unique things to it. I think it's going to stand out. It'll be interesting to see how it goes and of course I will share all of that with all of you and to give you my best insights. So I left the IMN conference last night and just arrived back here in Medellin, Colombia. As a lot of you know, I've been spending a lot of time here over the last 10 years. We've been building a resort hotel and I'm excited that we're probably going to be launching the first five units maybe in the next month. So without further ado, what makes the IMN conference stand out? And I've been to dozens of these. I spent a lot of money attending short term rental conferences. The thing that stands out for the IMN is that the attendees are actual operators. There's lots of people there that have portfolios and sizable portfolios. I would say the majority of the people there probably are operating over 20 properties and many of them operating hundreds of properties. Like my team and I at Coorsley, we're now managing a little over 225. We're in a whole Bunch of cities. If you need some help with your portfolio, head over to striches.com youm'll see a little partner with us button there. Be happy to jump on the phone with you, see if your property makes for a good fit. So what makes this conference different? Well, aside from the fact that tons of the attendees are real serious operators and I happen to know a lot of them personally because I've been going to a lot of these conferences, so I get a lot of benefit just from these side conversations outside of the big sessions. But the thing that's amazing about the way they've crafted this conference is that all of the sessions are held on a panel and they have chosen operators that are best fit for each of these topics. So everything from AI and technology to design to market trends, you name it, there's a panel for it. And the other thing that I like about this conference is it's actually really quick. It's only a day and a half or so and so they really pack it full, unlike some of the other conferences. Vrma, for example, again, I get a lot of benefit from the attendees going there. That is the industry's largest conference. But a lot of those sessions, to be honest, they're just kind of repeat stuff that they've been doing year after year. So I like the IMN because I think it's fresh, it's real world data and it's actually pretty small. So there's like maybe 300 people that attend. So it's a little bit more intimate and you get a lot more of those little side conversations going on. So let's jump into some trends. What's actually happening in the short term rental world in 2026? Well, there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes that I guarantee you do not know about. There are venture capital funds out there acquiring tons of thousands of units of individual property management companies. Now this new wave of venture capital is doing it behind the scenes. Whereas before we had companies like Vacasa, as you may be aware, they went out of business. They were the nation's largest property manager. They got bought by cago, which their CEO was there. And I've got some great notes that he shared during the conference. I'll share those in just a second. But there's this big trend where people are just chasing higher returns. And so these venture capital companies companies are coming in, they're identifying smaller property management companies, usually around the 100 to 200 unit size. They're purchasing them because they've got a proven model, they've been doing a good job and those returns that they're getting are better than they can get in other places. Now you would think that they're going in and just centralizing all the operations, adding a whole bunch of technology behind the scenes. And I'm sure that there are some doing that. But the gist of what I got speaking to some of these actual acquisition companies is that they're kind of just keeping things how they are. So we know that investors are always going to chase the highest returns. And over the last few years, it's just not really possible to get cash flow from long term rentals. And people recognize that and they're coming in and they're coming in quickly. So a lot of acquisition happening. Casaga, who purchased Vacasa, actually flipped the whole business, tens of thousands of units. And what they did is they realized that these large national managers were not doing a good job on the ground with their local teams. Reviews suffered and they started turning, started losing lots and lots of properties. We've talked about that a lot on this channel before, how you have to have the local operations in place, but you also need centralized operations in the back to really make that possible. If you're new to the channel, we can go to strictest.com check out all of our prior episodes. Our team and I have managed well over 60,000 guests in a whole bunch of different places. So we've got some ebooks put together with some real world advice to help you along your journey. Journey. So Casago flipped Vacasa basically in a year where they were taking all of these markets that had existing management in place and selling it off to other operators that they think could do a good job as a franchise model. So Picasso went from acquiring a whole bunch of companies and realizing that that wasn't a good model, things fell apart. They got bad reviews, they got purchased by Casago, who then broke up all that huge conglomerate into a franchise model. Again separating out all of those properties into individual markets where they know that they had good operators on the ground, along those lines of chasing higher returns. We are seeing a lot of people go into the luxury and ultra luxury market. The commodity type properties have really seen a lot of competition and their prices and their adrs have suffered. Although most people at the conference agree that they don't really see a big drop in the ADRs coming across the board because supply is not increasing like it was after Covid in 2122. So people are finding that the luxury market and creating those truly unique Experiences, again, just differentiating your property is where the highest returns are coming. And there were also people here at the conference, venture