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That is for a number of good reasons!
Happy Friday, everyone! Before you head into the weekend, I wanted to share some exciting new updates (29 total) that came out last week with a focus mostly on PM statements and payouts, but also enhancements to Booking.com channel integration. Let's get started! 🚀
The exciting news of the week is about our new PM updates for owner payouts. Owner payouts have been around a long time but tend to be less understood (and less used) because statements and expenses get most of the attention. Payouts are basically a record of money actually being transferred to the owner. The statement tells you what the owner gets. The payout is the amount you actually sent to the owner. Aren't those the same thing? No, there are situations that make them different. For instance, an owner might have a negative statement for a particular month and, instead of the owner sending you a check, you just hold over the negative statement to the next month. The next month, if the owner has a positive statement, the owner payout is the result of both the negative and positive statements.
The problem with payouts is that they were one by one. You could only record a single payout for one owner at a time. If you manage on behalf of 50 owners, it takes a long time to manually enter 50 payments. So we built a special "Record Multiple Payouts" for owner payouts feature to take care of this problem.
To see it in action, go to PM > Owner Payouts like you normally would, but notice that there is now a Record Multiple Payouts button at the top.
Click that button, and you'll get a special batch page that will show you all the statements that need to be paid (ie. any that still have an "unpaid" or "partially paid" status) and what the owner will get.
You can select the type of payment (bank transfer, check) for them and a note that will apply to all payouts. If the owner has multiple statements, the payout balance for that owner will be the delta of those statements' unpaid balances.
If you want to skip an owner, use the checkbox on the left to de-select that owner. Click the Record Owner Payout button at the bottom and the payouts will be saved. To be clear, as when recording individual payouts, our system does not actually send a check or ACH money to the owner's bank account. We assume that you will do that at the same time. And if that part (sending the actual money) has frustrated you in the past, keep reading!
The next big piece of news flows right along with this. You can now push owner payouts directly into QuickBooks as bills or checks. This means that you can use the tools in QuickBooks, like the Checks To Print queue or Pay Bills Online feature, to send money to all your owners quickly after recording multiple payouts.
This tool can also be found in the PM > Owner Payouts area above the Payouts grid. You'll see a "Send to QuickBooks" button that will either be enabled or disabled depending on whether you have a QuickBooks account connected to OwnerRez. To be clear, this only works with QuickBooks Online, not QuickBooks Desktop, and it has to be an active connected QuickBooks Online account which you can connect using our QuickBooks setup and connecting process.
The first time you click the button, OwnerRez will show you a configuration page where you'll need to map some options.
The "As Of Date" field allows you to set the starting date for when payouts should be pushed across to QuickBooks. After all, you probably don't want to push old payouts if the money for those payouts has already been sent. You can also specify whether you want to create Checks or Bill records in QuickBooks. If you want to print checks, use the "Check" type. At the bottom, you'll need to map the owner in OwnerRez to the vendor or customer in QuickBooks. This will allow OwnerRez to know what vendor or customer name to use when creating the check or bill in QuickBooks. When you're done configuring everything, click Save and you'll be ready to go.
After configuration is over, you'll see the actual page to send payouts to QuickBooks, and it will look and act like all of our other batch pages.
The page works in two stages. First, you'll use the top options to find and show payouts that need to be sent to QuickBooks. Then, after seeing the payouts, you can select or confirm the ones to send and OwnerRez will immediately push those payouts into your QuickBooks Online account as checks or bills. Let's step through the process...
Go ahead and click the Show Payouts button. By default, it will show any payouts that were never sent to QuickBooks in the past for all owners and for all dates back to the starting "As Of Date" you selected in the configuration area. The payouts will show right below that in the same page.
By default, all payouts will be selected, but you can de-select any that you don't want to send across to QuickBooks. If you need to change the criteria, simply do that at the top and the click the "Refresh Payouts" button. The payouts will reload at the bottom, and you can re-confirm the selection.
When you have the group of payouts showing and selected that you want to send across, click the bottom "Send to QuickBooks Now" button, and OwnerRez will create check or bill transactions in QuickBooks while you wait.
You can double-check your work by jumping into QuickBooks and clicking on the Expenses menu. You'll see the check or bills that OwnerRez just sent over.
Drill into one of those check or bill transactions, and QuickBooks will show the detail inside. Notice that if the payout is for multiple statements, both statements are referenced with the correct amounts.
After your payouts are in QuickBooks, you can use the Checks To Print or Pay Bills Online queues in QuickBooks to send money to the owners quickly, greatly eliminating the time to enter and send owner payouts.
This past week, we also added some "In Period" columns for owner statements. Most PMs only show the owner the money they earned and not the booking totals, and if the booking overlapped the period, many PMs only like to show the money earned inside that period. You can now do this for many revenue fields.
