WHY I'M CHANGING MY PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE | The STRR Podcast #78 | Tim Hubbard

If you've been watching this channel for any time at all or listening to the podcast. Well, you know, I'm a huge believer in using tools and software and the biggest one that I always recommend is using a property management system for your short term rentals. I've been using one for five years and I just changed to a new one. So I want to tell you why and which one I went to. Stay tuned. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick, actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Man, there are so many changes going on right now with, with my business and my properties, adding new ones and adding new team members, just all kinds of exciting things going on. But one of the biggest changes I'm making right now is I'm switching from a property management software that I've used for over five years that I've recommended heavily to a lot of people. I'm moving to a new one and I want to tell you which one that is and why I'm switching and just some of the challenges that come along with that. So I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you've checked out our new Short Term Rental Riches podcast website. It's strict. We have all the prior episodes on there. You can search easily, they're categorized. You can find lots and lots of information on there. So check that out if you haven't already. But let's get into this. Let's, let's jump right in.

Well, I'm switching in a nutshell because I haven't been super happy with the service of Guesty. Guesty is who I've been using. I've recommended them a lot and I have to say they've really helped me get to where I am because aside from their actual management software that can help manage reservations and pricing and messages and all that, they also have a guest receptionist service, which means they were actually handling messages from my guests for me. So I haven't had my own receptionist team until now. I just hired a bunch of new team members. Super excited about that. I will be talking about that more in the future and kind of what that looks like and some of the things that have gone into that. But for now, I just want to talk about switching from Guesty. So I do have to say before we get into any of this is that software programs are changing so, so quickly and there really are so many to choose from. When I first started, you know, there was a couple and I would Meet them in person at these conferences, you know. But now, I mean, there's literally probably 100 different programs to choose from.

So if you're not listening to this in real time, it's very likely that either the software you're using or the software you're thinking about using has added new features or changed something. So I want to talk about a few that I recently checked out. Guesty, which I was using, and the new one I'm going to. Before that though, I want to give you some background I have with software because I used to sell software for a living when I was getting started with real estate. For almost 10 years, I sold software to automotive shops in Northern California that helped run their whole business. So it helped manage their guests, it helped manage their pricing, their payments history, all those things, much like what our short term rental software can do for us. So I have a lot of experience with software programs. Even though they're totally different industries, the amount of software that I've explored I kind of think helps. And one thing that I found very, very interesting when I was working with all these automotive shops is this. The shops that used their software and took advantage of all the features were almost always outperforming the shops that didn't. So the ones that were using software and using all the features and really taking advantage of it were almost always outperforming the other businesses. And I think that that's probably similar in the short term rental space. A lot of times what I would see is someone might have the best software possible, but they weren't actually using all the features. So whatever program you have, if you don't have one yet, I highly suggest checking one out. And you'll get several recommendations from this episode. But if you don't have one yet, this is like the first step to automating everything and setting up your platform so you can scale. Just because we have the best software doesn't mean that we're using it properly. So I switched mainly from Guesty because I no longer need their receptionist service. I wasn't happy with it. The response times weren't fast enough. And you know, they went through the whole Covid curve like a lot of us did. And so I believe they let people go and then they hired new people. So, you know, just having to reteach people about our properties and things like that. I'm just at a point now where it works for me to be able to hire my own whole team. That might not work for everyone, but that's why we can use These software programs to automate a lot of the messaging and most all of them do that now. So the ones that I'll talk about can automate a lot of the messaging.