capitalists, chasing these types of properties and building them theirselves. So I would say we will see a little bit more supply coming down in the luxury segment because of barriers of entry to these really luxury type properties, given the amount of money they cost, the location, the time to build them or build them out. I don't see this supply segment growing extremely quickly. But you do want to keep an eye on it. And you can keep an eye on it by using tools like Air DNA. You want to filter out for properties that sleep maybe over 20, maybe over 30 people. All right, let's talk a little bit about operations. Because of course you can have the most beautiful properties in the world, but if you're not doing a good job at operating them, you get bad reviews. And then your guests will not book your property because you're not going to show up on the platforms. There was a really interesting segment on service and what actually makes for that good guest experience. And this was a stat that came from Disney. But if we break the experience of a guest down to people, the places and the process, three areas where a potential experience could go wrong, what do you think is the most important piece of that? It could be places, people or processes. Well, 80% of that, according to Disney, depends on your processes. That means you could have the best team, you could have the property in the best place. But if you don't have those processes in place, well, then things fall apart. You don't know how to handle guest situations when they come up, and that will lead to bad reviews. Now, one other thing to add to this. It's really interesting. You can actually create a bunch of better experience for your guests if something goes wrong. And now I know that sounds totally crazy, but things do go wrong, right? And so when something goes wrong, people's expectations go down. And this is your opportunity to really jump in there and serve them and show that you care. The biggest reason for someone to leave a bad review is not the, the people or the place. Yes, it's the processes. But inherent in that process is showing whether you care or not. So if someone thinks that they're just a number on the scoreboard and you don't care about them at all, that's when they're going to leave you a bad review. And so this is something that's been a little challenging for those of you out there that are renting very short lengths of stay. If you have someone stay with you for one night, for example, you don't get a lot of opportunity to show them that you care. There's actually a funny example they gave of a pet services company that provided, you know, pet supplies and things like that that would intention mess up their first order with their customers so that they could make up for it and win that customer over for life. And they had data to show that their lifetime value of those customers was higher when they messed something up and fixed it. Now of course I'm not recommending that you mess anything up with your guest experience, but just remember that when things go wrong, it's your opportunity to show that you actually care. But coming back to the main reason for a bad guest experience, you have to have those processes in place. There was a lot of talk at this conference about scaling and again that comes back to processes. You cannot scale if you do not have things in place, if you do not have standard operating procedures. And as your team's growing, as you're adding more properties to portfolio, there's way more to handle, right? And that's again why we've developed Coorsley so we can be that core operating center on the back end of your short term rentals. Because we know it takes a lot of time and experience to set up a lot of these processes. But one thing that you can do right now is if you're managing your properties yourself, is look at your communication. Whether you're communicating with your vendors, your housekeeper, your maintenance people. Are you doing it on standard old SMS text message? Are you using WhatsApp? Are you using a system like Slack? Well, a lot of times we're over communicating. If we have group messages set up, especially a lot of times we're sending messages to people that don't really need to see them and that sort of just bogs everything down. So that's something you can do right now if you've got a lot of communication going on. The more properties you have, the more communication you're going to have. Just do a quick revamp of that, make sure that there aren't people in groups or shared message threads or email copies, all those types of things that don't actually need to be there because that just bogs everything down, makes it more difficult for you to offer that great guest experience. Another interesting KPI that you might consider monitoring, especially for those of you that are growing your portfolios, is your messages per guest. Now I know that sounds a little weird, but if we think about it, we want to answer all of Our guest questions before they actually show up to the property or before they ask us something, we want to anticipate all those questions. And so if our average message per guest is very high, like maybe it's 20 or 30 or something like that, that means there's way more communication going on. That's, that means there's way more things that they didn't know or things that we didn't answer upfront. So the lower that number is, the better you're likely doing with your guests and the better your operation. All right, let's jump into technology. So of course there were a lot of vendors there sponsoring the event and a lot of them are talking about AI. And there's so many ways to use this in our short term rental business. But probably the most common one that people are approaching first is automated messages for our guests, the guest communication piece of it. Although there were financial companies there helping with automating your finances with AI. So you name it, if you are a technology provider in the short term rental space and you are not using AI, well, you are getting left behind very, very quickly and you're going to go out of business. That's just, that's just the plain, simple truth. One of the new AI programs out there that's creating quite a