The new "In Period" columns are only available in custom statement views; they do not appear in any of the default system views. Go to PM > Statement Views and create a statement, and you'll see the new columns showing in the drop-down.
These columns show the exact same thing as the regular ones only the amount is pro-rated for the time the booking is in the statement period. To be clear, it's possible for these columns to return $0 if the booking is not inside the statement period. For instance, suppose a booking occurs in April and is remitted 100% in April. Later in May, after the booking has long departed, you discover that the guest owed more money and the charges and payments were changed on the booking. The booking would have a new remittance balance and be picked up in the May statement. However, because the booking originally occurred in April, the "In Period" columns would all show $0 even if the "Remitting Now" column had an amount to remit to the owner.
While we were adding columns, we also added two new statement columns for Zero Commission Charges and Non-Standard Commission Charges. These columns will help you show your owners the total guest charges that had zero commission or non-standard commission on them. This is common for things like cleaning fees where the total was passed through to the owner or expense'd to the PM. If you have this situation, you can select the Zero Commission Charges column, name the header "Cleaning Fees" and then the owner will see how the gross minus cleaning fees leads to a net that your commission is applied to.
While you're messing with the custom statement views, notice that there's a new "Prefill Columns" button at the top.
When you click the Prefill Columns button, you'll see the three system views and any custom views you've already created. If you select one of those views, the page will fill in with all those columns so that you can hit the ground running. From there, make your changes and then save.
Last thing on PM... We noticed that the "Included Expenses" criteria options, when creating owner statements, did not accommodate certain situations and booking expenses would fall through the cracks or be delayed in getting picked up. So we updated the Included Expenses options to have two sections of criteria - one for general expenses (ie. non-booking expenses) and then one for the booking expenses.
This gives you the ability to fine tune your selection and pick up booking expenses exactly when you want no matter when the expense date occurred.
For the enhancements and tweaks section, let's start with Booking.com. We've wanted to update our Booking.com channel integration for awhile, but it's slipped down the list because of more-important things taking priority. This past week, we were able to do some work on Booking.com to strengthen the integration. There is far more we'd like to support, like syncing messaging and listing content, but we made some good strides in the limited time we had.
First, if your Booking.com channel integration is in "manual payments" mode, we no longer verify the card. Basically, we store the card on the booking, but we don't do a $1 authorization to test that the card works. So the card could be bad, but you won't know until you try it later. We do still error if Booking.com sends us "partial" card information (like a missing CVV code). This helps in situations where you don't want to alarm the guest by trying the card yet and plan to do everything manually.
Second, we updated Booking.com cancellations to always do refunds manually. In the past, we attempted to refund automatically based on the cancellation, but the refund was sometimes incorrect because Booking.com gave us misleading or ambiguous cancellation information. It was also out of character for our cancellation process since no other cancellations in OwnerRez do refunds automatically. So now Booking.com follows everything else and refunds are left to you to do manually as a separate step in the process.
Also, for Booking.com policies that have a final payment on the day of arrival, we added a "no show" penalty clause. The clause says "If the guest doesn't show up, they will be charged the total price of the reservation" in keeping with how Booking.com advertises their listings and policies.
Then, we've updated our cancellation policies for Booking.com bookings to support their new policies. Booking.com added a bunch of new cancellation policies since we first integrated with them. We have now added support for all of the new ones.
Finally, we added a Final Payment Due setting to our Booking.com channel integration.
There tends to be a lot of confusion, on the part of both guests and users, as to when final payments are due on Booking.com bookings, and sometimes the information Booking.com sends to us with the booking is not what you actually want on the management side. So this option allows you to manually override it to a specific number of days before arrival if the information we receive is not what you want.
In no particular order, here's a few other updates we made over the past week...
There's a "fix up" guest form where you can give guests a single URL and it will ask them for point of contact information, get them to sign the renter agreement and also ask for a credit card if a security deposit needs to be scheduled. However, we noticed that guests were not showing travel insurance information, so we added travel insurance information to the same "fix up" guest form. Like everywhere else that shows travel insurance, it follows your property rules, so it won't show if you have travel insurance turned off.
We clarified the "Surveillance" amenity to also include language about "Cameras". If this option is selected, channels like Airbnb will show that you have cameras on the property. Like all of the other amenities, the Cameras/Surveillance amenity has a note field where you can explain more about the amenity. Use the note field to describe where each camera device is located and whether it is turned on or off.