So what are some of the other programs I looked at? Well, I looked at MyVR, if you've heard of that one. And ironically enough, the week after I signed with the new company, Guesty bought my VR. So they're probably going to become a monopoly in the software space. Not a monopoly, but they have a lot of investment behind them and I will say their software is awesome and my VR software is awesome. But even though the software is awesome for the price, I just found some other ones to be a little more reasonable and basically have most the same features. So I looked at my VR, I thought it was great. I think it's a little more geared towards actual vacation rentals. So they had a better internal website and things like that set up. The price was really expensive. It was basically the same as Guesty. They have a per unit cost, but which is about five times what I'm paying with the new program that I'm using. So I looked at my VR. I used Guesty in the past. I looked at Smart BnB, which I've recommended in the past and I think a great software, but I think it's good for five, 10 properties mainly. I've got over 40 now and there's a few little features that everyone might not need that I find pretty valuable or at least some way to handle certain things like check in forms, for example, getting guest information verified automatically. A lot of the less expensive programs that I looked at, like your Porter and Hostify didn't have a check in form option. Guesty does. And this is one of the things I was looking for, or at least a workaround, a way to automate it. So that was a feature I didn't see in a lot of programs. But again, these things are changing constantly. Smart BNB and your Porter don't have a stripe integration. Stripe is a credit card processing company that most everyone in the short term rental industry uses. So if you're taking your own reservations or you're taking reservations From Vrbo or HomeAway, you're going to need to charge their credit card processing and that wasn't integrated with those programs at the time of this recording when I looked at them. So that's huge for me because we do lots of reservations outside of Airbnb. So if you're only doing Airbnb, you know that's probably not going to be that Big a deal. So that was really the biggest one for me is that stripe integration. Everything else I found I could do in the new program.

Dun, dun, dun. What's the new program I'm going with? It's Host Away basically has most all the same features that Guesty has. And with my amount of properties, I'm paying $10 a unit. Guesty is a percentage, I think, you know, I was sort of grandfathered in because I've been using them forever, but I was paying 3% with them. And that really adds up for me. You know, based on the amount that each one of my properties was doing, that's like four to five times the amount that I'll be paying with Hostway. So a big savings. So Hostaway is the new program I'm going with. I think it's great. Their support was great, had lots and lots of good features.

They have a scaling price level. So if you only have a few units, it's going to be more expensive per unit. I think it's around 30 bucks or something like that. But it will scale down as you get more properties. And I don't know about you, but, but I'm planning on adding a lot more properties. I'm in this for the long run and so I want a software program that I can grow with.

It's also not that difficult to switch programs, so obviously there's some things that we have to check off. We got to add our new automated messages in. We have to pull our Airbnb account over which these things sync. They integrate easily. So I basically turn it off on one, turn it on on the other one. I'm going to have to double check any reservations that are already open, but after that, you know, we should just be rolling. It integrates with Price Labs, which is who I use for pricing. Integrates with lots of software programs. And this is maybe one of my favorite features with Hostway is that it integrates with Zapier or Zapier, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, but if you're familiar with that, Zapier is a program that links thousands of different programs online together. So even if Hostaway doesn't have a built in feature, which they cover almost every feature you could imagine that you would need with for a short term rental, they've got, they've got pretty much all of it. There's not nearly enough time in this episode to go over what all those features are. I guess the big pull point I wanted to make is that software is super, super important. There's lots of programs available now. They're all changing, but we got to make sure that we're actually taking advantage of the features in our program. So if you're not using one yet, check out these. I think Smart bnb, your Porter, are a great option. If you've got maybe five or less units more than that, check out hostify, Host Away. I think those are a little better for five plus units. And if you want, check out guesty and my VR. But in my opinion, after using guesty for over 5 years and loving their software, I think they're just too expensive. And the other programs have come so far and they're getting better and better that I can't justify the price with them. If you're using one program right now and you're considering switching, just consider some of the challenges you might have getting historical data in there, which most programs will let you upload it back in. Disconnecting, reconnecting your listing sites like Airbnb and Vrbo. That's the other thing. These all integrate with Vrbo, HomeAway and Airbnb, which are the top ones, as well as booking. But just double check those things. If you're not using software, please, please just turn off the video or stop listening to the podcast and go online and start using one. I swear it's gonna make things so much better. And you can always change to a different one in the future if you need to. I hope this helped. I know it's kind of techy. I know I'm kind of just jumping around. There's so many features with these programs, but I'm using Host Away now. Just want to let you guys know that, because I've talked about Guesty a whole bunch in the past. I hope you guys are doing awesome out there, wherever you are. And until next time, have a great weekend. Sam.