bit of buzz is called Boom. And this is based off an AI platform in the back. But you know, I mentioned going to these conferences year in and year out, meeting a lot of people. It's really interesting to talk to people actually using these products. The reality is that there is no single product out there that's going to handle your whole short term rental operation. It does take a team combined with the best technology. And what's happening is because technology is so much easier to create today than it ever has been, everyone's trying to do everything. And we know after managing so many guests and so many properties in a lot of different markets that not every technology piece of technology is as good as the other one. Dynamic pricing tools, for example, Price Labs and Wheelhouse, they have been hard at work for over a decade. Whereas we have property management software platforms like Guesty and Hostway now offering these dynamic pricing tools. But they're way behind. They're not focused on this. They're basically trying to offer everything so that their customers use everything through them. Right. But we know that they're not doing as good a job as the people that are specifically focused on that one item. But we know that they got a lot of catching up to do and they're probably Never going to catch up. So the ideal scenario is that you choose the best piece of technology for whatever component of your short term rental operation that happens to be. Whether it's guest communication, whether it's integrating your locks in your smart home technology, whether it's your dynamic pricing or your task management, there is no centralized program that's knocking all of these out of the park. But the first place to start for most of you is guest communication. And we know that there's a lot of things that AI can do that we as humans just can't do. We can't remember everything, we can't create a tone to match each of our guest profiles. We're going to write the same way, right? And if we have other people helping us, well, they're going to write very likely the way that they write. And so that creates a bit of mismatched communication. And the reality is, is that we have to think about all these things, we have to remember all these details and AI can, it can do a better job. So always a good idea to keep an eye on technology. But remember, there is no one product out there that can do everything you need it to do for your short term rental operation. There's also a lot of overlap. So. So if you don't have the volume of reservations coming in to actually test out this software, well, then I hope podcasts like, like this one and other ones out there are providing you some good feedback. But the true, true source of real information is to talk to other operators that are actually using these tools. Okay, let's get over to some design tips because we know how important this is for our short term rentals. We have to stand out. Things are more competitive than they've ever been before. Right? A good tip that I picked up this last week was you really want to dedicate the majority of your furniture budget to your top five to seven photos. Remember, most people, when they're browsing Airbnb or the OTAs like VRBO, they're not looking past like five photos. In fact, a recent study showed that 80% of people browsing Airbnb don't make it past the first five photos. So that means you want to put your furniture budget into those header photos. Maybe it's your outdoor amenities, maybe you have a mural wall inside the property, something different that's going to get you to stand out compared to all the other properties that are similar to yours. Another quick tip, choose comfort over design. So yes, you need those design elements so someone will book your property, but once they Check in. If they're sitting in your chairs and they're squeaking and falling apart, well, that's not going to create a good experience. So linens, you don't want to skimp on linens. We actually did a full episode on that, and it's one of our most popular episodes on YouTube. It's way back, episode 167. So go back and check that out. You don't have to spend an arm and a leg for your linens, but you do want to make sure that they're comfortable and they're durable. And of course, you want to make sure that they're all white. Right? That's what hotels do. It's easier to wash. You can bleach them, and your guests know that they're cleaned. One area in design that you don't want to spend a whole lot of money on is artwork. So you can get some great murals and things like that online now, or wallpaper, for example. That doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. You don't want to be out there spending thousands of dollars on artwork and things like that that most people, the majority of guests aren't going to appreciate. One place you may consider adding a unique touch is what they were calling at the conference the fifth wall. That would be the ce. Most people don't look at the ceiling, but there are a lot of ceiling treatments that we can add to really make a space pop. And remember, make a space pop for those header photos. A couple other quick tips I picked up from another friend over dinner is using Perplexity. This gets into the AI, but there's. There's just so many cool things about it. First of all, it uses multiple AI programs at the same time. So Chat, GPT, Claude, and Gemini. Imagine doing one search and it goes to all three of those. And then they have their own browser called Comet, which will allow you to search for things online. And it can do the searching for you. Let's say you want to order something from Amazon, for example. You could have Comet do this for you, log into your actual Amazon account and add things to your cart. So those are just a few of the latest tips and tricks that I picked up at this latest conference. And I will of course, be going to a lot more so that you do not have to and reporting back to you if you haven't yet. If you're finding value in our content, I'd really appreciate if you wouldn't mind leaving us a like or subscribing on YouTube or if you're listening on the audio version following us on Spotify or on Apple itunes. Until next time. I hope you have a fabulous week, Sam.