The Booking Summary report provides a great overview of revenue and you can compare periods to each other like the current year to the previous year. The report offers some date selectors at the top so that you can filter and group revenue based on the correct month. For instance, do you want to show booking revenue based on arrival date, departure date or when booked? To that, we just added a "any stay during period (prorate)" option so that you can accurately show the revenue that occurred in the period versus the revenue that overlapped into a different period.
When importing charges via Channel Bridge, we updated our logic for Airbnb bookings to prefer OwnerRez pricing for guest fees if guest fee pricing exists in OwnrRez. This helps reduce confusion when Airbnb's revenue numbers don't match what OwnerRez calculates they should be. The total charges amount is always the same either way.
If you have Houfy connected to OwnerRez, you can now click on your Houfy listing numbers directly from OwnerRez. We noticed that Houfy listings have direct listings numbers, so we updated our Houfy API channel dashboard to show those listing numbers directly.
Channel Bridge using wrong calculation when expensing surcharges. Interesting little guy here. We noticed that in certain rare situations, the expense settings on surcharges (for PMs) was not being correctly applied, but only when charges were imported through Channel Bridge.
Don't show door codes that are blank. Just like it sounds! We were occasionally showing door codes in places even though the door code was not yet generated.
Crash when deleting bookings with fees. Just like it sounds again. If a booking had fees (ie. channel or CC fees on the transactions tab) and the user tried to delete the booking, instead of getting a nice message saying that you can't delete the booking, the booking would simply crash. This has been fixed.
Business amenities now save and show correctly. We added several new business amenities recently (eg. Desk), but there was a bug that caused them not to save correctly. All better now.
Owner dashboard showing un-managed bookings. The owner dashboard, in the Portal Access area, shows the owner a couple of cool charts with their revenue and occupancy. However, it only is supposed to show the owner the bookings that are managed and associated with themselves (as the owner). If there are old historical bookings though, not associated with the owner, they should not be showing up in the dashboard, but they were. We corrected this to only show the associated and managed bookings for the current owner.
Properly un-manage bookings before the first owner if selected. We found a case where adding the first owner to a property would not un-manage bookings before the effective date even if you asked nicely.
Booking list owner filter now works. We discovered that the bookings list did not properly apply the filter for owners. Now it does.
Allow including properties on Vrbo in Request to Book mode. Airbnb requires that all other channels be in Request to Book (RTB) mode to allow RTB on Airbnb. We were not checking the validation exactly right on the Vrbo property mappings so you may have seen a warning while attempting to include a new property. We've fixed that.
Google Analytics tracking on internal pages. We noticed that the user's Google Analytics tracking code (the one starting with "G-" or "UA-") was recently added to some of our internal app pages, but the code isn't needed there. The user's Google Analytics tracking code is only needed on public guest-facing forms and hosted website pages, so we cleaned that up.
Support multi-column sort on properties grid. We now support sorting by more than one column at a time on the properties grid. Hold the CTRL key while clicking column headers to add subsequent sorts. We'll be bringing this feature to more grids in the future, but we thought we'd pilot it here first. There was also a bug we fixed where the properties grid was not following the order of the Display Order column.
Don't show spot rates for inactive or deleted properties. These rates have no impact on anything, but we were still showing them in the spot rates grid. We won't do that any more.
Include $0 expenses on Owner and PM Statements. In the past, we have only included expenses on statements that had a non-zero balance to remit/collect. But some PMs like to include informational expenses that have a $0 balance upfront. You can now create those $0 expenses and they'll show up on the next owner or PM statement along side normal expenses.
Old SMS numbers still being used. In the past, when sending SMS messages, the FROM number (ie. your SMS number) would stick to the old SMS number you had before even if that SMS number was deleted. So new replies from the guest would keep going to the deleted number. This is now fixed to use your new SMS number. This only affected users that deleted their SMS number and registered a new one.
Yup, you deserve it. I resisted you for over a year, hearing all these horror stories of CM SW. Just keep doing what you are doing!
I've been using iCal links with TurnoverBnb for years now. The notes section allows the cleaner to see when a pet has been booked. That information isn't visible in the OR integration unformationely (though I much prefer the streamlined look of it in the Turnover calendar). Is there any chance y'all will be adding in customized options to allow for the pet count to be included as well?
I agree AirBnB guest are historically more difficult than direct and VRBO guest statistically. On top of that when you have an issue AirBnB tends to be extremely liberal in giving the guest benefit of the doubt using their extenuating circumstances clause. I prefer VRBO's stance, buy insurance or face the music of a sickness or storm.
Well deserved!
We're happy to announce that we've partnered with Find Rentals as one of our first class API channels. Find Rentals is an advertising subscription service that drives quality guest leads to be converted into direct bookings.
Since 2002, Find Rentals has serviced tens of millions of travelers with their primary focus to deliver a consistent and meaningful message to travelers of the advantages of booking directly with the locally run vacation property managers.
Our integration pushes listing content, rates, availability, and rules to Find Rentals. When guests inquire about your property on Find Rentals, Find Rentals will send you inquiries via email and then you can quote the guests and have them reserve directly through OwnerRez. The traveler can also connect directly to your hosted website by selecting book now from the Find Rentals side. This allows you to easily handle listings, bookings and guest communication.
Get started with Find Rentals by visiting the Find Rentals website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Find Rentals.
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with Turno (formerly TurnoverBnB). This will offer OwnerRez users a smarter way to schedule, pay, and find vacation rental cleaners and cleaning services.
Whether your goal is to manage your existing cleaning team’s schedule or find new cleaners, Turno provides the tools to put your vacation rentals on autopilot.
Turno automatically syncs with your bookings to automatically schedule your cleaners. If you need to find a new cleaner, simply describe your needs and get bids from over 35,000 service providers worldwide on the TurnoverBnB cleaner marketplace. Cleaners use their own app to receive updates, use checklists, report problems, track inventory, and send messages.
Turno offers flexibility for your business as it grows with no lock-in contacts and affordable pricing.
Get started with Turno by visiting the Turno website and checkout the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Turno.
Congratulations OwnerRez team!
So well-deserved! 👏🏼💃🏻🎉 Thank you for the amazing product and customer service y'all offer!
So hey, check this out! OwnerRez was just ranked as a "Front Runner" by Software Advice in the Vacation Rental software category. But not just any ole front runner - THE front runner. That's right, OwnerRez is number 1.
And not only are we number 1 overall, but we're number 1 in both of the categories they measure - customer satisfaction and usability. We're super proud of this!
The vacation rental industry has been exploding in growth over the last decade and the products and services that are available have exploded in growth along with it. Software Advice now tracks 67 products across the vacation real rental industry including PMS, channel management, pricing, websites and more. Out of those 67 vacation rental products OwnerRez is the #1 overall product in both Customer Satisfaction and Usability. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself here! 😇
Here are all the front runners, showing OwnerRez on top in both categories.
If you are not currently an OwnerRez user, find your software on this matrix (or perhaps it's not a front-runner at all?) and ask yourself what the differences are. Are you saving money; are there features you don't care about? Why are you staying with a product that isn't the market leader? Reach out, and we'll be happy to talk to you about switching over.
And for all you OwnerRez users, thank you for your support! Share this news with your friends!
Le Touquet Holid said:
A vague politician style answer from Rachel about commisions and no time scales.. They don't need to offer payment processing they just need lower rates.
A vague politician style answer from Rachel about commisions and no time scales.. They don't need to offer payment processing they just need lower rates.
Listened to replay. 14% commission (they can dream on) plus whatever I have to pay for CC. NO GO. It will never book when I raise my rates by 17% on that channel. Bye HTG.
every time I read the "best cities" type of stuff, I chuckle. Who TH will buy in Cleveland as a VR? People are fleeing big cities in droves for a number of reasons. And several places on the list I have never even head of.. and probably neither did the tourists.
Climate emergency? it is mostly called "weather". On the other hand, they should get busy stopping CHINA, not Oregon, from polluting, if they REALLY care.
Happy Friday!
This week we had our webinar with Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing) where we discussed the new era of dynamic pricing. You can watch the entire replay here.
Vacation rentals in Hawaii continue to have higher occupancy than hotels. In March, 62.3% of units throughout the state were occupied, which is only slightly lower than it was back in 2020. Hotels reported only 43% occupancy for the month of March.
Thinking about purchasing a vacation home? Some of the top locations according to LawnStarter’s rankings include Shelbyville KY, Brooksville FL and Buffalo NY. Vacation rentals have been a hot commodity during the pandemic. Many people find them more appealing than staying in a hotel, especially for longer periods of time. The average owner of a vacation rental rakes in around $33,000 a year!
The Oregon Coast Visitors Association joined tourism agencies worldwide in declaring a “climate emergency.” This is the first step in their plans to help the tourism industry and vacation rentals reduce their impact on the environment. The main goal is to provide businesses with a blueprint for how to reduce their carbon footprint. All recommendations are voluntary and were implemented to encourage more environmentally-friendly business practices.
The second annual Shortyz Awards took place virtually this year, with record-breaking attendance and winners announced from every category, ranging from Sustainability to the Best Property Management System. The Shortyz awards are meant to recognize excellence among peers and highlight the best practices in the industry. Over 400 entries were received across all 18 categories, and more than 69,000 votes were cast. Maybe we should enter next year...😉
Agree, what was that email all about? It's the second example of poor communication we have had from them. Perhaps the head of sales can give us some direction and a more competitive pricing model? Factoring in CC payment fees the current deal will always make them more expensive than Air BNB. I keep banging the Google free link drum but HTG is also in that metasearch space so they will have even more competition.
If they really want to be a disruptor Offer a deal at 8% or less and everyone will make some money.
Le Touquet Holid said:
Could we have some drop-down options for VRBO wifi speeds to cover 4 - 25 mbs.Unfortunately, Vrbo has not exposed any options below the 25+ speed via the API. If your speeds are less than 25 Mbps, it's probably best to leave that selection blank and provide more details in your Wifi description.
Could we have some drop-down options for VRBO wifi speeds to cover 4 - 25 mbs.
Some rural properties struggle to get anywhere near 25.
Thanks
Maybe you can ask why they decided to raise commission to 14% and ask for explanation of that mumbling email they have sent in that regard. As for return of travel.. I suppose it depends on market but ours has been red-hot so far. They just sent another survey out that made little sense. All about relaxed cancellation policies and covid cleaning procedures and if offering hand sanitizer helps bookings (even CDC now says that virus is extremely unlikely to transmit via surfaces, so enough of hygiene theater). Seeing their surveys makes me wonder if they have actual clue about VRs....
Happy Hump Day, everyone! 🐫 Today we'll cover a whopping 46 updates which includes 39 last week and 7 the week before. The big news is about some long-requested Airbnb and season features, but as always we managed to fit in like twenty other things. Off we go!
The biggest news of the day - Request To Book (RTB) is finally here for Airbnb API-integrated users. OwnerRez was one of the first Airbnb partners certified to do Request To Book and it's finally out. Request To Book is exactly like it sounds - you can set your properties on Airbnb so that the guest has to make a request instead of instantly booking - but Airbnb requires that all of your properties must be in this mode and across all of your channels.
This past week, we did an awesome hour-long webinar with the Airbnb team about how this feature works and answered a bunch of live questions about the feature and its limitations. Be sure to check that on our Webinars page or by clicking the link below:
Another exciting new Airbnb feature... You can now display offline security deposits to Airbnb guests when booking and require the Airbnb guest to give you a credit card. We were one of the first Airbnb partners to be certified for this feature as well, and we worked hard to get this in place. To be clear, Airbnb does not send us the guest's credit card; you have to obtain that from the guest directly, but it's now fully approved and shown to the guest ahead of time when they book that it is required.
When you go to your Airbnb API connection settings in OwnerRez, you'll now see a section where you can define your security deposit and whether you want it to stay like it was before (using Airbnb's built in security deposit settings) or use your OwnerRez rules and amounts.
Again, Airbnb will not provide the guest's credit card for you, so you need to reach out to the guest to get that after they book. You can do this by using our email templates and triggers to reach out to the guest with an automatic message, reminding them about this and asking for a credit card. OwnerRez has a powerful messaging system with field codes that let you fully customize and automate this process.
On the Airbnb side, Airbnb will display (at the time of booking) that a security deposit is required, what the amount is and tells the guest that the property (you!) will collect it separately.
We also just released some great new features for seasons.
First, you can now copy seasons forward from one year to another, across multiple properties, while retaining the same rates and surcharges that those seasons currently have. This allows you to copy all of your holiday seasons to the next year, for instance, and keep the rates that were there so that you can quickly prepare the next year without creating new seasons by hand. To get started, go to the regular Seasons list (under Settings). Select the seasons you want to copy by selecting the check-box on each row of the list. Then click the Copy Forward button.
This will take you to a batch screen where you can configure some options for how you want the seasons, and their associated rates, to copy forward to the next year.
By default, each season will display with the same name except OwnerRez will smartly detect if a year is present in the name and try to iterate the year to the next year. So if the name is "Christmas 2021" it will default the next year to "Christmas 2022". It will also default the dates to the same dates as the previous year but give you the opportunity to tweak the dates in line before moving forward. This gives you the ability to quickly consult your calendar and look at holidays or low/high periods across the next year and set the start and end dates to exactly what you want.
At the top, you can also specify if the rates and surcharges should copy across so that the new seasons have something to start with. Even if you want to change the rates to something higher, we recommend that you copy the rates as they are so that you can see what they were before when changing them on the Seasonal Rates editor. The surcharges that are copied are only surcharges that are applicable to the specific seasons you are copying. Surcharges without season criteria won't be copied.
Click the button and, just like that, you'll have a new year of seasons and rates already set up!
While we were working on seasons, we added a new Seasonal Rate Import from Excel. We used to have the ability to import season rates from Excel but dropped it when we overhauled our rates system in early 2020. Our new seasonal rate structure changed dramatically so the old seasonal rate import wasn't compatible. But we've added a new one, so you can now use Excel to upload your seasonal rates. To be clear, this import is only for uploading seasonal rates and not the seasons themselves. You must first have created your seasons in OwnerRez and then use this import to refer to those seasons when defining rates.
You'll find the import tool with all the other import/export pages under the Tools menu and then "Import Seasons" under the From Excel section. A spreadsheet template is provided like normal and the layout is very basic.
Each row in the spreadsheet is a single night/weekend rate for a single season and property. You'll define the season and property by name or ID and then put in the nightly and weekend night rate. Simple!
That's it for the shiny new stuff, but there's a lot more to go through as we move into enhancements and bug fixes...
Let's cover the channel stuff first, and we'll start with Airbnb.
We added an option where you can "use adults" as your max guest count in your Airbnb API connection rules. Previously, OwnerRez always used your guest count as the max number since Airbnb doesn't have any rules on max guests versus max adult versus max children. Now you can pick if you want it to be the max adult number instead which a lot of homeowners and PMs prefer. You'll find this new option on the Airbnb API connection settings.
After an Airbnb reservation request is sent, we now don't allow you to change the charges on the Airbnb request on the OwnerRez side. As with the finalization issue, this is something that isn't possible, so we made sure to check for this and show it up front before allowing you to try.
We also added a check in our Listing Quality Analyzer tool to detect Airbnb taxes that have per-property IDs selected, as an option, but no ID is entered. This is important because it will show you where you started doing some work on taxes but didn't complete it. It is common to not have all the relevant tax IDs when configuring tax settings and need to come back later.
We now detect if your Max Children size limit is set to 0 and automatically flip the Children amenity to "Not Allowed" for Airbnb. Technically there are multiple settings that govern this in OwnerRez - both a size limit and the amenity. If we see that the size limit is 0, Airbnb will be told that your Children amenity is Not Allowed no matter what amenity is actually set to in OwnerRez. There is always confusion around this issue, because of the multiple settings, so this will help reduce that confusion.
Last thing for Airbnb - we added a link to your Airbnb account page from the API connection in OwnerRez, so that you can quickly find your user page on Airbnb and click across. This is purely to help you - guests don't see it - and our fearless longsuffering support team!
Now, let's switch over to Vrbo!
We updated our listing importer for Vrbo to detect and parse the area unit more correctly. So instead of a property being in square feet, we now cleanly detect square meters and other differences.
We added an "Account Name" setting on Vrbo API connections, so that you can define what your company or business name is to Vrbo.
This is a really basic setting that simply lets you differentiate the account to Vrbo for display and research purposes. This new Account Name field is optional. If you don't specify it, we'll use the name on your OwnerRez account.
Vrbo added a slew of new amenities to their API integration (yes, including Wifi) so we added those to our amenities page or matched them up to ones we already supported. What amenities, you ask? Here you go:
Again, some of these were already in OwnerRez; we just matched up our existing amenity to the one Vrbo supports, so what you had entered before is already pushing across. In other cases, the amenity is new to OwnerRez as well.
For all of those Wifi/internet amenities, we created a new "Internet Access" section under Amenities so that you can define it all out in excruciating detail.
You should now have no problem clearing showing guests what kind of internet is at your property!
We noticed that Vrbo calendar imports (iCal) sometimes have blocks far in the future with no names, and these are often created by virtual rules or blackouts created by the owner. We are now skipping these far-future blocks when importing bookings from Vrbo calendar imports (iCal) even if the they are marked "reserved".
Last thing for Vrbo - we updated the logo on the ribbon calendar when hovering over bookings! It was changed everywhere else, but not there. All set now!
Find Rentals is now fully live. You can turn it on yourself like any other API connection and follow the instructions to wire it up on their side. We also updated the logo to look a bit nicer and clearer. Keep an eye out for the Setup and Connecting support article for Find Rentals (still being written) but you should be able to start the connection yourself and go from there. The Instructions tab on the API connection will tell you what you need to do next.
Since the Houfy integration has been updated quite a bit in recent weeks, we removed the wording that says "go book this on Houfy" when an inquiry comes in. You can now generate quotes and respond to inquiries for Houfy just like other channels or direct booking requests. The inquiry response may go back to the Houfy message thread (since Houfy uses a proxy email address) but it will pass along the quote and inquiry so that the guest can book from you directly.
Couple of last little tweaks to mention as we round out the channel updates:
We added some additional help text to the "Send Booking Confirmation" option on channel connections to explain what that is. This was confusing for users who though the confirmation was from the channel. To be clear, that option tells OwnerRez whether OwnerRez should send the "Booking Confirmation to Guest" system message to the guest when the booking comes in. Typically, you don't want to do that unless you have heavily customized that system message.
We also noticed that booking charges could not be changed (they were locked for editing) if the booking was in channel mode but the channel was disabled or deleted. There are certain situations where this can happen. We now allow the booking charges to be unlocked and modified when the channel is in disabled or deleted state.
Have you enjoyed our new property Excel import added a few weeks ago? It's gotten a lot of use and we've been steadily adding other columns to it. You can now import property rules along with the other property columns in the same Excel spreadsheet. To see the latest list of columns that are supported, go to the Import Property from Excel page and download the Excel template. Scroll to the right and look at all those columns!
For the nerds, check out what you can do with tags now via our API. Notice the new Tags section where you can find, create, update or delete tags for your OwnerRez account - now programmatically through the API. If you're an API or data partner that needs to group or tag data in your integration, you can now do that. You can also add tags to Guests on the fly now. For instance, when updating a guest record, you can pass an array of tags along with the request and OwnerRez will update the guest information and assign the tags at the same time.
Some of you might have gotten a sad email this week saying that we removed some of your surcharges and discounts. Sorry about that, but it had to be done! We found a situation where percent surcharges were being multiplied (per night, per stay) with percent amounts. This shouldn't matter because percent math is the same per night or per stay, but it actually does matter with channels and other down-stream things. When we saw how few users actually had this set, we decided to remove multiplier options on surcharges or discounts with percents altogether. Wondering what I'm talking about because you didn't see any email? Only about a dozen people had this problem.
Do you like using our website search to find support articles, blog posts, forum topics, videos and so on? So do we! And we built it ourselves, so we can change it to do anything we want! We changed the type selection (eg. Articles, Video, Blog, etc) so that when you click on it, it automatically submits the search if you've already typed in some search terms. It's all about reducing clicks!
Allow verifying country coded TLDs. We got too strict on validating the domain name for verified email addresses. Hand slaps occurred. You can validate those .co.uk and .ut.us domains now.
Don't show Convert to Booking button on Airbnb quotes. If you create a special offer for an Airbnb guest, you usually want to send it via Airbnb messaging. It is counter productive to convert that quote to a direct booking when you do not have any contact info for the guest, so we completely hid the button in that special case.
RentalGuardian CFAR literature. We noticed that a pamphlet about CFAR, displayed publicly, was pointing to some old information, so we updated it.
Messages for cancelled bookings in guest thread. Cancelled bookings don't show by default, but we noticed that the messages (both SMS and Airbnb) for cancelled bookings was still showing in the guest conversation. We fixed that to not show those messages.
Same phone number multiple times at agreement signing. In some rare cases, a guest's phone number would be displayed in the Home, Cell, _and_ Work fields on the agreement signing form. We fixed that so if we don't know what type of phone it is, we'll only show it in the Home field (and then only if we don't have another number we know is the Home number).
Disabling security deposits over $1000 on quotes. If your security deposit was over $1000 and you issued a quote and then attempted to disable the security deposit from the quote > rules tab, you would have seen a validation error. We've removed that.
Social network merge fields (MYFACEBOOK, etc) should work for themes too. We currently only allow storing social network details on your user account (or primary theme), but those social links weren't working for themes. We've fixed it so you can proudly drive traffic to your social channels from all your themes.
Provide the correct Airbnb Security Deposit support article link. Our help text pointed to a dead link... not very helpful if you ask me.
Rate calendar select and gaps. We noticed an issue where the rate calendar (the thing at Settings > Rates) was displaying wrong Minimum Night rules on small edit ranges that happened to contain gap rules. In other words, it would calculate the gap on the selected nights. We fixed this by expanding the calculation to take that into consideration.
Commission on Airbnb reservation requests. When generating reservation requests in OwnerRez for Airbnb API bookings, we noticed that the commission was not correctly being calculated. Found and fixed!
Scolding about Request To Book when not selected. Users were getting confused seeing the Airbnb "Can't use Request To book" message when they hadn't selected it, so we fixed the warning to only show if Request To Book isn't available and as help text.
Clarify included expenses language on owner statement creation. For clarity, we changed the "Included Expenses" wording on the Owner and PM Statement expenses options to read "occurred" instead of "recorded". When the expense was recorded doesn't matter as much as when it occurred.
Allow disabling original first owner on a property that is no longer managed. In some cases, we were not allowing the original owner of a property to be disabled. That's been fixed.
Don't crash-bang if the user decides not to complete the Stripe setup. We weren't handling the "Back to OwnerRez" escape options well during Stripe setup. This resulted in a "crash bang" error. All fixed.
Don't display travel insurance Q&A after quote billing info if it is not enabled. We were inadvertently showing a small "What about Travel Insurance?" text block on the quote completion process even when insurance was completely disabled. That's gone now.
Fixed grant access popover where property names have commas.
Listing quality analyzer should more accurately check surcharge criteria versus property maximums. The analyzer was too pedantic. If a surcharge had an "equal to" criterion, it would present an analyzer error because that maximum wasn't equal to the surcharge criterion. But that's not accurate so we fixed it up.
"Send me a copy" should honor the appropriate FROM information. This is an oldie but goodie! We've know about this persistent little bug for a long time but never got around to fixing it. If you use our Verified Email Domain feature, you can send messages to guests from your own domain name, and we have a "send me a copy" option that will also send the same message to yourself. However that second copy would not honor the verified email domain which was the source lot of support tickets over the years. The guest would get the correct thing but you (the OwnerRez user) would not. This is now... finally... fixed.
Don't error on sending an SMS attachment with an incorrect file extension. If you tried to send an attachment via SMS (such as an image) but with the wrong extension name, our SMS vendor was choking on it. We added some smarts so that we can tell them what the correct extension should be and get your picture delivered.
On Tuesday 4/27, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with HomeToGo.
We'll sit down with Rachel Tabellion, Head of Sales at HomeToGo, to discuss the return of travel. Covid has disrupted the industry but there is hope on the horizon.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/HomeToGo webinar link to register.
You can find all of our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
Well maybe Airbnb needs to reconsider its treatment of hosts and not side with renter every single time to the detriment of owners. What Airbnb wants is not hosts .. it wants su*er hosts who will buy their bull* propaganda and agree to lose money so that Airbnb can make theirs.
Good news, it's Friday!😃
This week we had our webinar with Airbnb on Offline Security Deposits and Request to Book. If you've been waiting for these features as long as we have, check out that webinar to learn more.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Airbnb CEO stated that millions of new hosts would be needed to meet travel demand. Airbnb currently has a whopping 4 millions hosts, with hopes to bring on many more to accommodate the recent rise in travel.
California legislators have introduced a bill that would implement a state-run system to regulate short-term vacation rentals by collecting and redistributing transient occupancy tax revenue. The bill would require listing sites like Airbnb and Vrbo to collect the transient occupancy tax, then dispense the funds to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. The CDTFA would then allocate the revenue to the intended city or county. Local municipalities would need to opt-in to the program and enact an ordinance.
Oahu may end up using a lottery system for vacation rental registration. The proposal would limit the number of short-term rentals outside of the permitted area and prohibit rentals to be within 1,000 feet of each other. Also, homeowners would only be able to apply for a limited number of new permits.
Washoe County, NV is accepting applications for short-term rental permits beginning May 1st, 2021. Around 12.5% of housing in Incline Village and Crystal Bay are already short-term rentals. The county is anticipating a flood of applicants once the online platform launches.
On Tuesday 4/20, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Beyond Pricing to discuss pricing strategies.
For Short-Term Rental managers and owners, having an effective revenue management strategy is a key to success, and the critical component to this strategy is dynamic pricing.
In this webinar, we will talk about:
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Beyond Pricing webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Looks like your facebook page needs at least 2k likes before you can install this app. I got an error message: "This Page does not have permission to install the custom tab."
Sorry I didn'T quote in the earlier message, here it is:
Paul W said:
Tarki said:
One thing though, I find it unfair and misleading when the only way of having multiple users in your system is to have premium Property Management module with a fee.That's actually being discussed internally and has before in the past. The idea is to split out portal access to a different feature (from PM) and call it Multi-User that allows portal access and some other things. I don't have any ETAs or promises on that, but it's highly requested on a regular basis and we understand how it stinks for non-PM users to need to pay for PM just to get multi-user access.
I'm wondering if there is any progress in this area?
Regards,
This unannounced (for us) price increase is extremely disappointing. Our pricing has just doubled and we just re-built our web site using your system about 7 months ago. We are a small player with just a handful of cabins on one property that only rent for about 3 months of the year, We do not use or need your channel management module and only need the booking and calendar functions. Your pricing before doubling was a stretch for our budget and is now by far our largest expense. We would have never invested the money in building a web site based on your software if we knew this price doubling was coming before we even experienced our first rental season using your software. Now we feel like we like you have us over a barrel because to change to another system will cost us another 30% or more of our annual profits if we want to make a switch.
We feel taken advantage of and very frustrated!
On Tuesday 4/13, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb to discuss offline security deposits and request to book.
Until recently you could only take instant bookings, and security deposits were held by Airbnb. Now you can hold security deposits and choose to take instant bookings or request to book.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Airbnb webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
